In November 1884, European powers (represented by elderly white men) met in Berlin presuming to divide amongst themselves the large “cake” that was the African continent. It was a looting mission that later morphed into a political exercise, and the rest as they say, is history. An interesting footnote is that the conference lasted a whole three months until February 1885, indicating that the discussions must have been quite protracted, and probably interspersed with copious amounts of food, drink and debauchery (a feature of conferences that hasn’t changed much, over a century later!)

Fast forward to 21st Century Africa. The much-touted Africa Protected Areas Congress (APAC2022) has been held in Kigali, Rwanda. Myself and others have already written and spoken extensively about how “Protected Areas” are actually “white spaces” in a majority black continent. During the colonial era, they were literally spaces set aside for the recreation of white people. In the post-independence era, the spectrum of users now includes black people, but they are still lily-white in terms of the paranoid, prejudiced, violent and intellectually stunted manner of their management.

This mentality is the “white” identity of conservation practice in Africa today. The practitioners have made many attempts to mask this identity, by creating strange mongrels referred to as “conservancies” of various kinds, but the concept is the same: annex land from indigenous African people who use it for their livelihoods and set it aside for the self-actualization of foreign elites.

Africa is fabulously wealthy in natural resources, but we must always remember that the value of the visible above ground resources is a mere fraction of what lies underneath. Sadly, the spectacular beauty of our wildlife, forests and rangelands makes them the perfect window-dressing for the cruel schemes laid out against us as a continent. The brutality of slavery and colonialism showed us the cruelty that exists within the matrix of Western capitalism. Laws and regulations have obviously been written in the last 100 years, but it we must remember that colonialism was a capitalist enterprise and it would be naïve in the extreme to imagine that capitalism had somehow lost its cruelty.

Africa is fabulously wealthy in natural resources, but we must always remember that the value of the visible above ground resources is a mere fraction of what lies underneath

The new dispensation only required that they apply new and more sophisticated methods and voila! Enter the climate change/carbon trade/conservation cult. It’s a perfect vehicle because it is pervasive, running in a contiguous vein through corporations, governments, civil society and even global bodies like the UN. Cult leaders (read: conservation “icons” like Goodall, Attenborough, et. al) have access to heads of state. Their greatest coup has been the so-called “30×30” plan, which is the ludicrous proposal that every country should put 30 per cent of their land under “protected areas” by the year 2030 to conserve biodiversity.

The “evil beauty” of this plan is that it has to be implemented in the global south, because there is no significant biodiversity gain to be made from expanding Regent’s Park in London or Central Park in Manhattan by 30 per cent. Everything is primed and ready to go. The adoption of this plan by the UN and governments smoothens out all the necessary regulatory hurdles, including by way of tax breaks in both the source and client states.

Once that is done, now all you need is a major conference like APAC2022 where you can blow all the dog-whistles against indigenous people and give all the apocalyptic alarmist statements about Africa (with no reference to the west where the real environmental destruction has been for the last 100 years). First, you pick a country like Rwanda that has formally decided that their greatest role in Africa will be as a European foothold on the continent (remember the UK refugees’ caper). Then you convene conservation organizations, practitioners, their corporate funders and governmental enablers. After a few days of lip service, drink and debauchery, you come up with a closing statement that includes a huge carrot and little substance and everybody leaves, struggling with the flatulence induced by excitement over the impending windfall.

One of the strangest parts of this excitement is that very little of the largesse actually finds its way to indigenous Africans. Most of it goes to expatriates from the donor countries, while Africans at all levels from heads of state to village elders are swayed with breadcrumbs in the form of business class air tickets, accommodation in luxury hotels, alcohol and per diem payments to attend meetings where they simply say “yes” to everything. The key point to note about this so-called conservation fund is that it proposes a “network” of a total of 8,600 conservation areas covering a total area of 26 million square kilometres. This is a startling figure, given that it is an area more than twice the size of the US, and represents more than 80 per cent of Africa’s land mass. How do these people subvert sovereign structures with such consummate ease? A simple tool known as “transboundary conservation areas”, conservation that purports to manage contiguous habitats across international boundaries.

We then find ourselves in a strange situation where non-state actors enjoy powers unheard of in state agencies, with untrammelled reach across international boundaries. An example of this power is the Big Life Foundation that operates across the Kenya-Tanzania border, enjoying access that the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA) cannot have. This is the nature of the new colonies. They fly under the radar by not following known boundaries, and within countries they exist as conservancies that don’t exist in law, don’t pay taxes and don’t register lands in their names.

We then find ourselves in a strange situation where non-state actors enjoy powers unheard of in state agencies, with untrammelled reach across international boundaries.

As the host of the conference, Rwanda has been the first signatory on this project and is taking leadership, asking other African countries to sign. With all due respect to that great nation, I don’t think that the owner of 0.0065 per cent of the protected areas in question should assume leadership of the same. This however reveals another well-practiced annexation technique of the conservation organizations—eliminating the individual opinions of nations and people by lumping them together into “projects” and “communities”. The colonists are here, again to stake a claim on our birthright. The other tried and tested technique is the relentless drive to evaluate our lands in terms of this strange thing they refer to as “carbon”.

What most Africans don’t realize about “carbon” credits, sequestration, sinks, etc., is that it is a tool for eliminating the natives from any discussions or calculations about the said land. They aren’t the fat old white men we see in the artists’ impressions of the Berlin conference. Many of them look like us, speak our languages, many are young, and many are women too, and they claim to be saviours. The methods and faces are certainly new, but the avarice and corruption remains unchanged, 137 years later. Despite myself, I must grudgingly acknowledge the historical correctness of holding the conference in Rwanda, part of what used to be German East Africa. Aluta Continua.

Lately, that old conversation on the contest between African and Euro-American beliefs and values has found renewed energy. So, as Rwandan President Paul Kagame would sternly ask recently at the margins of the CHOGM meeting in Kigali, “Who defines those values?”

African and Western values are still seen as problematically and diametrically opposed to each other despite co-existing in a global village.  “Why is that so?” European journalists, academics and diplomats ask themselves after working for five years in an African capital, and after seeing no difference between elite Nairobi and elite London. Why should we not have the same sensibilities? Consider the ways in which Nairobians and Londoners make their livelihoods, which is by renting out their labour for eight to twelve hours every day. Even the anti-capitalism activists in Nairobi or Kigali sound like Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders! Why then should we have different values regarding governance, animal rights, democracy or women’s rights?

This discussion that underlines an aspiration for common ground—some form of universality—on, among other things, what it means to be human, and the question of governance, specifically, electoral democracy as juxtaposed with growing authoritarianism, ironically and problematically still has the support of sections of the African elite.

It is curious that this conversation found new energy with Belgium’s return of a tooth belonging to CIA-murdered African giant, Patrice Lumumba, and with the holding of the CHOGM meeting in Kagame’s Rwanda, who will be running for another term in office.  “How does Kagame continue like that?” the democracy enthusiast asks. “We returned the tooth; that matter should be settled or not?” another Eurocentric die-hard adds. There was also the small inconvenient issue of the Melilla massacre on the Morocco-Spanish border and the plight of black folks in Ukraine. But who cares? Why are African political actors and sections of their elite still indifferent and slower to embrace the democratic ethic—as British democracy professor Nic Cheeseman wonders—and perhaps also to embrace other beliefs and values as espoused in Europe and North America?

Worth noting—and terribly problematic—is that there is a great deal of pressure on African political actors to exhibit inexplicable civility and loyalty especially as regards constitutionalism (as if constitutionally extending their stay in power isn’t a form of loyalty itself), and in the treatment of opposition groups and critics (even while journalist Julian Assange has been incarcerated for years and is facing extradition to the United States where he potentially faces 175 years of imprisonment for exposing the war crimes of Western modernities. Notice also that this conversation continues in a colonial-racialised paradigm and hierarchization where the African cultural and political actors have to constantly explain themselves to the Western world from a point of disadvantage—because theirs is the primordial position (a position that President Kagame touches in his interview cited above). I am not a defender of any abhorrent African political actors (whose actions, in all fairness, and in a more theoretically grounded sense, are not unique to them, but are, rather, a product of power). But I am concerned about the language of values and rights and the apparent insinuations of “indifference or slowness” on the part of African communities and actors to appreciate the universal values of democracy and human rights as understood in Western discourse.

First, despite being open to cross-cutting influences from elsewhere, it is difficult to achieve common ground on performative practices since cultures tend to be geographically contained. Talal Asad has told us that even Islam, which has a universally appreciated text, manifests differently in different geographic and time spaces.  It is my contention that the conclusion of this beauty contest of cultures and traditions—achieving common understanding of their inherent differences—is dependent, ironically, on non-cultural markers, specifically, power, power being the term for Western military and economic advantage.  It is not the superiority of ethical-cultural-value systems, and nor is it the absence of similar handicaps and vulnerabilities on either side of the Atlantic, but rather power and politics. It is the power relation embedded in the African adage about the hunter (more privileged) writing the story of the hunt to their advantage, before the animal (the less powerful) learns to tell their own story.

It is difficult to achieve common ground on performative practices since cultures tend to be geographically contained.

This contest over African and Western values is an old one. West African historians Ade Ajayi and Cheikh Anta Diop were among its first African pugilists. East African interlocutors including, more famously, Okot p’Bitek, Ngugi wa Thiongo, and Ali Mazrui participated in this conversation. Okot p’Bitek accused African actors of being fully imbued with the “colonialists’ practices” (exemplified by such accoutrements as the wigs won by judges to ape Europeans) and thus needing to “decolonise their minds”, as Ngugi would famously put it.  Mazrui’s essay, Islamic and Western Values, which tackled topics such as press freedom and democracy, concluded that the difference between Europe and the Islamic world was a difference of method, but the ills of power on either side of the aisle were the same.

Although I find it endlessly productive for African activists to constantly remind themselves and their European/American interlocutors of the words of Africa’s early intellectuals—on the non-uniqueness of the crimes of African political actors or the absolute goodness and uniqueness of African cultural traditions as understood on their terms—my intention is not to rehash the words of those intellectual giants. My intention is rather modest. Mine is a traveller’s tale of a journey into the lands of our “former” colonisers.  My people in Buganda say that “travelling is seeing, and returning is telling”. However, in telling this traveller’s tale, I want it to be read within the problematic frame of culture talk—or of a beauty contest between cultures.

For the last couple of years, I have been observing our former colonisers, and have become obsessed with turning the gaze on our beloved friends. How would a native from the African continent, from deep in the countryside, supposedly “untouched” by colonialist modernity, react upon encounter with some European—still present or recently dying—cultural/traditional practice? Because, frankly, the idea of cultural cross-fertilisation and integration, while it presents itself as pick-and-choose (where one aspect is chosen over another), it also presents itself as a package, as an entire system or civilisation. Here mediations that are understood as political (such as modes of governance or economics such as capitalism or the peasantry) intimately tie in with that which is viewed as essentially cultural (such as family, marriage, sexuality, kinship or inheritance).  As I have argued before, our European friends have toned this down as “cultural shock”, preparing the native’s mind for the horror they might encounter upon reaching Europe. It is some sort of challenge to understand, learn and perhaps embrace. But as a native I am stubbornly refusing to accept this as simply cultural shock.

Intercourse and kinship with animals

A few years ago in Berlin, I encountered a group of activists who were inconsolable about being denied their right to make love to animals by the German state.  “Why seek to moralize our country?” they angrily asked.  I need to start this story from the beginning:  Before 2012, our former colonisers in Germany—the country which hosted the 1884 Berlin Conference—had the legally sanctioned the right to make love to animals. This is understood as being in their blood; not that they lacked other outlets for sexual release, but that this was their natural inclination. Yes, it was normal to enter your bed, visit a pig stye, a kraal or a kennel and lower your pants and penetrate or be penetrated by the animal of your heart’s desire. It was only after 2012 that animal rights activists made a breakthrough, convincing co-nationals that it was unnatural for humans to find pleasure in mating with animals. The Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, finally passed the law banning intercourse with animals. Dear Africans, this was in 2012.

Dear reader, I am kidding you not, after this 2012 ban—just ten years ago—concerned Germans petitioned the courts to remove the ban, arguing that they were naturally attracted to animals.  But in 2016, the ban was upheld much to the celebration of many Germans.  However, the agitation for this right to be restored continues to this day. Please note that around this time, Norway, and Sweden had also banned the practice, and a British newspaper, The Independent, reported, that this had led “to a rise in the underground animal sex tourism in Denmark”. People interested in sex with animals—Zoophiles, so they are called—made trips to Denmark, which was yet to ban the practice, to satisfy their desires.

Two years after Germany, Denmark was conflicted on the same issue. While animal rights activists seemed to have made a breakthrough towards having the practice proscribed, the 12-strong Animal Ethics Committee of Denmark was opposed to banning the practice. The president of the Animal Ethics Committee, Bengt Holst, argued that the ban was unnecessary since the Animal Welfare Act, which was already in place, advocated for the protection of animals as it prohibited “animal suffering, pain, distress or lasting harm”.  This meant that you were free to make love to the animal of your choice as long as you didn’t cause it “suffering, pain, distress and lasting harm”.  For Bengt Holst, seeking to “moralise” the issue of making love to animals was not in good taste.

Great Britain—the world’s largest coloniser—only banned the practice in 2003 with the Sexual Offences Act. Some of its clauses are captured in this article which publishes allegations that former UK prime minister David Cameron once inserted his manhood in a dead animal while still at university in Oxford. Quoting a biography that is rightly described as controversial, the newspaper wrote that, “the Prime Minister inserted a “private part of his anatomy” into a “dead pig’s head” while at Oxford University—an act that was allegedly photographed.”  So, before 2003, our friends in the UK would have liked the African primitive to understand their reaction to the idea of mating with animals as simply cultural shock.

This meant that you were free to make love to the animal of your choice as long as you didn’t cause it “suffering, pain, distress and lasting harm”.

Our new colonising powers in the United States still have several states where mating with animals is permissible despite campaigns to ban the practice. By 2016, bestiality was still acceptable pleasure in Texas, Hawaii, Kentucky, Virginia, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Vermont, West Virginia, Montana, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, and New Hampshire. In a nicely researched article, British psychologist, Dr Mark Griffiths reveals that, “many zoophiles believe that in years to come, their sexual preference will be seen as no different to being gay or straight”. And while it is difficult to ascertain it, many zoophiles believe animals have given them some form of consent.

My intention is not to add to the voice of anti-bestiality campaigners in Europe or the United States, or to ridicule lovers of the practice. Not at all. But if I took the vantage point of an African anthropologist—of the colonial type—writing my tales about Europe and North America (with titles such as Into the Heart of Dark Europe; Flame Trees of Berlin, the Orients of the West, etcetera) for travellers, and students on the African continent, I would tell them about the inexplicable backwardness of the people in the West. I would challenge them to be careful about these animal-loving barbarians of Europe and North America. African readers would be appalled by the idea of human beings sleeping with animals, and lobbying and fighting to keep the right to do so.  Part of my intention would be to inspire them to travel to these lands and perhaps seek to civilise these people, forcefully if need be, and if they can, to also take their lands. Because the culturally backward have no right to property and neither are they able to govern themselves.

Before 2003, our friends in the UK would have liked the African primitive to understand their reaction to the idea of mating with animals as simply cultural shock.

Perhaps my larger contention is this: while cross-fertilisation is true about cultures and traditions, and oftentimes, and that, for their survival, less powerful communities/traditions are conscripted to the dictates of the most hegemonic power, the aspiration for common ground is merely a delusion of the militarily powerful. There are dislikeable, almost disgusting things on either side of the aisle, and cross-fertilisation ought to be understood as slower and fluid. While conscripts are often cast in an inferior position, they retain a great deal of agency within the constraining limits. They will not only remodel, repackage, or refashion that which they have to adopt from the hegemony, they will also often reject outright those practices and values they find either unsuitable to their contexts or completely repugnant to their traditions. Thus, journalistic and academic promoters of implied notions of “common ground” and “common values” from the Western world to their colonised conscripts ought to beware of these nuances and dynamics of time, fluidity, and refashioning.

About a month to the August 9, 2022 elections, a Kikuyu elder man was ushered in the offices of Enke Ltd, at the Chancery Building, uptown Nairobi, on Valley Road. Enke Ltd is one of the Kenyatta family’s flagship companies.

The man had an appointment with the princely Muhoho Kenyatta, President Uhuru Kenyatta’s younger brother, the behind-the-scenes political schemer and smooth operator, who rarely appears in the media and who, has the ear of the family’s matriarch, the all-powerful Mama Ngina Kenyatta.

The man had gone to discuss among other things the upcoming elections, with special reference to Mt Kenya region. “Let us be candid with the truth”, the man said to Muhoho. “Things have not been okay in the Mt Kenya region…the people of Mt Kenya have been in a very bad mood, in a very long time and all indications show that they will rebel against President Uhuru’s backed coalition, come the general election.”

The flashy office that the man had been let into, had many television sets mounted on the wall. “How do you intend to overturn this anger against the government and more specifically, against the Kenyatta family? Posed the man, to an intently listening and quiet Muhoho. “Whatever you need to do, you need to do it very fast, because time is of the essence and it is not your side.”

A bemused Muhoho possibly couldn’t believe what the man was talking about: Is this what you came here for, to tell me inconsequential stories, the aristocratic second-born son of the most powerful political matriarch in Kenya must have wondered to himself. “So-and-so be calm, and take it easy; I’m not sure you understand Mt Kenya politics and therefore know what you’re talking about,” retorted Muhoho.

“Turn your eyes to the screens,” Muhoho ordered the man, “What do you see? All those screens, what do they show? Do you all see all those blue marked regions? Those are our votes. What do you mean the (Mt Kenya) people are not with us? The mounted screens showed large swathes of Mt Kenya would vote blue, Azimio la Umoja coalition’s colour. The chairman of Azimio is Muhoho’ elder brother, the outgoing President Uhuru.

Azimio’s presidential flagbearer is Raila Amolo Odinga, Uhuru’s erstwhile, fiercest opposition leader, now turned bosom buddy. In the just ended presidential election, Azimio coalition was whitewashed in the Mt Kenya region. So humiliatingly did it perform in the region, that President Uhuru couldn’t even deliver his own Mutomo location, in Kiambu County, to Raila. Martha Karua, Raila’s designated running mate, equally couldn’t persuade her own former Gichugu constituents, leave alone Kirinyaga County as a whole, to rally behind her boss.

Contrary to what Muhoho’s screens were displaying, Mt Kenya voters in the election painted the region so yellow, the colour of the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) and the sponsoring party of the Kenya Kwanza coalition presidential candidate William Ruto, that Azimio losers in the region are still smarting from the defeat. If there is any hue of blue in Mt Kenya region, one must truly look for it, as one would look for a needle in a haystack, to use the hackneyed idiom.

“Those votes you’re talking about are on your screens, on the ground it is a different matter, I’m telling you the votes are yellow and you better listen to me,” replied Muhoho’s guest. “Believe all you want about those virtual votes on the smart screens, the real votes are on the ground and that’s where the battle will be won or lost, not on diagrams posted on the screens.”

Muhoho must have been flustered by his guest’s insistency and matter of fact statements, but he wasn’t going to let a great opportunity pass him without dishing to the senior visitor some nuggets of wisdom. “My dear friend, listen, let me educate you a little bit, because I think you don’t seem to understand these things. We the Kenyattas tell Kikuyus what to do, they follow our commands. This will not be the first time we’ll be doing so. Let that matter rest. We’ll talk after August 9.”

Many eons ago, the Greeks came up with a word for this kind of attitude and behaviour – Hubris. If you like, simply in English idiomatic language, pride that comes before a fall.

At just around the same time Muhoho was having an animated altercation with his guest, President Uhuru also ushered some Kikuyu elders in one of State House’s inner offices. They were part of a large team that had been invited to the pre-independence governor’s mansion on the hill.

Before meeting the large team, Uhuru wanted to have a word with the select elders. “I want you guys to declare the 1969 oath invalid, are we together?” Used to having his way and commanding people around, including men, the age of his avuncular uncle, he wanted an instant answer, like instant coffee.

“That would be all so well,” replied the gentlemen, “But that would involve a cultural process, because de-oathing people as you might well be aware is not a simple matter. We’ve to do it at the (Mukurwe wa Nya Gathanga) shrine. Rituals have to be performed, sacrifices have to be offered…is there time to do this?” Instead of listening to the elders and possibly coming up with a solution, he did what he does best under such circumstances – he snapped and stormed out of the office.

To the Kenyattas, it’s either my way, or the highway. The elders felt humiliated by a younger elder, albeit the president, who, to some of the senior elders, could be their last-born brother. The elders had also wanted to tell the president that all was not well on the ground: the water was salty and therefore undrinkable, but as they came to realise, well, too late in the day, it’s very difficult to engage the Kenyattas.

In February 2022, a mzee friend of mine was summoned by the matriarch nonagenarian Mama Ngina, because she wanted to have a word with him. “We had not spoken for such a long time, I wondered what it is that she wanted from me,” said my septuagenarian friend. After the usual prolonged pleasantries and greetings, the matriarch quickly delved into the subject matter at hand. “So-and-so, why have the Kikuyu people turned against us? Us, being the Kenyatta family.

“Mama Ngina couldn’t understand why a people they have lorded over for 50 years could (suddenly) rebel against the family,” the mzee would later confide in me. “To her, some malevolent forces were inciting the Kikuyus – ‘this is unlike them,’ Mama Ngina averred, do you have a clue what’s going on she asked me.”

The Kenyatta family has treated the Kikuyus like their slaves for so long, they assumed they owned them, said mzee. “The Kikuyus have had grievances for a long time, but the Kenyattas must have assumed, like they always do, that this time they were malingering.” I met the mzee a week after the elections; “now that the shit has hit the fan, the Kenyattas are all flabbergasted.”

Many years back, a central Kenya politician, now a former MP once told me, how one time they were drinking in a members’ only club that was also patronised by some of the Kenyatta family members. Inebriated and dropping his guard down, one of the close-knit relative let it be known that the family considered the Kikuyu people as their serfs.

“We didn’t want to believe what we had heard, I mean, some of us had always suspected what the family thought about the rest of us, but to vocalise it to all and sundry, really was a faux pas,” said the former MP.

So, it is that President Uhuru took to the Kikuyu vernacular airwaves from the precincts of State House, 72 hours to the election, believing that he would, with his wisdom, sway the Mt Kenya people from voting for Ruto and heed his call at the 12th hour and vote for his frenemy Raila.