Popular Art and the Reconfiguration of Police Atrocities in Kenya

Abstract

The government of Kenya has the singular obligation to protect, respect and ensure that its citizens enjoy the right to life¹, prohibit all forms of torture² and protect them from arbitrary arrest and unlawful detention³ as enshrined in the constitution. Paradoxically, Kenya’s law enforcement records paint a bleak picture. Human rights reports such as the report on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions by Philip Alston⁴ point to a culture of arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings, and government’s failure to enforce the law to the letter. Proceeding from this perspective, this paper examines how popular art, such as cartoons, popular music and comedies (parodies), reconfigures atrocities occasioned by government agencies, key among them being the police. While contending that popular art originates from a wide range of societal actors and that it transcends socio-economic and socio-cultural confederacies, this paper investigates how popular art represents atrocities committed by the Kenyan police. Couched in both textual and contextual analyses, the paper interrogates creative strategies deployed in the popular art forms to divulge various atrocities in the country. Ultimately, the paper concludes that popular art is at the forefront in of unmasking, speaking out against and archiving police atrocities in Kenya and that its versatility enables it to survive in the gamut of public discourse, from the centre to the periphery.