Film Censorship and Identity in Kenya

The postcolonial government in Kenya has embarked on a sustained war against identity by banning locally and internationally produced motion pictures that depict LGBTQ themes in the ongoing national discourse on gender identity. In 2014 and 2018, the government effectively banned two films by local directors ( The Stories of Our Lives and Rafiki) for including the LGBTQ community in this discourse. Within the same period, officials banned The Wolf of Wall Street and Fifty Shades of Grey, both by international directors, for their explicit sexual content. The bans attracted public attention and triggered a debate over the country’s censorship laws in particular and gender identity in general. However, while paying specific attention to postcolonial censorship laws that aimed to retain the status quo, the debaters failed to ground their arguments in their proper historical context. To better understand censorship in Kenya, we must first understand its history during the colonial period (1895-1963), a period that saw the colonizer attempt to construct for the colonized a morally acceptable identity. This construction saw the British colonial government shield African cinema audiences from films that they thought would teach them undesirable behaviors. To achieve this goal, censorship officials censored films with “questionable” scenes. This study connects the present and the past, broadens present censorship and gender debates by deepening our collective imagination of real and imagined laws, and incentivizes the debaters to think broadly about continuity without change in Kenya. It vacates rigid chronologies and does not purport to provide a definitive history of censorship and identity during the two historical periods, even if such a history were possible to produce. Broadly, the study situates censorship within a long history of framing and re-framing identities and, consequently, contributes to a more complex understanding of the chaotic interplay among power, art, and identity.