Wakurugenzi Networks: Reframing Kenyan Vernaculars of Gender/Gendering in Abel Mutua’s YouTube Channel

Abstract

During the Kenyan Covid-19 lockdown, Abel Mutua, a renowned actor, scriptwriter and comic created a YouTube channel that has instructively transformed a virtual space into a storytelling platform. The channel presents narrations on a diverse range of topics presented in the format of a TV series. In this article, I analyse the channel as a popular art form that makes use of hegemonic platforms and architecture to assemble communities of engagement that radically disrupt the rhetoric of national political mobilisation and troubles Kenyan vernaculars of gender/gendering. In this regard, I consider Mutua’s mobilisation of an online community, and his representation of non-hegemonic masculinity’s navigation of male friendships and work, dating and family, Kenyan masculinist cultures of violence, change and growth in ways that subvert orthodox framings of manhood and challenge the reproduction of gender power. Ultimately, I argue that Mutua’s channel presents a networked community that links decentralised and fragmented voices, and a space for thinking through progressive and egalitarian conceptions of gender. Further, I posit that Mutua presents a significant space for rethinking the notions of text and genre, while at the same time creating a digital archive that debunks hierarchies of being, knowledge production and dissemination.