Journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans
If you are a fact checker, the one East African Community (EAC) country where you will catch the least sleep is Kenya.
Virtually every day, there is a piece of fake news going viral on Kenyan social media. On some days, there are three. That is counting the big ones. If you throw in the small ones, you get up to ten. During the heat of elections, they shoot up to 100.
Many of them are not your run-of-the-mill fake news about a cabinet minister who is still very much alive despite having died.
They are tongue-in-cheek, backhanded political slaps, subversive, and cheeky. Recent days have been busy for the good people at the fact-checking organisation Africa Check in Nairobi.
They had to debunk a widely viewed video circulating on X (formerly Twitter) showing former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi dressed in black ceremonial robes alongside several others in a ceremony.
A post to the video claimed that it was the “2nd president of the republic of Kenya, Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi, getting inducted into the Freemasons.”
It was not true, but it played to the popular view of the Kenyan political class as being in cahoots with secret societies, and devious cartels.
Another fake news offering, which was even more widely viewed, is a graphic claiming that churches in the country must now have their sermons approved by the government.
“Churches have been instructed to send their sermons and preachings to the local Officer Commanding Station (OCS) every Friday. This directive aims to ensure that the messages delivered do not embarrass President Ruto”. It featured the logo of a popular
Kenyan news website, to give the impression they had published it. Hilarious and absurd.
It was not true. Kenyans have also taken to TikTok in a frenzy of parody to cock a snook at the establishment.
Ugandans break differently. When there is a tragedy and the never-ending political madness, they rush to do a spoof, a satirical sketch, or draw a cartoon. Nothing can be too grave to be lampooned.
Sometimes, they take to brutal caricature as journalist and writer Kakwenza Rukirabashaija did with his two books, “The Greedy Barbarian” and “Banana Republic”. For his troubles, he was detained and grievously tortured and had to go into exile.
This week Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, a Ugandan academic, columnist, author, human rights activist, editorial cartoonist, and one of the leading authors of this mischief, poked fun at this trait.
“Psychologists, how do you explain the fact that things that should make us angry now just make us laugh?”, he asked in a cartoon festooned with stories of grand corruption.
Someone explained: “They got us to a place where they needed us. Make every shameful deed seem just funny. The anger reached climax, evaporated and rained back cool. We are just immune to anger. If we don’t laugh, anger dey kill u.”
Other EAC (Jumuiya) countries, especially Tanzania, do this too, but it is sporadic, and sly, with the barbs sometimes being slipped into songs (which authorities often promptly crack down on).
If Mr Bean, that wonderful comedy character on British television played by the actor Rowan Atkinson, was East African, he would be a child born of Ugandan and Kenyan parents.
Ugandan-Kenya subversive caricature and fake news are emerging from specific political realities in the two lands. The Democratic Republic of Congo, or at least its troubled Swahiliphone eastern regions, and South Sudan, are either embroiled in war, great suffering, or beginning to emerge from destructive conflict in the case of the latter.
When pain is great, it does not allow for levity or humour. It would look like dancing on a grave. Rwanda, on the other hand, is in a state of benign serenity. The people are not restless.
Kenya and Uganda are somewhere in the middle; between heaven, hell, and purgatory. The two have the sharpest divisions between the political elite and the highest level of middle-class fracture.
They have the region’s most extreme split political personalities; liberal in the morning, quasi-democratic in the afternoon, and hybrid democratic-illiberal or authoritarian in the evening. Sometimes they are liberal for one week, illiberal for the next week, and chaotic the week after.
Thousands of young people are leaving these countries in record numbers, for jobs where some endure unspeakable horrors in the Gulf; the tough backstreets of Thailand; bandit country in Myanmar (Burma); or Russian factories supplying its war effort in Ukraine.
Uganda and Kenya also have the sharpest public policy contestations. Kenya is still embroiled in the economic grievances that led to the unprecedented June-July Generation Z protests and is roiled by the emotive flap over the impeachment of Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua.
Uganda is swept up in an unusually bitter fight over who shall pocket the spoils from its lucrative coffee industry; runaway corruption; the controversial evolution of the political system into a dynasty; a national capital that is decaying back into the Stone Age; a government that revelling in both petty and grand repression; and rising uncertainty about a transition to a post-Yoweri Museveni era.
Beneath that all, there is a boom in creativity and innovation. Societies are organising themselves in new ways, and in Uganda, the whole country seems to be running, hiking, or travelling somewhere in cosmopolitan communities.
The macabre humour and rabble-rousing fake news seem to be their way of saying that they have refused to die.
The author is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. X(Twitter)@cobbo3
