Tiktok star Brian Chira's paradox

In Act II, Scene 5 of “Twelfth Night,” the Englishman William Shakespeare, arguably the greatest playwright of all time, wrote down a most memorable sentence.

Little did he know that it would stand the test of time and even live on in infamy. He wrote: “Some [men] are born great, some achieve greatness, and some are confronted with greatness.”

With these words, Shakespeare captured the fate and destiny of the most important people. Look around Kenya and the world and you immediately see the wisdom contained therein. I'm assuming here that Kenyan TikToker Brian Chira, who died in a traffic accident last month, perfectly embodies three of these categories: He was born great because of his brilliance; he has achieved great things; and became something bigger due to a chance car accident in Nakuru.

For me, however, it was more than chance and coincidence that Mr. Chira became a youth phenomenon. Agency is what we do with opportunities. To quote Shakespeare again: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken by the tide, leads to happiness; Julius Caesar Act IV, Scene 2; If you leave them out, the whole journey of your life will lead to shoals and misery.”

That was Mr. Chira in his diametric personality. The section ends with the words: “On a sea so full we are now afloat; and we must take the current when it serves, otherwise we will lose our ventures.”

In short, this was the great promise, paradox and Greek tragedy of Mr. Chira.

He was a bundle of contradictions. Brilliant and yet humble and contrite. Masculine and yet feminine. Determined and yet full of desperation. Ambitious and yet addicted to hopelessness. Intellectually sober and yet addicted to the bottle. Popular and yet lonely.

I suppose we all have our own yin and yang. We are complex, but on some level we are simpletons who need to relieve themselves in the toilet on a fairly regular basis or risk public embarrassment.

For the benefit of those who lived in a cave: Mr. Chira was a young man from Githunguri and a student at Kabarak University. He immediately caused a stir when he was interviewed at the scene of the accident in Nakuru. He helped the interview gain TikTok fame.

Mr Chira was a person living with AIDS who, according to his statement, contracted it when he was raped at a drunken orgy in Mombasa. This was probably a defining moment in his young life, although his torment came earlier.

Orphaned and helpless for lack of a strong familial anchor despite the work his grandmother had put into him, poverty ravaged him, leaving him vulnerable and at the mercy of the most vicious social predators.

He confessed that there was “nothing he didn’t do” to earn a dollar to support himself. Chira's story is one that tears you apart. But his sense of humor and obvious love for life didn't let him give up.

Mr. Chira was not a quitter.

We know the tragic circumstances of his untimely death two weeks ago. Mr Chira was reportedly leaving a club in Nairobi in the early hours of the morning, drunk and in melancholy despair, when he ran into an oncoming truck that killed him instantly.

Little did the hit-and-run driver know that he would immortalize Mr. Chira and spark a profound national conversation about sexual identity, the desperate needs of our youth, and the revolutionary possibilities that TikTok is fueling. Tiktokers, artists and common people flocked to his funeral after raising millions in no time.

Kenya was shocked and surprised at the mourning for a “nobody.” Strangely, although politicians have never seen a funeral they didn't like, only one maverick MP, Peter Salasya, showed up for Mr Chira.

Even more shameful is that the Kenyan press completely ignored Mr Chira's funeral and the simmering national discourse about identity and powerlessness. I suspect that both the Kenyan press and the elite gave Chira a wide berth because of his gendered practices and biases.

Many suspected that Mr. Chira's sexual identity was gay or bisexual. So what? The power outage disgusted and angered me. Human sexuality is very complex, a fact that heterosexual simpletons never seem to understand. They act as if they don't have a single brain cell and insult and demonize people who are LGBTQIA+. The fact is that sexuality spans the spectrum of heterosexual, bisexual, asexual, pansexual or omnisexual, homosexual, gay, lesbian and others.

In societies with a more nuanced sense of sexuality, there is greater acceptance of many sexual identities, including the pronouns with which one identifies oneself. Today, my students and colleagues across the United States use their preferred pronouns to describe themselves and their sexual identities.

These include traditional words such as “he”, “she”, “they” or “he”. But increasingly a combination of “he/she” or “she” or “they” is also used. So a person who looks and sounds physically male can be a “she,” “he,” or “she.” A comprehensive and intelligent national conversation about Mr. Chira would have helped us grow as a nation. It's a missed opportunity.

– Makau Mutua is a SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, State University of New York. @makaumutua.