Kenya

^{Posted on Thursday 10th January,2008}

Official vandalism at the museum shames Kenya

^{By Binyivanga Wainaina, The East African}

^{When I was in primary school, a month or so before CPE exams, all Standard Seven students would be sent on an educational trip to Nairobi by bus. The route was unvarying. First, Museum and Snake Park, where a popular girl in my class fainted when some snake spat at her from behind the glass display. Then parliament, where we got a crash course in Civics for CPE — and we saw an enormously fat man fast asleep on the benches as other loud people heckled and sneered, and somebody in a wig and gavel said important things. After this, sandwiches and samosas at the Animal Orphanage.}

^{The museum was acknowledged to be boring? stuffy animals and echoes. Ahmed was great. Even the displays of various Africans doing their traditional thing was boring – inanimate and anthropological, there was nothing there to fire the imaginations of kids our age. We knew that for some people somewhere, this place was important.}

^{We carried something away for life from the museum — the name Zinjanthropus. Zinjanthropus was a sort of monster with a fearsome jaw, and it was invented by the distant Emperors and Empresses of all things museum and Thropus: Louis and Richard and Mary and Maeve Leakey.}

^{Snake Park was a treat, as was the animal orphanage, where animals were living beings that could engage with our imaginations and intellects.}

^{It never occurred to me that the museum was anything more than a sort of cemetery of things beyond my interest and imagination. It was good for you, we were told, like exams and Ujimix without sugar was good for you.}

^{I had occasion to visit the new-look National Museum last week. It looks exciting. Crisp and clean new buildings, all loaded with creative possibilities. Some useful-looking sculptures at the entrance, the stuffy old stone museum seeming to have merged seamlessly with angular new buildings facing the future, with natural light and things to investigate, and stained glass.}

^{I had been hearing about the new museum over the past couple of years, something exciting coming, fresh air and money pumped in. I had heard that a permanent exhibition of our contemporary arts would be there; a place where the more dynamic things that represent a living and evolving nation would happen.}

^{But, when I visited on Jamhuri Day last week, I found a storm brewing. Some committee and a certain director had decided to paint over a wall mural they had commissioned a year ago, painted by a collective of artists in partnership with the African Colours website. I was told the committee wanted the whole museum to reflect its corporate colours – the colour of baby food. So, without any further consultation, the mural was whitewashed.}

^{AS WE WALKED AROUND, TRYING TO digest the idea that a museum can do such a thing, I started to hear more. The great idea I had heard circulating – to have a matatu on display and a multimedia presentation about urban Nairobi life — had been deemed “ unfit” for the museum. I heard that the Asian Heritage section was to have a new wing, by presidential decree, and that this section would be deliberately separated from the general Kenyan Heritage section – because those funding it wanted to keep it separate.}

^{Dogma and knee-jerk nativism seem to be ruling the thinking around what should be available for us, the Kenyan public, in our National Museum.}

^{By the time I had heard all this, it was easy enough to understand why the mural had been painted over. There are people so distorted by self-importance, they are able to commit cultural treason and not even think they are doing anything wrong.}

^{There are people who believe a museum should be a seemly and decent cemetery, and that its form should overwhelm its function.}

^{That the people of Kenya do not know who they are, and they need to be taught – and an intelligent elite has the dirty job of displaying boring but essential things to a lumpen mass of watu out there who do not know what is good for them. A museum is a museum is a museum. You the lumpen public must fit into what the museum is, because we say so. And we say, no matatus here.}

^{People like me say, the matatu is the most dynamic and intelligent and creative example of Nairobi contemporary art and design and technology. It has also come to be a cultural artefact that most Kenyans use.}

^{The people involved in painting over the mural have committed cultural treason. The museum is charged in our Constitution with protecting our cultural heritage. We need to trust that there are systems in place that are larger than the corporate interests and personal aesthetics of egos working in the museum, funding it, or advising it. They have failed their constitutional responsibility, and have spat in the faces of all artists and cultural producers in Kenya.}

^{It is the biggest act of arrogance visited upon the Kenyan art world since Charles Njonjo refused to allow Samuel Wanjau’s sculpture of a Mau Mau warrior to be installed in front of the High Court. To this day it moulders in Elimo Njau’s Paa ya Paa gallery, way out of town.}

^{MUSEUMS ALL OVER THE WORLD are changing how they relate to their publics. I visited the new Alexandria library a few weeks ago, and saw how it has invested in the coming digital world. A reincarnation of the oldest library in the world has made itself a centre of future knowledge. Are we in our new small country trying to say a museum is a place where things are shut away to ossify, a place that looks back rather than forward?}

^{What you have done, National Museums of Kenya, is to say that your baby-food corporate colours matter more to you than your constitutional responsibilities. Think about it.}

^{Meanwhile, I shall keep far away from you, for I fear one day you will burn my books.}

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