Nairobi and the Graffiti Revolution: Political Awareness Through Street Art
- Apr 4, 2015
- 4 min read
Kenya is right now (at the time of publication) gripped by an uneasy atmosphere. With just over a month before the presidential election, people are hoping that the past does not repeat itself. In January 2008, the entire continent looked to Kenya, trying to understand the post-election violence in the country, which was provoked by claims of fraud and which culminated in an ethnic conflict and the deaths of hundreds of people.
Many questions remained unanswered at the time, but since then people have been leading their own struggle for a response to the event, with art – and in particular street art – as the leading force.
On the walls of the capital, graffiti has now taken on the role of political activist and revolutionary.
Early in the morning, and for just a few short hours, the city’s nocturnal street artists gather together and color in a piece of work that would have otherwise taken days to create.
The illustrations denounce political corruption, the abuse of the citizenry, vote buying, and “political vultures.”
Graffiti is giving a name to the untouchable big cats of Kenya, putting a face on guilt, and questioning the country’s top leaders.
The idea is to get people to stop blaming each other and to realize that the scale of the problem is not ethnic, but instead tied directly to political corruption.
The sun eventually hits the capital, and the once-white walls have now gained new faces. This social complaint comes from within urban culture and establishes its finest expression in the colors that burst from simple paint cans.
These “spray poets” are numerous, increasing in number across Nairobi. They’re young people who embrace the art form, the cause and the struggle, and who put forth in their art the words of a city that decided not to be silent.
Among the artists the movement became known as “Anti-Vulture” Interventions, in reference to politicians who profited from the crisis. “R,” a street art pioneer, explains that after the elections there was massive silence.
He says, despite the many news stories and advertisements that were being released nothing was targeting young people.
Instead, the information reported exclusively on the raw violence and didn’t propose new solutions or explain the origins of the crisis.
“We had an obligation to call this ourselves,” the artist explains.
S,” also a revolutionary graffiti artist, criticizes the duration of power in the country: “In our generation, we always heard from the older generation that we would be the leaders of tomorrow.
But tomorrow never came and they continued in power, lying to us about that future.”
And, reflecting on the fact that in Kenya, the same political bosses have ruled the country since independence, he continues: “So we thought: why not take the lead rather than wait for tomorrow?
So we took the initiative to look ahead and stop complaining about all the problems. We decided to be a force for change, because if we wait for tomorrow, it never comes.”
For these cultural activists, graffiti is part of a process of political awareness.
According to R, who turns to the city’s walls as a means of seeking freedom, graffiti is a platform that stimulates the mind, a new way of communicating with young people.
What’s more, it has the nostalgia of raw art and at the same time is a celebration of new media.
“The world has always been about people communicating on walls. Before it was on rocks, and now it’s on buildings. To send the right message, it takes just one strong cause.”
As a style that is typically Nairobi, both graffiti artists summarize the movement as “Ethnic, Urban” or “Afro Urban Fusion,” which characterizes its representations of Africa that use different impressions, thick strokes, shading and highlights, and strong graphics that stem from a more “wild” style. It alters the abstract and hits straighter to the point to relate art with environment and culture.
The same approach works with characters, masks, jewelry and vibrant colors – everything “a la Africa.” In all of this, it’s not the first time the city had gained prominence in the area of street art.
At the beginning of the new millennium, artists instigated a style that became the watermark of the capital: Matatu graffiti, in reference to the local name given to vans and small buses that are tasked with public transport in the country.
With the vans laced with grafitti, the streets of the capital were a moving color screen until 2006, when this type of street art was banned by the Ministry of Transport, which claimed it wanted to standardize public services.
But it was not only vans that have had their graffiti stripped. Dozens of works done by these “Anti-Vulture” artists have been erased. Still, the artists don’t mind. “We believe we have reached our goal. People are now aware of what was going on and are trying to take action now.
There is much more to come. Some things harder, some things softer, but we’ll find a way to send the message out,” says R. It seems that there could be no amount of white paint to cover up the voices of Nairobi’s revolutionaries.
Story and images from article in afreaka
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