The "Missionary Position" and the Postcolonial Polity, Or, Sexual Difference in the Field of Kenyan Colonial Knowledge

Kenya, once the glory and the hope of post-colonial Africa, is a country in sad decline. It is fractured and uneasy, ruled by a corrupt government and an intolerant president, and has only a divided and mealy-mouthed opposition as an alternative. In the darkness, there was one faint glimmer on the political horizon as Kenyans went to vote yesterday. That is Charity Ngilu, the first prominent woman, untainted by old-style politics, to emerge on the Kenyan scene. . . . Daniel arap Moi, now 74, and his KANU party have led Kenya on a 20 year downhill run from a civilized and prosperous British Colony to yet another African basket case of corruption, decay and poverty. (O'Dwyer 6, my emphasis)

Within months, [Charity] Ngilu, a vicar's daughter and mother of three, has come from nowhere to become one of the most serious contenders to challenge [President Daniel arap] Moi, the last of Africa's old-style leaders after the deaths of Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and Hastings Banda of Malawi. Although there are 14 candidates running for president in the general election, Ngilu is widely regarded as the candidate with the greatest chance of toppling Moi's corrupt regime. (Orr "Mama," my emphasis)

Twice in the last four years (first between 1995 and 1996, then, in 1997), Western media accounts "darkened" the Kenyan polity, depicting it as a site of postcolonial backwardness, bad governance, mass suffering, endemic corruption, ethnic chauvinism, rampant sexism and an atavistic capacity for mass violence. In both instances, these accounts incarnated the figure of a saviour for Kenya, a figure whose symbolic efficiency as saviour was directly proportional to the "darkening" of the Kenyan polity. Kenya's saviour between 1995 and 1996 was the famed scientist turned political activist, Richard Leakey, a white man (as press accounts obsessively referred to him); Kenya's saviour in 1997 was Charity Ngilu, a black woman (as press accounts obsessively referred to her) who unsuccessfully ran for the Kenyan presidency. The transition from Leakey to Ngilu--from white maleness to black femaleness--reinforced the image of Kenya as a polity desperately in need of salvation from self-destructive excess. What factors might account for this development?

Although the central focus of this paper will be on the discursive apotheosis of Charity Ngilu, I will also briefly discuss the case of Agnes Siyiankoi Risa, a woman who attempted late in 1997 to seek redress in criminal court against her common law husband, Moita ole Risa, for domestic abuse. Risa's case was coterminous with Ngilu's bid for the presidency and, at least as far as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was concerned, represented a paradigmatic feminist moment in Kenya. In a sense, the structure of my essay imitates the structure of the reporting of two events in the West. Ngilu's candidacy provoked a veritable discussive explosion--as if to indicate that her bid for the Kenyan presidency constituted a radical reconfiguration in feminist terms of the Kenyan political order. In contrast, Risa's court case was largely ignored by most major Western media outlets with the notable exception of the BBC, which accorded the latter story nearly as much prominence as the Ngilu story. Risa's story is important despite the fact that almost no other major media outlet picked it up. In addition to contributing to a gendered darkening of the Kenyan landscape, this story ought to be conceived as the emergence of a "failed saviour," a saviour-image whose imaginary-ideal failed to achieve full symbolic efficiency (perhaps as a result of the co-presence of Ngilu's more dominant imaginary-ideal). The irony is that both Leakey and Ngilu were, as I discuss below, ultimately failed saviours.

The concerns that animate this paper are relatively straightforward and quite normative: Apropos of Africa, why do the contemporary discourses of authoritative...