Anxieties of mixed-raceness in Kenya: perspectives from music, media, and novelistic representations

Abstract

This article argues that historical issues that shaped racial relations in Kenya continue to undermine mixed-raceness in social imaginaries. It links the Kenyan public’s stigmatisation of mixed-race couples and mixed-race individuals to colonial histories of oppression and dispossession of subordinated races. The subconscious colonial memories ventilate through anxieties against mixed raceness in the media, music, and novelistic representations. In the representations, one notices mixed persons’ struggles to belong in a society that links them to oppressors. The article further nuances representations that exhibit delusions of racial purity of communities traceable to ‘distant’ mixed raceness and their ironical contempt of those whose mixed raceness is traceable to a recent past. Thus, memories of racial injustices and imbalances can have lasting effects on mixed raceness whereby anxieties against the category may suggest resistance against racial inequalities.