Kenya Boy and its complicated relationship with Queerness

We have no idea that Kenya Boy has inspired 3 video games, two movies (live action and animation), a manga with 2 runs, a retelling for younger audiences and a live action tv show. 

And now for something different! A revised backstory for Zega will unfortunately involve his wife dying of tuberculosis (after all, even though it's native to Africa, it still has shaped human history, but who cares) before Zega himself got raped by his superior (and almost dying because of it). Even sadder was that he surely was pelted on by most people in his village within every frigging whim possible. Zega also seems to be one of a few surviving seniors in a Kenyan Maasai village, since the typical life expectancy of a Maasai person is currently a somewhat measly 55-60 years old (an improvement with somehow more varied diets and slightly more vaccines in comparison to decades ago when it was a measlier 41-45 years old), partly due to both a relatively large lack of vaccines and partly due to high infant mortality rates, amongst many other factors not to name. Life as a Maasai senior in a forgotten gender (which somewhat resembles minority world Bisexuality) surely is somewhat depressing AF, since queerness would've been more acceptable in much of Eastern Africa centuries back than it is now. 

However, queerness itself was both increasingly forgotten and unfortunately made taboo in most predominantly Christianised East African nations during European colonial rule, but the huge decline in its remembrance might've also occurred even before Middle Eastern, North African and European snobs colonised it and still overexploit it to this day. The good news is that anti-queerness in much of Eastern Africa (at least south of Ethiopia and southwest of Somalia) is thankfully getting combatted more successfully by relatively liberal people who still know their cultural roots in more recent decades. Hopefully, much of the Kenyan nation is still going a long way from the complicated AF European colonial times. 

Even though it’s a mere product of its time, it’s still a compelling story despite lacking genuinely Kenyan/Tanzanian/Ugandan mythical creatures. Frankly, even I have to admit that Kenya Boy isn’t intentioned to be blatantly imperialist either, since it genuinely had called out the worst British colonialists that it could find in its time. 

Instead of the older versions having a rather complicated journey map, which isn’t without so many obvious dangers in real life, the newer version mainly has just Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda as the main locations due to how big the East African subcontinent really is.