The Governor and the Everyday Woman: Reflections on Dina Ligaga’s Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media

Abstract

In June of 2020, the Honourable Anne Waiguru, one of only two women Governors in Kenya, was impeached by her county government following charges of corruption and misappropriation of county government funds. Waiguru found herself in front of a Senate Committee which would either ratify her impeachment, or keep her in office as is the constitutional procedure in Kenya. As the Senate discussed her fate, Waiguru sat in silence, appearing to read messages from her phone. A photojournalist zoomed in on her, perhaps wanting to spy upon what messages she was reading, only to find she was engrossed in a game of solitaire. When this photograph, accompanied by headlines of this "embattled governor" appeared in the public sphere, the condemnation rang loud and swift. The consensus was that the "connected" Waiguru was so nonchalant as to play solitaire on her phone because she was confident she was going to retain her seat, unbothered by the proceedings that were ideally determining her fate. These "connections" have cheekily been associated with the topmost echelons of power, and Waiguru's "relationship" with the president of Kenya has been a subject of speculation and innuendo. The Governor has invariably been referred to as supuu, Sheng for the President's "girlfriend", as a way of explaining her rise from "unknown entity" to a Cabinet Secretary, and then to an elected governor. The President himself is on record as having denied he was in love with Waiguru, 1 further fuelling the rumours.I start my review of Dina Ligaga's monograph Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media, with the above anecdote to demonstrate the timeliness of this book, in which Ligaga offers us exquisite readings of women, sexuality and power within different publics in the Kenyan context. Kenya itself is usually billed as a "progressive" nation-state within the wider eastern Africa region. But for a country with progressive laws on paper, Kenya continues to be left behind in its treatment, both real and abstract, of women and minorities. Ligaga demonstrates this through what she terms as "scripts" which "discursively define what is morally acceptable in terms of public behaviour" (7). I therefore reflect on Ligaga's work using the examples of Kenya's women governors as political leaders representing a hyper-visible woman in the public sphere in possession of the kind of social capital Pierre Bourdieu theorises on the one hand, and the everyday woman existing visibly within the same public sphere, on the other.Ligaga examines the surveillance of the "spectacular wicked woman" (82-98) through public discussions of (mostly) sexual scandal. This surveillance is evident in the reporter