ABSTRACT
Photography has become a key ingredient in Kenya’s political communication. This is based on the fact that photography, its use, appreciation and interpretation in postcolonial Africa, has allowed people to identify with specific modes of agency, subjectivity, intentionality, necessity, determination and impact in political and democratic processes. Photography, like other popular media texts, offers evocative evidence that supports political messaging and discourses in the national or global public sphere where the production of meaning takes place, and public opinion is negotiated, aggregated and legitimised. Even though this chapter is based on the work of popular photographer and social justice activist, Boniface Mwangi, it contends that the use of photography in postcolonial Africa is important in political communication, mobilisation and action, and ultimately in the development and consolidation of “democracy” and associated principles like accountability and the rule of law. What’s more, Mwangi has used public spaces to exhibit pictures and thus invited Kenyans to internalise and evoke memory, remember their experiences, express anger and mobilise feelings and actions. The chapter locates arguments within the ambit of “photography of resistance” whose meaning is drawn from photography’s capacity to incite action and change in postcolonial Africa.
