Lydia Asano sashays down the red carpet at Kampala’s luxury Serena hotel, wearing an “Afrocouture” black lace gown, partially see-through and with a slit up her left thigh. Onlookers are captivated by the 6ft model. “It’s my favourite piece that I’ve ever modelled,” gushes Asano (21) backstage after the fashion parade. She regularly goes out to Kampala nightspots in this kind of outift. “It could be something little and cute, anything goes,” she says. Fast forward to Saturday night and Lilian Mubende (25) is sipping a cocktail in De Posh Bar in Kabalagala, Kampala’s party area, sporting a purple above-the knee dress. “When I wear my short dresses I feel free,” she says.
But if a bill passed by the Ugandan Parliament in December becomes law, fashion parades such as that at the Serena hotel may be threatened and Ugandan women will have to cover up or face arrest. Passed the day before a more notorious anti-gay bill, the government-backed anti-pornography legislation has a broad definition of “pornography”. According to the 2011 version, retabled in parliament last year, this includes “any cultural practice, radio or television programme, writing, publication, advertisement, broadcast, upload on internet, display, entertainment, music, dance, picture, audio or video recording, show, exhibition or any combination of the preceding that depicts sexual parts of a person such as breasts, thighs, buttocks and genitalia”, among other meanings. The 2011 draft bill reportedly proposes that anyone found guilty of abetting pornography face a 10m shilling (£2,473) fine or a maximum of 10 years in jail, or both.
Simon Lokodo, Uganda’s ethics and integrity minister, insists the bill in its current form will be signed by President Yoweri Museveni, and therefore come into force, very soon. “Maybe he will take some time to sign the anti-homosexuality bill, but for that anti-pornography [bill] we are sure he’s going to sign,” he told the Guardian. “He has not commented on this [publicly] as he has with the anti-homosexuality bill. That means he is comfortable with it.” Lokodo says that the bill targets “irresponsible” women wearing clothes above the knee in public because they are “hurting the moral fibre” of Uganda.
“So today if I met somebody putting on a miniskirt, a miniskirt that explains a lot of what that person has in one’s mind, that person should be arrested,” he said. “What we want to condemn is the provocativeness, that they want to draw somebody to desire them. We are saying that we are blaming and condemning any of these girls who dress so indecently, especially in public areas. We shall not accept it, whether it is fashion or what.”
Last April, when the bill was reintroduced in Parliament, Asano sported a “save the miniskirt” T-shirt and went to many save-the-miniskirt parties. Despite Lokodo warning that people will be “sensitised” by the law so they report others breaking it before police catch them, Asano is not letting down her hemlines yet. “We should be focusing on getting thieves and rapists off the streets instead of bringing in a miniskirt bill,” says Asano. “It violates our rights. If they refuse to let us wear miniskirts, why should the guys be able to wear little shorts?”
Protestors in London at a Slut Walk event in 2011. The Slut Walk initiative serves to protest against the perception that the way a woman dresses can justify rape and sexual violence. (Pic: Flickr / msmornington)
Mubende thinks that certain politicians are just trying to whip up fear. She is more cautious than Asano, saying: “The minister is serious about it [the bill] but the president’s not. When the president is serious about this we shall stop wearing them.
But Rita Aciro Lakor, the executive director of Uganda Women’s Network (Uwonet), argues the issue is about more than whether women can wear miniskirts. “It’s about going back to controlling women,” she says. “They’ll start with clothes. The next time they’re going to remove the little provisions in the law that promote and protect women’s rights.” She says the more people talk about miniskirts, the more people wear them, and that the law will be hard to implement.
Human rights lawyer Peter Magelah believes the bill, which he stresses is also largely about press freedom, will be used “selectively” and “for political reasons” if it becomes law. “Idi Amin had a miniskirt law in Uganda and a lot was written and said about it, but it wasn’t removed from the statute books until 2002,” he says. “It was in place and no one enforced it. And, of course, the law doesn’t provide for how short a miniskirt should be, so in a court it’s one thing a lawyer would have a field day challenging.”
A week after Nelson Mandela died, Kenya marked 50 years of independence from British colonial rule. This anniversary, on December 12, amid South Africa’s mourning period for Madiba, received little attention in the world media.
For President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose mission is to turn Kenya into a middle-income economy, the golden jubilee festivities offered much-needed diversion from the International Criminal Court (ICC) which has charged him for having a hand in post-election violence that left 1 200 dead and 600 000 homeless back in 2007. The ICC trial is a millstone no (sitting) president wants around their neck.
Between executing his duties as Deputy President, William Ruto – Kenyatta’s co-accused for the 2007 clashes – has spent the recent while, and a fortune, shuttling between Nairobi and The Hague, where his trial began in September. Whatever the result, it’s a lamentable distinction that Kenya’s top brass – already made up of strange bedfellows – is being tried by the ICC. With the exception of a euphoria-filled but troubled first decade of independence, and, less so, from 2003, Kenya’s past is sorry to put it mildly. Given where things are, will Kenyans look back on the 50th anniversary festivities with a sense of pride in years to come?
President Uhuru Kenyatta reviews the guard of honour during celebrations marking Kenya’s 50th year of independence. (Pic: AFP)
Sandwiched between Jakaya Kikwete-led politically stable Tanzania, Ethiopia and Somalia, a failed state notorious for piracy, Kenya is home to about 43-million people. For context, Nigeria’s population is four times larger while South Africa’s population is 50-million. Kenya’s US$71bn in GDP makes it Africa’s tenth-largest economy, according to the World Bank. On a per capita basis it’s pitifully low – a fraction of Botswana’s, Tunisian or that of Mauritius, Africa’s bellwether.
High levels of poverty and kleptocracy have spurred Kenyatta’s talent-packed administration to force a turnaround to achieve 10% in annual economic growth. But graft could dampen that, University of Nairobi academic Dr Brigitte Okonga-Wabuyabo explained in a telephonic interview. Indeed, corruption affects many other facets. In an article titled “The rot that is killing Kenya“, journalist Bertha Kang’ong’oi bemoaned its pervasive nature and linked the Westgate incident to “endemically corrupt” police and state officials. It’s no small wonder then that Kenya fares shabbily on the Mo Ibrahim Governance Index as well as the Global Competitiveness Index.
On the upside, Kenya, replete with ICT initiatives such as Konza Techno City, East Africa’s Silicon Valley, is a top performing market with a “burgeoning middle class”. Still, Kenya is a curious mix for South African companies. Some of them, like Avusa and Nando’s, flopped and retreated while others boom.
Lured by a mix of rising incomes that have boosted levels of alcohol consumption, SABMiller is back after retreating last decade. On a per capita basis, according to SABMiller, Kenyans consume 46 litres of beer. While that’s half the Polish average, it’s pretty high by East African standards, where consumption hovers around 10 litres per capita.
On why some locals fail to impress, Okonga-Wabuwayo argues that some companies don’t understand the Kenyan consumer profile and “feel that whatever works in South Africa can be replicated here”. Further, she says, Kenya is an expensive place to do business in.
Despite such hurdles, Southern Africa is well-represented, with Strive Masiyiwa-led Econet, Botswana’s lender Letshego and JSE-listed outfits like Woolworths. Dozens of Chinese firms, including Huawei, also play here.
Back to the ICC. Okonga-Wabuyabo prefers the matter to be dealt with speedily “for the sake of certainty and sanity”. In contrast, it seems Kenyatta, with the African Union egging him on, would rather not go to court. In his favour, it’s emerged that some witnesses, who were bribed, have turned out to have lied against some of the co-accused. After many delays, it seems Kenyatta will have his date in court in February. Don’t bank on it. Across the border, Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir is also wanted by the ICC for genocide in Darfur.
Kenya’s leaders For all its troubles, Kenya, led to independence in 1963 by Kenyatta’s father, Jomo (also known as Mzee, an honorific), has made strides. These are notable especially since, to paraphrase Moeletsi Mbeki in Architects of Poverty, by 1970-1990 Kenya had fallen to unprecedented lows. Because Mzee, the father of the nation, neglected the poor he endured two coup bids. Diagnosing the malady, Oginga Odinga (who was subsequently fired from his job as Mzee’s deputy and then jailed), cited land grabs from the poor and neo-liberalism, which he felt worsened poverty.
On the economic front, Mzee fared excellently. GDP rose on average by a high 6% per year and Kenya outdid Indonesia and Malaysia right until 1980. Behind the stats is a sad picture. “[The] figures disguised a widening disparity – the rich got richer and poverty levels increased,” Martin Meredith observers in The State of Africa.
The narrative got worse under Mzee’s successor, Daniel Arap Moi, another coup d’état survivor. His 24-year reign – a spaghetti junction of violence, terror, repression and graft – cost Kenya dearly on all fronts. Criticising kleptocracy or advocating political reforms was akin to treason. “Arrest, detention and other forms of harassment – for journalists, academics, trade unionists, and even members of parliament – were the most likely,” Meredith writes.
Some of those who spoke out including Bishop Alexander Muge and other clerics were assassinated. Foreign Minister Robert Ouko was found dead after compiling a report into “high-level corruption”. Eight hundred protesters were killed on the eve of the 30th anniversary of independence. Hundreds of thousands more were displaced while others, like Shadrack Gutto, fled into exile. Moneywise, runaway inflation hit 100% and the economy degenerated.
So, when Mwai Kibaki, whose clean government campaign enabled his coalition to dethrone Moi, took over in 2003 the country was freefalling. Within a year, sadly, members of Kibaki’s top brass were thieving. Michela Wrong, citing human rights and anti-corruption activist John Githongo, put it aptly in It’s Our Turn to Eat. Nevertheless, Kibaki is best remembered for extricating Kenya from the doldrums and setting it on an upward trajectory.
What will Kenyatta’s legacy be? Back to the future. With the festivities that marked the 50th anniversary behind us, the question for Kenyatta is what his legacy will be. It’s not the pomp or speeches that matter to Kenyans in slums like the capital’s Kibera or Mombasa’s Bangladesh but when and how they’ll live the Odinga dream: get land and jobs that will enable them to escape poverty, and have access to quality education and clean water. Will the incumbent (or his successors), like Kibaki, fail the corruption test? Kenyans are watching.
Kenyatta better take lessons from Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva – whose successful efforts to grow the economy and reduce poverty makes him a case study – especially since Kenya is still trapped in the vicissitudes of the past. Life expectancy is in the 50s (markedly lower than 80 in the UK or even Cuba, a peer low income nation, but in line with Botswana and South Africa). Before gazing into the future or speculating on how all of this can ail the Vision 2030 development blueprint, no one is saying what’s to be done with the republic of slums – the type synonymous with Rio de Janeiro’s favelas.
Instead of simply patting itself for dominating East Africa, a small pond, Kenya should measure against giants like Malaysia. Apart from making it to the middle-income league, its success should reflect in improved literacy and reduced infant mortality rates, for two. Kenyatta is a youthful politician with a business background. Members on the fourth president’s team are highly trained and have talent aplenty. All of these factors should count for something.
“Vision 2030 is about ensuring that the country becomes a developed one, it’s also about uplifting the poor. Right now, most Kenyans live on less than $1 a day,” says Okonga-Wabuyabo. While South Africa also fares poorly on this score, Mauritius has slashed the number of people in that category to just 1%.
The Kenyan academic believes Vision 2030 can work, but stresses the need for players to pull together. “For now we’re still battling with corruption – it’s a serious threat that could take us back or stall progress.”
Kenyans have been singing Not Yet Uhuru since the Odinga days. It’s time for a new tune and the founding president’s son, whose Kiswahili first name means freedom, hasn’t only the power to do it. If he fails, well. Will the nation look back to 2013, which marks the second half a century of independence, with a sense of pride?
Shoks Mnisi Mzolo is a South African print and broadcast media practitioner who covers a range of topics including business and the economy, healthcare, telecommunications, and politics.
The usually straightforward act of going to the toilet is is far from simple in Kibera, the sprawling slum on the edge of Kenya’s capital.
Hundreds of thousands of people, whose homes are little more than makeshift shacks, are crammed into an area that lacks the most basic water and sanitation facilities, and where just one public toilet is available to every 300 people.
The result is two-fold: First, people become adept at holding it in, often spending hours in discomfort. And second, they eventually find relief by doing the necessary in a plastic bag, and then tossing it out onto the street or path outside.
Hence “flying toilets”, one of the many scourges of life in Kibera.
“Sanitation is one of the world’s biggest problems. Forty percent of the world’s population don’t have toilets. They say about 70 percent of the diseases come from the lack of sanitation, where water is polluted,” said Camilla Wirseen, director of a project that proposes an innovative solution to the problem.
Wirseen, who works for the Swedish firm Peepoople, is using Kibera as a testing ground for the Peepoo, a biodegradable, self-sanitising, single-use toilet that could one day provide a cheap, smart fix for the world’s billion slum dwellers.
The Peepoo is a slim bag with a larger liner tucked inside, both made of biodegradable plastic and designed to fit over a small pot. Inside the bag are a couple of spoonfuls of granulated urea, an ammonia that eliminates dangerous pathogens contained in faeces and urine within two to three weeks.
After use, the bag is knotted and taken to a drop-off point – where the family gets a small refund on the bag’s small purchase price because the contents are sold on for fertiliser.
Peepoo Bag. (Pic: peepoople.com)
“Before the project started, flying toilets were everywhere,” Wirseen told AFP, explaining that Kibera residents dare not go out at night to relieve themselves because of security fears.
“It’s also a social problem: women hold all day.”
‘A question of dignity’ Lydia Kwamboka, a 29-year-old Kibera resident and happy Peepoo user, said the freedom to answer the call of nature whenever necessary had had a profound impact on her life.
“Where I stay there are no toilets. When my kids had diarrhoea at night, I just gave them a plastic bag and dumped it in the drainage in the morning. You had to be careful what you stepped on,” she said.
“When Peepoo was brought in, it changed almost everything,” added Ann Wambui, a schoolteacher and another user of the bag.
“You can use it alone. Once used you dispose of it and Peepoo is carried away the same day, while you need money to get the latrines cleaned,” she said.
Peepoo salesperson Patricia Okello, aged 51 and also a Kibera resident, said she believed the part of the slum where Peepoople has been testing the bags since 2010 – currently to the tune of 5 000 a day – was becoming a cleaner, healthier place.
“Before Peepoo, this place was very dirty, the water we drank was not clean. Now we don’t have sicknesses like cholera and typhoid anymore,” she said. “It has brought a big change in my life.”
An illustration of the usage of Peepoo bags and toilets in Kibera. (Pic: AFP)
Wirseen said the aim was for the Kibera project to expand ten-fold over the next year, and twenty-fold by the end of 2015.
While Peepoo’s business model is still unproven as a long-term, sustainable solution – after all, it depends on the world’s poorest people seeing a benefit in paying 200-Kenyan shillings (around USD $2) for something they used to do for free – the Kibera testing ground has at least proved that the product works.
In addition, the firm is hoping the bags can be stockpiled for humanitarian emergencies in order to help refugees from conflict or victims of natural disasters like earthquakes, floods or typhoons before proper sanitation structures can be put in place.
Above all, the project helps highlight how going to the toilet cannot be taken for granted.
“Sanitation,” Wirseen said, “is a problem of dignity.”
Last Tuesday night, Nairobi held its first major, international commercial auction of East African art. The auction, organised by the Circle Art Agency, featured 47 works from 43 artists from six countries spanning the last four decades. In terms of sales, it was a huge success, with 90% of the works going for a combined Ksh18.5-million ($216 000).
But in a region long ignored by serious art collectors, and in a city that has mainly catered to foreign art buyers, the auction’s biggest achievement was that over half the works sold to Kenyans. Though that fact is partly a symptom of the ‘Africa Rising’ story of growing middle classes, it also marks an arrival for an unlikely city that has forged a unique modern art history.
“Kenyans like a party”
On the surface, Nairobi is perhaps a surprising art centre as it has little or no art infrastructure. The city has no renowned university art programmes and only two professional galleries, both of which operate in private homes to stay afloat and take tiny percentages so they can keep on board artists who would otherwise sell from their own studios. Kenya more broadly has no art education in government schools or significant public art installations. And beyond a few graffiti artists and political cartoonists, visual art is not on most Kenyans’ radar. The government is so out of touch with local art that it sent Chinese artists to this year’s Venice Biennial to fill the Kenya pavilion.
Yet behind the scenes, Nairobi’s art scene hums with improvised vibrancy. In slums, self-taught artists work in collectives where artists sleep, eat, and create together, pooling profits under the tutelage of an established name. More successful artists share shipping containers as studios. There are showings every week in galleries, private homes, restaurants, and cultural centres, and studios are gathering places for artists, buyers, and hangers-on.
But without a base of buyers who grew up learning about and viewing fine art, groups such as Circle Art have had to be creative in educating and building a market of locals willing to invest in Kenyan art.
“The traditional gallery sort of situation of going to a gallery and running for two or three weeks is not necessarily the best way to bring in a new audience,” says Danda Jaroljmek, director at Circle Art, explaining why they opted for an auction. “Kenyans like a party. By having a big noise, some glamour, a sort of party atmosphere, that’s perhaps a better way of doing it.”
Circle Art gives city art tours to galleries and collectives, and hosts collectors clubs to teach interested Kenyans about the history of local artists. There are ‘M/eat The Artist’ dinner parties in private homes where artists show and sell their work, and most studios are available for walk-ins whereby people can watch the artists in action and buy directly from the source. In Nairobi, art is interactive.
“It’s the story of Kenya,” says artist Gor Soudan (31) from his cramped apartment studio in the city’s Kibera slum. “The government, the banks were not working properly so M-Pesa [a mobile money service] came up to bank the poor people. So that’s the way the art scene is growing. By need and vision.”
Ugandan artist Geoffrey Mukasa’s ‘Lady in Green’ sold for Ksh 563 520. (Pic: Circle Art Agency)
Soudan, who was featured in the London’s 1:54 fair of contemporary African art last month, weaves human figures using metal wires from tyres burnt in riots. His home is a mini hub for local artists, and within walking distance are two other slum collectives. At one, artists weld scrap metal into sculptures and paint dreamscapes on Chinese-made plastic Muslim prayer mats.
Artist Paul Onditi, whose painting Half Life sold at Tuesday’s auction for Ksh704 400 ($8 200) says the fact that these many artists have little training means they make better art. “Here is a place you get self-taughts and they gamble around,” he says. Onditi is actually one of the few here who has received some formal training, but like his fellow local artists loves to experiment, making paintings by a long process of printing digital pictures and transferring them, through a four step chemical procedure he developed, to antiquated plastic printing press boards that he covers with oil paints.
Paul Onditi’s ‘Half Life’. (Pic: Circle Art Agency)
Painting politics
Kenya has long been known for its untrained but exciting artists. The ‘naïve’ movement, so called because the untutored artists never studied things like perspective or art history, dominated Nairobi’s scene for decades. Artists such as Sane Wadu, Wanyu Brush, and Jak Katarikawe painted surreal scenes of animals and rural life with expressive colours, and were marketed to foreign buyers as ‘untouched’ modern African artists.
These artists are still revered in Kenya and internationally – a six-panel painting by Wadu sold for Ksh1.5-million ($17 000) on Tuesday – but in the last decade, a new group of contemporary artists have become the big names in Nairobi. This second generation – of Onditi, Soudan, and others – is often just as untrained, but is connected through the internet to global conceptual trends. Notably, these younger artists are more eager to take on political issues now that Kenya’s public space is freer under multi-party democracy.
Peterson Kamwathi’s ‘Nchi 1 Barcode’. (Pic: Circle Art Agency)
Nchi 1 Barcode, for example, a woodblock by Peterson Kamwathi that auctioned for Ksh375 680 ($4,400), shows the Kenyan flag next to a barcode, questioning the country’s nationhood. Joseph Bertiers, a former painter of homemade signs, makes Bruegel-esque paintings of partying politicians, one of which, The World’s Craziest Bar, sold for Ksh821 800 ($9 600) on Tuesday. Onditi’s paintings show Nairobi’s congested slums superimposed on slave ships, while Soudan’s sculptures are made literally from the ashes of political violence.
‘The World’s Craziest Bar’ by Joseph Bertiers. (Pic: Circle Art Agency)
Even Wanyu Brush, an old master known for delicate paintings of safari animals and village folk, has moved to tougher subjects and styles in the last few years, with dark lines, jagged brushstrokes, and starker colours seen in his epic Never, Never, Never Again, painted in the wake of Kenya’s 2007/8 post-election violence.
“What you are your seeing right now is Nairobi being activated,” says Soudan.
Still, many Kenyan buyers avoid such cutting edge, confrontational works, preferring decorative pieces instead. Artist Beatrice Wanjiku, for example, who paints distorted human forms and anguished mouths, was not featured in the auction, while a piece by Richard Kimathi, who paints unsettling blue portraits of child soldiers and gaunt animals, was one of the few under the hammer that did not sell on Tuesday.
It will be fascinating to watch where the new attention pushes Nairobi next. Is there momentum to develop more traditional galleries, or will the city continue with self-taught artists and an informal flair? However things progress, what’s clear is that Nairobi has some very high calibre art, and Nairobians are noticing.
Jason Patinkin for Think Africa Press, where this piece was first published.
It is normally the catwalks of Lagos and Johannesburg grabbing the limelight, as African fashion industry grows in stature around the world. But the Rwandan capital put in a bid for style glory at the weekend with the launch of the second annual Kigali fashion week.
Designer Sonia Mugabo, who lost grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles and friends in the genocide nearly 20 years ago, was one of 10 local designers whose work was showcased at Friday night’s show with help from the organisers of the New York fashion week.
Although Rwanda does not have a fashion school, Mugabo says the tragic history of her family has made her more determined to follow her desire to be a designer.
“When I was doing graphic design in college, my parents asked what is she doing?” says the 23-year-old, who studied in the US and interned at Teen Vogue. “Fashion is a luxury here, not everyone can afford to be fashionable and our culture is very conservative so people think it’s too showy. But I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life.
“I think people here don’t understand art as a whole concept. They don’t know what art can do for a country.”
Mugabo and her friend Candy Basomingera (30) launched their women’s range Afrikana Exquisiteness in August.
LDJ Productions, the company that runs New York fashion week, believes Rwanda it has the potential for a strong fashion industry, after the country was recently ranked as the third easiest place to do business in sub-Saharan Africa.
It has provided technical support and training for Kigali fashion week. “It’s not about giving money for us, it’s about giving our time and expertise,” says LDJ chief Laurie DeJong, who’s also worked on fashion weeks in Miami, Toronto, Los Angeles and Mumbai.
“The talent here, no one’s tapped into it. But the designers are so serious and dedicated and so enthusiastic. They really want to learn more than anything.”
A model in one of the creations from Sonia Mugabo’s Afrikana Exqusiteness range. (Pic: G.R. Vande weghe, Illume Creative Studio)
For the past two years DeJong has mentored self-taught designer Colombe Ituze Ndutiye, who launched her INCO icyusa label in 2011. Ndutiye’s pieces, which include denim and cotton dresses and skirts teamed with traditional accessories, are made with the help of genocide widows through Canadian initiative Centre César.
“When I started the fashion industry was not there, people were confused,” says the 25-year-old. “Now there’s a lot of awareness.”
Friday night’s show featured Mugabo and Basomingera’s creations, which the former described as “vintage and Victorian-inspired”.
“My pieces are fully covered because I don’t feel like a woman should have to reveal too much to be beautiful,” says Mugabo, who is hoping to find local shops to stock her designs but also plans to sell online.
A model in one of the creations from Sonia Mugabo’s Afrikana Exqusiteness range. (Pic: G.R. Vande weghe, Illume Creative Studio)
LDJ is also helping to build an arts school in Rwanda with local firm House of Fashion, which was set up to develop the Rwandan industry. But its chief executive, John Bunyeshuli, also has his sights on Rwanda’s neighbours. He hopes to stage Burundi’s first fashion week next year in the capital Bujumbura.
