The Idiom of Age in a Popular Kenyan Newspaper Serial

Abstract

This article examines the narratives constructed around age in Kenya. Noting the ‘spatial crossings’ of the Kenyan subject, who is as much attuned to the village ethos as he is to the globalized world, the article problematizes our approach to the study of age in Africa. It discusses the multiple narratives now constructed around age within the context of a society in rapid flux, especially underscoring its relationship to authority. The article proposes that there are multiple ways – some new, others merely reinvented – in which social and political relationships are now (re)constructed around age in Africa. The article is based on a critical reading of popular fiction, an important site of popular cultural production where the performance of political power is manifest and narratives around power are created and enacted. The work is based on a popular Kenyan newspaper serial ‘Whispers’, an important site of cultural production in the 1980s–1990s. This period witnessed ruthless political repression in Kenya when spaces of popular expression were all but monopolized by the government. It is in such sites as ‘Whispers’ that ‘spaces of freedom’ emerged, narrating the travails of the period and challenging the ‘bounds of the expressible’. Through ‘Whispers’, the article explores how age and gender are used as ‘instrumentalities of political survival’ but also how African maledom reacts to the challenges of globalization that threaten to disrupt the status quo, especially regarding the normative grammar of patriarchy. Further, the article explores how the twin elements of gender and age are manipulated by the Kenyan polity but also simultaneously reproduced and contested by society, resulting in a largely contradictory discourse that challenges but at the same time reaffirms the (il)legitimacy of gerontocracy and the sanctity of the male order.