Global Masculinities and Manhood

5. Postcolonial Masculinity and Commodity Culture in Kenya

5 Postcolonial Masculinity and Commodity Culture in Kenya MICH NYAWALO introduction In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon (1961) describes the African social elite as a bourgeoisie without capital. This characteristic is attributed to Africa’s “postcolonial” leaders, primarily because they are not endowed with the means and infrastructures of production through which their social status as a bourgeoisie can be validated. Conceptions of masculinity as embedded within political power structures have often been problematized within “postcolonial” discourse. African scholars, authors and filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembene (1974) have, for example, explored the theme of impotence as an embodiment of the African leader’s sociopolitical condition. This chapter seeks to analyze the means through which tropes of masculinity and political power, which are manifested within the spectacle of commodity fetishism, operate in Kenya’s contemporary neocolonial environment. The chapter conducts a sociopolitical analysis of the different symbols of masculinity and power that have been implicitly and explicitly internalized within Kenyan society by asking the following questions: How have conceptions of masculinity and power been constructed in today’s Kenyan society and how (or why) have they “evolved” from their traditional manifestations? What role does the Kenyan and Western media play in constructing new perceptions of manhood and power? And finally, how do these new perceptions participate in the autopoietic economic world system to which Kenya belongs? I shall answer these questions by first focusing on the multiple facets and definitions of power (both at the macro and micro level) that are manifested in neocolonial societies, before analyzing the ways in which they are represented in the Kenyan media and internalized by the society at large. Impotence as a common theme proliferates in a vast array of African postcolonial literary texts. In these texts impotence often manifests itself as an epiphenomenon of the clash between precolonial structures of power as embedded and signified within tropes of masculinity, and post-, or more appropriately, neo-, colonial embodiments of manhood and power. In Xala (1974), Sembene’s protagonist El Hadji, a successful and wealthy businessman whose persona stands as a symbol for the emergent African bourgeoisie, has been struck by the curse of impotence, of which he struggles to rid himself throughout the story. In Xala, El Hadji’s sexual impotence can only be cured through the debasement of his Western persona, the removal of his Western mask, which has to be shattered through humiliation and not just any kind of humiliation but one applied within the boundaries of traditional beliefs. One could argue that Ousmane Sembene therefore equates the forced alienation of one’s “African” self, the exchange of identities in which the native is brainwashed into identifying with the oppressor, as a state of impotence. Impotence in this case means the inability to forge a future for one’s community . Just as an impotent man is deprived of a future family legacy because he cannot have children, so is the westernized African bourgeoisie incapable of forging a future for his community. In Ahmadou Kourouma’s work The Suns of Independence (Les Soleils Des Independences, 1968), Fama, the main character, lacks the ability to impregnate his two wives; this symbolizes the postcolonial state of disempowerment experienced by the precolonial African ruling elite in an environment where structures of power have been reversed. Similarly in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Wole Soyinka’s play The Lion and the Jewel (1966) we find juxtapositions among traditional perceptions as well as performances of masculinity and power, and the colonial realities that threaten to destabilize them. The characters Obi Okonkwo and Baroka in Things Fall Apart and the Lion and the Jewel, respectively, personify embodiments of certain African traditional concepts of manhood and power. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo’s suicide at the end of the novel signifies the protagonist’s refusal to “effeminize” his cultural performance of manhood and sense of empowerment in the face of colonial realities. In The Lion and the Jewel the clash between Baroka the village chief and Lakunle the school teacher, both of whom desire Sidi the village beauty as the object of masculine empowerment , presents a dichotomy between traditional performances of manhood and contemporary applications of masculinity. Lakunle’s emasculation at the MASCULINITY & COMMODITY CULTURE IN KENYA · 125 end of the play problematizes the educated African male’s projected internalization of Western manhood. In many of the above texts, colonization and neocolonization present themselves...