Sex, HIV/AIDS and “tribal” politics in the benga of okatch biggy

Abstract

"In this article I argue that the celebration of sex in the music of Okatch Biggy is ultimately political. A Kenyan Luo artiste, Okatch Biggy (1954- 1997) became successful (Oywa, “Okatch Biggy”) in the 1990s while celebrating sex. Paradoxically, this was the time when HIV/AIDS, first identified in Kenya in the early 1980s, was doing very great damage in Biggy’s country. The Kenyan government’s response to the disease in those years before affordable antiretrovirals were available was more or less restricted to the strident advocacy of change in sexual behavior. The government argued that such behavior change would minimize the possibilities of HIV transmission. The Christian church in the country saw in the government advocacy a validation of its sexual mores. So, too, did traditionalists of the different ethnic groups in the country, who base their beliefs on interpretations of their people’s pasts. The reinvigorated profession of “the correct sexual morality” by these two groups contributed significantly to the construction of the stigma that quickly attached itself to the disease. Okatch Biggy’s popular and commercial success indicates that a significant number of people agreed with or found interesting what he was doing at the time he was doing it. Most of these people were the same Luo people that, of Kenyan ethnic groups, were most affected by HIV/AIDS at the time (Minorities at Risk Project, “Luo”), for the Luo constituted the primary audience of Biggy’s DhoLuo (that is, the language of the Luo) music. Most Luos identify themselves as Christian, while at the same time many of them—those who profess Christianity included—observe remnants of pre-colonial Luo culture and beliefs. That a significant number would agree with Biggy’s celebration of sex at the time suggests their support for a force they interpreted as being more important than “religion.” In the following pages I argue that Biggy’s celebration of sex in the 1990s was, beyond being a manifestation of psychological denial, what is defined as that “ego defense mechanism that operates unconsciously to resolve emotional conflict, and to allay anxiety by refusing to perceive the more unpleasant aspects of external reality” (The Columbia Encyclopedia), also a response to the ethnicized politics of the post-colonial Kenyan state."(pg 1)