Kwani Litfest Featured on Africa Journal

This year’s litfest is certainly not about to fade into our distant memories. Reuters have just released a feature for the Africa Journal entitled, “Is anyone reading in Kenya” which takes its story from this year’s Kwani Litfest.

Click on image above to watch the full documentary.

Ishmael Beah talks to Kwani

Ishmael Beah talks to Kwani about life and literature. Please click the arrow above to listen to the podcast. Alternatively you can download it to listen to on your computer or mp3 player.

Ideas, Words, Markets…

Click HERE for lots more pictures…

Photos by Kirstie Wielandt and Aurelie Journo (two of the coolest volunteers you can come across!)

A Braver New World for children

By Aurelie Journo

Bravely conquering the cold and damp Nairobi weather, and making their way to the lush green gardens of the Lower Kabete Junior Academy, over 40 school children, joined by their parents, teachers, writers and volunteers, spent a colourful and inspiring afternoon combining work and play.

The kiswahili translation of ‘The Unlikely Burden‘, sponsored by the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) was launched by award winning author Stanley Gazemba, reading the title story of the book written by him. The launch was an opportunity for children, parents and teachers alike to remember the importance of animal welfare in their daily lives.

This was followed by the launch of author John Sibi Okumu’s latest book ‘Tom Mboya, Master of Mass Management‘ (A Sasa Sema/Longhorn Publication). After reading a short passage from the book, John talked poignantly about the importance of documenting Kenyan political history. Generations met and exchanged ideas, as Mr Wamalwa, a protagonist in the book and permanent secretary to Tom Mboya, shared with the audience his early days by his side.

But the day would not have been complete if books were the only focus. One look around the garden, with the colourful faces, adorned with flowers, butterflies or animals, one look at the joyful gait of children stepping out of the bouncy castle and heading for the swings, were the perfect illustration of the proverbial saying “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. No dull boys or girls at the children’s day indeed.

Storytelling has various facets that should not be limited to their written form. Simiyu Barasa led the audience into the world of animated stories. From words highlighted in the Kenyan school curriculum, he created a story that was then turned into an animation film, proving that stories don’t only entertain but also teach. Mediae presented the workings of the transformation of a text into a storyboard and then an animation picture, conjuring images from words, and movement from images. The animation, The hyena and the ostrich, was then shown, as a première, the children being the first viewers of a cartoon that will be featured in the TV show ‘The Know Zone’, and the film itself being the first cartoon written, drawn and created in Kenya.

The exciting day ended on a thought provocating workshop by Storymoja, around the story of ‘In the land of the kitchen’. The adults were asked to sit back and observe while the discussion went on between the children. After a lively and highly entertaining storyteller told the story of antagonism and destruction in the kitchen community, the children were led to reflect on the meaning of key terms such as community, stereotypes, conflict, and eventually peace. In the light of the post election turmoil, the workshop showed that stories are not only an end in themselves but also the beginning of other stories that seek to question the ideas and terms we take for granted.

The day was long and full, but as they walked towards the school buses that were to take them home, the children were certainly not only tired, but also inspired to become, who knows, the future great storytellers of Kenya.

Conflict, or, All a Writer Needs

By Arno Kopecky,
Kwani Editor

Incredibly, no one went over their five minutes. Going by the event’s title – “Writer’s Stories: Unpacking Kenya’s Crisis Session” – not to mention the venue, a Nairobi University lecture hall, all signs were pointing to a listener’s crisis of over-pontification.

Instead, we started out with a sneak preview of Wanuri Kahiu’s new film, From A Whisper, marking the tenth anniversary of the American Embassy bombing with possibly the best film about it to date – I say possibly because it wasn’t long before her characters all started speaking Swahili and I had to start inventing the plot. The preview was followed, appropriately, with a moment of silence, and then, melodramatically, with the national anthem. “Remind me to tell you what Oscar Wilde said about patriotism,” whispered Kwani? editor Billy Kahora before we’d even sat back down.

Oxfam director Irungu Houghton took over from there, MCing the mostly-full auditorium through a rapid succession of five-minute readings by all kinds of fiendish writers. The good professor, Wambui Mwangi, started out by reading the poetic hate letter Shailja Patel wrote to ECK chairman Samuel Kivuitu a few months back. Moving, yes – but it’s too bad the letter Kivuitu published in response never made it into the auditorium.

Binyavanga Wainaina came up next, introduced as the man who’s “collected over 1300 African recipes.” (“Bullshit,” coughed Kahora in the seat next to me.) True to form, Wainaina told a whimsical tale of the evolution of his name’s pronunciation over the thirty-some year’s he’s been hearing it, a subject he somehow related to the topic at hand.

Playwright Simiyu Barasa followed that up with the obituary he wrote himself in January – you know, just in case. It was that kind of month. The letter found its way into the New York Times and marked Simiyu’s descent from unchecked optimism to miserly cynicism as far as his beloved Kenya was concerned. Apparently he’s swung back to the middle, having “learned that too much love can make you a fundamentalist.”

Betty Murungi – yep, ODM stalwart James Orengo’s wife – then took us through an excerpt from the Diary of a Mad Kenyan Women, aka Wambui Mwangi’s blogsite, which as early as January 2nd presumed to say of the post-election madness: “we caused this, let’s fix it.” We’re trying, you madwoman, we’re trying.

I lied earlier, by the way. Irungu fielded some questions from the audience at this point, provoking an unsolicited poem which breached the five-minute mark.

Was that what Kalundi Serumaga had in mind when he took the stage next and said “When I get to disturbed, I like to share the feeling”? Hard to say. The razor-witted Ugandan leaves very few crimes unexposed, starting with the writers beside him: “When you say the violence started in January,” he wondered, “what exactly do you mean? Kenya has been violent to the core since independence…the role of the writer is to talk about these things in good time.” That is, before they happen, you assholes.

But where would we be if we actually learned to prevent them? Nairobi U professor Okoth Okwombo came on to point out the “paradoxical relationship between writers and conflict,” as in, how many great novels have you read about peace? (And yet, I wondered, how can it be that my own polite, well-ordered country has produced writers like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Alice Munro?)

The Okwombo Paradox was a good segue to Ishmael Beah, child soldier extraordinaire and the afternoon’s final contestant. Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone tells the story of his recruitment to Sierra Leone’s civil war at the age of 13; it’s sold a million hardcover copies in a year, making it the best selling African book ever. I wonder – would it have sold as many copies if Beah still looked like a drugged-out badass instead of a Benetton model? Either way, it’s an ironic shame A Long Way Gone remains unavailable in Africa, as Ishmael ruefully pointed out to me later. “Conflict is a part of human nature, it’s inevitable,” Beah surmised on stage. “What we can do as writers is minimize it.”

Question-and-answers from there on in. You shoulda been there. Suffice to say we reached a few tentative conclusions, chief among them the fact that writers have a tendency to take themselves and their so-called role too seriously. Or do we? Why then, as Binyavanga pointed out, does a government like Zimbabwe’s, which can’t even fill a pothole on Mugabe Boulevard, still find the time to bomb its independent newspapers?

Whatever the case, next time you feel like throwing a Molotov into the Kenyan Parliament’s nonstop cocktail party, keep Beah’s closing quote in mind (penned by the incontestable Maya Angelou): “We must be angry, but we must never be bitter.”

Ideas, Words and Markets!

Writers, writing, write,
Readers, read, reading
Hmmmm…

Bags, kangas, books
tshirts, booklets
Aaaaa….

Contact litfest (at) kwani (dot) org for a bit of this and a bit of that…

A Moment of Silence

Yetanatha by Arno Kopecky (may you be blessed with endless waves through your travels)…

A moment of silence, please, for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dead on Saturday, August 2 at 89 years of age – several decades more than the Russian lit-giant must have expected in his firing-squad-facing, gulag-archipelagoing youth. It was Philo Ikonya who reminded me; last seen heckling the readers at Sunday Salon, Ikonya was on the Open Mic stage at Club Sound by the time I walked in on Tuesday night, telling the audience about all the times she’d met the late Mr. S – first in a Nairobi slum, then again on Robbin Island, and yet again…

Maybe one day we’ll be telling kids about the people we met at Litfest. It was a special session of Kwani’s monthly Open Mic poetry night, maybe because this time the mic was only half open. Elitist, I know. But praise Allah for vets like Ikonya, David Ofiano, Nuru Bahati, and Imani Woomera, the Hawaiian Kenyan (how many of those do you know?) who cameo’d briefly on Ikonya’s heels with a trademark oceanic rhapsody that almost got me sprinting for Lamu.

Next up was the night’s main feature, Neema Mawiyoo, whose middle names I don’t have time to type. Neema’s one of the risin’est stars in Nairobi’s poetry circles. She started out with a series on memory, “something that’s been obsessing me lately,” which must mean she’s finally old enough to find it unreliable. I don’t know if the ‘goat meat’ song and chant she broke into halfway through her performance was related to childhood recollections, or if she’d switched themes by then, because at that exact moment I was accosted by the foulest-breathed man in east Africa; it smelt as though the man had eaten half a goat two weeks ago and left a quarter pound rotting in his teeth. I gagged my way through the introduction, exhaled in relief when he moved on, and spent the rest of Neema’s performance hyperventilating.

The mic opened up to the public after that, with predictable results: sooner or later, someone always starts to rhyme. I did enjoy the dramatic element of revenge that crept into the less inspired performances, though, however unintentional. All that romance, alliteration and rhyming caused an entire line of heads seated at the bar to look over their shoulders for the first time all night – having spent the night interrupting the poetry with loud drinking, their situation was finally reversed.

A distressing mass exodus followed the final intonations, with Binyavanga Wainaina, Wambui Mwangi, Angela Wachuka et al leading the charge to quieter environs. Left to wallow in the poetic aftershocks were myself, Tony Mochama and his girl Sharon, an enthusiastic Advanced Fiction workshopper named Betty-from-Meru (not sure about her writing, but she knew how to dance), and one Scisa Rumenge, a young filmmaker from Kakuma refugee camp. Rumenge was here on a special Litfest scholarship, having attracted the attention of Litfest co-organizer Dipesh Pabari through a number of award-winning films at last year’s Kenya International Film Festival.

“Every second here is like a year’s worth of learning for me,” Scisa told me, jolting me back to the greater realities that the Litfest was meant to address. “I’ve been living in that refugee camp for seven years now, ever since I escaped genocide in northeastern Congo.”
Not everyone, it suddenly occurred to me, ought to die before earning a moment of silence.

Click HERE to view more photos from Mentalacrobatics

Thoughts from Magfest Day

Zahid Rajan, Executive Editor of Awaaz Magazine shared his feelings about the struggles of independant publishing in Kenya:

Let me cut the crap – and get to the chase as the Nation media would say.

I am not going to make any long winded donor targeted speech about how AwaaZ talks about Identity, Migration, Integration and start conversations about minority views and seminal characters that jump out of literary text. That I will leave for others…

This is our message. We have been publishing for the last 5 years and we are here to stay. We are one of the most important literary magazines in this country with an important message that does NOT deal with popular personalities, sex, entertainment, music and all that jazz – that is after what sells doesn’t it? And as a result we are not ‘popular’, do not have the circulation numbers and are therefore denied Advertising. But then who cares eh?

We are quite happy as a ‘chattering class’ reacting to back street abortions, a drug addicted society with our youth taking the brunt of the smoke; rape of infants, teenage, middle-class and elderly women; broad daylight fictitious sale of our national institutions; rape (rape again I suppose that must be a coincidence – it has become part of our ‘normal’ vocabulary), of our forests, and the imminent collapse of the country we are proud to call Kenya. And what do we do – continue publishing glossy interviews with the ‘successful’ celebrities of modern day Nairobi and praise our thieves as the ‘drivers of Kenya’s economy’. Ah, and those street families are simply a nuisance for knocking at our car windows and blackmailing us by leading the so called ‘blind’ to beg for alms. What are a few thousand street families on the street – that is how life has always been hasn’t it? Fighting for the underdog is no longer the-in thing with the ‘funders’ of today.

But back to more ‘serious’ issues. We have all become quite immune to the assault on our civil rights. What does it concern us if all the magazines presenting today can not afford the 1,000,000/= shs bond that is imposed on all magazines and are awaiting arrest from the civil authorities at the slightest hint of ‘dissenting’ views; who cares if one of the biggest media houses is raided and its publication burnt; does it matter if we are forced to pay through our noses for printing that is controlled by the rich and to the Government for taxes like Valueless Additional Tax (VAT) for which we precisely get that – zero value? And did I hear that the media council has now imposed a tax on media houses and magazines; and how come all we get are small scraps of information tucked away on P 59 of a 48 page newspaper? Whose interests are they championing? Get my drift?

And so while the big media in this country lavishly spend their shareholders money on launching and relaunching their newspapers which we have to turn upside down to read, starting spoiler brand newspapers which are subsidised by annual profits, run multiple radio stations spreading ethnic hate and violence and get away with murder (murder did I say, something violent about all this), start up lavish magazine companies with international affiliations. And what do the small fry have to put up with?

- No advertising support
- No shelf space in the big supermarkets
- No distribution support from these main stream magazine companies.
- Magazines being confiscated for daring to print what ‘mainstream’ media deem politically incorrect

Hey but this is quite normal. First they came for the ‘gutter’ press; then they came for the individual journalist and threw him down 4 floors; then they raided the big newspapers; next were the small magazines with no godfathers and no money to bribe them – and next they will come for us. So either we hang together or we shall surely all hang separately.

And finally a message for those that consider the bottom line to be the bottom line in their daily writings – we are on the verge of being bottomed out as a Nation, are we going to stand up and rescue it or drown with it?

Think about it…

Zahid Rajan

Electropulco Litfest Launch!

“I was listless, down out depressed, with chicken, egg and crossing of roads questions weighing on my mind; when my fingers as if they had a series of self-cordinating nanobots, tipitty tapped their way onto a blog called Sukuma Kenya. There, I found a pebble shaped like a play button on a retro CD player encased in a rectangle of sorts with a cryptic ‘You Tube’ logo on the bottom right. I touched the pebble. Holy haberdashery! I touched it!

My fellow Africans, that is how i came to make an interweb acquaintance with Just-A-Band. JAB is defining Kenyan animation and Kenyan techno music with aplomb, piercing wit and style…what follows is the result of smoke signals encoded with morse code and for some strange reason, un-encrypted. Enjoy it, or the chicken gets it. Wait, the egg gets it! oh what the hell…something will get it.”

Click HERE to read the rest of this post on Afromusing

click HERE if you want to experience more than just a read…

Coming Soon to a space near you…

In Search of Africa’s Writing Talent

A Senior Editor, searching for the latest African writing talent is due to land in Nairobi on 5th August to take part in this years Kwani Litfest.

Ellah Allfrey, a Senior Editor with the Random House imprint Jonathan Cape is looking for good scripts to build her list of contemporary African writers. The Zimbabwe born editor, who was recently nominated for a Booksellers Association Nibbie: the Decibel Cultural Diversity Award, will spend time going over manuscripts in her search for hot writing talent.

Allfrey will first give a talk on TUESDAY August 05th at 7.30pm at Club Undecided on Getting Published before taking appointments with individuals. Having commissioned the likes of James Baldwin, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Chinua Achebe and Nuriddin Farah for Penguin Modern Classics, she has great experience to pull from. She also commissioned Mi Revalushanarry Fren, a collection of the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson.

“All I need is 10 pages and a synopsis of the novel to assess the viability of the book,” said Allfrey who has worked with authors Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. “And I am sure that Kenya is full of relevant and interesting manuscripts.”

Allfrey commissions history, general non-fiction and literary fiction and a central focus has been the building a list of young African writers within the Cape imprint ? creating what is arguably the premier mainstream list of young African talent in British publishing.? Her prize-winning authors include Dinaw Mengestu, Biyi Bandele and Segun Afolabi.

Please send your synposis and 10 pages only to litfest@kwani.org

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