The problem with the truth: political alliances, science, and storytelling in Nairobi

Abstract

This paper reflects on the making of a collaborative, ethnographic life story on/with a leading Kenyan scientist, Davy Kiprotich Koech. A prominent and controversial international scholar in immunology and molecular medicine, Koech, born in 1951, came of age in postcolonial Kenya, an era characterized by optimism and possibilities as the nation gained independence from British rule in 1963. Internationally educated in medicine and science, he emerged as part of a new intellectual elite in postcolonial Kenya. He was a founding member of the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) in 1979, the national state agency responsible for medical research, and has won innumerable prizes and awards for professional and scientific achievements over the past 40 years, but a closer examination of the personal and political raises questions about the ethics of ‘global’ science, postcolonial development in East Africa, and HIV medicine in Kenya. What might his own personal story of scientific accomplishments, and controversies, tell us more generally about African science, institutional racisms, and postcolonial state making? This paper documents the methodological dilemmas in initiating a collaborative life story project with an elusive, elite scientist, including the challenge of co-narrating a life story that is entangled with political and scientific controversies.