Usually, when I drive home from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA), my eyes glaze over. the My car settles into a rhythmic drift, as I am lulled into a dreamscape of forward momentum. The familiarity of the drive allowing me to switch off and take comfort in the wind rushing past the windows like salty spray off the ocean, carrying whispers of distant places. A promise of home. This time, I pay attention. Not being home for over a year can do that to you. So, I look up. I look left. I look around. And I start to see the story we tell ourselves about Kenya.

I see the animal figures – wildebeest, giraffes and cranes, that decorate our international airport. I see the elephants that adorn the insignia welcoming visitors and citizens to Kenya. I see the carefully chosen colour scheme – greens, yellows, browns and reds – deliberately chosen to evoke a spirit of nature. I recognise how locating our international airport near our national park – corroborates this vision of Kenya as a place for the outdoors. But what I don’t see are the people, my people.

And I don’t mean the people of the Mountain (Mũgĩkũyũ), or of the Coast (watu wa Pwani, where I was raised). But black people – period. And when they are featured, they are noticeably “ethnic” – a word I use deliberately and derisively to communicate the tendency, within Western narratives and discourse, to characterise anything that is visibly and demonstrably not white as “ethnic” as evinced by the continued existence of an “ethnic” food isle at the supermarket in the year of our lord 2025. I see black bodies adorned in shukas and kikoi’s (traditional cloths) and ornate beadwork. I see black bodies defying gravity as they dance the Adumu – the traditional Maasai jumping dance. An almost Edenic tableau to be gazed upon; as one would look at a museum piece.

But this careful reproduction of us, isn’t us. Where are we in “Brand Kenya?” And when we are present, what spaces do we occupy? And what are the consequences of obscuring the people?

It’s only when we left the Expressway – a 27km, $500 million road connecting the Airport to Nairobi’s more affluent neighbourhoods – that I started seeing the people reflected in our tourism advertisements. I see the differences between how Kenya is marketed internally – to Kenyans – and externally – for tourists and diaspora. For Kenyans, Kenya is about the people, community and strengthening the bonds between them. For everyone else, Kenya is the “great outdoors.” A place of boundless, limitless natural beauty; an emblem of a lost time, perfectly preserved. For others. Not for us.

This image – Brand Kenya – reveals a lot about Kenya. As Nigel Morgan and Annette Pritchard discuss, these images reveal the ‘power relations underpinning its construction, as it does about specific tourism product or country it promotes. The images projected in brochures billboards, and televisions reveal the relationships between countries, between genders and between races and cultures. They are powerful images which reinforce particular ways of seeing the world and can restrict and channel people, countries, genders and sexes into certain mind-sets’ (p.6)

This is the story our government tells others; A story that treats Binyavanga Wainaina’s sardonic advice on writing about Africa as infallible gospel. A story that forces us to question the value of lingering on colonial premises. As Elizabeth William notes in her fantastic book, Primitive Normativity Race, Sexuality and Temporality in Colonial Kenya:

In the late-imperial mindset, Kenya “functioned as a primordial space of natural purity, a sort of Edenic wild garden of open spaces teeming with wildlife”—an association that was bolstered by the belief of some anthropologists (notably Louis Leakey) that East Africa was the home of the first human beings. Kenya is a place … where the landscapes cleave dramatically and the sun beats down mercilessly, and where white people go to reconnect with their own primitive urges, their own wildest dreams.

What is the value of perpetuating this image? To argue that it, alone, is responsible for bringing billions of dollars it brings into the economy, is to ignore the millions of Kenyans who dedicate their labour to complicating, sustaining and challenging this image. It is to also obscure the material harm that is enabled by relying upon colonial nostalgia. Especially when this nostalgia is directly marketed to the citizens and residents of our new homes.

Diasporic communities carry the weight of these national narratives in their interactions with others. To be Kenyan abroad is to be repeatedly measured against this vision of home. It is to be caught in the dissonance between a constructed image of your homeland and the lived reality of your people. How can we feel fully seen when our identities have been carefully packaged and sold for foreign consumption?