Narrating trauma as modernity: Kenyan artists and the American embassy bombing.

In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai posits media as one of the major diacritics which works to constitute modern subjectivity (1996:3). How might media be used to express the experience of a national trauma? And how does a national trauma--in this case a terrorist bomb attack in Kenya--embody this modern subjectivity? One aspect that concerns me here is the public's acceptance of a national ("modern") identity in the popular consciousness when most public and local discourse, including that fostered by the state itself, is instead framed in terms of rival ethnicities or loyalty to opposing political, regional, or religious factions. Most discussions of media's role in the production of these identities focus upon print and electronic transmission since these reach the widest audiences, although both Jurgen Habermas (1989) and Benedict Anderson (1991) have noted the salience of the visual arts as well.

My own story concerns both word and image: a visual narrative couched in terms of a 1998 news story of a terrorist bombing, which is itself part of a much larger historical narrative about modernity, beginning with late nineteenth century colonialism and extending up to the present in one East African nation-state. Thus, I deal with three layers of narration, but also three "modes of production": first the paintings; second, the informal discourse of Nairobi bars, markets, and offices picked up and subsequently framed by newspaper journalists; and third, the more formal narratives of academic historians and political commentators, including myself.

Of these layers it is the news story as popular discourse which most powerfully shapes the larger narrative. Talk, in the form of reportage of "breaking news," including eyewitness reports and rumors, is the frontline mediator of the event itself. But this river of talk is then dammed, preserved, and reproduced in print, along with news photographs (and in wealthier countries, amateur videos) and it is these which establish and frame the "facts" to which later commentators, including artists, must respond. In this particular case, the layers of narration are heavily intertwined, in that most of the artists (as well as the author) heard the breaking news on the radio, followed by rumors of more attacks, and then tracked the account day by day in the newspapers. Most of us also went to the bomb site hoping to see the rescue operation, walked through the broken glass on Nairobi downtown streets, and knew people who had been injured or who died.

Johannes Fabian's (1996) groundbreaking, early 1970s collaboration with the painter Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu to produce a visual narrative of the history of then-Zaire supplies one model for understanding the convergence of visual and verbal accounts in this paper. Others are the work of historian Luise White (2000) and anthropologist Misty Bastian (1993) on the uses of popular narrative for understanding larger-than-life events in African settings. And for the early colonial period there is the classic example of figurative Asante gold-weights and proverbs as a nexus of visual and verbal knowledge, discussed by Herbert Cole and Doran Ross (1977) and M.D. McLeod (1981).

But if invoking a scholarly pedigree might suggest a plan behind this project, let me clarify that it resulted from accidental involvement. I was in Kenya when the bomb went off at the American Embassy in downtown Nairobi on August 7, 1998, and was there again one year later when a group of artists from Banana Hill Studio organized a painting exhibition, "The Bomb Terror," at the Goethe-Institut in the city center. This was part of a larger donor and government initiative known as Operation Recovery, intended to help people work through the collective trauma that had been visited upon the country and its citizens. (1) But it was not until Shine Tani, the artist-organizer, and I unsuccessfully approached the American Embassy in Nairobi about obtaining its help in circulating the show in the US that I realized that this was something that ought to be written about, given the ephemeral nature of a local African exhibition without a catalogue. (2) I will first very briefly sketch the event itself, then the narrative that quickly formed around it in the days that followed, and third, the way in which visual artists remembered it a year later. Along the way I will try to develop the relationship of this rich body of material to the ongoing national debates in Kenya's political landscape.

The Event

Just before midday on Friday, August 7, 1998, a terrorists' truck bomb exploded in downtown Nairobi, killing more than 200 people and injuring an astonishing 4000. The two explosions ripped apart the American Embassy and totally demolished the Ufundi Cooperative building next to it, and also broke the windows of nearly every downtown skyscraper in a radius of 1 km (.62 miles) (Figs. 1, 3). The site, only a few meters from a congested roundabout at the junction of two main streets (Haile Selassie and Moi Avenues) became an instant scene of carnage as pedestrians and passengers in cars, buses, and matatus were vaporized, blown up, or mortally wounded. An equally large number of victims were office workers in the surrounding buildings who, hearing the initial explosion, rushed to their windows to see what had happened, only to be killed or injured by flying glass from the larger explosion moments later.

[FIGURE 1 & 3 OMITTED]

What happened next was critical for the subject of this paper. For several hours, confusion and uncertainty reigned at the official level: young American Embassy marines, following their standing orders, tried to keep would-be rescuers off the Embassy site at gun point despite the fact that people were trapped inside; the Kenyan police adopted a similar stance, falling back on their usual crowd-control measures and trying to keep everyone away from the wreckage. International trained rescue teams did not arrive until late that night and the next day. But the wananchi, which is to say, ordinary members of the Kenyan public, ignored this (literally) guarded bureaucratic response to unpreparedness--instead, they clambered onto the rubble and started digging people out with sticks, shovels, and their bare hands. John Githongo, a correspondent for the weekly paper the East African who was at the scene, reported that twice when the police tried to push them back, the crowd roared in anger, shouting "Leave us to do our work!" (Githongo 1998). In like fashion, taxis, lorries, and other vehicles became impromptu ambulances voluntarily bringing thousands of wounded people to hospitals. Then, for the next several days, hundreds of Kenyan volunteers, including doctors and nurses, worked side by side with Israeli, American, and other rescue teams.

The Narrative

The narrative that formed around this event arose spontaneously at the site and fanned out into public discourse through survivors, eyewitnesses, accounts repeated in bars and at bus stops, and through the five local daily newspapers, as well as radio and television. From the beginning the narrative had two parts: first, the extraordinary fact that in the crucial hours after the blast, ordinary passersby had taken charge of the rescue operation while the police did little except mill about reporting to one another on walkie-talkies, and second, that this cooperation was stunningly new and totally unlike the everyone-for-themselves attitude which has come to be expected in places like Nairobi, where armed robbers often seem to enjoy greater visibility than the police.

It was also totally unlike Kenya's traditionally partisan responses to crisis, whose divisions follow the lines of ethnic and political party loyalty. Suddenly, no one was asking how many of the rescuers or victims were Luo or Gikuyu, or how the Kenya African National Union (KANU) or the Opposition was responding. In fact, President Moi and Opposition political leaders were totally absent from the initial story, because they were irrelevant. Only later did they make ritual appearances at the site, along with prominent members of the clergy, to lay wreaths and announce that Kenyans were innocent victims of international politics, while assuring the public that everything was being done to bring the situation under control and find the perpetrators.

The first thread of the narrative, the self-help story, was the understandable response of a citizenry that has learned through experience not to count on help from government bureaucracy in times of crisis. It was given vivid journalistic form by Sunday Nation reporter Mutuma Mathiu two days later:

   As the tragedy unfurled, in this
   dense smoke of death and hatred
   to which the victims could neither
   attribute a motive nor understand,
   there shone through strengths that
   Kenyans couldn't have suspected
   they possessed. They did not
   have the trained discipline or the
   resources of the Americans. But
   they seemed to sense that salvation
   would only come from
   themselves....Bleeding passersby
   rounded up the badly injured,
   jammed them into private vehicles,
   most with their windscreens blown
   off and with drivers themselves
   bleeding, and sped off to hospital
   ... mechanics fiddled with the KBS
   vehicle [city bus] in which 14 people
   had died ... policemen and ordinary
   folk watched, mouths agape,
   as life came into the pile of junk and
   the engine coughed and spluttered.
   And creaking and weaving, the
   pile of rubble drove away. If shell-shocked
   Nairobians were looking
   for a symbol of hope, that bus was
   one (Mathiu 1998).

There are other hidden nuggets to be mined from this self-help narrative. One pertains to the mode of production known in Kenya as jua kali, or "hot sun." It refers to the many small businesses and kinds of artisanship which proliferate on sidewalks or in alleys without benefit of offices, factories, or showrooms. Such work, referred to by economists as informal sector production or the "parallel economy," occupies the majority of the productive population in poor countries such as Kenya, where the worker resembles Claude Levi-Strauss's bricoleur, using whatever is available to turn ends into means and means into ends. The early stage of the rescue operation was jua kali in every sense, for while no one had any paper qualifications in rescue work or any special equipment, they were already perfectly attuned to dealing with problems using whatever comes to hand, unlike the technology-dependent international rescue teams that followed and used cranes and bulldozers to move the tons of concrete. The act of resuscitating the bombed-out bus became the symbol for both endurance under extreme hardship and the sheer ability to get things done without specialized equipment and training.

The second thread of the narrative was a political realization: This had not been at all like the public response to the Rift Valley clashes over land of the early 1990s, in which entire villages were destroyed, hundreds of lives lost, and large numbers of livestock killed or stolen. With those events, sentiments quickly hardened along primordial and party lines with no common humanitarian regard for the suffering of people who happened to be born on the wrong side. The difference, of course, was that this time the enemy was external, very nebulous, and was in fact not the enemy of Kenya but of the United States. Kenyans in turn were random victims, selected not for their ethnic identity or party affiliation but by which office building they happened to work in or what city bus they were taking at the moment the bomb went off. The effect was that people saw their tragedy as something visited upon them collectively as one people, i.e., as Kenyans. As Peter Ondeng put in the Daily Nation, "The difference, I suppose, is that this time the perpetrators were foreigners. The thought of international terrorists bringing their fight to our soil angered Kenyans and triggered emotions that can only be described as patriotic" (Ondeng 1998).

The Artists

Now the artists--who are in one sense just the wananchi with paint-brushes, but who are also the makers of narratives of their own. They are not quite the Tshibumbas that Johannes Fabian has written about, which is to say that they are not artists who ply their work on the streets or from door to door. Instead they sell in public and private exhibition spaces in and around Nairobi. At the same time, those from Banana Hill Studio who made up the core of the exhibition are not academically trained and are not a part of Kenya's intellectual elite. In fact, most have not completed secondary school, though they are as much at ease speaking English as Kiswahili. They are quintessential African urbanites, typically unable to afford a computer, but aware of the power of technology. Some frequent Nairobi Internet cafes and an ever-increasing number now use "mobiles" (cellular phones), the new radio trattoir in African cities. Most of them have not traveled outside Kenya, and certainly not to the US, but in 1999 they could talk knowingly about Bill Clinton and even Monica Lewinsky.

They are young, mainly in their twenties and thirties, and most would identify themselves as Gikuyu (Kikuyu), one of Kenya's two politically dominant ethnic cultures. The visual narratives they construct are therefore representative of their age and class and of their experience of modernity in this time and place, which is both postcolonial and increasingly globalized. All of these facts would predict a group of paintings of the bomb blast that closely resemble the print and electronic media narratives of the event. Well, yes and no.

Of the forty-six paintings, all but a handful were cast as narratives of the event itself or of the rescue operation, and many drew upon newspaper photographs of the Embassy or Cooperative Bank and the burning wreckage of vehicles caught in the traffic roundabout next to the Embassy when the bomb went off (Fig. 4). But two things worked against any attempt at straightforward copying: As informally trained artists, the Banana Hill group were both limited in their technical ability to reproduce the news photos with exactitude, and simultaneously free from any perceived obligation to do so. Scenes of ruined buildings were often fanciful and not depicted in space or drawn to actual scale. The most popular landmark was the Cooperative Bank, whose distinctive, tall "clothespin" shape appeared in dozens of paintings, probably because, unlike the Embassy or Ufundi Co-op House, it was left standing, though tattered and windowless.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

An example of this tendency is James Mbuthia's The Work of the Enemy, in which Cooperative Bank, the Embassy (looking like a parking deck), and an American flag, and further away the Kenyatta Conference Center, form the architectural background for an exploding bus and people flying in many directions (Fig. 5). Mbuthia said, "The blast occurred, everything was frying, no camera got the action, but this is what took place. It was painful to the ears, to the eyes, and even the heart." In Julius Ndung'u Kimemia's Blast Sight, amid toppling buildings and carnage a giant-sized arm reaches up from the crowd with a mysterious object like a butterfly net, and flags of different colors fly (Fig. 6). He commented, "I can't forget the day when many lost their life--when Kenya's flag separated into pieces."

[FIGURE 5-6 OMITTED]

The representation of human subjects (rescuers and victims) was more familiar ground for these artists, and many created a montage of forms drawn from different stages of the catastrophe into a single composition. There are two ways to read such a compositional strategy. Historically, this kind of narrative compression was associated with a "premodern" sensibility, both Western and non-Western. But a different historical filter, that of a globalizing space-time aesthetic, recasts spatial and time compression as post-, and not premodern. Mbuthia's figural group I Can Remember (Fig. 2), in which he includes rescuers, the injured in hospital, and even the Head of State (who visited the site several days later) in the lower left corner, has all the solidity and fanfare of a Quattra-cento altar painting.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Some artists also found ways to focus their representations upon the problem of representation itself. Wanjohi Nyamu, an artist who worked not at Banana Hill but at the informal studio outside the National Museum sponsored by Kuona Trust, imagined the explosion as a recorded media event, explaining, "It was the greatest cry ever heard in recent times. It was aired by electronic equipment all over the world." In the painting, titled Airwaves, the artist represents this cry as a howling dog, while a building topples in the background and a transistor radio hovers above, broadcasting the sounds (Fig. 7). (3) In a work titled Is It the End of the Earth? Cartoon Joseph also depicts the scene as media reportage, using a montage of Nairobi newspaper photographs on top of a painted crowd scene at the site (Figs. 8a-8b). Both of these artists conflate the bomb explosion as an event in time and space with its media representations, whether by sight or sound. It is easy to read a self-consciously modernist aesthetic sensibility into Cartoon's use of collage, but in fact he learned the technique in primary school art class, where the scarcity of paints often dictates the use of whatever comes easily to hand, what one might term "the jua kali philosophy of art education." But even if absorbed innocently in a Kenyan school where used newspaper is cheaper than art supplies, modernism trumps academically literal composition, found in only a few of the paintings in the show.

[FIGURE 7-8 OMITTED]

Shine Tani, a Nairobi ex-street child who taught himself to make art from materials he salvaged from the city dump, is the leader of the Banana Hill group as well as the organizer of the "Bomb Terror" exhibition. His own painting Time to Love (Figs. 9a-9b) also developed around a found object, a child's red sneaker he picked up at the bomb site, from which he created this narrative:

   I got him in the street and I saw
   that he was in danger and I know
   that the life of a human being is in
   the soul, so the shoe gave me inspiration
   of how (he) was left alone....
   And I stretched my hand and rescued
   him. (4)

Along with the work from Banana Hill studio were a small number of paintings by academically trained artists. (5) Yvonne Muinde's Trauma I: Rescued works as a prototypical drawn-from-life pen-and-wash composition, the victim turned away from the viewer so that the face cannot be seen (Fig. 10). David Michuki's The Scene of Terror depicts the same roundabout with burning cars and the looming Cooperative Bank seen in Mbuthia's The Work of the Enemy and Ndung'u Kimemia's Blast Sight, but with greater architectural fidelity and without people, giving the piece a documentary feel devoid of the emotion or affective power of the event (Fig. 11).

[FIGURE 10-11 OMITTED]

In a parallel way, both Donald Maingi Kuria's Street Child in the Blast (Fig. 12) and Wycliffe Ndwiga's Bomb Terrorist and Civil Wars in the World (Fig. 13) attempt the same subject as Shine Tani's Time to Love but, unlike Shine, represent the homeless child as part of an urban social document rather than a personal rescue attempt. Ndwiga actually paints the scene not as one narrative but as a catalog of separate images floating in space: the woman whose forearm has been amputated, the soldier with a gun, the old man leaning on a herding stick and peering directly at the spectator, two vultures, a street child taking shelter against a the (with its double meaning in Kenya of modern detritus and vigilante "necklace"), all against a murky background of smoke and a running figure. Maingi Kuria's street child, on the other hand, is screaming and wounded, bleeding next to his begging dish. Sheets of paper litter the ground everywhere, as they did at both the Embassy bombing and three years later at the World Trade Center. One of the ubiquitous rumors heard in Nairobi was that moments after the explosion, thousands of shilling bank notes rained down from the wreckage, which instantly brought hordes of street boys onto the site, trying to pick them up. As the story went, many were then killed by falling debris.

[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]

While the paintings by Banana Hill and Kuona workshop artists are technically less sophisticated and sometimes clumsy, they are also more imaginative at conveying the chaos, pain, and confusion brought on by the bombing, often as hyperbole--"It was the greatest cry ever heard in recent times"--compared with the documentary-style realism of the formally trained artists. Yet it would be misleading to try to fit the "trained" and "workshop" artists into a textbook-style dichotomy of practice, since art is about far more than learned techniques. Everyone, journalist, bus driver, unemployed youth, or university graduate, experienced the same trauma. Their training and individual subjectivity shaped their representations, but all the artists were responding to the same event.

The last painting I will discuss is the most complex, by a prodigiously talented young artist who is still at the early stages of his career. More than any other picture in the 1999 exhibition, the visual narrative by Martin Kamuyu captures the idea that the bombing of the Embassy was some kind of historical experience which managed to fold the global issue of superpower politics into a local expression of new-found consciousness and national identity. By their forced participation, Kenyans have not only acquired a national perspective but have now entered into a history that is shared with other nationalities: the victims, the local heroes, the international rescue teams, and even the unknown terrorists, both of the latter entering Kenya from afar. (6) Kamuyu simultaneously embeds this local event in the historical record and shifts back and forth between image and text, by the device of situating the visual narrative upon the pages of two open books (Figs. 14a-14b). He calls the painting Heartbook and had this to say about it (August 10, 1999):

   I tried to gather the idea and I found
   that I can't portray everything on
   the canvas, but what if I put it in the
   book there? A book can carry a lot
   of things in it ... and you see from
   the book that was at the bottom
   side there was a dog standing there
   and a police and some rescuers
   who came there. So that's the book
   telling about how came experts
   from the US to help us here ... and
   the police from this country they
   were harassing them.... And you
   will also see that was something
   like helicopters and aeroplanes
   transporting the people who were
   the victims.

   ... even the cry of the "bird-man" as
   his rest-house is being destroyed
   by the cutting of the supporting
   tree ... [and] ... the loss of many
   lives, as Nairobi by then was looking
   like a dustbin-place. This will
   always remain in our books and it
   will open up time and time again
   for remembrance and history. It
   will never be forgotten, our book
   of sorrow.

Modernity and the Politics of Representation in Kenya

For Kenya, the condition of modernity is associated with at least four kinds of changes: the embrace of technologies such as electronic media and Western-style medicine; the acceptance of nontraditional ideas about social relations, such as the increasing autonomy of women and girls; the commodificafion of wildlife and coastal beaches in the creation of a postcolonial economic dependence upon tourism; and a greater awareness of the "outside" world and Kenya's position in relation to it. This last category seldom impinges on day-to-day life like the first three, and when it does, it tends to be grounded in economic issues, as in World Bank loans being withheld due to government corruption, or in medicalized global politics, such as the HIV/AIDS issue or the origin of the Ebola virus.

But regional violence and terrorist attacks have also entered into this fourth category of "being modern" because in Kenya, these are seen as assaults on the country's sovereignty as well as its security. Tourism and terrorism have turned out to be twin vectors of change for the old Kenya of pastoralism, smallholder farms, and colonial ranches. One concrete example is the former Northern Frontier District (NFD), now the North Rift, home of pastoral peoples such as the Turkana, Samburu, and Pokot, which was claimed by both Kenya and Somalia from 1963 until 1968. The British kept it a closed district because of the dangers posed by Somali shifta (armed bandits or freedom fighters, depending on whose side one is on). But since the 1970s the postcolonial government has introduced safari tourism in the Northern Rift Valley and expanded beach tourism along the Swahili Coast. Because of the porousness of the northern border with Somalia, the bombing of an Israeli-owned coastal hotel there in late 2002 was thought to be accomplished with weapons smuggled down the coast from Somalia by dhow. Furthermore, the North Rift is awash with illegal arms from Uganda, the southern Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, used in both cattle-raiding and banditry. It is not that violence and the trauma that accompanies it are intrinsically modern, but the ways in which it is being perpetrated are new. Yesterday spears were the weapon of choice in the North Rift; today they are being replaced by the Kalashnikov and rocket-fired grenade. This represents not just a globalizing technology but also a shift in the relation between Kenya and these bordering states destabilized by civil wars. "Modern" in this sense has come to mean unstable, unpredictable.

It remains to try to fit this narrative of catastrophe and altered subjectivity into the broader frame of popular representations in Kenya, particularly in the way they engage with ideas of the place of Kenya in the world. To do so, it is essential to define what I mean by "popular" and to place these visualizations within the local framework of what modernity (and, by contrast, antimodernity) is understood to be in places such as Nairobi.

I have avoided speaking of "popular art" up to this point because the term has been used to mean quite different things by different writers. To most academics and curators, it connotes an art, regardless of style or subject, made by "the people" (in the sense of non-elite, or not academically trained, artists) and for "the people" (ordinary citizens, in Kenya the wananchi), who are its primary audience. To a committed Marxist-Leninist (and one could easily stretch this to include South Africa's African National Congress and its belief in art as a weapon of struggle under apartheid), popular art is art that depicts the struggle of "the people," regardless of who makes or buys it. To a trader, of course, popular art is that which is most in demand with buyers. The Banana Hill and other workshop artists do not easily fit any of these categories, though their collective practice partakes in some ways of all three: They are non-elites, they often depict the struggles of ordinary people, and a few of them are quite successful with galleries and buyers. Because of these ambiguities, I have limited my own use of the evanescent term "popular" to popular discourse, explained earlier as gossip, rumor, testimony, and the mass media decoctions of all three, and expanding that meaning in material ways, to popular representations. Such representations, whether images or inscriptions, are by definition widely seen and recognized by ordinary citizens--that is, are part of the public domain of knowledge.

While the 1998 terrorist bomb attack certainly dominated popular discourse in Kenya for over a year, it never became a subject of widespread popular representation aside from the newspaper photographs published in the first few days. The Kuona Trust, a Nairobi-based foundation- and government-supported arts initiative, erected a billboard near the bomb site downtown and invited the public to respond to a series of images commissioned from Kuona workshop artists Patrick Mukambi and Tom Ogonga with the assistance of the Dutch artist Rene Klarenbeek in the weeks following the event. A table was provided with paper and writing materials, as well as marker pens for drawing pictures. The outpouring was impressive, but was essentially a river of words, not images. The popular visualizations seen in Nairobi streets, markets, and galleries could not easily encompass such a subject.

This is perhaps because in the spectrum of current artistic practice seen in Kenya, the works displayed in the "Bomb Terror" show would occupy a position far from the center, where woodcarving, genre paintings of village life, nomadic jewelry, and other artifacts aimed at the craft and souvenir market occupy the dominant position. To greatly oversimplify, if the representation of contemporary terrorism in these paintings can be subsumed under the general rubric of "modernity," then the rank-and-file of visual production in Kenya ignores modernity in favor of a remembered past or renarrated version of contemporary life. (7) In those media that are descriptive, such as carving and painting, but also images on postcards and in books of photographs, the dominant subjects are invariably pastoralists (Maasai, Samburu, Pokot, Turkana, etc.) and idealized scenes of pastoralist life, even though these groups constitute a tiny fraction of the contemporary Kenyan population.

If one asks a Kamba sculptor (or in Tanzania, a Zaramo one) why he chooses to represent the Maasai and not someone from his own community, there is a short answer and a longer, more complex one. (8) The short answer is that it is simply what buyers prefer, but in the longer and more interesting one, the artist often speaks of his own nostalgia for the pre-British past, when "we were all like Maasai," (9) suggesting something akin to Tshibumba's portrayal of a usable pre-Belgian past (Fabian 1996, Jewsiewicki 1991, Jules-Rosette 1987), a time and way of life that is partly the artist's conjuring, partly received local history, partly colonial and missionary reportage. In Ben-Amos's (1977) classic formulation, "Maasai" could be said to function as a kind of pidgin representation, which to the souvenir hunter means something like "noble primitive" but to the artist and local buyers means "us, long ago." I would suggest, therefore, that modernity is a topic toward which Kenyan people, artists included, feel great ambivalence, and the visual representations of it do not at present have a broad popular audience. (10)

Although most of these sculptural representations of pastoralists (or paintings of idyllic village life, be it Luo, Gikuyu, or whoever) are intended for exportation abroad and for the decoration of restaurants, bars, and hotels where foreigners and local elites congregate, they are also highly visible in the City Market and other souvenir shops and markets of Nairobi itself. Inevitably, then, they do form a part of public discourse, in Parliament and in the press, giving material substance to the broad debates concerning modernity and economic development, as well as the loss of traditional values. One could therefore argue that these types of representations, whether nostalgic or primitivist or both, stand for a clearly rendered antimodernity, albeit one that is criticized by intellectuals and overly romanticized by foreigners.

In Parliamentary debates, a closely related set of issues revolve around Kenya's self-image as a modern state, which exists in constant tension with the spectatorship of tourism. Lawmakers who are themselves the products of Western-style education understandably do not want Kenya to be known as primitive and backward. At the same time, everyone recognizes that primitivist nostalgia is good for the business of tourism (Kenya's second-largest source of foreign exchange), which entered a sharp decline in the last decade of the Moi regime through a combination of general lawlessness and fears of regional terrorism and has only recently begun to recover.

If it is fair to say that a sharp contrast between modernity and antimodernity characterizes popular representation in Kenya, with antimodernity far more widespread, we can then see the American Embassy bombing narratives as an attempted countermove by a group of younger artists on the side of a modern self-awareness, however disruptive its appearance or minimal its local market impact. One needs to ask if this is generalizable to other African countries; that is, dropping the more familiar generic labels such as traditional, religious, popular, transitional, and elite artistic practice, does the antimodern African subject far outweigh the modern one?

It would be overly cynical to attribute this antimodern bias solely to the tastes of elite collectors, though these obviously play a part. To the extent that these representations enter public discourse and capture current feelings, they also stand as evidence of the deep ambivalence toward an uncertain and often risky modern consciousness, allied as it often is to new claims of internationalism and the new forms of political violence that accompany it. In closing, it is possible to see the bomb experience as a collective rite of passage for the thousands of affected Kenyans that, to extend Appadurai's line of argument (1996:179), acted to inscribe a new layer, however thin, of national subjectivity upon a previously ethnicized and factionalized political body. And as one newspaper reporter remarked at the end of a traumatic and sleepless week, "We've been attacked by international terrorists--I guess that makes us modern now."

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2005.]

Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at Iwalewa Haus, University of Bayreuth in October 2001 and the Triennial Symposium in African Art, Harvard, April 2004. I am grateful to Kim Miller and Shannen Hill for their incisive suggestions for its revision and expansion.

References cited

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White, Luis. 2000. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

(1.) The exhibition, held in July and August 1999, was officially opened by Dr. Frank Njenga, chairman of Operation Recovery, which marked it as part of a season of memorialization one year after the bombing. The string of events included turning the American Embassy bomb site into a memorial garden, while building a new embassy far from the city center.

(2.) There was, however, a valuable checklist containing brief statements from the artists, some of which have been incorporated here. The comments from Martin Kamuyu, Cartoon Joseph, and Shine Tani were recorded in interviews at the Goethe-Institut and Banana Hill Studio in July and August 1999.

(3.) Wanjohi Nyamu was not a member of the Banana Hill group but worked at the informal studio outside the National Museum sponsored by Kuona Trust. He has since left Kuona and is working at Mamba village, according to local sources.

(4.) From the exhibition handout.

(5.) Some were associated with the Creative Arts Center, Nairobi, others with the Thika Art Studio (Shine Tani, personal communication, February 15, 2005).

(6.) On August 3, 2004, the BBC Africa Service reported that the chief perpetrator, a Pakistani national and Al Qaeda member, had finally been arrested. The four other participants were tried and found guilty in New York on June 1, 2001.

(7.) The same phenomenon can be seen in Inuit sculpture and prints, in which anachronistic clothing and hunting practices are depicted even though people now hunt with snowmobiles and wear generic Western-style winter clothing (Lemux, Jackson, and Freeman 1994).

(8.) These questions have been posed by me to Kamba carvers in Nairobi and Mombasa during yearly visits between 1991 and 1996.

(9.) Kasfir, unpublished field notes, 1992.

(10.) Only one of forty paintings in the exhibition was actually sold while the show was installed. I have been told that two or three sold later. Linking this fact to their modernity is probably an oversimplification, and Jessica Gershultz (personal communication, February 19, 2005) has reminded me that several of the most interesting Nairobi artists at work today do in fact comment on the condition of modernity, such as Tabitha wa Thiku's social critique of clothing. To the list of artists following this trend one would certainly add Shine Tani.