Down memory lane to see how we got to our collective present

Academics are often accused of pounding readers/listeners with arcane abstractions. As a result, few succeed in pitching their work at a level that would allow them to make profound insights in a language that is accessible to a general readership.

The author of the work under review has avoided both these pitfalls.

Dr Joyce Nyairo has succeeded in executing a readable project – a discourse on who we are, what we have been trying to be and why we identify with what particular ideas and not others – by delving into the history of Kenya using popular sources in a manner that makes me wish that all Kenyan youth could be compelled to read Kenya@50: Trends, Identities and the Politics of Belonging rather than the shallow textbooks they are fed on at school in the name of learning Kenyan history. In this book, readers  are invited to take a trip in time, down memory lane as it were, to see how we might have arrived at our collective present.

When I got hold of Joyce Nyairo’s text, I had sworn I wasn’t going to stop reading until I got to the last full stop.

Little did I know that I would pause scores of times to ruminate over a detail I had read, an event which had fallen off the radar of my recall or some startling details I had never quite heard of, such as how Muungano Choir came to be so-called, or how the songs the choir sung during the week Kenya mourned President Jomo Kenyatta in 1978 were composed.

The book is an invitation to look and rethink some of the epochal socio-cultural, economic, and political moments.

The author quickly pulls the reader into the text through a first person rendition of the events/trends/moments that she writes about.

She describes how Nairobi youth went literally on hunting parties, their clubbing life from Hallians to Blue Post Hotel Thika, their fashion and décor fads from bell-bottom pants to wet-look shirts and platform shoes, Lara 67 and Charming 69 nail varnish – particularly useful in calling to question the methodological positioning in the humanities and social sciences where we’re always chided to stand apart from the data we analyse.

Here Nyairo has shown how one can actually use proximity to their research subject or data to come up with a compelling story. Understood as personal experience narratives, these snippets of Nairobi life back in the day enable a basis for comparisons with contemporary youth culture.

There is something quite noteworthy about the style of the text: music is central to this book. Indeed, it is not farfetched to state that the author thinks through music, hence the seven interludes, the breaks that lie between the chapters. She will have a line from a famous hit for almost every occasion. Particularly evocative, told as a personal experience narrative, is the second Interlude, “Remembering August 1,1982; The Day the Music Died”.

There is no attempt to make a major political claim about the event; the beauty lies in the simplicity of the telling, blow by blow, of how the event impacted upon the lives of city dwellers right down to affecting the ways in which city folk would henceforth consume nyama choma, mutura, kachumbari, boiro and Tusker! 

The events of that day, Nyairo avers “set the intellectual, political and sociocultural tone for the entire 1980s – a time of austerity and fear” (p.99). The phrase “down memory lane” aptly captures what the music that percolates through this text does to you.

GRAMMAR OF OFFICIALDOM

 “What is the grammar of officialdom?”, the author asks of us. Its proclamations, such as they are, reveal the state’s chameleon nature.

Whatever the state says, pay attention to its doublespeak as we see in that oft-repeated phrase “no stone shall be left unturned” by which the police only concern themselves with pebbles as criminals walk off with your tax money, maize, land or they kill you outright. The place of rumour in countering the state’s obfuscatory language has also been analysed.

All the same, the author is quick to point out that the state also does author rumours to get the citizenry to think in certain ways.

The author does a fine job too, reading musical, political and literary texts intertextually.

The occasion of Old Jomo’s burial is read against Joseph Kamaru’s 1975 pop hit JMKariuki — “the one responsible for the murder of JM shall be rolled down on a beehive watched by Kenyans in broad daylight” is a line of particular interest. In turn, Kamaru’s music praxis is read against Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s arguments about Gikuyu (vernacular) and the need to return to a space of “authenticity” culturally whereupon Nyairo finds that the musician has a better appreciation of the idea of cultural hybridity than the don.

Contemporary life is more about appropriations than it is about fixities and fossilisation of culture.

One of the most delightful accomplishments in this work lies in the way the author weaves, consistently, the thread of popular culture through the fabric of Kenya’s history of the last 50 or so years.

Another achievement lies in the author’s diligent attention to sources, textual and otherwise. At times, she refers to actual conversations she had with some of the people present during some interesting moments.

Additionally, Nyairo does not shy away from citing the work of local scholars, thus bucking the trend where Kenyan academics appear to remain beholden to Western sources which they prefer to cite at the expense of local colleagues.

Dr Nyairo’s book will be launched on Wednesday at the Nairobi National Museum.