Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This paper examines artistic expression in Kenya as a media infrastructure through which political polarisation is lived, contested, and bridged. Tracing analogue and digital practices, it shows how humour, satire, and creative activism mediate repression, hope, and belonging across publics.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines artistic expression in Kenya as a media infrastructure through which political polarisation is lived, contested, and occasionally bridged. Tracing a historical arc from the Moi era’s analogue censorship to contemporary digital creativity under the Ruto administration, it explores how theatre, music, satire, graffiti, and memes circulate across intertwined offline and digital worlds. Drawing on archival research and digital ethnography, the paper shows how artists operate within fragmented media environments shaped by colonial-era laws, platform algorithms, and moral discourses of nationalism, youthhood, and threat. Rather than framing art solely as resistance to state repression, the paper foregrounds how creative practices mediate affective and moral relations among polarised publics. Youth and Gen Z creatives mobilise humour, irony, and AI-generated content to critique authority while cultivating spaces of shared recognition and hope amid surveillance and censorship. By analysing moments of repression—such as the banning of school plays and digital crackdowns—alongside everyday acts of creative circulation, the paper argues that artistic expression functions as a moral technology that both exposes fractures and imagines forms of repair. In doing so, it contributes to anthropological debates on media infrastructures, polarisation, and the ethical possibilities of connection in contemporary Africa.