African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
KenyaPolitics
Home›African Arguments›Country›East›Kenya›Kenya: It really is about dicks

Kenya: It really is about dicks

By Nanjala Nyabola
April 18, 2016
9234
5

My claim is not that women’s rights matter more than any other political issue. My claim is that Kenyan politics and analysis is dominated by toxic masculinities.

Kenya celebrates 50 years of independence. Credit: Sudath Silva.

Kenya celebrates 50 years of independence. Credit: Sudath Silva.

I bet you never thought the day would come when you would log into this website and find so many articles about penises.

Last month, I wrote an article on this platform on Kenya’s phallocentric public policy, inspired to a great extent by a front page newspaper article concerning Deputy President William Ruto’s comments on the state of Gideon Moi’s member.

[See: It’s time to axe Kenya’s big dick politics.]

Last week, my colleague and friend, Ngala Chome responded with an article of his own saying “it’s not just about dicks”. Inasmuch as I agree with the overall observations Ngala makes – yes, women are not the only marginalised group in Kenya, class is a major issue in Kenya etc. – I fear he might have missed the point my article was trying to make.

[See: Not just big dicks: Kenya’s real cross-cutting theme is class.]

First, and quite simply, the point of using a feminist methodology to analyse Kenya’s public sphere is not to say that issues affecting women are the only issues affecting Kenyans. Rather, the point is to trigger a conversation about how patriarchal analytical frames and tools necessarily mis-order the hierarchy of issues that the average Kenyan faces.

Saying that land and ethnicity are not the biggest problems facing Kenyans is not the same as saying land and ethnicity are not problems facing Kenyans. It is saying that our obsession with these two things clouds our ability to have a meaningful conversations on the issues facing most Kenyans by privileging the interests of elites and those who study them over the real interests of the population.

Chome himself gives examples that substantiate this counterargument. Consider street children or street families. They don’t own land and most live in invented families based on convenience, access, protection networks and pretty much anything but the kinship ties or common origin myths that make up clans and eventually ethnic groups. This example in fact speaks to the point I made about how ethnicity isn’t a problem on a day-to-day level for most Kenyans in the way that analyses that are focused on masculinised formal politics set out.

This was the point of shifting the referent object: to say that the standards against which we discuss normal political behaviour in Kenya are necessarily skewed to privilege the interests or approaches of elite men over those of everyone else. The fact the Deputy President feels empowered to discuss the state of another man’s penis in front of a crowd – the same Deputy President who wants to criminalise homosexuality – speaks volumes about the political space given to interests of elite men.

This leads to the second point. My argument was not literal. Of course it’s not just about dicks. It’s about the toxic masculinity that gives the phallus its political potency: much like the snake telling Adam that he is naked, toxic masculinity gives the politician in a patriarchal system a framework from which all other issues flow. The phallus is the phenomenon: the toxic masculinity is the episteme that determines why it matters. It’s about erecting a fixed point against which political viability can be ascertained in a society in which ethnicity is constructed, class is fluid, and age is no guarantee of permanence. The phallus becomes a physical and somewhat absolute way of pinning power down. Grace Musila writes very eloquently and extensively about this in her academic work on the issue, arguing in summary that it is a physical manifestation of the mapping of a power dynamics.

Basically the dicks are a physical manifestation of the ego-driven masculinities that decides political eligibility, viability or candidacy. Regardless of how smart, talented, accomplished, or connected you are, your value as a political entity in Kenya is ultimately measured in relation to your proximity to a suitable penis. If you have one, is it suitably mutilated? If you don’t have one, are you married to one? In either case, did your gene pool flow from a suitably qualified one?

This would be the same whether one was a street child or the daughter of the president, which suggests a primacy that is worth investigating. For the academic who would study Kenya, this doesn’t mean that other factors don’t matter. Rather it says that any political analysis that is methodologically unable to see this as a key factor is partial and skewed.

Finally, even presuming that I was making a purely literal argument – assuming that I really was just talking about dicks – it is important to reiterate that gender isn’t simply about women or women’s rights issues. It’s about how constructed gender identities intersect in the public sphere, whose experiences are taken as the default, and the impact that has on how we see and solve problems. When women claim space in political discourse, it doesn’t mean that we do not see problems that affect both men and women. It means what is taken as the default experience is not universal and we would like more nuances acknowledged.

Conversations about gender are about both masculinities and femininities, and zooming in on toxic masculinities invites us to look beyond simply including women in poisonous narratives. What exists and is taken as the default in Kenyan political discourse simply does not see women – not as political actors, nor as analysts of political situations. It assumes that having a women’s representative position in parliament or having a gender chapter in a book about Kenyan politics covers the bases as far as thinking about gender is concerned. This approach makes women’s claims the problem rather than the toxic masculinities that exclude anyone who is not an elite man from the political sphere.

The central claim in my article wasn’t that women’s rights issues matter more than any other political issues. The central claim was that Kenyan politics and political analysis is dominated by toxic masculinities.

We need new frameworks. We need new ways of thinking about Kenyan politics that have more utility because they are more representative of our lived realities. A feminist methodology can be this new framework. It highlights the many silences embedded in the prevailing discourse. A feminist methodology allows us to democratise the study of Kenya, include a diversity of perspectives in our analysis, and climb down from exclusionary, elite level analyses.

Of course it’s not just about dicks. But it’s about dicks in more ways than Chome acknowledges, and we can’t evolve past phallocracies without acknowledging that far too much of Kenya’s contemporary politics is determined by them.

Nanjala Nyabola is a Kenyan writer, humanitarian advocate and political analyst, currently based in Nairobi, Kenya. Follow her on twitter at @Nanjala1.

Previous Article

Somalia is still fragile, but fragile is ...

Next Article

Republic of Congo government blames non-existent militia ...

mm

Nanjala Nyabola

Nanjala Nyabola is the author of the forthcoming "Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Kenya" (ZED books/African Arguments, 2018). She is a Kenyan writer, humanitarian advocate and political analyst, currently based in Nairobi, Kenya. Follow her on twitter at @Nanjala1.

5 comments

  1. leon 18 April, 2016 at 15:30

    This article assumes that only men have enlarged egos and women, bless their hearts, are humble creatures.
    That ain’t so ! Some of the strongest and predatory leaders have been female.

  2. Alex Gachanja 18 April, 2016 at 15:47

    Fantastic!

  3. hydroxocloroquine 20 August, 2021 at 10:43

    cloroquin https://chloroquineorigin.com/# why is hydroxychloroquine

  4. Patrickvussy 27 August, 2021 at 11:47

    https://cialiswithdapoxetine.com/ cialis coupon

  5. Patrickvussy 30 August, 2021 at 04:06

    cialis generic buy cialis online

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Politics

    Managing Political and Economic Claims to Land in Darfur

  • china racism guangzhou africans covid-19
    Covid-19EconomyPolitics

    Last month could’ve been a real turning point for Africa-China ties

  • Martin Fayulu on the campaign trail in December 2018. Credit: Martin Fayulu.
    Congo-KinshasaPolitics

    “One day Congo will explode”: What now for the DRC’s “president-elect”?

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81.7K+
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Recent Posts

  • Blackness, Pan-African Consciousness and Women’s Political Organising through the Magazine AWA
  • “People want to be rich overnight”: Nigeria logging abounds despite ban
  • The unaccountability of Liberia’s polluting miners
  • Africa Elections 2023: All the upcoming votes
  • “Poking the Leopard’s Anus”: Legal Spectacle and Queer Feminist Politics

Editor’s Picks

CameroonEditor's PicksPolitics

Inside Cameroon’s Bunker: “Different guys had different torture techniques”

African Arguments spoke to several former detainees of the notorious prison where prisoners underwent daily torture and lived in appalling conditions. This article was made possible by the generous “supporter” ...
  • Students graduating from Babcock University, Ilishan-Remo, Nigeria. Credit: Rajmund Dabrowski/ANN.

    “We copy it from them”: How campus politics sets scene for big man politics

    By Olayide Oluwafunmilayo Soaga
    June 16, 2022
  • South Africa: Meet the queer vloggers taking back the narrative

    By Grant Andrews
    March 4, 2021
  • President Hakainde Hichilema giving a speech at the European Parliament in June 2022. Credit: European Parliament.

    An assessment of President Hichilema’s first year in Zambia

    By Sishuwa Sishuwa
    August 24, 2022
  • Uganda's military is engaged in Operation Shujaa in DR Congo. Credit: Credit: Rick Scavetta, U.S. Army Africa.

    “Total Success”? The real goals of Uganda’s Operation Shujaa in DRC

    By Kristof Titeca
    June 20, 2022

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • en English
    am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
By continuing to browse this site, you agree to our use of cookies.
en English
am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu