Kenya...

My comment minutes ago to a blog post on Renegade Eye, "Kenya: What is to be done?"

Kenya did not seem the kind of place where anything remotely akin to this could happen. I say this as someone who's been there before, and who encountered, in the main, very mild-mannered people. I was horrified by the turn of events therefore, and can barely pluck up the courage to look at the increasingly portentous news reports. It's getting harder and harder to sanitise the blood from these newsflashes. On the one hand, you don't want to see the blood; on the other, you dare not allow yourself to be deluded as to the extent of the atrocities, so you want to see for yourself, just how bad it is.

When Kibaki was hurriedly sworn in before the vote results had actually been announced, I could only shake my head. I despaired, looking at the man. He is past his best; he has nothing left to offer anyone, let alone a country; he is saddled with an embarrassment of a wife who slaps officials all over the place. Yet he wants to hold on to power. This is the tragedy of my Africa; leaders that just won’t go.

This is not democracy. This is what the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti called: Democrazy.
But what is happening in Kenya now is beyond anything connected to a disputed election. It’s no longer about a recount, but the counting of the piling bodies. Hard to make sense of it, but what is clear is that these are old grievances, old rivalries, breaking out like phantoms from hell. A flawed election has merely given vent to it.

I saw a news bulletin the other day where a young man whose panga was caked in what he called the “pure blood” of many people, boasted about killing a former classmate of his. You wonder: what makes someone who never killed before suddenly become a butcher of men, women and children? What madness? I don’t know. But it seems to me that there is a madness lurking under the civilised veneer of every society. Given the right – or shall we say wrong – circumstances, it will come to the fore. And when it does, Lord knows what is to be done.

A fellow writer pointed out to me today how Kenyans who are not even on the ground back home, who are in the Diaspora – are tearing one another apart in the blogosphere with the most hateful language imaginable. I went to some of these sites to read some of the comments for myself. Frightening. Something has been unleashed, which will be difficult to curtail even after the bloodbath is over. Long live Kenya.

Adichie on Ekwensi

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In the Review section of today's Guardian, Orange Prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie remembers Cyprian Ekwensi, who died recently.

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Excerpt

In the testosterone-fuelled political and cultural scene of 1960s Nigeria, Ekwensi wrote novels that looked at the world through female eyes. The women did a lot of hip-swinging (and in People of the City, one is described as "a real danger to men's moral loyalties") but they were often wonderfully bold. The Igbo character Lilia in Iska, for example, confronts her Hausa husband's Igbo killer much to everyone's surprise: "Why do you young men go about spreading hate, allowing politicians to use you? They are in their mansions . . . you are sleeping in your own excrement."

In my favourite of his novels, the eponymous Jagua Nana (nicknamed for the English luxury car) is an ageing sex worker whose exaggerated sexuality is of the brassy, chain-smoking, body- baring sort; she helps her ambitious boyfriend get his education in England, she houses a homeless girl at the club, gives away most of the money she finds, makes peace between two feuding families. She is also full of contradictions and always interesting, by turns confident and self-questioning, gentle, resentful, hateful, clever and humane. The liberal use of her sexual charms to get what she wants verges on caricature - in Ekwensi's novels, women endlessly place the hands of men on their breasts to great success - as we follow her picaresque journey. Ekwensi's engagement with sexuality is refreshing, though, because it lacks the pursed-lip restraint of much of the Nigerian fiction of his time and, even more remarkable, has female characters acting as sexual initiators. Men are often helpless in the face of this, bringing about much unintended humour, such as when Jagua's lover seriously muses about liking being "molested by her" and another lover is described as "mumbling incoherently and sucking at her lips like a child of six months".