Raila / Prof Makau Mutua Debate in the Trickster Tradition

I have keenly followed the debate kicked off by Prof. Makau Mutua’s much talked about Sunday Nation article on Mr. Raila Odinga. Cutting through the regrettable insults that have popped up on both sides to muddy the issue, I know the critiques will help better Kenyan society. Personally, as an artist, I believe that characters like Raila are best understood in the Trickster Mould.

Many world cultures are replete with "tricksters" who challenge the legitimacy of conventional wisdom and traditional pieties, to achieve change.

The trickster is not a moral person in any conventional sense of the word, but he does have an ethic to make society gain from his labours. The trickster expands reality, allowing us to see imaginative potential which conventional wisdom restricts or ignores altogether. A trickster’s role is one necessary to all societies which hope to change for the better.

Moralists cannot easily fault the trickster because he does not personally live a lie, but deals in lies to bring out the bigger truth. He plays with what is widely accepted without question to be the truth. On the surface of it his public acts are deceitful because his success is based on a lie, but on deeper examination this “lie” serves a larger "truth".

Tricksters are agents of change in society; they perform this necessary social function because they have the imagination to see a possible future and the skill and tenacity to make that vision a reality. They don’t let an injustice stay; they destroy it. The trickster’s loose way with the "truth" is necessary if he or she is going to help society rethink its conventional wisdom in the process of creating new social values.

In an introduction to one of my published plays, “Voice of the People”, Professor Peter Nazareth of the University of Iowa in the USA writes, “African culture is replete with trickster stories, in which a figure outwits more powerful creatures by using the system of power against itself, playing language and mind games to get past barriers society has built up. The trickster looks simple or foolish or wears other masks.”

My favourite African trickster tale is the proverbial race between the hare and the tortoise. The tortoise wins the race by placing relatives at strategic points along the route and at the winning post, relatives the hare did not know about, so that however fast the hare runs there is always a tortoise ahead and, most important, the race is already won.

To guard against complacency in their camp and to give false hope to those they oppress, colonial powers subverted this tale to have the hare lose the race because of reckless pride, falling asleep during the race, so that it would mean, “Slow and steady wins the race”. This concept is not only impractical but totally unacceptable to the oppressed since it prescribes hard work as opposed to working hard; since it seeks to justify injustice, to justify the current totally unjust imperial world order that puts the West at the top of the food chain without any care about its social and environmental costs; since it eliminates justice as a key component of (the West’s prescription of) morality.

Trickster figures in African folktales engage in trickster strategies to defeat injustice. They are not passive participants in systems that are skewed against them.

Before you wax moral about the deceitful tortoise, ask yourself, what level playing field, what justice, what fairness, what morality even, is there in a race that pits the swift hare against the slow tortoise? The disadvantaged tortoise is destined to lose the race even before it starts. But if his survival demands that he participate, it is futile for him to simply protest the unfairness, or to take to the tracks in the false hope the hare will fall asleep and let him win. He has to reach deeper and develop structures that subvert the hare’s unfair superiority. It is his duty to change the rules of the game, to shift the contest to a new arena of struggle.

By demanding we do whatever it takes to get justice, Africa’s celebrated trickster tradition invites us to overcome fear and a sense of helplessness to be part of the solution, realise our hidden potential and move to defend our right to self-determination against all odds. The trickster seeks to open our inner eye to know how to win for change.

Since the trickster’s ability to adapt to the necessities of change allows him to prevail, those championing our liberation must not waste all their energy just throwing themselves at the oppressive world machine and its local players but simultaneously embody alternatives that give them the opportunity to create new political realities.

This calls for a visionary political leadership to step in and explore new arenas of struggle to manage the war against imperialism and transform it into a springboard for true progress and social change.

In order to win for change, to subvert the yoke of imperialism, to restore our inalienable right to sovereignty, it is important to demystify the prevalent mantra of Western-style moral rectitude worn by many of our political activists to the self-destructive exclusion of any possible recourse to strategising and use of common sense.

Foolhardy 'militancy' is of course at the superficial level, popular yes, but very little if anything is achieved through this route. Africa’s trickster wisdom advices us that the intellectual hero motif must be brought to a new paradigm that seeks to demystify the demagogic, ideological and moral convictions spearheaded by some in the movement for liberation, by specifically asking for rethink and the other possibilities that are available to the continued project of struggle for liberation.

949 Words

By Okiya Omtatah Okoiti
NAIROBI
P. O. Box 60286-00200, Nairobi
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