The God of this Age

It is intriguing to read African scholars based in the West blasting their compatriots on the home continent for abandoning African culture and aping the Western one. It is also saddening to hear them blame victims of oppression for bending to cultural and economic domination, instead of blaming the immoral oppressor for making exploitation complete by numbing the minds of the oppressed. Most of all, it is discouraging to read scholars use these narratives, whose origin is the 19^th century at the height of Jim Crow, colonialism and apartheid, in the 21^st century of independent Africa, post-Apartheid South Africa, and of the United States under the Obama presidency.

I had these mixed feelings when I read Prof Makau Mutua's lambasting of Kenyan fans of the English Premier League in the Kenyan weekly publication of the Sunday Nation. From his position as Dean and SUNY Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School, he accused Kenyan fans of being fascinated with English soccer primarily because of their attachment to England as the "mother country." Prof Mutua makes a simplistic argument that Kenyans prefer English to Brazilian or Spanish Leagues because of the colonial hangover and the "spinelessness of the Kenyan fans."

For a resident in Kenya, it seems a little ironical for a US-based professor to blast fellow citizens, who are dealing with the challenges of globalization the best they can, for their lack of cultural loyalty. Surely, an African studying and publishing in the colonial mother tongue in the belly of the empire is not without cultural baggage that he should cast stones at his less fortunate compatriots.

But more than that, if he is not residing in Kenya he may not know the frustration of watching Kenyan soccer deteriorate because of poor management and rabid politics. Kenya's Harambee Stars made it to the qualifying round for the Africa Cup thanks to the local coach Francis Kimanzi. At the height of his success, he was fired by the local football governing body for his "arrogance," which in reality was his refusal to let coaching decisions be made by people who have never played football and are only using football as a stepping stone into national politics. And by the way, when I say "local football governing body," I am not even sure which one it is, because there is a tug of war between the government-backed Kenya Football Federation and the Fifa-backed Football Kenya Limited. Once Kimanzi was fired, Prime-Minister Raila Odinga, the politician per excellence who uses football for populism and political mileage, got German Antoine Hey hired as coach.

Get this - in his history of coaching in different African countries, Hey had not won a single match. And it gets worse: Raila initially stated that the coach would be paid by the German Embassy, which the Embassy promptly denied (and how Raila believed that one country with World Cup hopes would pay for the coach of another World Cup hopeful team is beyond me. In any case, Hey is not a diplomat to be on the Embassy pay-roll). So now the Kenyan government pays an over-a-million-shilling salary to Hey even though there is no signed contract that binds the government to dole out the money every month. And the madness doesn't end there. This Hey coach is so money-minded and arrogant, that at one point he stayed put in Nairobi while the national team left the country to play one of its continental fixtures because his salary had not been paid. He followed the team a day later when the money was placed in his account. Last week, after the team lost a do-or-die match in Maputo, Hey ran away to Germany and left the embarrassed team to return and face the disappointed soccer fans and unsympathetic Kenyan press on their own. Even with much, much slimmer salaries, Kenyan coaches have been too overwhelmed by patriotism to succumb to such blackmail and cowardly tactics.

If anyone should get blasted for colonial hangover, it is not the Kenyan fans, some of whom still who go to stadiums to watch Kenyan teams play. It is the politicians who seem to believe that they can create history by being the first country to win a major continental or global title under a foreign - usually European - coach, and this despite the evidence that the most successful periods of Kenya's football team have always been under local coaches. Kenya's most successful performances in team sports - namely in rugby and volleyball - are under Kenyan coaches. However, our politicians are so unpatriotic that they ignore the evidence, because they would rather advance their political careers and line their stomachs with the meager proceeds from football matches rather than improve the equipment and stadiums for the benefit of Kenya's youth.

Perhaps Prof. Mutua is a little removed from the daily pain of reading of yet another instance in which our stupid, unpatriotic and selfish politicians continue to cripple the development of football in Kenya, and so he may be impatient with Kenyans who, understandably, want to watch a more professionally run English Premier League. But even in the mania for English football, many Kenyans are still enthusiastic about local soccer. Clubs like AFC Leopards, Gor Mahia and Kenya Premier League leaders Sofapaka have strong fan-bases complete with uniforms, instruments and the accompanying enthusiasm at every match. For this enthusiasm and support, Kenyans should get kudos rather than scolding.

But what I find most regrettable in Prof. Mutua's analysis is his adherence to the nationalist narrative that was strongest in the 20th century but not 21^st century. Because of sticking to the adoration-for-the-colonizer argument, he misses the global context in which the English Premier League has grown into one of England's largest cultural exports. And the EPL has made efforts to maintain its popularity worldwide, most recently by investing in tours of Asia over the summer break by teams such as Manchester United and Liverpool.  As Kenyan columnist Sunny Bindra pointed out in his rejoinder in the Sunday Nation the following week, the EPL has become a product "which offers the greatest entertainment, value and accessibility." And this not only in Kenya but also worldwide - including the United States where Beckham played. The popularity of the EPL, Bindra correctly states, is "no colonial hangover - it is globalisation."

My concern with Prof Mutua's dated theoretical framework echoes my earlier call for Africans to update the narratives with which we read our position in the world in the wake of the Obama presidency. With a black man heading the world's most powerful country, I said, evoking narratives of slavery, colonialism and centuries-long racism seem weak, even though the issues are still relevant. If we are to still use them, we must adapt them to the 21^st century where the world's most influential politician and the one of the world's richest women are both blacks whose names start with "O." Both reached where they are because of the power of the media, namely the internet and books for Obama, and a TV talk show for Oprah. Their success may also be attributed to the fact that in this age of cultural capitalism, small doses of ethnic diversity are a plus rather than a minus, for people from non-Western cultures are a product for entertainment and moral redemption for a historically tainted Western world. The English Premier League has used these two factors to sell itself as a brand worldwide. Earnings from the televised matches of the EPL worldwide run into the billions of pounds. Moreover, the plethora of international football players, many of them African, endears both Africans fans who are proud of the success of their own and of English fans who enjoy the best talent that the world has to offer.

In this context, Profs Mutua and Akurang-Parry's regret that Africans on the continent are not proud of their culture and are instead aping Western norms sounds like a reduction of Africans to human museums for the preservation of lifestyles which entertain those visiting from the ever-evolving Western world. Moreover, expecting Africans to resist the allure of global capitalism seems a little harsh. Africans, like everyone else, are human beings with their weaknesses and strengths, and are therefore not impervious to what is going on around them. In any case, what gives the esteemed professors the right to partake of the West's cultural goods in the universities but not to their fellow Africans consuming those goods through television?

It would have been more helpful to provide a new or updated theoretical framework through which we Africans can situate ourselves in today's world. As Akurang-Parry senses, the Obama presidency has reduced the already limited sensitivity of Africans to imperialism (although pedestrian accounts indicate the Clinton's welcome in Ghana wasn't much less enthusiastic than Obama's). It is now normal in Kenya to find cars with stickers and all manner of paraphernalia of the American flag, a phenomenon which may have been frowned at a little than a year ago before the Obama presidential campaign.

Obama's phenomenal success is too powerful to counter with a narrative about racism, imperialism and colonial baggage, no matter how relevant they are. Therefore, the onus is on scholars to find and create analytical tools which capture the historically disadvantaged position of Africans in the world today without requiring Africans to let go of their admiration of African icons such as Obama, Didier Drogba and Samuel Etoo.  Such a framework requires scholars' recognition that the god of this age is cultural capitalism diffused worldwide through information technology. Racism is simply his footstool.