Kenya’s mistaken identity in The Government Inspector and the Kofi Annan motif

IDP camp has been dismantled and moved to some secret locations away from international focus

By Maurice Aluda

In act 1 of Nikolai Vasilyevitch Gogol’s The Government Inspector the governor calls together the leading town officials to discuss strategies for covering up the extent of corruption, incompetence, and inadequacy in the town’s public institutions from the eyes of the government inspector — who is expected to arrive any day. The governor explains that this government inspector is to arrive “incognito” with “secret instructions” to assess the local government and administration of the town. The governor, in a panic, instructs his officials to quickly cover up the many unethical practices and general corruption of the local town authorities.

One of the things any serious work of art must concern itself with to some extent is discerning connections and patterns amid the apparently shapeless mass of day-to-day experience and examining the relationships between one event and another. It is argued that most of the well crafted works of literature are vehicles for experiencing and enhancing the present moment. They may offer resonances to regretted past or longed-for future, experiences, but it is above all the coherence of the present experience that they enable uniquely. This description fits well The Government Inspector. It is one of those literary classics that have defied the passage of time.

Admittedly, the last two weeks, and perhaps more to come, will go down the annals of history as a period in which our nation’s political history was negatively written. Like it or not, future generations will judge us harshly after encountering some startling and disturbing historical literature, which will inform them about how their political history was seriously misshaped by the present generation. Perhaps, this is why I am deeply praying that some miracle happens before this time comes and makes disappear some literary texts from our bookshop and library shelves. I have on mind a long list of literary works, which have simply defied the test of time, but Gogol’s The Government Inspector stands out, at least for the present moment.

Tower of Babel

In recent times, due to the confusing nature of political leadership in Kenya, the media has variously described our country as the Tower of Babel. Why? The Tower of Babel, according to the book of Genesis in the Old Testament, was built in Babylon after the flood. The story of the Tower of Babel is that the people of Babylon wanted to build a tower that would reach as high as the heavens. To defy this effort, God was said to have created a confusion of languages among the workers building the tower, so that they could not effectively communicate with one another and therefore had to abandon the construction of the tower. The dispersing of these people throughout the world is said to explain the diversity of languages among human cultures.
References to the Tower of Babel usually imply a nonsensical confusion of words. But the Tower of Babel as described by our media reflects its central news point of the general ineffectiveness of our country’s coalition government.

Last week Dr Kofi Annan, a high-ranking diplomatic official, was sent by the international community to inspect us. Though his role was basically to prepare way for arrival of a real inspector in the name of Louis Moreno Ocampo, the way we misbehaved before him relates well with how the townspeople in The Government Inspector misbehaved before Hlestakov.

From Russia to Kenya

More than a decade ago some of us had an opportunity to study The Government Inspector, a Russian classical comedy, as one of the set books in our O’Levels. By then it never occurred to most of us that at some point in future, like now, the town described in Gogol’s drama will relocate from Russia to Kenya. We hilariously laughed at every unfolding episode in this comedy of errors. But little did we know that this words by the Mayor near the curtain fall of the play, “What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves!” were a futuristic description of us. Was Gogol writing about us? I imagine so.

The Government Inspector hinges on a case of mistaken identity, when a lowly impoverished young civil servant from Saint Petersburg, Hlestakov, is mistaken by the members of a small provincial town for a high-ranking government inspector. The town’s governor, as well as the leading government officials, fears the consequences of a visit by a government inspector, should he observe the extent of their corruption. Hlestakov makes the most of this misconception, weaving elaborate tales of his life as a high-ranking government official and accepting generous bribes from the town officials. The townspeople do not discover their mistake until after he is long gone and moments before the announcement of the arrival of the real government inspector.

Just like the government officials in the play, before Annan’s arrival in the country, our government officials were busy patching up some makeshift structures such as putting in place a commission on truth, justice and reconciliation, ‘firing’ some individuals and closing refugee camps for the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). And for all this, it undeservedly graded itself highly.

International Criminal Court

If according to D.J.Beresford in The Government Inspector: A Comedy of errors Gogol made use of the plot motif of mistaken identity “to reveal a fundamental state of chaos in human life,” the International Criminal Court (ICC) must be using the Annan motif to achieve the same goal in our country.

Therefore if The Government Inspector is a story of deception and self-deception, so is our political story at the moment. The townspeople deceive themselves into believing that Hlestakov is the government inspector. The townspeople attempt to deceive the government inspector as to the true corruption within the local government, but find that they have only deceived and cheated themselves in the process. This echoes well with what is currently happening on our land. Thus, when our political leadership behaves sheepishly before Annan and self-deceiving itself that it’s taming him, it should be made to understand that it is simply washing its dirty linen in the very hawkish eye of the real inspector, Louis Moreno Ocampo.

The writer is a Literature and Communications lecturer