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 monthly retelling for similar 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. Nonetheless, the good news is that, except for Uganda (now the world’s most biphobic nation, because even Cameroon is getting tired of that record breaking title), 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 understand their cultural roots in more recent decades. Hopefully, except for the northeast (which remains consistently anti queer because of how many extremists it has, relative to other provinces), much of the Kenyan nation is slowly decolonising itself 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 called out the worst British colonialists that it could find in its day. 

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 and populous the East African subcontinent really is.