By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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Ugandan MP and musician Robert Kyagulanyi, better known as Bobi Wine, was in Kenya a few days ago.

Bobi Wine, the most trending Ugandan-anything in the world in recent months, has been on a roll since he was detained and tortured by President Yoweri Museveni’s palace guard in August.

He was charged in a military court with treason, but the case was dropped there, and transferred to a Magistrate’s Court. Bruised and hobbling with the support of a walking stick, he was granted bail and allowed to travel to the US to repair his broken body.

He received the kind of celebrity treatment from Kenya’s activist and democracy community rivalled only by that which controversial American hip hop star Kanye West (or simply “Ye” these days) got back in Uganda at about the same time. Ye hung out with the First Family, and even gave President Museveni a signed pair of sneakers as a gift – for which the Big Man expressed much appreciation.

Bobi Wine took off time to slam Ye for canoodling with Museveni, whom he cast as a long-ruling dictator.

There were a few things one noticed, as Bobi Wine rallied with his Kenyan comrades-in-arms like youthful Embakasi East MP Babu Owino and activist Boniface Mwangi.

First, were their berets (mostly red, and the occasional green). While the beret has a long revolutionary pedigree, at its most sexy era on the heads of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, it had never captured the imagination of East African activists and dissidents.

In Kenya, the so-called Luo cap, popularised by radical leader Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Kenya’s founding father Jomo Kenyatta, was once a favourite.

Jaramogi’s son Raila Odinga, and other 1990s pro-democracy activist favoured the “Lenin workers’ cap”, better known as the “newsboy.”

Otherwise, the rebels of East Africa of the past 30 years preferred the regular (baseball) cap. These changing preferences would signal important changes in the struggle.

Kenyan activists protests on the streets of Nairobi for the release of Ugandan MP and musician Robert Kyagulanyi alias Bobi Wine on August 23, 2018. While the beret has a long revolutionary pedigree, at its most sexy era on the heads of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, it had never captured the imagination of East African activists and dissidents. PHOTO | KANYIRI WAHITO | NMG

A baseball cap is good if you are fighting in the bush, but in this age of social media and selfies, where democracy wars are fought on the internet and the streets, a beret works much better – it doesn’t cover the face.

The second small, yet significant, change is dress. The earlier revolutionaries wore Kaunda, Nyerere, Mao and related suits, or military fatigues.

The Bobi Wine generation wear t-shirts, but most importantly dashikis (colourful African dress that some East Africans refer to as “West African”).

Already a growing trend, it was turbo-charged by African favourites like Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, films like Black Panther, and the proliferation of pages on Facebook and Instagram promoting and selling incredibly beautiful African aesthetics.

Along with natural hair and such things, young Africans thus continue to get seriously Wakanda. It is a stylistic shift that means that in another 10 years, “African dress” will be as ubiquitous in East Africa as it is in places like Ghana and Nigeria today.

Politically, it is a repudiation of the global geopolitical order that young Africans blame for propping up strongmen on the continent.

Bobi Wine’s visit to Kenya also highlighted the growing role of “creative spaces” like Nairobi’s Pawa254 in, to use its words, organising “a movement of young social conscious artists and activists.”

The political party has competition.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3