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Thèse Année : 2003

Identity Politics in Nairobi Matatu Folklore

"No French Title"

Résumé

Matatu 1 Culture: Nairobi's Three Dimensional Space Our every day lives can also be seen as stories, as narratives, in which we act out our lives and construct our identities. (Berger 1995:165) 1.0 Elements of the matatu culture matrix. In this introductory chapter, I seek to map generally the issues that lie at the core of this study, indicate the perspectives from which the study has approached its subject as well as highlight key questions that have been addressed in subsequent chapters. An appropriate beginning point then is to explain the term "matatu culture." 1.1 Definition of terms. Matatu culture is the combined range of activities and symbolic acts, verbal or written, either deployed upon the vehicle or embodied by matatu workers and passengers in their interaction upon the space constituted around the material culture object known as matatu. Its worldview is governed chiefly by the fact that matatu work is a predominantly male youth occupation.2 Music, DVD movies shown in the duration of a trip, stickers, icons of film, music and football stars drawn on the vehicle's exterior surface,3 hip hop fashion, humor, idiom and gestures used by crews and passengers, attitudes towards other road users and disregard for the Highway Code are key ingredients of matatu culture. It is a culture that thrives on the hybridization of semiotic codes as diverse media, languages and attitudes are brought to capture and express experiences and worldviews. After Hebdige, I view culture as any "systems of communication, forms of expression and representation" (1979: 128,161) of which the combined oral, visual, auditory and written items deployed on matatu are examples. Hence, matatu text means crews' quotidian expressive acts and forms manifested through such elements as stickers, dress, language, pictures, gestures and music, variously or in combinatory sets. Even though subcultures generally enact values that differ from those of the mainstream (Bauman 1992: xiv-xvi; Fiske 1992: 25; Dundes 1987:149- 150), as an example of such, matatu culture discourse is ambivalent in the sense that it is also couched within mainstream patriarchal practices and views on crucial issues like gender and (male) control over property. Passenger responses to the culture are part of matatu culture in that they help to circulate its ethos and values within public discourse, with personal experience narratives being a relevant instance of such responses. I use the term sign to refer to any object, action, image or sound that embodies meaning either within itself, outside or in juxtaposition to other objects, images and sounds. As texts, such signs point to other meanings in other texts. An agglomeration of such visual, oral, auditory signs, among others, which might seem disjunctive when taken as a unit because of their disparate media, make up texts just as individual items like sayings, swear words, gestures or designs on the matatu have been treated as texts in themselves. Without doubt, behavior such as pick-pocketing, extorting sexual favors from female passengers whose fare has been stolen on a matatu by a conductor's accomplices or the physical confrontations between crews, passengers or, on the other hand, competing matatu crews lies in the region of criminality. As such, an assessment of matatu work as crime does not lie within the scope of this study; it is only pertinent to the extent that it sheds light on the general transgressive behavior that shapes the subculture's character.
"No French Abstract"

Domaines

Philosophie
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Dates et versions

tel-01259814, version 1 (21-01-2016)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : tel-01259814 , version 1

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Mbugua Wa-Mungai. Identity Politics in Nairobi Matatu Folklore. Philosophy. Department of Jewish and Comparative Folklore The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2003. English. ⟨NNT : ⟩. ⟨tel-01259814⟩
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