Thread by @wmnjoya

No justice, no morality.

You can't tell us about morals when there is injustice every day. And in Kenya, morality is another way of saying "sshh, don't speak the truth because it threatens my power, job or status."
#KECreativesDeserveBetter

The idea of morals parallel to injustice is Victorian. Colonial missionaries called our clothes, ceremonies and knowledge immoral, while they facilitated the colonial government to brainwash and brutalize us.

It's the same dualism being done to artisrs
#KECreativesDeserveBetter

Artists are brutally exploited. They are not paid for their work. They are insulted repeatedly. Those of us in arts education are called useless. It's the same thing that was done to our cultures, songs, dances and fashion by colonial missionaries.
#KECreativesDeserveBetter

Why do people in power hate the arts?

The arts is a language that power can't control. Arts is the space where we make the people who are silenced speak, when we say what people in power can't contain. Arts is democracy, and power cant stand that.
#KECreativesDeserveBetter

So when Kenyans use the language of "morality," they are speaking in the narrow language of Victorian England and in colonial Christianity, which refer to individual behavior: sex, chemical consumption (drugs, alcohol) and what individuals wear.
#KECreativesDeserveBetter

The moralists are silent on the social, on the fact that individual choices interact with the options which society makes available. Moralists hate the arts because the arts show how society that makes certain individual choices possible or inevitable.
#KECreativesDeserveBetter

For instance, the arts will show that you cant call talk of addictive drugs immoral without exposing poverty and despair in a hopeless economy that is sabotaged by dynasties who arrest youth for telling the truth.
#KECreativesDeserveBetter

The reason why sexual themes seem to dominate the arts is not a function of the arts but of capitalism and autocracy. Corporate and state power silence socially constructive arts and use sex to distort society. We saw it with "ifikie mastude" by DCI.
#KECreativesDeserveBetter

Capitalism's and the state's control of the arts means that they frustrate the production of films, plays, books and music on our history and knowledge. The artists who were killed and exiled in the first 30 years of independence for "non-sexual" art.
#KECreativesDeserveBetter

Do the math: if you subtract history and society from the arts, what are you left with?

The body.

So the people who are supposedly concerned with morality should be asking for support to EXPAND the arts. Instead, they want further restriction.
#KECreativesDeserveBetter

Moralists are essentially demanding arts that make us human beings look like robots, where we only eat, sleep, go to work, and pay taxes and go to church and have no opinion, no dreams, no sense of life, of love for one another or justice.
#KECreativesDeserveBetter

And the moralists remain silent about the way the government slaughters young men, rapes women, distorts education, exploits us and is hopelessly corrupt.

Dear moralists, that isn't going to happen. We are not going to accept that nonsense.
#KECreativesDeserveBetter

Just as we say:
No justice, no peace

We artists say:
No justice, no morality.

So either you address injustice faced by everyone, even artists, or continue to be the coward you are and go pray in church.

#KECreativesDeserveBetter