It was an emergency. Their daughter was ill and with non-existent ambulance services in the town, she needed money to pay for a taxi. I was about 10 years old, and my brother only six years older, became my hero that day because he intervened and pulled the man away from his wife.

In trying to understand the links between class, masculinity and feminism I often go back to that moment. And how in either lamenting gender inequality or in applauding the important strides toward gender we fail to see its connection to class and poverty.

Kwambira is very poor – the residents are either jobless, or work as day laborers. The moment the wife walked into that bar, she was in essence undressing a wounded masculinity. With the shame of being in a bar and an inability to provide sustenance above the poverty level in a society where manhood is everything, the man could only assert control and power by beating his wife in public. Patriarchy, debilitating poverty and a wounded sense of masculinity had become a lethal cocktail.

Yet the wife was only doing what any reasonable person would do. A child is sick and the husband is squandering the little money needed on alcohol with other equally wounded men. And more generally, that woman was responding to what society demanded of her. When disasters strike, be it in the form of war or famine, African women are the first responders because it is them who fetch water, cook and look after the health of the children.

Could it be then that they were both victims of class and that the wife was a double victim because of her gender? To me African feminism, which out of necessity has to understand African masculinity, is a theory that tries to explain what put both husband and wife on violently opposing paths, and how she, other women and ultimately society can liberate all of us – male and female alike – not just from patriarchy where prisoner and the guard are both locked up, but from oppression in general terms.

Simple enough. Yet mention feminism to African cultural purists, and you become an agent of Westernisation. African purists are peddlers of miracle water; keep your culture pure and all the continent’s other problems – classism, poverty and the national and international usurpation of natural resources – will disappear. But in vanquishing real and imagined enemies, they end up defending the most retrogressive aspects of African cultures.

We have been here before. When the colonists and their missionaries came to Africa, the purists said it was African to be hospitable. Come independence and they said it was African to forgive. To the pro-democracy youth fighting dictators these purists said it was African to respect our elders.

And to women seeking equality, the cultural purists argue it is not natural that women have an equal footing to men – The Bible forbids it and that advocating feminism is yet another form of Westernisation. In short, it is part of African culture to keep women oppressed. The problem is: who decides what is African culture and what is not? The only thing that culture guarantees is that it will change and is dynamic.

African women have been at the forefront of that change. They were part and parcel of the liberation movements, from the Mau Mau to the revolution in Algeria and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Women were also at the forefront of Africa’s post-independence democratisation struggles. They have had to fight not only for national liberation and democratisation but also for their rights as women.

As a result there have been substantial changes for the better. The African Union and most constitutions recognise and promise to promote equality before the law and in positions of power. Today, we have an female president in Liberia and women constitute 50 per cent representation in Rwanda’s parliament. Throughout the continent women are represented in all facets of national life. But this is not the full story.

Present-day African feminism has made peace with neo-liberal capitalism, which is leaving poverty and inequality in its wake. Neo-liberal democracy has come to mean protecting these interests. The man and wife in Kwambira are condemned to remain in poverty even though armed with the vote. Gender equality will be undermined by the debilitating poverty that the African majority poor live in.

Yes women are oppressed as women, and the politics of liberation have to be cognizant of gender, but that women can be free from patriarchy within the marginalisation that comes with poverty is an oxymoron. Class matters and we have to fight it alongside with patriarchy.

And for the African men, the ultimate question is whether we can put aside the useless grandstanding and destructive masculinities and work with women for a democracy that sees both patriarchy and class as the pervasive enemies within democracy and globalisation.

*Mukoma wa Ngugi is the author of Nairobi Heat (Penguin, SA 2009) and Hurling Words at Consciousness (AWP, 2006). He is also a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine where this essay first appeared.

African Feminism and the dilemma of Class is a post from: Mukoma wa Ngugi

How Waterloo was named is a post from: Mukoma wa Ngugi

Commit sins of transportation. Bite the past. Spit broken teeth
and colored blood that will chart global awareness. Learn
to say fuck without flinching. Seduce anarchy of the mind and try
to order schizophrenia in realms just outside the touch of your black

hand. Image coming at you. Color it in Old English and an accented
haiku and see what you win. If lucky enough, if you are one of those
lucky cigar smoking sons of bitches, play the lottery and you might win
the lady’s hand. Do not try to break the chains that bind her feet.

Hold her. Touch an image of her that is a mirage of you. Laugh
and say she is crazy to forget with you. Sip your beer gently. Light up,
let the sizzling seeds pass from your lips to hers. Watch the smoke
and its promise, it will turn you on onto possibilities of the night. Smile.

Ghosts. As a child voices sang in my sleep and then took to life. I dueled
them with screams that were hushed with threats of tranquility. I stole
Don Quixote’s sword and found a horse in my bouncing bed and would
have won the battle had it not been for the doctor who found Malaria

where there was none. Pills. Silent duels. And so when the police with guns
and big black coats came for my father, it must have been a dream I dreamt.
That night – pills with no water but morning tea still found a newspaper
damp with dew. Swords thrust, truths as righteousness of strength

bouncing horses and Marx -it all could have been a dream. Learn to stay up
late and talk of classes and footsteps. Not of classes but of labor at the nearest
Micky D’s. Dance to old rhythms and constitute common law while talking
of tradition. Find the nearest altar. Take pills without gun powder. Say

Mandela always with a smile. Miss her but call her a bitch. It will make
you feel like a man to stare her down feminism. Dust sprinkled so sparsely
and gently on your feet, stripped dress, gapped smile, black hair in rainbow

your laugh and the way your fingers curled inwards – they always smelled
of plums. I miss our evenings by the pond, that time the sun refused to set
and we had to roll it over and down the hill You never did come to say good bye
how is it I remember your smile at the airport? Stay away from New York.

Too many mirrors of yourself. Read Harlem only in your sleep. Learn
to say Puerto Rican radicals got what was coming to them and Mexico
is no man’s land. Watch birds on national geographic migrate.
Amuse yourself in the sound of wing against wind. Ignore the wail

of the middle passage. Find beauty in trees where no necks were broken
and burning flesh was not sacrificed and color it Rainbow. You see,
its all creation. Streams, your feet washing clean. Your curved elbows
sending rays back to the sun. Your militant Khaki skirt wet at the folds.

I sent you a letter. In it I enclosed photos of you as I will remember
you tomorrow. Sometimes I am waiting for you at our pond scribbling
little notes shaped like butterflies and birds that bear your name.
It’s Sunday. How did you leave church to come to me? I swear you make

me laugh. A hungry bird once in mid Indian Ocean flight, very much
weakened by hunger and scared of what lay below, measured
wing against thigh and eat its feet. And as all must come down, it landed
on its head and died. My dear, eat your memories very carefully.

*This poem originally appeared in Hurling Words at Consciousness (AWP, 2006) and Tin House Magazine (2008).

Recipe: How to Become an Immigrant and an Exile is a post from: Mukoma wa Ngugi

I am sipping a cold Taj Mahal beer at Empress Taytu, the Ethiopian restaurant on Cleveland’s East Side. My wife, friends and I have just finished some doro wat stew and injera bread while our 10-day-old daughter, Nyambura, takes a nap.

I am a Kenyan claiming Ethiopian culture in order to feel at home. Perhaps years ago, it would have felt ironic, but not anymore.

I came to the United States in 1990 to attend college and reconnect with a father I hadn’t seen in eight years. A writer, he was living in political exile after using his pen against the dictatorship of Daniel Arap Moi. Leaving for a conference in London, he’d been told he’d receive a “red-carpet welcome” on his return — a euphemism for being jailed or killed.

I was able to leave Kenya only because I was born in Evanston, Ill. My parents had returned home shortly after my birth, so my first language is Gikuyu, and my English accent is unmistakably Kenyan. The dictatorship had denied my siblings passports — an attempt to punish my father — while I, armed with my birth certificate and Kenyan identification, was able to go to the American Embassy and get a U.S. passport.

So my return to the states was an escape. But because I had lived in Kenya all my life, it was not a return home; it was to begin the life of an immigrant in the country of my birth. To cope with my feelings of isolation in the racially polarized America of the 1990s — the time of the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles riots and the O.J. Simpson trial — and the news from East Africa — the dictatorship intensifying in Kenya, the genocide unfolding in Rwanda — I sought the company and conversation of other Africans and African-Americans. I had to abandon a narrower Kenyan identity and embrace my Africanness and blackness.

Still, even today, I can get terribly homesick. But even though I left Kenya for very complex reasons, the cure is in finding small, mundane things that bring home back to me. Immigrants are forced out of their native lands by great upheavals: war, famine, oppression. But in our host countries, those larger issues become abstract. We miss small, practical things that function as metaphors for home. When we do find them, it is deeply satisfying. We feel like we have reconnected with our culture.

Finding such nuggets, though, is like translating between languages. I am constantly looking for the original or equivalent. At other times, I have to compensate and substitute. For example, I wanted to get married in a free-flowing African kitenge shirt, not straight-jacketed in a tuxedo. I couldn’t very well drive to Steelyard Commons for it. But at the Calabash African Market in Cleveland Heights, I found one with matching shorts.

Mostly, though, I am in search of food. If you love food as much as I do, food is culture. And for Kenyans, there is no substitute for goat meat. We eat roast goat at weddings and funerals, at birthday parties, in five- and one-star restaurants. There is an urban legend set in Cleveland of an elderly American couple who went out of town for a few days, leaving their pet goat under the care of a Kenyan student, who promptly threw a party. No need to spell out the fate of the goat, or the friendship.

So in 2007, when my wife and I moved to Cleveland from Wisconsin so that she could start medical school, I promptly found my way to the West Side Market. Although I cannot buy a whole goat there, a full leg for roasting gets the job done.

Sometimes, as a food lover and fumbling chef, I have to innovate. Indian naan flatbread replaces thicker Kenyan chapatis. And in order to make ugali, a hard cakelike dish made of maize, I must find the dry, white maize flour at a Hispanic or Asian grocer, since sweet, yellow American corn flour won’t do. Thus, I’ve also begun to experiment with foods from many different cultures — and now even make a mean pad thai.

Ultimately, some things do not translate. Last year, when I flew home and my brothers met me at the Nairobi airport, we immediately went out for goat and Tusker beer. In the restaurant, a lone musician was strumming his guitar, singing old favorites in Gikuyu. The audience did a Mugithi train dance, snaking and chugging around the dance floor. This is home at its essence — music, food, family and language.

But what Cleveland cannot give, it can compensate for in profound ways. My daughter was born here. Her roots, which I hope will span wider than mine or her mother’s, will always start here. We named her Nyambura, which translates into bringer of rain, after my late mother. Culturally speaking, my mother continues to live through her.

Translation means a word is reborn into a different language and culture. So isn’t my mother being reborn in Cleveland the ultimate act of translation?

*This essay first appeared in the October 2010 issue of Cleveland Magazine.

Cleveland in Translation is a post from: Mukoma wa Ngugi

One morning I burst into my father’s study and I said
“when I grow up, I too want to hunt, I want to hunt
words, and giraffes, pictures, buffalos and books”

and he, holding a pen and a cup of tea said, little father,
to hunt words can be dangerous – but still, it is best to start
early. He waved his blue bic-pen and his office turned

into Nyandarua forest. It was morning, the mist rising
from the earth like breath as rays from the sun fell hard
on the ground like sharp nails. Little father, do you see

him? – my father asked. “No” I said. Look again – the mist
is a mirror – do you see him? And I looked again and
there was a Zulu warrior tall as the trees, spear in hand.

Shadow him, feign his movements, shadow him until
his movements are your movements. Running my feet
along the leaves I walked to where he was, crouched

like him so close to the earth, feet sinking deeper
into the earth as if in mud, turning and reading the wind
and fading into the mist till I became one with the forest.

For half a day we stayed like this – tired and hungry
I was ready for home. But my father said, I did not say
this was easy – you cannot hunt words on a full stomach.

And just as soon as he spoke there was a roar so loud
and stomping so harsh that hot underground streams broke
open like a dozen or so water pipes sending hissing

steaming water high into the air. I turned to run
but the warrior stood his ground. As the roar and thunder
came closer, his hair braided and full of red ochre

turned into dread-locks so long that they seemed like
roots running from the earth. When the transfiguration
was complete, before me stood a Mau Mau fighter, spear

in one hand, home-made-gun in the other, eyes so red
that through the mist they looked like hot molten
cinders, the long dreadlocks a thousand thin

snakes in the wind, the leaves and grass and thorns
rushing past him. You must help him, don’t just stand
there, help him – my father implored but just as soon

as I had closed my little hands into fists, the lion
appeared high up in the air, body stretched the whole
length as the Mau Mau fighter pulled the spear like

it was a long root from the earth. The lion, mid-air, tried
to stop, recoiled its talons to offer peace but it was too
late and it let out another roar as its chest crushed

into the spear, breast-plate giving way until the spear
had edged its way to the heart. Dying then dead
it continued its terrible arc and landed. I waved

and the picture stood still. My father came up to me
and asked, why have you stopped the hunt? I said
“but we killed it – I have what we came for.” I pointed

to where the Mau Mau warrior was pulling his spear
from the carcass but my father shook his head and said
–you have done well but look closely – how can you

carry all that in a word? How can we carry that home?
It is too heavy. I laughed and said – “father, you help me.”
But he pointed to the ground, to a steady flow of a bright

thin red river furiously winding down from the grooves
of the spear to the earth. I too pointed unable to speak
– the beauty larger than my imagination. I was confused.

I had no words. Come, let us go home little father.
When you are of-age you shall find the words, he said.
But always be careful – to hunt a word is to hunt a life.

Hunting words with my father is a post from: Mukoma wa Ngugi

The first thing we have to combat is classism, a looking down upon the poor that afflicts the wealthy, the middle class and ironically the poor themselves.  Anything associated with poverty is seen as an anathema and things associated with poise and being classy are welcomed without question.  Food is a good example.  White rice is associated with having class, while sorghum and millet are seen as poor people’s food.  So we end up importing the more expensive rice instead of growing our own hardy, disease and drought resistance sorghum and millet.

This does not just affect our pockets and our health.  It means that local farming suffers while at the same time various strains of sorghum and millet disappear.  The bio-diversity, created by thousands of years of adaption, is lost as we stop growing these strains.  In a way, we are eating our way into hunger as we grow less and less food and rely more and more on GMO’s and imported food.

In cities such as Nairobi and Cape Town, middle and upper-classes see it not just convenient to buy bloodless and colorless meat at the supermarket, but also as a sign of having arrived.  No more going to the rural areas to buy fresh produce, or the market.  Yet, the relationship between the city and the rural is symbiotic.  Small farmers sell their fresh produce to the rural or city market. This keeps farmer’s family fed, clothed and where school is affordable, educated.  It also means that the farmer will rely less on money from relatives working in the city.  Instead of giving money to the already wealthy corporate super-markets, it is makes more economic and health sense to buy the fresh produce from local farmers.

Classism also leads to self-destructiveness.  Gout, the rich man’s disease, is a result of over-indulgence in eating roast meat and beer.  In most traditional African societies, meat was a rare treat. But somewhere along the line, in countries like Kenya and Malawi, being able to afford copious amounts of roast meat became a marker of class.  Not only is gout now at epidemic levels adding strain to already poor national health systems, but it also means that money that could be spent on school-fees is being spent on medication, meat and beer.  Nothing wrong with a cold beer and occasional roasting session, it’s the excess and expensive self-destruction that is the problem.

Related to classism is The West is the Best syndrome exemplified by the importation of second hand clothes.  This is a symptom of such psychological dependence that even pride (rightly or wrongly) that would make one scoff at wearing clothes worn by a stranger is sublimated.  Tailors and cobblers are out of work meaning they are not participating in the local economy.  The end result is local and national clothing industries in shambles and a population that cannot clothe itself without help from the Western donors. We are driving ourselves out of businesses and further into dependence.

Nollywood in Nigeria has shown that it is possible to have a thriving national film industry.  But more needs to be done.  It is still easier for us to embrace and more importantly pay for Western cultural products before ours.  Yet artists and other cultural workers cannot survive without getting oxygen from those who share their culture.  By buying local and national music and art, we will not only benefit the individual artist, but the whole industry as well, from the local seller, the producers, editors, critics and reviewers.  There are no innocent buys, each shilling, rand or kwacha will either benefit someone one in the West or your neighbor.

There is more we can do on the cultural front.  Invite your writers to a local bookstore, or primary and high schools, to local gatherings, or if you form one, to a reading group.  Invite a local band to play at your wedding or a poet to perform a love poem or two.  The more we consume our culture, the more we will produce.  And the more we produce, the more the shared experiences and a sense of national identity.

Related to the question of culture is that of African languages.  It is now shown that children who are proficient in their mother tongue acquire other languages faster.  If you want your child to acquire and master English or French, it will be to their advantage if they are proficient in their mother tongue.  But more than that, you are also creating a reader for the African writer who decides to write in his or her language.  And you are bringing up a child who stands at the center of your culture, as opposed to the margins of Western cultures.

In the course of taking individual actions, not only will be supporting each other, but we shall be getting to know each other while developing mutual respect.  And because we will have learned to talk to each other through our shared experiences, and we will be aware of the power of action even at the individual and local level, we shall be better poised to fight the bigger struggles.  We shall better practice the Zulu world view – We are persons through other people.

*Mukoma wa Ngugi is the author of Nairobi Heat (Penguin SA 2009) and Hurling Words at Consciousness.  This essay first appeared in the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine.

Those who help themselves is a post from: Mukoma wa Ngugi

I know that Black people were sold as slaves because they were seen as talking beasts of burden and Africans colonized for their own good; and it was unnatural for women to operate heavy machinery let alone operate on a brain.

I know that in the United States, Jim Crow used the rope to keep black from white, and apartheid in South Africa killed for as little as looking across the color line; and that intermarrying between the races was a crime against God, Queen and Country.

I know that a God of many names, the Laws of many lands, science and nature were used to justify slavery and colonialism, holocausts and genocides, rapes and lynching.

I know that African dictators called those who fought for democracy “puppets under the pay of foreign of masters” and the foreign masters called those same people communists and insurgents.

And this I know very well: that had the Sojourner Truths, Dedan Kimathis, Martin Luther Kings, Malcom Xs, and Ruth Firsts failed, my wife and I would not have crossed the color line and my daughter would not have been possible.

I know that she, just like her mother and I, just like her grandparents will have her struggles, but it will a struggle waged at the crossroad of many cultures and worlds.

So I must know that those before me did not die so that I could use my freedom to put others in jail; or use the same laws that betrayed them to enslave and torture.

I must know that if Steve Biko died so I could write what I like, then my pen cannot become the weapon that justifies the torture and murder of others.

How then can I not know that no one appointed me protector of African cultural purity? How can I not know that I am not the standard of all that is moral and natural?

What fortress is this I build that subjugates those within and keeps those outside under siege? Whose moral law is this I use to judge?

Whose legal system to jail? Whose weapon to murder? And whose tongue do I use to silence?

How can I, Black and African and blessed as I am by the struggles of my fathers and mothers deny my gay brothers and sisters their rights?

This I know – The struggle continues. And if it continues for some, then it continues for all.

*Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Nairobi Heat (Penguin, SA 2009), Hurling Words at Consciousness (AWP, 2006) and a political commentator based in Cleveland, Ohio.

This is what I know… is a post from: Mukoma wa Ngugi