KIBERA ARTISTS CREATE ‘CHOKORA FASHIONS’ AT DIGITAL MEDIA FESTIVAL

Maasai Mbili is an artists’ collective that normally operates in Kibera. But for the recent Digital Media Festival, they created an installation at Alliance Francaise highlighting life on the street.

Specifically, their installation was a three-dimensional space known in Swahili as a kibanda, which is a shop found primarily in so-called slums. In this case, their kibanda belongs to ‘Kwa Viduka’ who specializes in creating ‘chokora wear’.

It was not the first time that Maasai Mbili (M2) have created such an installation, specifically one that recreates common features of slum life. “A kibande can be selling anything,” says Gomba Otieno, one of the two founding artists (and former signwriters) who launched Maasai Mbili back in 2008.

“It can be where you find anything from fresh food and hot tea to mitumba [second-hand clothes] or what we call ‘chokora wear’,” adds Gomba whose loyalty to Kibera, to art and to slum life has made him one of the most eccentric and ingenious artists in Kenya.

“We’ve taken our art everywhere from Berlin and Bayreuth to Vienna and Denmark,” he recalls. In some cases, the focus has specifically been on ‘chokora fashion’ as it is at Kwa Viduka at Alliance.

For instance, Gomba with Kevo Stero Irungu have held other ‘chokora fashion shows’ like theirs at Alliance, where models like Tola and Jano construct and then model chokora fashions right before an audience’s eyes. In so doing, they illustrate exactly what chokora fashion is.

It could be simply a pair of second-hand pants with patches or paints added. Or a pair of cut off jeans covered in a brightly patterned sliced-seamed skirt or any other sort of mitumba mix and match that the customer prefers.

The point is, says Gomba, chokora is a word that has two meanings in Sheng (Swahili slang). The root word means to dig, which is what ‘chokora’ street children do when they dig into city dumps in search of items they can sell. But ‘chokora’ can also refer to the way people dig into piles of mitumba clothing as they look for the jacket, sweater, shirt or pants that they want.

So chokora fashion is what starts with a mitumba which then gets made over [often with another mitumba piece] in ways one isn’t likely to see in downtown shops or city malls. That’s because the finishing touches on the new chokora fashion will be the designer’s made-over mitumba.

Gomba explains that chokora fashion is not for Kenyans obsessed with international brands like Gucci or Dior. But it’s definitely a style of slum fashion that produces fascinating ‘looks’.

Some of them could be seen during the Digital Media Festival in the Virtual Reality (VR) video entitled ‘African Space Makers’. M2 is one of the six ‘out of the way’ art spaces featured in the VR.

In it, Gomba and Kevo take us first to Toy Market where there are mountains of mitumba and we see the way people literally dig into them to find the precise item that suits their taste. Then we’re taken to see their M2 studio in Kibera and finally into a parking lot where a chokora fashion show is taking place. All the clothes worn by the models are chokora styles.  That means some are layered with skirts on skirts draped with torn jackets, others are patched and painted, while others are straight from the mitumba heaps, washed, pressed and worn under a chokora-labeled shirt.

So with M2 having received a significant place in the longest of the three virtual reality films in the festival, it was no wonder that they were selected to lend a lot of color and interest to the festival and to cover two of AF’s ground floor walls with not only ‘Chokora Wear Kwa Viduka’, but also works by other members of M2 like Mbuthia Maina, Anita Kavochy, Kevo, Gomba and several M2 newcomers.

“There are always new people coming to us, and we welcome them,” says Gomba who explains that while it wasn’t easy, but M2 managed to raise funds to buy their Kibera studio, which is one reason why they are happy to share what they have.

“We like to show people that artists don’t need to be poor,” he says, noting that he never intends to move out of Kibera. Even if he became a rich man, he says, Kibera is where his loyalty lies and he’s happy to demystify the meaning of slum since for him, it is home.