Is it possible to understand Africa as more than a mere consumer of the products of Western society? How does urban Africa in particular reflect local enterprise in its engagement with global practices and in its constitution of a distinguishing ethos?
This paper works through examples from a variety of Kenyan cultural practices - popular music, fiction, jokes and obituaries - to show how an ethos of reconstitution and modification informs the ways in which Africans experience urban life. As such, the practice of jua kali -
that indigenous economic initiative that is the informal sector in Kenya - is seen to have resonance in urban forms of representation that consistently exploit whatever resources and influences are available in order to capture postcolonial experience and generate new idioms to express it. The songs of contemporary artistes like Hardstone and Nairobi City Ensemble do not simply echo the age-old clash between ‘tradition’ and modernity but rather they reveal the sheer extent of the acquisitiveness that defines African urbanism. Likewise the fiction of emergent writers such as Binyavanga Wainaina and the pervasiveness of the street language Sheng confirm the grammar of negotiation and merger between cultures that drives local existence. The constant revision and editing of traditions seen in joking contests and in the changing patterns of funerary practice confirms strategies of modification and selection as the bedrock of African urban culture.
The study is inspired by recent work on African popular cultures which has done much to dismantle the rigid dichotomies that previously dominated discussions of African culture (Barber, Fabian). These works have validated the significance of urban cultural practices just as the growing corpus of work on urban historiography (Ranger, Lonsdale, Anderson, Odhiambo) lends support to this project of unpacking the economies of urban space and rethinking the constitution of contemporary African culture and identity.
In association with the Royal African Society.