13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

Wa-MUNGAI, Mbugua

Mickey Mouse, Rambo and My Son: cultural colonialism through film among Nairobi children

Mbugua Wa-Mungai is unable to attend the congress and present this paper.

The central thesis of this paper is that Nairobi children's view of themselves and the world around them is conditioned largely by what they watch on both television and film. This means that Disneyland and Hollywood - here used as metaphors of cultural diffusion - are not just centres of entertainment but also sites of cultural productions that are couched in specific ideological views of American society. For the child audiences in Nairobi, watching American screen productions is a process through which they appropriate the values of American society. It is thus an imperialistic process precisely because of the technological and financial muscle that enables Western film producers to export their cultural productions without accepting, or expecting, the cultural productions from other peoples.

The effects of film and television on children in Nairobi are especially evident upon examination of the roles these children adopt in the course of their play such as songs and roles adopted in their improvised drama. The fact that only characters from Disneyland and Hollywood (for instance Tom and Jerry, Rambo, Robocop and wrestling personalities such as Stone Cold Steve Austin, among others) are used as role models is telling. From these personalities children locate their identity by adopting the symbols of the cultural ‘other’. It therefore becomes necessary to interrogate this phenomenon within the context of globalisation especially when local realities in Nairobi seem to be eclipsed, and displaced, by the fabulous realities of Disneyland and Hollywood. This, the paper suggests, is cultural colonialism.

The paper seeks to explore its thesis from a cultural materialist framework. Here we argue that Nairobi children construct their identities and worldviews based on American screen figures, and not any others, because they find significant relevance that enables them to apprehend and explain the Nairobi/Kenyan reality.