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.’
Maasai Mbili is an artists’ collective that operates in Nairobi’s Kibera slum. But for the recent Digital Media Festival, they created an installation at Alliance Française, highlighting life on the street.
Their installation was a three-dimensional space known in Kiswahili as a kibanda, a makeshift shop found mostly in slums. In this case, their kibanda belongs to ‘Kwa Viduka’ who specialises 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 kibanda 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 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 in Germany to Vienna in Austria 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’, where models like Tola and Jano construct and then model 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 cutoff jeans covered in a brightly patterned sliced-seamed skirt or any other sort of mix and match that the customer prefers.
For Gomba, chokora is a word that has two meanings in Sheng (slang). The root word means to dig, which is what ‘chokora’ street children do when they dig into city dumps. But ‘chokora’ can also refer to the way people dig into piles of second-hand clothing.
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 in Nairobi’s Kibera where there are mountains of used clothes and we see the way people dig into them to find the precise item that suits their taste. Then we're taken to see their M2 studio and finally into a parking lot where a fashion show is taking place.
All the clothes worn by the models are chokora styles. 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-labelled 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 colour and interest to the festival and to cover two of the ground floor walls with also works by other members of M2 like Mbuthia Maina, Anita Kavochy, Kevo, Gomba, and several 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.
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