"For I name thee…": Disability Onomastics in Kenyan Folklore and Popular Music

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"No French Title"

Matatu 1 Culture: Nairobi's Three Dimensional SpaceOur every day lives can also be seen as stories, as narratives, in which we act out our lives and construct our identities.(Berger 1995:165)1.0 Elements of the matatu culture matrix.In this introductory chapter, I seek to map generally the issues that lie at the core of this study, indicate the perspectives from which the study has approached its subject as well as highlight key questions that have been addressed in subsequent chapters. An appropriate beginning point then is to explain the term "matatu culture."1.1 Definition of terms.Matatu culture is the combined range of activities and symbolic acts, verbal or written, either deployed upon the vehicle or embodied by matatu workers and passengers in their interaction upon the space constituted around the material culture object known as matatu. Its worldview is governed chiefly by the fact that matatu work is a predominantly male youth occupation.2 Music, DVD movies shown in the duration of a trip, stickers, icons of film, music and football stars drawn on the vehicle's exterior surface,3 hip hop fashion, humor, idiom and gestures used by crews and passengers, attitudes towards other road users and disregard for the Highway Code are key ingredients of matatu culture. It is a culture that thrives on the hybridization of semiotic codes as diverse media, languages and attitudes are brought to capture and express experiences and worldviews.After Hebdige, I view culture as any "systems of communication, forms of expression and representation" (1979: 128,161) of which the combined oral, visual, auditory and written items deployed on matatu are examples. Hence, matatu text means crews' quotidian expressive acts and forms manifested through such elements as stickers, dress, language, pictures, gestures and music, variously or in combinatory sets. Even though subcultures generally enact values that differ from those of the mainstream (Bauman 1992: xiv-xvi; Fiske 1992: 25; Dundes 1987:149- 150), as an example of such, matatu culture discourse is ambivalent in the sense that it is also couched within mainstream patriarchal practices and views on crucial issues like gender and (male) control over property.Passenger responses to the culture are part of matatu culture in that they help to circulate its ethos and values within public discourse, with personal experience narratives being a relevant instance of such responses. I use the term sign to refer to any object, action, image or sound that embodies meaning either within itself, outside or in juxtaposition to other objects, images and sounds. As texts, such signs point to other meanings in other texts. An agglomeration of such visual, oral, auditory signs, among others, which might seem disjunctive when taken as a unit because of their disparate media, make up texts just as individual items like sayings, swear words, gestures or designs on the matatu have been treated as texts in themselves. Without doubt, behavior such as pick-pocketing, extorting sexual favors from female passengers whose fare has been stolen on a matatu by a conductor's accomplices or the physical confrontations between crews, passengers or, on the other hand, competing matatu crews lies in the region of criminality. As such, an assessment of matatu work as crime does not lie within the scope of this study; it is only pertinent to the extent that it sheds light on the general transgressive behavior that shapes the subculture's character."No French Abstract

(Re)membering Kenya Vol 1 : Identity, Culture and Freedom

One of the critical questions that Kenyans have continuously asked is what went wrong in January and February 2008 with the 'peace' they had hitherto enjoyed. There have not been readily available answers to this fundamental question. The collection of papers presented in this book attempt to provide, as a starting point, possible explanations for the events of early 2008 including key background issues in Kenyan history since pre-independence times. Based on a series of public lectures titled (Re)membering Kenya organized by the volume editors together with Twaweza Communications and sponsored by the Goethe-Institut Kenya, the Institute for International Education and The Ford Foundation the lecture series became a way of trying to get scholars to engage meaningfully with the Kenyan public on critical matters pertaining to their nationhood - even if this entailed first calling to question the 'lie' about the very ideas and practices upon which that nationhood is assumed to stand. A key lesson drawn from the unfolding discussions at the Goethe-Institut Kenya was that the 2007 elections' debacle was merely the cusp of momentous crises to do with among other issues, governance, law and order, Parliament's abdication of its role in ensuring accountability from the Executive, dilemmas of identity and socio-economic marginality. The book is the first of three volumes under the (Re)membering Kenya series whose overall objective is to cast some new light on the various trajectories that informed the happenings of January 2008. The present volume brings together some of the best interpretative writing and suggestions on pertinent questions, past and present, ranging from the architecture of Kenya's ethnicity, Kenyanness, generational competition, socialization and violence, iconic representations of identity to the ongoing debate on the efficacy of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC). It is hoped that the issues debated during the public lectures and documented herein will spur further discussions in other spaces within civil society organizations, among activists and in newspapers where the public might continue to expand their thinking on the complex task of (Re)membering Kenya

(Re)membering Kenya Vol 2 : Interrogating Marginalization and Governance

Out of the first series of public lectures titled (Re) membering Kenya organised by the Volume editors together with Twaweza Communications and supported by the Goethe Institut Kenya, The Ford Foundation and the Institute for International Education, and whose key outcome was the publication of Remembering Kenya Vol.1 (2010) grew a second round of lecture series. The second series took cognisance of the fact that the problems that bedevil Kenya as a nation go far beyond questions of culture and identity that Volume 1 dealt with. Thus, the second presentations revolved mainly around issues of economics, governance and power. The awareness of the role and/or lack of equity and social justice in causing Kenya?s persistent problems informed all these presentations. Issues of how to bring marginalised groups into the mainstream were discussed. This Volume, in part, arises from the second presentations. The authors of chapters attempt to provide answers to the question: what entails (re)membering in post-conflict Kenya? From their work, it is clear that there is a lot to (re)member in Kenya, and many ways in which to reconfigure project Kenya. (Re)membering is re-thinking and re organising our ways of doing things. It entails a juggling of priorities; between peace and reconciliation, peace and justice, and seeking justice and reconciliation without undermining peace, all of which are arduous exercises. Reconciling misconceptions about places, issues and people is part of this reconstitution too. New pathways require being embraced, past mistakes (individual and collective) acknowledged and giving earnest meaning to the vow ?never again!? Yet, as observed in this Volume, Kenyans must be vigilant against individuals and groups that have often resisted change. There are also material constraints to the achievement of the various economic activities that come with reconfiguring the Kenyan nation. Worse still there exist certain cultural underpinnings that continue to have a debilitating effect on efforts to forge a sustainable peace after conflict. These aspects require deep reflection and honest work. In part, the contributors to this Volume suggest how it can be done. There is a hint in these chapters that we need to find new organizing spaces and principles on which a ?new? Kenya can move forward. Equally, debating the very meanings of social justice and reconciliation against the background of potential conflict should be a project of this endeavor. Questioning and identifying where impunity begun is key to this process. In doing so, we begin liberating ourselves from Kenyan society?s deep-rooted impunity. (Re)membering Kenya, after all, calls for a reconstruction of ?the journey to the conflict? in order to find the right balance between the right of remembrance and the duty of forgetfulness

Introduction

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