Anxieties of mixed-raceness in Kenya: perspectives from music, media, and novelistic representations

Abstract

This article argues that historical issues that shaped racial relations in Kenya continue to undermine mixed-raceness in social imaginaries. It links the Kenyan public’s stigmatisation of mixed-race couples and mixed-race individuals to colonial histories of oppression and dispossession of subordinated races. The subconscious colonial memories ventilate through anxieties against mixed raceness in the media, music, and novelistic representations. In the representations, one notices mixed persons’ struggles to belong in a society that links them to oppressors. The article further nuances representations that exhibit delusions of racial purity of communities traceable to ‘distant’ mixed raceness and their ironical contempt of those whose mixed raceness is traceable to a recent past. Thus, memories of racial injustices and imbalances can have lasting effects on mixed raceness whereby anxieties against the category may suggest resistance against racial inequalities.

Keywords:

• Mixed raceness
• racial injustices
• racial purity

Acknowledgement

This article is a revised version of my PhD thesis chapter two titled “Mapping Kenya's Literary Transnational Histories” (pp. 22–54). The thesis is titled “Narrated Histories in Selected Kenyan Novels, 1963–2013.” My heartfelt gratitude to my supervisors Prof Grace A Musila (Witwatersrand University) and Dr Godwin Siundu (University of Nairobi) for their invaluable contributions in shaping the ideas for the earlier version of this work during supervision.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The term White Highlands “was derived from official policy that [high potential] agricultural lands in Kenya should be reserved for settlers of European origin” (Morgan 140).

2 Watch the clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bztN0EypJG0.

3 The Indian Ocean World has been described as “the core of the first global economy” (Campbell 173). Kusimba locates the Swahili coast at the centre of Indian Ocean World from the days of King Solomon to Portugal and Omani conquests (Kusimba 19,27).

4 Spears views the Shirazi as the ‘‘prototypical Swahili, conceived in the intercourse between different peoples and economies, born into a society in tension, and raised in inequality’’; a group that ‘‘called themselves Shirazi for the prestige foreign origins so often bring” (1984, pp. 299, 300). Chittick outlines the Shirazi civilization and Shirazi dynasty in a search for this group thought to have originated from Persia or from the Gulf and concludes that they were a ‘‘Swahilized people from the Banadir [in Somalia and called themselves] Shirazi in much the same way the Swahili people of Zanzibar do at present day’’ (292).

5 Odhiambo contends the situation where “World History [has become] European History” (187).

6 See Odhiambo, 186; Gilbert, p. 187; Campbell, 181.

7 This is anchored on the knowledge that the Zionist Movement that was committed to finding a homeland for Jews was itself imperialist as they urged European powers between 1900 and 1917 to establish ‘‘a Jewish state [for them] in the colonial world’’ (Wa-Githumo 96)

8 Kantai demonstrates that the British constantly hired Maasai auxiliaries in their conquest campaigns at the dawn of the 20^th Century (108).

9 A grant of 3,200,000 acres was allocated to the Jews to form an autonomous Jewish state in the White Highlands. British settlers in Kenya strongly opposed the project and tricked the Zionist emissaries by showing them an arid section of the land (Wa-Githumo 87,94–5).

Additional information

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Wafula Yenjela

Wafula Yenjela teaches literature at South Eastern Kenya University, Kitui, Kenya. He is also an adjunct lecturer at Africa Nazarene University, Nairobi, Kenya. He holds a BA (Literature and Linguistics) and an MA (Literature) from University of Nairobi, Kenya, and a PhD in literary studies from Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, South Africa. His research interests are mainly race and gender activism, the Kenyan novel’s literary histories, documentary film, and life writing. He is published in journals such as Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies; Agenda; Journal of African Literature Association; Pathways to African Feminisms and Development, and Oxford Research in English. His book chapters have also appeared in Lexington Books and Routledge Books.