What does increased surveillance – being watched – have to do with our sense of vulnerability? As children, our parents constantly remind us of this constant surveillance: our neighbours are watching and we should be careful of what we say and act, behave well or people will talk. In school, the threat of increased surveillance by figures of authorities (bullies, teachers, school prefects) shapes in many the power paradigm in such oppressive places. Being watched is being laid bare, someone lying in wait to see if you will make a mistake and pouncing on you just at the moment of that mistake, the moment of the vulnerability itself. We used to say that this sense of vulnerability was exacerbated by the surveillance but how far can that statement take us? It was already there, the person in authority noted signs of it and increased surveillance, and we just acted out the rest of the stuff generally.
When and how did our sense of community become so oppressive that human surveillance infringes so much on us that “being careful” or “behaving well” became acts of concealing and masking human vulnerability? How can we break the cycle that so inevitably gets us? When do we get to watch others probably because we are beyond being watched? What tropes of class consciousness, religiosity and different forms of hierarchisation do we go through in being watched and trying to watch?
Gays and lesbians are constantly being watched. This was one of the first things that I came to read when I was trying to learn about the queer community in Kenya. We are always being watched, always being laid bare and vulnerable by the government through the police, the religious sector and the all powerful family. I am tempted to say that the act of coming out in a society like Kenya’s where homophobia and forms of queer abuse are still rife and the body is still ruthlessly policed is an act of trying to break out of this vicious cycle of surveillance and counter-surveillance but its not, one is just subjected to a different, deeper kind of scrutiny.
A saying that I have heard is that one must not pay attention to gossip or rumour about him/herself when even in death people are continually talked about. This statement coalesces well with mourning and loss, not a transformative and deeply introspective process (a la Butler, Violence, Mourning, Politics) but a process by which we deflect our own sense of loss into the person we have lost. Mourning is never a taking stock of any kind, as if this taking stock is going to help us dispose off this person from our memories and emotions as quickly as possible or to mourn for the person faster and more conclusively. The “best” mourning, if such a thing exists (it doesn’t) is the process by which we search for the person’s imprint in ourselves, a process that takes times, with varied results but adequately caters (though we may not know it) to knowing much about ourselves.
It is with this background that I come to the death and the subsequent mourning protocols of Wambui Otieno, Kenyan feminist, Mau Mau veteran and political activist. I have read most of the obituaries, if you could call them that, of Wambui in the newspapers, watched her feature in the news for the past day and all this comes up short. But I have to ask, how do nations mourn a singular person? How do we come to this much contoured sensation? What does this say about national melancholia?
I came to know about Wambui Otieno when she made the news after getting married to a man who was 42 years younger than her thus subverting an age old practice in patriarchal Kenya where old wealthy and respectable men married very young women or girls. At that time, the only varying opinion other than that of the media was that of the people around me and a lot of people who circled around her newfound infamy. The media coverage was considerable, much more extensive than what I see now. Even as we now come back to trying to circulate around her, a keen eye brings us to the patriarchy that circulates over us who circulate around Wambui. The news is drenched with bending-over-backward brief pieces on her life and work, with the rest of the airtime spent on describing kinship ties and what her family is doing for funeral arrangements and burial plans.
And burial plans are a powerful point of anxiety in this scenario. Considering the long court battle of Wambui Otieno and the Umira Kager clan and the subsequent re-marrying of Wambui to a younger, less socioeconomically enfranchised man, it remains to be seen for the next few days the kind of coverage about Wambui’s death will elicit.
And I also want to acknowledge the ethnocentrism in the room, how it comes up in ubiquitous ways. I would never want to see the court case in 1987 outside the realm of feminism thought. I think the best work on the case then and now remains how it was articulated according to feminist theory. There is a deeply deeply flawed kind of thinking that wants to pit the Umira Kager clan against the Waiyaki family, ostensibly the Luo versus the Kikuyu and I am worried about the kind of intimacy which Wambui Otieno was angling for back in 1987 that this kind of thinking consciously tries to do away with. I am worried about the patriarchy it does not want to unsettle.
Scholars and intellectuals have written extensively on the S M Otieno case which was keenly viewed by African feminists all around Africa. I am highly grateful of such investments in feminist circles, it reminds me that there is hope in a future where feminist thinking will be taken more seriously and will have a more active role in shaping events and policies.
What is the meaning of the deep scrutiny of Wambui, pre and post-humus? What does it bring the whole nation to in knowing and searching within itself for the imprint of Wambui Otieno? This is a question that should be taken seriously in that it reveals a lot about the ways in which national mourning and watching singular figures operates. I don’t think there is ever anything conclusive or even productive that comes of out of surveillance. It is an authoritarian approach for a community or group of people to give a set of rules and then watch itself go around these rules. It is dangerously narcissistic. When Wambui stepped out of this sense of communal navel-gazing, she was given into more scrutiny, more personal details about her life.
I am wary of the actions that want to deem mourning as anything less than trying to place her in Kenya’s history and I am also wary of the evading of crucial topics such as feminism and Mau Mau and the blanket of patriarchy that is always circling above, the scrutiny that always looks deep within but has nothing to add to our sense of mourning or thinking on vulnerability.
I thank Wambui Otieno for her life, work and the influence she continues to have on my thinking.
Also, Keguro Macharia on Gukira has a really nice piece on Wambui Otieno. Read, it’s nice
This is a really good, strong and layered post.
The surveillance you speak of reminds me of feminist Donna Haraway’s notion of “the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere” i.e. the way increasing “vision” and surveillance operates like a god who sees everything but remains unseen. In a Modern sense we could say with Haraway that “the eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity — honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy — to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power.” And in a postmodern sense we can ditch this knowing subject to claim it is surveillance itself that is now the Master, no? Or that there is now no Master, that there is no eye that see all, but rather cameras/vision/eyes ad infinitum.
That paragraph you penned about mourning and its mirroring capacity is very powerful, very well written. I experienced some sort of epiphany reading it.
Now, onto ideology (because that is where truths lie most of the time). The first I heard of Wambui Otieno was after she married Mbugua. Back then, I don’t think the media spoke of her background as Mau Mau (and they may have hinted to her struggles against “that clan”, but I don’t remember them dwelling on it — just the usual footage of Wambui next to a Mbugua slightly overwhelmed by all the surveillance). First, Wambui Otieno is a reminder of just how policed the image of a Mau Mau remains. It’s markings are: male, heterosexual, set in a past time, etc.
I see these new details (“she was a feminist, she was Mau Mau”) as a sort of rebranding (you know, the usual eulogy material), but I think there is a way in which these name brands/titles may take away from the person, life and achievements of Wambui Otieno rather than add onto them. I think (in a Lacanian sense) Wambui Otieno must remain Wambui Otieno, a specter that haunts our chauvinism, ageism, patriarchy, etc. Only as her name, Wambui Otieno, does she invoke all those images and struggles for which she is now being given empty brands. Otherwise, this rebranding risks subsuming Wambui Otieno, destroying her complexity in favor of honoring her using “accolades” that numb and dim her rather than revealing something about her. (I know, I know, this is a poor argument, but I don’t have much time to develop it here).
I also had some bad vibes when I described her like that but I don’t want anyone to take my word for it. Those invested in her mourning will draw their own paths on how to go about this process. Indeed, most of the stuff I read about her were really bad shit: describing her along kinship ties, her marriages etc. There is very little that is in the public domain that tries to think about her work in line with feminism, political activism or even the Mau Mau. I must admit that haven’t read as much as I would like on the last two.
I guess people should also make a point of asking how what we know about her, what is largely in the public domain, has been placed there by patriarchy, misogyny, historical revisionism and so on. I guess I am also in a way drawing, in this post, the main tropes of knowledge that I will be using in thinking about her life and work.
There is some inevitability to thinking of her as a feminist, coming to know her as a Mau Mau veteran or recognizing her as a political activist but I may be employing what Judith Butler calls protestant modes of going through mourning. I think a lot of people should ask themselves, how was Wambui a feminist, what was her participation in the Mau Mau movement what thinking did she employ during her days as a political activist under the overarching question of “who was she to us?”
If you want to know about her she did write a book “Mau Mau’s Daughter: A Life History
Wambui Waiyaki Otieno, edited and with an introduction by Cora AnnPresley”
that I found in the library some years ago. The book is very raw and detailed explaining what she underwent during the mau mau struggle.
Kenne, thank you for this. It has been incredibly helpful in the midst of the (not unexpected) trivialisation of her life in the public. I have been struck by the silence after her death, until a few days ago, which seeks to pigeonhole and tidy her up in much the same ways as much public sentiment did while she was alive. But this often happens to women whose lives are difficult to narrate. We see it happen across the continent – and the world – especially to revolutionary women. The fact of the matter is that whether she self-identified as a revolutionary, feminist, nationalist, pan Africanist, anti-racist, etc – or not, her life and words suggested these meanings powerfully at different times. However we speak of her, we have agendas and all our claiming of her serves ideological purposes – just like her belittling as “just” daughter, wayward wife, inappropriate lover, does. Even her memoir leaves some questions about how she saw aspects of herself, and there are parts that just seem like she is having fun at the reader’s expense. But none of that takes away from the fact of her complexity, and the many ways in which she made it possible for many of us, not just Kenyans/in Kenya, to see ourselves in more freeing ways. This too is her legacy.
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