Below the stern Kilimani horizon, below the flat roof, there is a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a high sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled—peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional dove-gray cloud fusing with amorous mist.
It is Friday. 10Am. She is waiting in the lobby of Microsoft Teams where we are having the interview. I allow her in. Eyes bright. Complexion fair, the type you see in someone who has arrived.
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There are people whose eyes burn with the intention to defy social conventionalism and all the nonsense that sustains it. Adelle Onyango is one of those people. I have finally managed to meet the celebrated media personality and podcaster. I wanted to have a one-on-one kind of thing, some intimate talk, you get the drift? But since she was out of town, and her hands were full, she requested that we do a snap interview virtually.
Like a therapist’s bookshelf that sags under the weight of Freud, Jung and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM), the things Adelle has achieved in this life so far sag under the weight of their own glory.
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In 2020, she was recognised as one of MIPAD’s Top 100 Africans; she was one of Facebook’s 2009 Icons of Change; she was declared the most influential Young African in 2019, one year after being part of the OkayAfrica’s 100 extraordinary African women; she was one of BBC’s 100 inspirational and innovative women in the world in 2017.
She will be hosting this year’s The Moth event, an annual storytelling show that brings together people from all walks of life. The event will take place on November 5 at Catholic University of Eastern Africa, LRC Auditorium.
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When God is satisfied with how you have responded to the constant dilemma that is this life, he gives you fame and fortune. Fame and fortune are good, or so most people, lost in the stew of human culture, think. But Adelle is not most people. She is not in the business of fame.
I didn’t ask her whom she’s married to. Or the price of her shoes. Or how often she visits Paris. Or such stupid questions some journalists believe deserve answers. I asked her what my friend Roy calls “real questions”.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What influence do you think your career has had in the collective consciousness of your audience?
I have managed to connect with the audience. I have allowed them to see themselves in me. I have never shied away from speaking about the things that I have navigated and kind of overcome. We’re all humans navigating this mad thing called life. And so I think there’s an appreciation for that. It would have been harder for me to do that on somebody else’s platform, obviously.
What are your views on the future of journalism with regard to new media?
First and foremost, there are no jobs in traditional media organizations. And there have not been jobs for a long time. I remember the last media house I worked for, at Radio Africa Group, they would take not more than 10 interns. New media gives us the opportunity to tell our own stories and talk about issues that affect us, you know, without the Western lens. Traditional media houses are biased. They are in bed with the government and the politicians. Naturally, there is a bias when it comes how they report stories. With new media, there’s a lot of freedom. I hope that doesn’t change.
Whereas previously the industry stifled conversation on some of these things, and you were expected to put on a perfect persona. I think we have two levels to it. For the longest time our stories and the issues that affect us have been covered and told from a western lens, which always has its own agenda.
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Also, new media allows us to kind of democratize our stories and get on ground in an uncensored, unbiased way, which is really exciting. I think what needs to change though is the duration the media council take on the accreditation processes. There is an urgent need to develop, say, a curriculum of some sort to be able to accommodate new media. We can’t just sit and say new media practitioners are not journalists.
The world is going the new media way. The question is how do we adapt? We need to have a quality control in terms of media law and ethics that allows new media practitioners to be accredited so that they can create content freely. I think as a country we’re so stuck in this university degree thing. The world is moving past that. There are really good online courses that are just as good if not better than some degree courses around journalism.
We need to come up with a process that ensures that people who go through that can still be accredited so that even if you don’t have the funds to go for a degree, it doesn’t lock you out of becoming a new media practitioner.
Equally, I think the Media Council of Kenya and the Communications Authority of Kenya are moving a bit slow in that sector. They need to prepare Kenyans for the future of journalism, which I don’t even think is the future of journalism. It is the present.
What is/are your opinion(s) on the role that patriarchy has played and is still playing in the systemic violence against women?
I think with gender-based violence, we do so much in terms of conversation. We don’t do enough in terms of actual action. That’s my problem. I don’t even care if we sustain the conversation across one month. For me, it’s the action that matters most. You can’t engage with the government, which is basically the policymaker, and expect them to do awareness. We need free access to therapy. Therapy is so expensive in this country, yet it is so necessary.
Whoever you are, male or female, or whatever gender you identify with, I think it’s important to know that we didn’t grow up in a vacuum. We grew up in a patriarchal society. And so on a personal level, I have always got to keep questioning myself and questioning why I’m thinking the way I’m thinking. I’m constantly trying to unlearn those thoughts that have been planted in my head as an African woman.
Equally, I think it’s very important for everyone on a personal level to do that, especially men, because in a patriarchal society, there’s a privilege that men have been accorded. I have recently moved away from talking about the system to talking about the criminals and saying, “hey, when somebody does a crime, let them be held accountable. Let them go to jail.”
What do you think should be done differently to fix the policy failure on the question of sexual and gender-based violence in a sexually repressive society like Kenya?
Why don’t we ever see survivors get justice? We don’t have the capacity as a country to properly collect evidence, store and preserve it. How do we strengthen that? How do we strengthen the DNA system? Do we have adequate files and data on DNA of our citizens that can allow us match things through? How do we get the country to that level?
Has The Moth provided platform to the less privileged people with the opportunity to share their stories?
First and foremost, I think all of us have personal stories. You go to The Moth thinking you don’t have a story and then they help you find that story. That’s also really amazing and that’s just one. Two, if you know someone who has a strong story, you can share with them through their website; that way, they can apply to be part of the global program.
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The Moth is largely American – where storytellers enjoy historical advantage in terms of availability of resources – what has the organization done that you know of (or plans to do) to ensure more voices are captured?
It’s a workshop, but it’s also more like a therapeutic journey because they help you work on a story on something that you’ve experienced. I remember the first story that I worked on was around grieving my mom.
I remember one of the people I encountered was a lady, a Muslim lady. And I still remember her story because she’s Kenya. I started understanding the cultural context of some of the things women go through. Muslim women go through things I have never encountered in my life. It just tells you the power of storytelling. The Moth is a global program. They have presence not just in Africa but also in Asia, for example, in India.
What is the idea behind Legally Clueless?
One thing I love about Legally Clueless is that we honor the storyteller. Obviously I’m biased because I’m the founder. But I never tell someone what story to tell me. I think that’s a huge issue with the model around traditional media and radio.
Two, I limit the screening process because I don’t want the stories to be perfomative. It’s literally the way you would tell a story to your friends. You don’t rehearse in front of a mirror.
Legally Clueless is very African. I’m not looking at public personalities. I’m looking for everyday folk. I don’t tell you what’s interesting about you. You tell me what you want to share, you know. I think in that regard, we’ve been able to capture voices of the average Africans. Traditional media hugely focuses on the click baits, the trending stuff.
In addition, we have looked at the effects of colonialism. We have a tour series and one of the places we went to was Zimbabwe. We recorded stories by Zimbabweans there and also captured the country. And we were part of a conference which was, I guess, the 10th conference on African culture and heritage. And we were able to be part of conversations on the violent legacy of colonialism.
The colonialists stole our artifacts, for example, and they have refused to bring them back. We have to start saying, “hey, as Africans, this is a platform where we get to learn about each other from each other.” This is how we can avoid getting colonized again. We really survived some madness, you know.
As one of Africa’s top podcasts, how has Legally Clueless influenced policy intervention in any jurisdiction in Africa as far as the creative industry is concerned?
The work that I do with Legally Clueless is basically centered on stories. Some of the skills that I use I literally learned at The Moth at the workshop that I went through their global program. I feel like they fill in the gap because we don’t have that in Kenya or Africa. It’s so sad because, for Africans, storytelling is such a huge part of our culture, but we don’t even have that in schools.
How has Legally Clueless addressed (or endeavored to so) the question of identity with regard to content consumption?
I hear you as practitioners in the music industry, in the entertainment industry, I hear you. I also think there’s a deeper way to have this conversation: by trying to confront the root of the problem and not the symptoms. We tend to forget that there are quite a good number of Kenyans who love Kenyan music, who show up for Kenyan shows. Colonization really disrupted our identity as Kenyans. We have a problem with the way we view ourselves. And, for so many years, we have been told that we are less, and we have actually believed it. It’s almost like a collective self-esteem issue.
We need to make it easier for people to discover Kenyan music. What type of platforms do we need? We need to weed out corrupt institutions that are stealing money from artists. I think the conversation should not start from the symptom point, but from the causality.
We need to collectively figure out who we are as Kenyans and Africans by extension. We need to rethink who we were before the disruption that was colonialism. I think we need to remember that huge parts of our archives and history were moved to the UK.
Why in the world were we learning about Hitler and not that there were concentration camps in Kenya? Why were we, for instance, not taught that Kitale started off as a slave town? You know what I mean? When we go back to kind of start finding out who we are, we can understand it. We can heal, and then we can start finding pride in ourselves. But until we fix that, we will always see ourselves as less deserving.
In Our Broken Silence – where you give us graphically disturbing details of what a failed society looks like – did you aspire to provoke some form of robust discussion around sex, sexuality and the consciousness that envelops both?
I co-authored Our Broken Silence with an amazing Kenyan woman called Lanji Ouko-Awori. She’s in the legal space and is really focused on ensuring survivors of gender-based violence get access to justice. When we did the book, our primary goals were: (a) to figure out how victims of SGBV can get access to justice; (b) how do we ensure that victims of SGBV get access to quality psychological intervention; (c) ensure that SGBV survivors have a sense of community; and (d) create awareness and conversation.
Proceeds of the book go to Safe254, Adelle Onyango’s initiative and Lanji’s microfinance fund that facilitates relocation of SGBV survivors and their legal fees.
