16 Jan 14 | Africa, Kenya
Leonardo DiCaprio at the recent British premiere of The Wolf of Wall Street in London
Hollywood film The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has been banned in Kenya. The Kenya Film Classification Board announced their decision in a post on their Facebook page.
“There is a LIMIT to everything and we believe the Kenyan public deserves better. WOLF OF WALLSTREET has been RESTRICTED. The film is NOT for sale, exhibition or distribution in KENYA. Violators shall be PROSECUTED,” the message reads. No reason beyond this was given for the ban.
This article was posted on 16 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
04 Dec 13 | Africa, Kenya, News and features
As Kenya prepares to mark its golden jubilee on 12 December, the country is still behind in tackling its biggest threats to free expression. Corruption, ignorance and political meddling still reign supreme.
Articles 33 and 34 of the Constitution of Kenya respectively grant the freedom of expression and the freedom of the media. The articles cover individual as well as media freedom and independence free of government interference or intimidation, provided the rights and reputations of others are not infringed. These freedoms, however, will seemingly come at a heavy cost to the recipients.
Corruption has permeated every aspect of Kenyan life. Institutions of repute have fallen prey to the graft menace including the police service, the judiciary, and government ministries. The private sector has also not escaped corruption’s grip. Corruption robs Kenyans of their rights. Various reports by organs like Transparency International perennially rank Kenya among the top most corrupt countries.
There are often untold stories of how envelopes with “tokens” are passed around to journalists after press conferences or meetings by certain organisations, spokespersons or public figures. For all intents and purposes, this is in exchange for good press coverage. There are also cases of journalists being bribed to kill stories that may incriminate or taint the images of certain politicians or advertisers.
The duo of investigative journalists, John Allan-Namu and Mohamed Ali, were once offered a bribe of one million dollars in early 2009 to drop a story they were working on regarding a certain company offering vehicle tracking services. They declined the offer, going on to expose the company’s fraudulent activities, as well as the bribery attempt itself. But this raised the question: how many journalists have accepted bribes?
Media literacy is also a problem. The average Kenyan takes up whatever they see, hear or read about in the media as absolute truth. Media literacy is important for a person to be able to analyze and evaluate content disseminated via the various media outlets as well as to distinguish truth from falsehood, hoax or propaganda. Without this, most Kenyans accept everything portrayed in the media. This is dangerous as messages can be tailored with ulterior motives and used to manipulate the masses and their perceptions.
Ignorance also causes people not to know where the boundaries are in terms of their freedom of expression as well as how much power they really wield. Many crimes go unreported yearly because citizens may be apathetic or unaware of reporting procedures. It is not uncommon to find people who do not know their leaders are.
Political and government interference also play a major role in liberty of expression. The Kibaki administration saw many strides made in the expansion of the democratic space although it was no stranger to controversy. The infamous raid on the Standard Group by masked gunmen on March 2, 2006 sticks out like a sore thumb in the history of media freedom. Even more recently, there is the Kenya Information and Communications (Amendment) Bill 2013, more popularly known as the Media Bill. Some contentious sections of the bill include forming of a powerful Communications and Multimedia Appeals tribunal to handle regulatory matters; receive complaints and provide judgment over contravention within the new Communications Authority of Kenya or the Media Act.
There is also the imposing of fines of up to 20 million Kenyan shillings for media houses and one million shillings for individual journalists, as well as the powers to suspend and remove a journalist from the roll of practice. This is an unacceptable state of affairs. The media’s role as the fourth estate providing oversight over the other arms of the state, cannot be taken for granted or trampled on.
This article was posted on 4 Dec 2013 at indexoncensorship
09 Aug 13 | Kenya, News and features, Religion and Culture
(Photo: Courtesy Boniface Mwangi)
Boniface Mwangi is an award winning Kenyan photographer and activist. During the 2007 post-election skirmishes he took thousands of photos. His coverage of those attacks entailed great danger as, more often than not, he had to falsify his ethnic identity. In 2009 he founded Picha Mtaani, the first-ever street exhibition in Kenya which was held in towns across the country, showcasing the post election violence photographs to a wider audience beyond Nairobi.
Mwangi has been recognized as a Magnum Photography Fellow, Acumen Fund East Africa Fellow, TED Fellow, and twice as the CNN Multichoice Africa Photojournalist of the Year, among other awards. He currently runs Pawa 254, a collaborative hub for creatives in Kenya. Mwangi recently received the Prince Claus Award 2012 and is now a senior TED fellow.
Mwangi was interviewed by Index on Censorship Head of Arts Julia Farrington at an arts event in Ethiopia in July.
Index: How would you describe Kenyan government’s position on freedom of expression?
Mwangi: Recently the president and deputy president had a media breakfast and invited all the top editors and bloggers, writers at the state house to a meeting. This is unheard of, it has never happened before. The new government is being advised by a British firm advising – it was actually the same firm that advised the US government on how to deal with insurgency in Afghanistan. They are a very smart PR company, they know how to package lies and make it look like the truth, they know how to package crap and sell it to the electorate. At the moment there is a communication bill that is going through parliament which goes against freedom of speech and when they met, the media said they want self-regulation, they don’t want to be regulated by the state.
But beyond this censorship in Kenya is by choice – it is because of the owner’s business interest; they don’t upset the system because they are going to lose business, lose money. The biggest advertisers in the country are the government and the bigger corporations. Editors know as long as they go on the path of truth, they won’t sell advertising space. They spend so much money on advertising – so it is more self-censorship than anything else.
Kenyan journalists are poorly paid. They are paid by story and the money is very little which makes them easy to be bribed, corruptible. If you work in the rural area you have no transport and to get around you rely on the local police to give you a ride or the local politician or drug lord and you get compromised in the process. I worked for five years I know how it works there is a lot of brown envelopes exchanging hands, depending on who is who. And sadly no-one talks about corruption in the media.
Index: You are saying media is compromised but it is essentially independent?
Mwangi: It is independent – there is very little government interference. It’s almost non-existent – they know the media is controlled by interest. Not a single journalist is in jail at the moment. In the previous government there were a lot of libel suits that were awarded to politicians, actually a ridiculous amount of money was involved, but that has stopped.
The other thing is the emergence of bloggers and citizen journalists who can write about anything, which is actually a good and a bad thing because they can write about rumours and attack people’s lives. But sometimes they can become an alternative channel for communication. I have seen a lot of stories that have not made it into the mainstream media, but if you go on line or if you buy the tabloids, it may be exaggerated but there may be some truth in it.
Index: How would you describe the Kenyan’s people’s appetite for freedom of expression?
Mwangi: Kenyan people do not want to fight for their freedoms, they want activists to do it for them, so it is only a minority who are fighting for these rights. There is this wait and see approach on these issues, and it hurts the whole country. Kenyans have all grown up with parents who told them, don’t protest you are going to get arrested, and that fear has been carried out to this generation. There is the lock in the mind of Kenyan people that says we can’t do this, it isn’t possible it is too scary, too daring and dangerous to do it. If you don’t overcome that fear it is going to be passed on to my kids and my kids’ kids so that is what we are trying to do, to give people courage. Our acts of courage are trying to get the people to protest and resist injustices with confidence that nothing bad will happen to them.
Index: You believe doing very extreme, provocative actions is the right way?
Mwangi: We are always going for the shock effect. The shock effect says that if they can do that then other people can do some smaller than that. It has an influence – if I can do it you can do it.
Index: You don’t think it alienates? People could say those guys are crazy?
Mwangi: I don’t think many people think we are crazy – maybe some upper class people and some politicians. But the people understand where we are coming from and they understand our anger and given the chance they would also do extreme things, but they are actually afraid.
Index: Do you think that part of what you need to do is to test the boundaries of the law especially in the context of the new constitution?
Mwangi: We need to do that for Kenyans because we have some over-zealous police officers who arrest and charging people using non-existent laws . So it is important that people understand their rights. And the police should be educated on the bill of rights so that they don’t infringe on Kenyan’s rights.
Index: Some say freedom is a luxury, let’s get people housed and educated first and then let’s turn our minds to freedom of expression. What do you think?
Mwangi: Education is a term that is used very loosely. Many Kenyans are very full of wisdom and they have never been to school. So when you are talking about education you are talking about western standards of how people get educated – more education in what they call the ‘good life’ that isn’t going to change anything.
Freedom is good – it gives human beings dignity, with freedom you can do what you want – it means you can challenge authority, you can give feedback to the government about how you feel. So if you look at a dictatorship most of them stagnate because there is only one thinker amongst a population of many people. That one thinker cannot be omnipresent then you find that there is a shortage of ideas and a want of thinking. So freedom of expression is key to life and to democracy. It has to be there at the start – it is like life.
Index: This space which you have created – is it for a planning space for activists? Or it’s a public space? Or it’s both.
Mwangi: It is a space for creatives where we people share plan events, protest, a place where people discuss. So it’s a place where you can come in any time and discuss, read a book, come in anytime and do a grafitti or just chill or read a book. It’s called PAWA 254. Creatives, activists, journalists and film-makers, guys and women who are like minded who have a real job or a real career but they want a place where they can come and meet like-minded people and discuss.
It is open every day, we plan for it to be open 24 hours per day. And the debate nights are every Tuesday and other days we have different activities where we train activists, photographers, animators or cartoonists – different trainings going on at any given time.
Index: The authorities know you are there. Do they let you get on with it?
Mwangi: The thing is we have a very progressive constitution if you come to my property they need to have a search warrant or a warrant for my arrest. They can’t just come and ask questions. They have to read me my rights. That is actually something that doesn’t happen in this continent but Kenya has a very progressive constitution, which if everything was working could make it a beacon of democracy and human rights.
07 Mar 12 | Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa
“Slum is a tricky word. It conjures up images out of control. The threatening. The miserable. The lawless,” thus wrote Richard Swift in his article “Welcome to Squatter Town” for The New Internationalist. This publicity raised awareness of the difficulties of slum living in Kenya, but it also highlighted the negative aspects of life in these settlements. 60 per cent of people in Nairobi live in slums or informal settlements. You can’t romanticise it. There is hunger, poverty, dire sanitation and overcrowding, with around 200,000 people living in an area approximately 630 acres (similar to 630 football pitches).
But, if you look for them, there are also high expectations, enterprise and thriving creative expression.
In a small room crammed with paintings and metal sculptures partially illuminated by sunlight concentrated through two small windows, eight artists form a collective know as Maasai Mbili in one of Africa’s largest informal settlements, Kibera. The group started in 2001 when friends Otieno Gomba and Otieno Kota decided to combine forces to create a studio space. In 2003 they purchased their current building, turning what had previously been a dodgy bar into a centre of artistic expression and tolerance.
Most of the artists now affiliated with the studio started as sign writers, and in a style directly influenced from this past they create works of visual texts. It makes for hilarious and perceptive art. Otieno Gomba’s piece Save Our Souls features the tread of a running shoe and alludes to both the culture of recycling in Kibera and the depravity found there, while Ashif Malamba’s Somali Pirate series pokes fun at the media’s recent fixation with banditry on East Africa’s coastline.
Using the street as their primary inspiration, Gomba says, “It couldn’t be art if it was just eight artists locked in a room.” Their studio doors bear the word “karibu”, welcome, an open invitation to the community. The work here is not a reflection of life in Kibera, but a representation of it. From the canvases that are primed with a mixture of paint and rubble to mimic the walls of houses, to snippets of conversation overheard in bars that feature in Kevo’s paintings, this is art that is intrinsically bound up with the community in a relationship approaching symbiosis.
As well as creating a neutral space where people can come to them, Maasai Mbili also undertake outreach programmes. Mbuthia Maina holds informal art classes for children where they can “paint what they want” and “pour out their minds”. In a country where art has been sidelined in the national curriculum, this opportunity to explore creativity in an unmediated environment carries even more importance. Not only to does it contribute to building imaginative capacity, but crucially it also provides children with a vehicle to express the issues they see around them but are powerless to control.
Maasai Mbili have created a network of influence within their community, and in the process are building consensus around the idea that there are other possibilities and futures to explore. “Mental attitudes are changing,” said Gomba, speaking of the youth who once saw their options as limited. Rather than turning to a life of petty crime, they now see art as a viable means of making a living. It is a message which is no doubt made all the more powerful because it comes from those who have grown through the same circumstances they have.
The initiative that Maasai Mbili are best known for arose out of the post-election violence of December 2007. Almost overnight, neighbours turned on each other for being from the “wrong tribe”. The death toll rose almost daily for weeks. Amidst the chaos, members of Maasai Mbili decided to use the paintbrush as their main tool in an effort to restore social cohesion. Using street art as a form of visual resistance to unfolding events, they painted Kibera’s ruins, adding colour to blackened buildings and daubing walls with the words “PEACE WANTED ALIVE”. At the time Gomba asked himself, “What is the impact of art in the community? What is the role of art in the time?” In short, how does art influence interaction with our environment, and by extension, our behaviour in it? Art For Peace was born.
Identifying children as having suffered the brunt of the trauma, Art For Peace then embarked on a series of programmes that encouraged youth to address the violence that had engulfed them through creative means. It was “a form of therapy” Gomba said, and an initiative that drew considerable media attention. In the months that followed camera crews and dignitaries flocked to see how a group of dreadlocked artists had begun to address the horrors that those most vulnerable in their community had born witness to.
Now that the violence is over the world’s gaze has moved elsewhere, but for Maasai Mbili the work goes on as they continue to engineer positive social change through art. As Gomba aptly put it, “Art For Peace is eternal. It has no limit. It doesn’t just apply to Kenya. It has no boundaries.”
Maasai Mbili utilise art to effect lasting social change, and they have another pressing goal: to see street art recognised as a legitimate art form. “Street art is sidelined,” said Ashif, “although now there is some recognition. We want to integrate street art with gallery art.” With limited gallery space across Nairobi, compounded by high costs associated with exhibiting, this is ongoing struggle. However when they do get the chance to exhibit, their work consistently sells out. “Our perspective is unique,” Says Ashif, “it is a commentary that is social, personal, economic and political. And it is also full of humour.” Maasai Mbili opens up alternative paths of understanding and gives fleeting access into the visual culture and identity of their community in Kibera.
African Street Art deserves a place in global contemporary discourse. It has meaning beyond commoditisation and market whims. Street Art directly engages with communities through its own language. It changes behaviour and opens up new possibilities; it holds the potential to shape our society. Art — from the street to the gallery — forms an integral part of our national identity.
Musimbi King is a freelance journalist in Nairobi focusing on creative industry in Africa and the role this sector can play in promoting socio-economic growth across the continent.
