The worst of BBC's Jane Mugo documentary is also its best

Two things dramatically raised the hackles of Kenyans in recent days, among the several others that daily rile them on social media.

The first was the announcement that British supermodel Naomi Campbell had been appointed Kenya’s tourism ambassador. The other was a BBC documentary, Kenya’s ‘Spy Queen’, which was broadly about the dark side of the country’s private investigations industry. However, it focused primarily on the colourful and quite controversial private detective Jane Mugo.

It is easy to see what could go wrong, especially with Campbell’s appointment. The patriots and nationalists were unhappy and went to war on social media, saying the job should go to a homeboy or homegirl, of who Kenya had plenty with international fame,

Caroline Mutoko

The debate raged back and forth for days, until the unapologetic and plain-speaking Caroline Mutoko took to her YouTube channel to rain on the parade. First, she said, Ms Campbell wasn’t being paid. She was a friend of Kenya and is to perform the role pro bono. Then the messy stuff: she made the point that if you want success in international tourism, you don’t preach to the converted. If you want people in the West to visit, you get one of their own, or a figure they can relate to, to sell the destination to them.

Uganda is an important tourism market for Kenya; so, some years back, Kenya got popular Ugandan musician Eddy Kenzo to be its tourism ambassador. If you think of it, although Willy Paul is a good musician, Ugandans wouldn’t have taken him as seriously as they did Kenzo if he’d been the one pitching them to visit Kenya. Things like “He’s a Kenyan; what else would you expect him to say?” would be said.

Arsenal FC

Ms Mutoko noted that the Kenzo deal was slammed, and that when Rwanda wanted to sell tourism to a global audience, it sponsored the Arsenal FC shirt for $40 million (Sh4 billion) in a three-year deal starting in 2018. By early 2020, the projection was that Rwanda was close to earning $200 million from the Arsenal deal.

Rwandans love their national football team, the Amavubi Stars (The Wasps), but there is nothing they could humanly put on their shirts that would earn $200 million.

There is the bigger, more philosophical and ideological contest about tourism as an industry. Those who have a problem with it made the point that, whether its Campbell, Kenyan Hollywood stars like Lupita Nyong’o or Edi Gathegi, being a tourism ambassador would still be morally wrong. But that’s a complicated debate.

Ridiculed documentary

Kenya’s ‘Spy Queen’ attracted an incredible amount of ridicule. Too much of it was third-rate theatrics for the camera, and Ms Mugo has been embroiled in a list of disputes an arm long. Mugo and her men were more hyperbolic than former US President Donald Trump, claiming their training was up with the US Marines.

Mugo said she was the best private detective in Africa. There were too many of those moments, and they were unbearable. For those looking for a sleek James Bond-like feature, it was a national embarrassment for the ages.

I out these issues to someone at the BBC. He told me it was meant to be a Louis Theroux-type access documentary.

Louis Theroux is a British-American documentary maker, journalist and author. DStv subscribers will have encountered his work. His style is to be unthreatening, get close to his subjects, make them comfortable so they can drop their guard enough to reveal the unusual, weird and intimate side of them that they usually wouldn’t. He does that with deadly effect.

Brilliant access

There is always the danger that, where the tradition is not well established, most of the audience might not come along with you, which seemed to have happened with Spy Queen. However, as an example of access film, it was brilliant.

And all the things that have been ridiculed about it are exactly why it was so successful: the dogs in Mugo’s compound, which were supposed to be a picture of lethal control, descending into unruliness (and that puzzling moment she reveals that one of the dogs is named Hitler because it hits, not after Adolf Hitler). Mugo showing she was a taekwondo artist of some renown and then falling over; the hapless woman tasting her food for poisoning when a simple swab would do it.

The BBC’s Sharon Machira has been panned, but her straight face and unemotional demeanour got the goods. Towards the end, the tough Mugo, with a major court case approaching, and clearly overwhelmed by the death threats and worries over her children’s safety, cracks and breaks down in tears.

Kenya’s ‘Spy Queen’ was Inspekta Mwala, Borat, Johnny English and a slice of that famous low-budget Uganda action-comedy, Who Killed Captain Alex?, wrapped in one. Except, it was the other way round: it was real-life imitating fiction.

In the reactions, something fundamental was revealed: the hankering for a more glorious side of Kenya runs deep.