- Hi, everyone, my name is Karen Maniraho
or Jambo for my Swahili speakers and I did the research
for the 100 Years of Beauty: Kenya video.
What is Kenyan beauty?
What is Kenyan pop culture?
What is Kenyan music?
What are the ways that we want to have fun
and how are we going to present that to the world?
A historian that was talking about Kenya was saying
it's impossible to describe the Kenyan woman.
Because, first, in terms of so many different tribes,
but also there is no one thing that makes the Kenyan woman,
whether it's through politics, culture, or economics.
If we're looking at the story of Kenyan beauty
as a story of agency,
we can kind of divide the video into three parts.
We have the colonial story
from 1920's to late 1950's.
We have the long overdue struggle for
independence in the '60s.
And then a huge cultural shift
through the '70s and 2000s
that as Kenya's adjusting to this new movement
on the international stage,
trying to figure out who they want to be
within the region now as this independent power.
Then, this third stage of this huge emergence
of creative talent, this youth pop culture,
all of these things that Kenyans
taking a moment to self-define.
Our look for the 1910's,
when you type Kenyan beauty on Google,
it's going to be of stereotypical, tribal, traditional look.
When British colonizers were
coming in to the region,
these are the images that they perpetuated back home
about what Kenyans looked like that continue today.
What we see in the 1940's
is a family portrait of a Nubian family in Kenya.
So what we don't see in that picture is
that a lot of Nubians came from Sudan to Kenya
to work in the British army during both World Wars.
When they came back from fighting,
many of their rights to the land had been stripped away.
So we find that, in an area for example called Kibera,
which is known as the largest slum in Kenya,
Nubians still are one of the larger populations in this area
but do not have the land recognition that they deserve
even though they've been there for generations
and participated in as big of a colonial project
as being in a British army during World War II.
When you step away from it,
I as a researcher come across this picture,
and I see that it represents
a family that had land and political and civil rights
taken away while this photo was taken.
Moving into the 50's,
we're coming into this second stage of agency.
It's an interesting fact that
I don't think gets talked about often.
A man named Thomas Mboya who was a political leader in Kenya
he went on to form the Kenyan African National Union,
which was later prominent in terms of
forming government post-independence.
He worked with President John F. Kennedy
and the African American Student Foundation
to bring 81 promising students to the U.S.
to be able to study at U.S. universities.
As part of this initiative,
leaders like Malcolm X
were teaching African students about
some of the civil rights tactics, sit-ins, boycotts.
When we use an image like that,
pre-independence for the Kenya video,
but they were also informing American historical landscape,
the American civil rights landscape.
And so on top of that,
one of the students in this cohort was Barack Obama Sr.
And as we know, that later led to getting us
the 44th President of the United States.
After a long fought struggle,
Kenya gets its most-deserved sovereignty and independence.
And so the look that we have is inspired by
Kenya being in this new moment of
power being transferred from 50,000 white population
to an 8 million strong Kenyan population.
This is also the time that Kenya was
finally allowed into the international Olympics.
It's important to show Miss Kenya in the 60's
because if there had been these pageants before 1960,
it wouldn't have been Miss Kenya.
It would have been Miss Britain's Kenya
and I think it's important to show Kenyan women
defining the narrative behind womanhood.
I think in the 1970's,
we reference back to an author, Grace Ogot.
Her stories talked about themes
of womanhood, of gender roles.
She also has this similar beehive look
that we have previous, in this 1960's era.
So for the 1970's we pull a look from
Kenya's first First Lady, Ngina Kenyatta.
If you look at the political activism
that her husband went through,
even before he became the first President.
That grace and style that we try to
create a look out of for the 1970's
was known throughout Kenya to the point
that she's known as Mama Ngina.
And so we end that second stage of this
theme of agency we're talking about with the 1980's.
It's based off of a look of an international model
on an international magazine cover.
So while it's critical that you have
Kenyan women on this global beauty platform,
she's still the muse of European designers
such as Yves Saint Laurent
or on these runways of European magazine houses.
From 1980's forward, we are informed
by this huge cultural shift of
the emergence of TV, the emergence of commercial FM radio.
Really setting off this stage of new producers,
new musicians, new creative talent informing
what is Kenyan beauty.
What is the variety of sounds when we're
thinking about Kenyan music.
A variety of actresses, actors,
when we think about Kenyan film.
So when you get to the 2010's,
we use an image that's reminiscent of Lupita Nyong'o,
a globally admired actress.
It's crucial to end with someone like her
because the whole point of this video
is to show that there is no one Kenyan woman.
Someone like Lupita is critical because,
as a dark-skinned, natural-haired actress,
being treated as this darling across the fashion industry,
the face of beauty campaigns.
It's particularly important because,
if I were to ask a young Kenyan girl,
name some famous Kenyan women
that you think are beautiful,
I'm sure that Lupita would come up.
All of these cultural factors that we're talking about
would make it possible for someone to be able to
have multiple examples of what a beautiful Kenyan woman is.
For someone like Lupita to be possible,
you have to point to this history of trailblazing women
that fought for the agency that she has today
to be able to shape the conversation around beauty.
So take the time to learn the history behind these images
'cause you're going to learn a lot more than you think.
Thank you everyone for watching the video.
Comment below if there's something new you learned,
and I'd love to keep the conversation going.
(upbeat music)