NAIROBI LETTER:XYZ targets the high and mighty at home and beyond, stretching the bounds of reality to ridicule its subjects, writes JODY CLARKE
TAPPING HIS shoes to Michael Jackson’s Bad, jiving to the disco lights in the background, Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni is showing off his dancing skills to anyone who cares to watch.
He’s even got some lyrics of his own: “Gonna break your hand, gonna shoot to kill. I’m bad.”
The venue however isn’t one of Kampala’s famously wild nightclubs. It’s a TV set in Nairobi’s industrial area, where luckily for his public relations team, the actual president is nowhere to be seen.
His comically long arms waving in the air, “Museveni” is obviously just a puppet, one of at least 30 that appear on Kenya’s hit satirical show XYZ, now half-way through its fourth series.
The show is influenced by Britain’s Spitting Image and France’s Les Guignols. The fact that it is on air at all shows how much Kenya has moved on from the grim days of Daniel arap Moi, when cartoonists couldn’t even show the president’s face.
Now XYZ gets stuck into the high and mighty of Kenyan society and beyond, stretching the bounds of reality to ridicule its targets, as the best satirists have always done.
The president and prime minister bunk up in the same prison cell; home videos from Osama Bin Laden's Pakistani hideout show him in front of a mirror, singing into a hairbrush to Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance with Somebody; while President Museveni solves Uganda's "gay issue" by sending them to Somalia to fight al Shabab on the front line.
In one of the latest episodes, South Africa’s Jacob Zuma arrives in prison to give advice to Dominic Strauss-Kahn on how to evade imprisonment for rape.
“When I was accused, I blamed the media,” says Zuma, who goes on to accuse scantily clad women of fuelling his own temptations. “Shifting blame works a charm.”
That all this is possible is partly attributable to the man behind XYZ, east Africa’s best known cartoonist, Godfrey Mwampembwa, or Gado as he is better known to Kenyans.
Not afraid to get up the backs of the authorities, he has been lampooning politicians since 1992, when he dropped out of university in his native Tanzania to start drawing cartoons for Kenya’s Nation newspaper.
“There is more space now,” he says from the small studio he shares in downtown Nairobi with two other cartoonists. “Satire is a good way to rile the authorities. Once cartoonists began doing it in the 1990s, you saw things opening up. That gave a push. We could do things that writers couldn’t do.”
XYZ is doing more of the same, pushing the boundaries of how much can be said about the country’s elite.
Around the cabinet table, well-known government ministers discuss different ways to fleece the public, while marriages of convenience between warring politicians are portrayed as exactly that. One marriage features two MPs currently before the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, who is dressed as a bride.
“Kenyan politics is like a soap opera. But no one talks about it. So XYZ is a way to bring that out,” says Linda Maria, the show’s art director.
With no significant advertisers, the show depends on charitable donations from several foundations and embassies to survive. The budget is tight, which means Maria has to head to Nairobi’s second-hand markets to find everything from bishop’s frocks to military uniforms to put on the puppets.
But that hasn’t deterred viewers. From small beginnings in 2009, the show now attracts six million viewers every Sunday night and through its internet streams, impressive given that the TV station it broadcasts on is only available to people living in and around Nairobi.
Earlier this year, the show was forced to move from a national broadcaster for reasons that appear somewhat sketchy. Other producers could have taken this as a sign to tone down the content, but for Gado, it’s just an excuse to do more of the same.
“The nature of the cartoonist is confrontational. I didn’t wake up in the morning to please anyone. But I didn’t wake up to piss them off either. To be honest it’s a job. I treat the public with just as much contempt as I do the politicians.”