Rafiki by Wanuri Kahiu (review)

Wanuri Kahiu’s Rafiki (2018) hums with warmth, lavender, and possibility. Opening sequences of chalky-pink cement buildings and plum-neon lighting heat the growing love between two Kenyan girls: a love that cultivates a radical openness and exchange, challenging religious fundamentalism and the criminalization of LGBTQI identities and expressions in Kenya. Kena Mwaura and Ziki Okemi—daughters of two opposing men vying to become elected officials in Nairobi— offer one another transformative generosity that forms an oasis of self-definition and discovery. Kena’s father, John Mwaura, a humble, financially strapped businessman opposes the incumbency of Ziki’s wealthy and powerful father, Peter Okemi. Political ego and masculinist traditions clash with the struggle for LGBTQI rights in Kenya disallowing both girls the space to cultivate radically authentic selves. Kena, struggling toward self-definition and belonging, must confront the risk of societal and familial rejection for refusing to conform to rigid standards of gender expression and sexuality. Ziki on the other hand, rejects somber expectations of adulthood as imparted by her strict parents. As the campaign intensifies, Mr. Mwaura’s campaign posters are vandalized, compelling Ziki to apologize on behalf of her rapacious friends. This apology forms the base of their cultivated space of vulnerability, proving transformative, and ushering in queer utopic possibility. The town gossip, Mama Atim, noticing the growing connection between Ziki and Kena, is the shaming chorus of intolerance in the local neighborhood within Nairobi. Mama Atim’s ridicule of same-sex desire is replicated by many others and proves physically harmful when, found kissing, Ziki and Kena are beaten and Kena arrested. The girls are forced apart when Ziki is shipped to London as Kena focuses on her medical studies until the film’s hopeful end. Rafiki offers vulnerable exchange as a mode of generosity that abets bright possibilities for self-definition and queer female desire.

The heady queer utopia created by Wanuri Kahiu in Rafiki is informed by what the Afrofuturist director terms “Afrobubblegum.” Both a collective of African media creators and an aesthetic sensibility, Afrobubblegum seeks to complicate static representations of Africa through a reclamation of fun and frivolity. Frequently reduced to grim news of war, disease, and famine, the African continent becomes fixed within a dystopic imaginary of seriousness that buries the joy, myth, vibrancy, and complexity of African history and culture. In this way, Afrobubblegum resembles a radically decolonial act of recovery, signaling to those invested in complicating monolithic depictions of African cinema and students of queer utopic potentials that frivolity is its own political project. Thus, the bubblegum palette saturating Rafiki points to a greater worldmaking project aligned with frivolity and softness, which abets a vulnerable generosity that incites transformative self-definition.

As José Esteban Munoz’s queer utopia orients us towards hope for those that “have been denied a world,”¹ Afrobubblegum restores levity and self-definition to queer women of Africa denied softness and the opportunity to be heard on their own terms. Ziki, embodying the radical potential of Kahiu’s Afrobubblegum, is a bright departure from the somber rigidity that has not only defined cinematic representations of Africa but also functioned to restrict transformative exchanges that could complicate understandings of gender and sexuality. From the initial encounter, Kena senses this, gripped by Ziki as the camera jump-cuts between their shared gaze; Ziki’s lavender locs, fuchsia lipstick, and laughter encapsulate the allure and levity of Afrobubblegum frivolity. Kena is engrossed by Ziki, often brought to a stand-still during dutiful chores (tending to her father’s shop, assisting with his campaign, mediating his infidelity with her acerbic mother, Mercy) watching Ziki from a distance with wonder. Just as Afrobubblegum functions to rewrite codes of limited cinematic and literary imagination, Ziki incites new possibilities Kena can sense but not yet see. As Kena navigates the strictures of marriage, duty, and tradition that meet her at every turn (her suitor, Blacksta, is on an endless campaign to make her his bride), Ziki pulls her towards new futures.

Inciting a chase, Ziki’s friends tear down...