OBBO: Kenya’s excellence stems from fight for survival

So we return to the unfinished business of last week’s column: Why, we asked, are all awards, except one, for the Caine Prize for African writing that have been won by East African, gone to Kenya?

For that matter, why did it have to be Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge, to be the first human to run a sub-two hour marathon? Why was it Kenya that was the “Silicon Savannah,” not Tanzania? And, why is it that Oscar-winning Lupita Nyong’o became the most globally successful actress, and not a tall beautiful Namubiru from Kampala?

It cannot be that it has been the most stable country in the region. It is not, it’s politics is driven by often-violent ethnically-fuelled politics, and the occasional bout of madness, as happened with the post-election violence of 2007/2008. That honour of “most stable” belongs to Tanzania.

It cannot be because it is the most “capitalist” country in East Africa. It was from the late 1960s to mid-1980s.

The most capitalist country in East Africa is Uganda; for 20 years it has had the state that intervenes the least in the economy.

The number of agencies and parastatal-like creatures in Kenya alone in the tourism and wildlife sector is almost equal to all the parastatals in Uganda. Uganda’s central bank manipulates its currency the least.

Kenya is not even the leader, at least in per capita terms, in government investment in the digital, and creative sectors in which it’s the champion. The gold medal winner there is Rwanda.

Leading from the front

One the things that sets Kenya apart, is that in the decades when the rest of the countries in the region were mired in disastrous socialist experiments, and military dictatorship, it did extremely well, and was out there alone.

Kenyans developed a sense that they were the “special ones.” Today, the sense of exceptionalism can come across as even comical, but the big pay-off is a still-lively sense that they were born to excel, and a great confidence to put a foot in almost any open door in the world, in ways few other East Africans do.

Until recently, the rest usually did it when they had been exiled from home.

But perhaps least appreciated, is that barring post-apartheid South Africa and late 20th century Egypt, nowhere in Africa have “creative refugees” from the continent—writers, intellectuals, artists (cue Uganda’s Jak Katarikawe), musicians—flocked to seek sanctuary and opportunity as they have to Kenya.

If you read a history of “Congolese music,” you would be forgiven for thinking that 50 per cent of Congolese musicians (song writers, guitarists, singers), especially in the Mobutu Sese Seko days, lived in Kenya.

Those creative juices have melted into the local fair and seeped deep into the country’s soil.

And then, Nairobi is not disparaged as “Nairoberry” for nothing. For years varying levels of violent urban crime has plagued it. It’s ringed on all sides by teeming slums, like no other city in the region.

The mad race to succeed and escape squalor and desperation, and the dangers that lurk around even for the elite, means Kenyans really don’t fall into complacency.

In the 1970s, Tanzanians famously mocked Kenya as a “man eat man society.” What they missed is that no Kenyan man (or woman) will let themselves be eaten without a big fight.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is curator of the ‘Wall of Great Africans’ and publisher of explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3