Voicing “Kenyanness” in the everyday: disrupting traditional broadcasting tropes through participatory digital storytelling

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe violence ensuing from the disputed 2007 elections in Kenya exposed the deep fragmentation within the nation-state and became a significant fissure for simmering tensions among the country’s 42 language groups. These events evinced the hegemony in media ownership and unmasked the recurrent motifs of the elites’ selfish stranglehold on the mediascape. Premised on Jenkins’ (2006) thoughts on convergence culture and Carpentier’s (2011) views on maximalist media participation, the article discusses two user-generated content texts: the Project 10 documentary series and the Capture Wales project. It proposes that, compared to traditional media, to a greater extent and in varying degrees, these two user-generated content projects offer greater participatory spaces for ordinary people to tell their everyday narratives, and that this provides a framework that could intervene in, or disrupt, existing tropes, strangleholds and motifs in the Kenyan broadcasting-scape. Although these two projects provide a framework for the Utaifa Mashinani Masimulizi ya UKenya digital narratives project initiated by the author, it is argued that the two projects still manifest instances of skewed power relationships towards media elites at the expense of ordinary people. The article therefore discusses how these interventions can be independent, sustainable and empower ordinary people.