Octopus / GvP 3

A presentation by Bethuel Muthee about debt, loans, sports betting apps, financial speculation and gambling and how it messes up our perception of time, using the trick game pata potea as a metaphor. Kenyan social media has been in uproar over the country’s burgeoning debt and its concomitant strain on citizens through taxation. This comes against a backdrop of a decade of massive government borrowing and the exponential growth of fintech services that have increased personal debt of numerous households. Credit is ubiquitous and has been theorised by scholars such as Arjun Appadurai and Maurizio Lazzarato, to be a fundamental social relation of Western societies. Happening contiguously has been the rise of sports betting, either online via betting apps, or through USSD codes for those without smartphones. Nairobi has a number of betting shops set up by betting companies where one can watch and keep up with a variety of games. Both credit and gambling are happening on digital platforms that exemplify what Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik refer to as the “speculative time-complex” in which the future determines the present. This presentation seeks to think through how notions of the future shape sociality that is increasingly virtual and what, if any, solutions there might be to reclaim the present

BETHUEL MUTHEE is a poet living and working in Nairobi. He is a member of Maasai Mbili artists’ collective. He was series editor for Down River Road’s inaugural issue Place. As a member of Naijographia he has co-curated three exhibitions Naijographia (2017, Goethe-Institut Nairobi), Wanakuboeka Feelharmonic (2018, British Institute in Eastern Africa) and From Here to When (2019, Goethe-Institut Nairobi).