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00:00Africa, one of the fastest-growing regions in the world, the youngest continent where
00:12six in every 10 people are under 25.
00:16With hundreds of different ethnicities and some 2,000 languages, Africa is the most culturally
00:23diverse place on Earth.
00:27I'm Afua Hirsch.
00:29I've been lucky enough to work across Africa as a journalist.
00:34And now I'm exploring Africa's history through its extraordinary creativity and culture.
00:41I'm looking at how three very different countries, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Kenya, emerged from
00:49the shadow of empire in the 20th century and are thriving in the 21st.
00:58These African countries are reasserting their identity, gaining new recognition for their
01:03role as cultural powerhouses.
01:06I'm interested in how that's happened and how the struggles for liberation in the past
01:11have helped shape today's African renaissance.
01:20In this episode, Kenya, a country created barely a century ago.
01:28Where we are standing here was a bad place for Kenyan nation.
01:33Where the British spun an idealized stereotype while carving out a brutal empire.
01:38And in the works camp, the detainees would make bricks.
01:41So they were being forced to build their own prison.
01:44Exactly.
01:45Independence created new heroes and icons.
01:49I'm an African nationalist, wanting my people to have their own independence, just like
01:57any other country.
02:02And an exciting collision of cultures, finding creative ways to respond to the past.
02:08As an artist, I think the time for painting beautiful flowers is over.
02:15Kenya has come to symbolize the idea of Africa for so many people, but there is so much more
02:20to culture here.
02:22So many divergent traditions united by a unique political history and by a complicated relationship
02:29with the land itself.
02:45Here's a vision that we in the West tend to think of as quintessentially Africa.
03:04In northern Kenya's great rift valley, the Samburu, an ethnic minority who are a branch
03:09of the cattle herding Maasai people, use their bodies as a vivid artistic canvas.
03:19The Samburu are semi-nomadic, and so their art is portable, a projection of identity
03:25and status that moves through the landscape.
03:30Animal blood, tree sap, clays, ash, the very materials and dyes the Samburu use in their
03:36body art are rooted in an almost symbiotic relationship with their cattle and the land.
04:06The Samburu are always passing through Kenya's imposing landscape.
04:28They see themselves as tenants here, but others saw the romantic vastness and wanted to be
04:35owners.
04:46For centuries, the Kenyan coast witnessed the arrival of adventurers, explorers, missionaries
04:52and slavers, all vying for power, but nobody actually tried to plant a flag.
04:57It was the arrival of the British at the height of their imperial project who would change
05:02all that overnight.
05:07The year was 1885.
05:10The European heads of state had gathered at the Berlin Conference to put some order on
05:15the so-called Scramble for Africa.
05:18Secretly and without consulting any Africans, they divided up this vast continent into spheres
05:24of influence.
05:26With the stroke of a pen, the East Africa Protectorate threw together indigenous cultures,
05:32becoming peoples like the Kikuyu, Kamba and Giriama, fishing people like the Luo and
05:37semi-nomads such as the Maasai and Samburu in a new country commonly known as Kenya,
05:43in the British sphere.
05:47The first big British project, a 600-mile railway, snaking inland from the coast to
05:56open up Central Africa to trade, to transport colonial officials, troops and resources.
06:15This was more than just a railway.
06:18This was a piece of strategic power play so audacious, so costly that at the time it hardly
06:25seemed possible.
06:26More than any other single event, this railway established British control over the land
06:33and created the state of Kenya, setting this country on a path from which there'd be no
06:38turning back.
06:50Work began in 1896, but disaster immediately struck.
06:56Thousands of the Indian workers brought over to build the railway were eaten by lions.
07:02British MPs, outraged by the costs and excesses, nicknamed the project the Lunatic Line.
07:22More workers died for each mile of railway that was constructed.
07:26This was a hugely costly project, one which mostly British people didn't have to make
07:33the sacrifice for.
07:38Sir Charles Elliot, the commissioner who presided over the project, quipped,
07:42It is not uncommon for a country to create a railway, but it is uncommon for a railway
07:47to create a country.
07:53But not everyone was thrilled by the creation of the new country.
08:00Some Kenyans found ingenious ways to unite and resist the encroaching power.
08:31This is the Kifudu dance, being performed today to keep alive the memory of Mekatilili
08:40Wamenza.
08:41A resistance fighter against British rule, Mekatilili inspires contemporary artists and
08:47her people to this day.
08:50Mekatilili was from the Giriama people, who lived predominantly along Kenya's coast.
08:58A widow, she had lost brothers to the Arab slave trade, and was suspicious when in 1913
09:06the British tried to recruit Giriama men into work in plantations or the army.
09:12One day, there was a public meeting where we are standing here.
09:17The British administrative officer then, Arthur Champion, came here with his translator, he
09:23was called Wanja Wamugaya.
09:25And when you say here, you mean right here in this spot?
09:28On this spot we are standing.
09:30Arthur Champion said, I want your boys to join the British army.
09:34And she told Wanja Wamugaya, the interpreter, can you tell your boss to take one of those
09:40siblings of that hen?
09:42He walked there and took one of those six, and you can imagine the mother hen reacted
09:48very furiously.
09:50And he took his pistol and killed the mother hen.
09:54Mekatilili also understood what that meant, and she slapped Arthur Champion to the ground.
10:00She slapped the British officer?
10:02Yes, physically, physically slapping.
10:05And Arthur Champion went down.
10:06And this is a man who's armed with a gun?
10:09Yes.
10:10So what did they do?
10:12One of them just pulled the trigger and killed one of the Giriama men.
10:17When he did that, the war started.
10:22Mekatilili travelled across the country to galvanise a resistance, gathering people by
10:28performing the funeral Kifudu dance.
10:52So, after the dance, Mekatilili would then preach to them and say, we have a disaster
11:16here.
11:17People have come here.
11:18They are taking our land.
11:19They are taking our children.
11:21We don't want them here.
11:30Where we are standing here was a bad place for a kind of nation.
11:39Mekatilili has become a folk hero, a Giriama David against the British Goliath.
11:45Without money or weapons, with her people dispersed, she took the thing that united
11:49them, their culture, and weaponised it for her cause.
11:54The British responded by twice exiling Mekatilili, confiscating Giriama lands, killing around
12:01150 people and burning 5,000 homes.
12:08Slowly but surely, they tightened their grip on their new possession.
12:16And what a possession it was.
12:19For the British, a space more than twice the size of their homeland, with wild savannah
12:25and mountains of eerie beauty, packed with exotic wildlife.
12:31They saw the opportunity for a white settler colony.
12:39Their idea was to use the newly finished lunatic line railway to encourage British farming
12:45of the central mountain plains of Kenya, the area with the most fertile land, coolest climate,
12:52and with a plentiful supply of Africans who could be turned into farmer herds.
12:57The area became known as the White Highlands.
13:01In 1934, the government declared this fertile mountain region an all-white preserve.
13:07Native Africans, in this part of the country mainly the Kikuyu tribe, were excluded except
13:13as hired servants of their white masters.
13:16Before the white farmers came, the highlands was haunt of game and the wild herds of Africa.
13:40The white settlers were invariably drawn from Britain's aristocracy and landed gentry.
13:45People who felt they knew a thing or two about running large estates and who had the money
13:49to invest in them.
13:51They also brought with them intense ideas about British culture and civilisation.
13:56Ideas that took on a new dimension in this landscape.
14:00But thousands of miles away from the rigid norms of Edwardian Britain, they regarded
14:04this as a place that was kind of an Eden, uninhabited and wild.
14:09The perfect setting for adventure and freedom.
14:14This white romantic vision of Kenya has had enormous resonance and staying power.
14:21It's been projected across the world in literature, film and television.
14:28And by one book in particular.
14:34I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
14:38The equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm
14:42lay at an altitude of over 6,000 feet.
14:45In 1937, a Danish baroness called Karen Blixen published a memoir about her life on her family's
14:52coffee farm near Nairobi.
14:54She called it Out of Africa.
14:58The book documents the attitudes of the upper crust of colonial Kenya, who became known
15:03as the Happy Valley set, the tabloid fodder of the interwar years.
15:08It also traces a love affair based on the real-life fling Karen had with the Englishman
15:12Dennis Finch-Hatton, a story adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1985.
15:18Out of a land of beauty, mystery and majesty.
15:27Out of Africa.
15:33The real star was the epic, awe-inspiring landscape of Kenya.
15:39The geographical position and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that
15:45had not its like in all the world.
15:48The views were immensely wide.
15:51Everything you saw made for greatness and freedom, an unequalled nobility.
15:59That book has done so much to promote an image of Kenya as a blank landscape, a primordial
16:06canvas onto which the white nobility, privileged people, come to fulfill adventure and romance.
16:14And the role of Africans in this narrative is minimal.
16:17They've simply existed as accessories to that central white adventure.
16:23Nothing like a nice log fire at this time of year, is there?
16:27Even when you're right on the equator, in the most luxurious club in Africa, the Mount
16:31Kenya Safari Club.
16:33And as you'd expect from a millionaire's playground, it really is exotic.
16:52Safari culture had been ushered in by the lunatic line.
17:00Among early pith-helmeted hunters, with their tools, stories and trophies, was American
17:06President Teddy Roosevelt in 1910.
17:09But it was after the 1940s and the establishment of Kenya's vast national parks that safari's
17:15promise of adventure and sighting big game fueled large-scale tourism.
17:21People in search of their own out-of-Africa moment.
17:24And the tourism, in turn, transformed Kenyan art.
17:38A typical Nairobi craft market.
17:53This is where you find the most popular Kenyan art, vibrant celebrations of the country's
17:58wilderness and safari animals.
18:02Being in this craft market in Nairobi is a little bit like being inside the mind of a
18:09tourist's idea of what African culture is.
18:11Even though the people who work here work so hard and there is great skill, I can't
18:17help but feeling that they're often giving tourists what they want.
18:23Things that feed into their preconceptions of images of giraffes, zebras, wooden carvings
18:30that don't have any actual recognisable tradition but kind of conform to that vague idea of
18:34a mask.
18:35And then tourists come here and buy that stuff and feel like their world view has been vindicated.
18:45You know this, this is a giraffe.
18:57The expert wood carvers here are largely from the Kamba people, who make up a tenth of Kenya's
19:02population.
19:05The Kamba art movement began in the early 20th century and invented what some call a
19:10colonial modernist style that has been eagerly embraced by the tourist market.
19:16Hello.
19:17Hello.
19:18How are you?
19:19We make animals, wild, wild animals.
19:24Here in Kenya we have a national park, we have giraffes.
19:27So they see a big giraffe.
19:30After there they go and see a big elephant.
19:34After there there is a rhino and cheetah.
19:37That's the most tourist thing which they like it.
19:42We can make anything, but because of our mind we are put there, tourism likes animals.
19:51You're from an ethnic group that has a tradition of carving.
19:55Can you tell me about that and how did you come to be so good at making things from wood?
20:02That's something which I know because that is my grand, my grand, my grand, my grandfather.
20:07When we were colonized he tries to go somewhere when he was naked, no clothes.
20:16So he tries to find his head, what am I going to close my body, what am I going to make?
20:25I make a shirt from wood.
20:27From wood?
20:28A wooden shirt?
20:29Yeah.
20:30Just make like this one.
20:31Okay.
20:32He close there and he make another thing to close there.
20:35That sounds very uncomfortable.
20:36So he was, so that he can move because of the colonizing people.
20:42Because Europeans came he didn't want to be naked anymore?
20:45Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
20:49Highly skilled and popular, these camber carvers make money from tourists and art about the
20:54land at the same time.
21:03To the east, near Kenya's coast, wood carvings are literally rooted into the land for a deeper
21:10purpose.
21:16The Giriama people's villages are based around sacred forests called kaya.
21:22They believe they're filled with the spirits of their ancestors, marked by carved posts
21:27that look like human statues called vigango.
21:31Vigango are designed to represent the dead.
21:35Commissioned by the family after a relative dies, they're interred into the ground during
21:40the funeral ceremonies to make sure the deceased is welcomed into the ancestral world.
21:46It's a marriage between art and spirituality, planted in the landscape itself.
21:53The vigango you can see taking shape behind me is more than just a headstone or a representation.
21:58It's the living embodiment of the spirit of an ancestor who has died.
22:03And as long as the vigango remains in the ground here, it anchors that spirit to their
22:07home.
22:18The vigango is nearly finished now and the villagers are using red ochre to paint the
22:21body and charcoal to mark the eyes and the eyebrows on the face.
22:29Really just putting those finishing human touches so that it looks like the person that
22:33it is.
22:59It's a law of traditional or a hundred years ago culture.
23:27It's the spirit of your ancestor in the vigango.
23:32What is the purpose of the vigango?
23:54When you made the vigango, did good things happen?
24:12So it brought you prosperity.
24:13Yeah.
24:14So it really changed your life?
24:19Sometimes these traditions have brought the wrong kind of attention.
24:23Unfortunately for the Giriama, over decades thieves and unscrupulous dealers have targeted
24:29vigango, uprooting them to be sold to Kenya's booming tourist market.
24:34Only now are some vigango being successfully repatriated from the private collections and
24:39public museums where they've ended up all over the world.
24:43If somebody came and took this kigango away to sell it, what do you think would happen
24:48to the person?
24:49If a person who is a thief, a great thief, to come and steal, very, very, very simple.
24:53You just come here, you just put as a cassava, you cut it there and you are in for it.
25:02You are in, you won't escape.
25:06You won't escape.
25:07You die or you become mad.
25:09Do you think this kigango will be here for a long time?
25:14Even it will pass through and it will remain here for a century.
25:19Even your granddaughter will come and sit here, if it's still alive.
25:25There's been a real trade in vigangos over the past century or so and I can see why people
25:29value them.
25:30But when you understand what they mean in this culture, they're so much more than an
25:35interesting piece of art.
25:37They're inhabited by the spirit of an ancestor and their purpose is to anchor that spirit
25:43to their home here.
25:44So the idea of taking them away and trading them for money is a violation of everything
25:49that they represent.
25:54Back in the 1950s, Kenyan resistance to the violations of colonialism was mounting.
25:59As the British imperial project in Kenya reached its peak, more and more Kenyans were being
26:05excluded from their own land and being forced to work for white farmers.
26:12Just how serious is the security position in your area of Kenya at the moment?
26:17There has been this build-up of hatred engendered by various, I should say, African subversive
26:26elements in the country that is going on the whole time and the situation is deteriorating
26:31every single day.
26:35The Kikuyu people were most affected by the White Highlands Project and after World War
26:41II, as a new wave of anti-colonialism swept across Africa, their frustration boiled over.
26:48The Mau Mau was a secret society of Kikuyu who took an oath to attack European settlers.
26:55In 1952, the British authorities declared a state of emergency.
27:00Years of bitter guerrilla war followed.
27:03Hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu were detained or curfewed and the British trialled a new
27:09tactic, a pipeline, as they called it, of internment camps, where suspected Mau Mau
27:14supporters would be forcefully educated out of what the British authorities regarded as
27:20mental disease brought about by the psychological shock of modernity.
27:30This is Mweru Girls' School outside Nyeri, north Kenya, but it holds a macabre reminder
27:36of the country's violent past.
27:39Tayana Chow is part of a younger generation of Kenyan historians documenting the internment
27:44sites that still survive.
27:47So the buildings we see here, they were used as cells to keep detainees.
27:54You can see barbed wire on the roof.
27:58You'll notice in some of the buildings you have a carving on the bricks that says MWC,
28:03that means Mweru Works Camp, and in the works camp the detainees would make bricks that
28:09would either be sold or used to build the structures.
28:12So they were being forced to build their own prison.
28:15Exactly.
28:16So you'll notice that the room we're in has windows, but when this was a cell, there was
28:23no light coming in, so the school has basically carved out the windows from the brick itself.
28:29How many maumau do you think would have been living in a space like this?
28:35From our research sources and our conversations with veterans, we estimate maybe 60 people.
28:4160?
28:4260 people.
28:43In this space?
28:44In this tiny space.
28:54This is a torture chamber.
28:55A torture chamber for the camp.
28:58They would be kept here alone with very little food and very little water for a period of
29:04a number of days.
29:05I don't know if you can see it now, but they would put water, they would fill the room
29:10with water and you couldn't sit or sleep, so you just have to stand.
29:16That's horrific.
29:18Do people still feel critical of maumau?
29:22Because there was a level of violence involved.
29:25Everyone selectively chooses what they want to remember and what they don't want to remember.
29:30And you have very many factions that say that maumau was, they were savages and they killed
29:36people.
29:37You have some that say they fought for independence.
29:38You have some that say that they gave us Kenya as we know it today.
29:43People who were part of maumau, who fought alongside them or who suffered because they
29:48were deemed maumau, were the sacrifices they made respected and remembered once Kenya gained
29:55independence.
29:56A lot of them left detention just to find out that their land had been taken, their
30:01ancestral land, so they didn't have any land.
30:05They had to buy back land from the chiefs or the loyalists who were put in place by
30:11the colonial government.
30:13Their families had separated.
30:14Some of their parents or their siblings had died.
30:18So they came out of detention, I think both physically and mentally, in a very deprived
30:25state, which continued on to independence.
30:29It was either you abandon maumau or you just wither, wither away, yeah.
30:37If this episode of British history seems unfamiliar, it's no accident.
30:43The British worked hard in the 1950s to spin their own version of events.
30:50The British needed to keep the public at home and allies like America on board with their
30:56dirty war in Kenya.
30:58They turned to cinema in its golden age to do that job.
31:02A series of starry, big-budget feature films were made and released during the insurgency.
31:09Today, these African Westerns are a fascinating, forgotten window on the propaganda war in
31:16the twilight years of empire.
31:18Here's one example, Simba.
31:21In Simba, Dirk Bogarde plays a character full of doubt and distrust about Kenya, as the
31:28brother of a British farmer who has been murdered by the maumau.
31:35Sixty years ago, when the first white men came here, these Africans were hardly down
31:39from the trees.
31:40How can they be rational adult human beings?
31:43They're children.
31:44When Mary was six, I wouldn't have let her play with this.
31:49What this scene sets up is a very familiar narrative to me.
31:54Africans are like children.
31:55They can't take responsibility for themselves.
31:57They need to be ruled over with a firm, responsible hand that can only come from white settlers.
32:04This all comes through the voice of the white farmer, who speaks from a position of experience
32:08and authority, having really been out there.
32:10And at the same time, he says this in front of two African house servants.
32:15And in contrast to his eloquence, his rant, his passion, his knowledge, they are silent.
32:22It's dishonest because it's claiming to show some kind of interest in the future of Africans.
32:26But it's not really doing that.
32:27It's about British self-interest.
32:28And even worse, I feel that debate is still playing itself out now.
32:32If you think about the discussions about aid and development in Africa, it's still
32:37white British people sitting in a room talking about Africans as the needy recipients of
32:43their charity and generosity.
32:44That continues today.
32:52There's also a gruesomeness at play in this film.
32:56It was shot on location in Kenya while the real war was raging.
33:01And with the help of the British Kenyan authorities, it was not just biased, but according to contemporary
33:06press reporting, exploitative.
33:09The Mau Mau initiation ceremony involved real Mau Mau insurgents who were taken from a prison
33:16by the company that made this film.
33:18And shortly after filming, they were executed by the British for their role in the Mau Mau
33:22insurgency.
33:24These are people who were performing something to entertain British audiences and then were
33:30executed because of that very thing.
33:33It brings history and fiction together in a way that is so troubling.
33:38And it means that as an audience member, I've now been entertained by something which I
33:43know cost these Kenyan men their lives.
33:49The film climaxes with an attack on Bogard's farm and the murder of an African doctor trying
33:54to mediate.
33:59This is a threatening scene.
34:00You are meant to feel afraid of these Africans.
34:03They represent senseless violence, savagery versus the virtues of civilization and reason.
34:12I think this scene taps into a very old fear, this image of being under attack, this invasion
34:20of violent, dark-skinned people.
34:23You see it in stories about the empire.
34:25You even see it in the way that immigration is discussed, this idea of being swamped or
34:30swarms or floods of people who are coming to threaten peace and security.
34:40This was designed to win people over into the British worldview of the empire, that
34:45it was a force for good, that it was facing these threatening, violent, senseless, barbaric
34:50Africans.
34:51And I don't think that legacy has ever really been challenged.
34:55Perhaps we don't deserve peace.
35:01You couldn't underpin an empire with force alone.
35:05You had to make people believe that it was the right thing to do, that Britain was on
35:10the right side of history, and that's exactly the role that these films played.
35:16But ultimately, this myth-making was of no use.
35:19The Mau Mau insurgency was the beginning of the end for British rule in Kenya.
35:25The last word would belong to a Kikuyu, and the land would soon be handed over.
35:30And at last, here comes Kenyatta, flown from detention and driven on the last stage of
35:37his journey in a police vehicle.
35:45Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu who'd been imprisoned by the British on trumped-up charges of being
35:50a Mau Mau leader, led Kenya to independence in 1963.
35:54It only remains for me to present to you, Mr Prime Minister, these constitutional instruments
36:01which established Kenya's independence.
36:07Articulate, charismatic, and larger-than-life, Kenyatta managed to turn this most British
36:16of colonies into a successful, independent African nation, and avoided a Rhodesia-style
36:22confrontation with the white settlers who wanted to stay.
36:27Kenyatta wanted Kenya to look forward, not back.
36:30Will you change your policy as a republic towards Britain and to British people here
36:35in Kenya?
36:36We have no change in policy.
36:38We stand where we were, neutral, a friend of all, an enemy of none.
36:50What do you think is going to be the main problem of Kenya as a republic?
36:54You wait and see.
36:55Okay?
36:56Thank you very much.
36:57Okay.
37:06Nothing better expressed Kenyatta's infectiously optimistic vision than new architecture.
37:14Central Nairobi, once a backwater railway siding, was transformed into a teeming metropolis
37:20defined by African modernism, daring new buildings, even heroic designs in concrete and steel.
37:28Kenya's first major contribution to that modernist wave was this building in Central Nairobi.
37:35It was built by the first president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, who, in a not uncharacteristic
37:40case of showboating, named it after himself, the Jomo Kenyatta International Conference
37:45Center, built as a headquarters for his political party.
37:50With its cylindrical tower rising above Nairobi at 32 stories, it was by far the tallest structure
37:56in East Africa right up until the late 1990s.
38:01Inside, it has a magnificent auditorium shaped like a traditional dwelling.
38:10The design was by a Norwegian, Carl Henrik Nøstvik, but it's a building particularly
38:15suited to the tropical Kenyan climate, a bold use of concrete in airy, open galleries and
38:21terraces without the windows and insulation you'd need in Scandinavia.
38:27In African buildings like this, modernism was set free.
38:32I feel like there are so many stereotypes and cliches about African cities, and this
38:37building is just one of so many examples, albeit a very impressive one, of how Africans
38:43decades ago were already thinking in big, ambitious, modernist terms about the future
38:49and using architecture like this to realise that vision.
38:53Post-independence Nairobi was an economic magnet, pulling Kenya's diverse peoples
38:59into an exuberant melting pot, and they found a common language in... music.
39:07As the city grew after independence, workers from across the continent brought with them
39:12different styles and ways of playing music.
39:16Denga fused these styles.
39:24A hybrid of rumba from the Congo and the folk songs of the Luo people from western Kenya.
39:30In the 1960s and 70s, it quickly became the unifying soundtrack of the city.
39:45It's a very big band, so when we do practice, everybody contributes, like you come with
39:56a song and then everybody contributes.
39:58So what's your role?
40:00My role? I sing.
40:01And is there usually one singer or more than one singer in a Denga band?
40:05There are many singers.
40:11How are the vocals in Denga?
40:13Very sweet.
40:18It teaches people about living with one another in peace, you know.
40:23And it teaches about day-to-day life and love, mostly.
40:27Very important.
40:28Yes.
40:43Is it something to do with the city and the way people go to work and they want to relax,
41:04that helped Denga thrive?
41:06It is, it is.
41:07Because if you see around, the people who are here, we have doctors here, we have lecturers
41:11here, and then after they come from work, they want to, you know, to chill their minds,
41:17so they come here.
41:18When we play music, they go home, they feel better.
41:24You can come here and you're very stressful, and when we play like one, two, three songs,
41:29you go home and you're happy and smiling, you know.
41:33Denga embodies the energy and excitement of the decade after independence.
41:38Saturday night at this pub in Western Nairobi is Denga night.
41:42People believe Denga died a long time ago.
41:45Our fathers and grandfathers, we used to do Denga.
41:48But tonight, if you go around Nairobi, you'll find every club is playing live band.
41:53It's Saturday night, so you're not going to go anywhere?
41:57No, no, we are not going anywhere, so we are there to stay.
42:27The excitement for the future embodied in Denga spilled out onto Nairobi's streets
42:32and found expression in a very distinctive form.
42:36Like London's red buses or New York's yellow taxis,
42:39Nairobi's minibuses have become an icon of the city's visual culture.
42:47They're known as Matatu, Swahili for three,
42:50after the original three-pence fare of the 1960s.
42:54Matatus are the way most of Nairobi's 4.5 million people get around.
42:59Congestion is a challenge in the city.
43:01Many commuters spend hours in Matatus every day.
43:05Given that Nairobians spend so much time waiting for or sitting in Matatu,
43:11perhaps it's no surprise that they've eventually become part of the city's identity.
43:15Unofficial Nairobi mascots.
43:17They're brash, chaotic, noisy, but they also have free Wi-Fi.
43:22They're entrepreneurial and full of life.
43:25Today, Matatus are an unlikely outlet for creativity.
43:32Drivers need to compete to attract paying passengers.
43:40So they use lights, music, and vivid paint jobs and graffiti,
43:45popular stars, politicians or athletes.
43:49If you think about it, Matatus is a place where you can find
43:52If you think about it, Matatus is a place where you can find
43:56Nairobi's most visible version of street art.
43:59It's just that in this case, the canvas is always on the move,
44:03transporting its ideas and images round and round the city.
44:12Denis Murugiri is one of Kenya's leading contemporary artists.
44:16He depicts the chaotic beauty of Nairobi's street life
44:20life through mixed-media prints and paintings.
44:24I can see your obsession with matatis, they're everywhere in your workshop, even on your
44:28clothes.
44:29Yeah.
44:30What is the obsession with matatis?
44:31I just grew up loving matatis and I grew up next to a bus park.
44:36They are more than just a vehicle that takes you from point A to B, they are kind of concept
44:41boxes.
44:42So you find matatis with, they try to outdo each other with some ridiculous paint jobs
44:53and plasma screens, loud music, performances by the operators.
44:59You could say that the matati experience encapsulates a lot of the challenges of life here, sitting
45:04in traffic, not being able to guarantee your safety, a level of chaos and noise, so you're
45:10deliberately countering all of that negativity by actually actively celebrating the good
45:15parts.
45:16Yeah.
45:17Matatis without passengers and operators is just a shell, it becomes alive when people
45:24come into it, that's the most beautiful thing about them.
45:40As economic migrants arrived from around the country, Nairobi's growth created new challenges.
45:55Today as many as two and a half million people live in slums like this across Nairobi, almost
46:01two thirds of the city's total population, but on just a tiny fraction of the land.
46:10So right now I feel like I'm giving you your obligatory slum scene and to be quite honest
46:20I'm frustrated with the fact that depictions of places like this, that don't really get
46:25to the bottom of what life here is like, are still such a prevalent way of depicting African
46:30countries like Kenya.
46:31This is a difficult place to live, there are challenges here, there's poverty, but it's
46:36so much more complicated than that, there is so much more going on here, there is such
46:40an order to life here that you can't really understand just by looking at tin shacks or
46:46rubbish dumps.
46:47And one of the things that's going on in areas like this is a really interesting creative
46:52scene that's often not what you would expect.
47:15Classical ballet has become a source of self-expression for children living in Kibera, the largest
47:21urban slum in Africa, home, it's believed, to over a million people.
47:28Joseph Kanyenje is one of their teachers.
47:37Were you surprised that people in Kibera take so well to ballet?
47:42At first, at first, I had a perception in my head when I was told, oh you're coming
47:47to work, you're going to work in Kibera, I was like, oh God.
47:51But then when I saw how they're moving, it's like, oh, there's no difference from here
47:56and other places that have an interaction with children.
48:01My perception was changed immediately.
48:03It is quite a noisy, chaotic area, but it's as if in this room you've created a very orderly
48:09ballet studio.
48:12I'm surprised how the girls, the girls are the ones actually who calm me down, because
48:16for me, I can't, I can't deal with the noise, but the girls, they're not fazed.
48:27Do they face hardship?
48:28Of course they do have their own hardship, but you never see it.
48:34They're always happy, they're always coming to school, you see them chatting around.
48:37You see them when you ask them, how do you see Kibera, it's a nice place.
48:41It is a nice place, it really is.
48:47This ballet is a reminder that the narrative of Africans in destitution and in need of
48:52handouts is outdated and unhelpful.
48:56There's a real resilience in the face of adversity here.
49:06Exploring even further beyond the cliché, we find the very material of the slum inspiring
49:11a whole new art movement.
49:17Meshack Oiro is one of a new generation of artists producing recycled art.
49:22A sculptor, he works to upcycle the junk the slums produce and turn it into something positive.
49:29I have to say it's a little bit hard to see at the moment this pile of rubbish, it's kind
49:35of covered in flies, quite grimy.
49:38I can't immediately imagine its potential.
49:42As you know, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, so I see beauty in there.
49:47And what gave you the idea to do it?
49:49As a young artist, coming up with the money to buy materials and not being sure of the
49:54market, it was quite challenging, so that's why I turned into recycling.
50:00Is there an ideological dimension to using recycled material as well?
50:04Are you making a bigger point about the environment?
50:07Yeah, definitely, because I'm upcycling what has already been thrown away and trashed,
50:13so I'm trying to give it another life.
50:20How do you pick one chain from another?
50:22They're slightly different colours, lengths.
50:24Different chains make different pieces.
50:26There are pieces where I want really smaller chains, like these ones are small and you
50:32can see they have some beauty in them.
50:34This particular one I work with when I'm doing maybe a face or a tiny piece.
50:41And then there are other pieces where I have to use fat chains like this.
50:45That's a lot chunkier.
50:46Yeah, a lot chunkier.
50:48So this particular one I can use when I'm making maybe the body and I need to cover
50:55lots of bulks.
50:57I will easily use this one when I'm making quite a humongous piece, because most
51:04of the time I need to cover all the blank spaces around.
51:07You see this kind of piece, it's aluminium, but also the aesthetic in it is quite beautiful.
51:16I really can't wait to see what you're going to do with all this stuff.
51:34Intriguingly, despite the innovation with materials, Meshak reworks a familiar and abiding
51:41Kenyan theme, the call of the wild.
51:54They say charity begins at home, so my first audience where I would like the message to
51:59go to are my fellow countrymen.
52:03And then out there, because out there is just a plus now, but this is our doorstep.
52:07So if it's well here, then I'm happy with that.
52:15Meshak is one of hundreds of artists in Africa's burgeoning recycled movement, using their
52:20startling inventiveness to repurpose found material and create both powerful art and
52:27an ecological rebuke.
52:36The world is listening.
52:38African recycled art now has a global reach, featured in exhibitions and prestigious institutions
52:44across the world, and collected by the likes of Bill Clinton and the Swedish royal family.
52:58Today, Kenya finds itself in an exciting moment of transition.
53:12With a dynamic, young population, responding with huge creativity to the challenges of
53:17urban life, Nairobi buzzes with energy.
53:22Michael Tsoi is the leading artist here, documenting Kenya's journey.
53:28His bold, colourful style holds up a satirical mirror to Kenyan society and politics, and
53:34has brought him worldwide attention.
53:39He's a young artist, but he's also a young artist.
53:43He's a young artist, but he's also a young artist.
53:49This is your studio?
53:50This is my studio.
53:52You have a really distinctive style, very accessible.
53:56It really hits you and your messages are there to see.
53:59What I try to do is make it as simple as possible, to a point where if you stand there and don't
54:04get it, then there's something wrong with you.
54:06Make it as simple as possible.
54:11This is a piece I did last year, after the election.
54:14This is a piece I did last year, after the election.
54:18There's a lot of Kenyans who were killed by policemen
54:21because people contested the results of the election.
54:25All the people who were killed,
54:27all came from the same region.
54:29So you've depicted bullet holes leading in that part of the...
54:32Yes, the bullet holes and then the lines that you see
54:34are actually names of the people who died.
54:36Wow.
54:37So this is a name of this person who was killed
54:40either in Western Kenya or in the slums in Kibir.
54:45Michael is painting a series he calls China Loves Africa,
54:50questioning the growth of Chinese power in this region
54:53and asking again, who owns the land?
55:02The world's fastest growing superpower
55:04is extracting resources and minerals from Eastern Africa
55:07to feed its growing economy,
55:10building local infrastructure here in return for leverage.
55:15In Kenya, the Chinese loaned $3.6bn for a new railway line,
55:22running alongside the old lunatic line
55:25as part of its Belt and Road initiative.
55:28Kenyans were hired to help build the line,
55:30but almost always under Chinese supervisors.
55:34Many, like Michael, worry about the debt trap
55:37in which Kenya now finds itself.
55:39I haven't seen that many artists in African countries
55:43where China is now so heavily involved.
55:45Yes.
55:46Critiquing it in their painting.
55:49First of all, it is not a critic.
55:52Really?
55:53A lot of people think that I am criticising,
55:55but it is not a critic.
55:56The question now that everybody needs to ask themselves,
55:59how did China find itself in Africa?
56:01China was invited to come into Africa.
56:03By who?
56:04By the Africans themselves.
56:05If I talk about this particular piece,
56:07now all these men,
56:08you will realise some of them are very fat.
56:10You understand?
56:11But you've also infantilised them
56:12and you've put them in their underpants.
56:13Yes.
56:14They look dependent now.
56:15The reason why I make them fat
56:17is because the people who are benefiting
56:19from the generosity of China
56:24are not the ordinary people,
56:26it's the politicians.
56:27When you hear of the railway,
56:29people connected in government
56:30will go and buy their land from the peasant farmers
56:33for nothing, for next to nothing,
56:34like $100 per acre.
56:36And when the railway was proposed,
56:38they now sold the land back to government
56:41for like 100 times what they bought it for.
56:44The people who are suffering
56:45are the people, are the citizens,
56:47who are going to be paying some of these loans.
56:49If you have a 10-year-old kid right now,
56:51by the time they're 20, 25,
56:53they'll still be servicing the loans
56:55that we got to build the railway to Mombasa.
56:58Me, I will not blame China.
57:00China is doing what it feels is its own interest.
57:05Is this potentially, though, the new imperialism?
57:07It's more subtle.
57:09It's potentially even more long-lasting
57:11and definitely omnipresent.
57:13No, I think the British came with the Bible first
57:15and managed to convince everybody.
57:16And then the guys with the guns came later.
57:19The Chinese are coming with money, you know?
57:21And, you know, when you have a continent
57:24that consistently thinks that we are poor,
57:26we are poor, we are poor, we are poor,
57:28and come and offer money,
57:29then trust me, you will get
57:31into whatever corner of the country you want.
57:34As an artist, I think the time
57:36for painting beautiful flowers is over, you know?
57:39I try to do a lot of work
57:40that revolves around social issues,
57:42things that affect the normal Kenyan
57:43on a day-to-day basis.
57:45So I am documenting certain moments,
57:47maybe probably for posterity.
57:48A kid sitting in a classroom
57:50in 40, 50 years' time from now
57:53can get a book, look at it,
57:54and kind of, like, get an impression
57:55of what Nairobi was like back then.
58:01Kenya has attracted outsiders
58:03too often for the wrong reasons.
58:10Brutal imperial schemes
58:12have dispossessed the people
58:14while contorting their story
58:15into a cliché that shaped perceptions
58:18not just of this country,
58:19but of the whole African continent.
58:23Yet here, I found a population
58:26and dynamic art scene
58:28channeling a creative renaissance
58:31and, frankly, embodying hope
58:33amid the legacies of a dark history,
58:37a new vision for the future
58:39that breaks through old clichés.
59:07I'm going to get it.
59:09I'm going to get it.
59:10I'm going to get it.