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.

Revisioning Kenya

Revisioning Kenya, the highlight of Kwani Litfest 2008 hosted by RaMoMA gallery on Friday afternoon, was a climax of highs and lows. We arrived to find organizers Dipesh Pabari and Shalini Gidoomal scuttling around with a hunted look in their eyes, as though this were January 2008 all over again and we were in Kibera, not Parklands. But they sorted out the electrical snafus that threatened to nix the whole show at the last minute, and about seventy of us crammed into the presenting room to listen to fifteen ‘visionaries’ from every field of endeavor talk about the future. (The idea came from Bill Gates, who a while back invited the most innovative thinkers on earth to Arusha to give him an eight-minute presentation about their next big idea.)

Unlike the previous day’s event at the University of Nairobi, almost nobody stuck to their time limit. Sometimes we didn’t notice, like with Judy Kibinge’s movie Coming of Age, which took us on a moody romp through post-independence Kenya – starting with the early Kenyatta days, “when a carjack was a thing you used to change a tire”; through post-coup Moi, when Kenyans learned what it was like to live under a dictatorship: “at night, people drew the curtains shut and whispered rumors about rumors in the dark”; following the euphoric “second liberation” of Kibaki’s election in 2002, and finishing with his stolen victory last year, when “Kenya began to burn, and we wondered, what is democracy? Do we even want it anymore?”

Same kind of roller coaster that characterized our little event. I hate to hate, but in the spirit of constructive criticism I can’t help wondering why Alfred Omenya, who actually is a visionary architect, felt it necessary to talk about himself for eight minutes before getting round to the subject at hand. By then, moderator Wambui Mwangi had no choice but to yank the mic on him. And John Kiarie, the former Redyculass comedian who these days is trying to prove Beth Mugo rigged him out of victory in the race for Dagoretti’s parliamentary seat – great speech, John, we laughed and cried, but where were the new ideas?

Rob Barnett, Kwani?’s first sponsor back in the day (thanks Rob) gave an interesting talk about Diffusion Theory, basically, how do bright ideas take root in society and become widespread? I’m all for spreading the love, but can’t help wondering about the NGO-esque philosophy underpinning the concept: ‘we know what’s good for you, now LISTEN.’

But that’s what Revisioning Kenya was all about after all – if more of us listened to the good ideas stored in the minds inside that room, maybe Kenya and the world would be a better place. For instance why is it, as former Olympian Ole Munyai asked us, that Kenya’s pyrethrum farmers are only earning $16 million in a world market that is making $600 million off their harvest? Why don’t we set up a distribution company in the US, where most of the global trading takes place, and channel Kenyan pyrethrum through that? As Ole said, “we could pay our farmers five times what they currently earn and still make a profit.”

Now that’s what we came to hear. More good stuff came from Kevit Desai, who talked about the potential for ICT to improve just about everything, and Dr. Moses Musaazi, who broke down the alternative technologies we have at our fingertips (ranging from solar water heaters, which everyone’s heard of, to papyrus sanitary pads, which I bet you haven’t). Tony Mochama represented the poetic outlook, and though I’m not sure exactly what it was he said, I know it wasn’t bad.

The best came last. Ishmael Beah, the child soldier from Sierra Leone, stirred us up with some of the lessons learned by his country’s civil war. He finished by describing a village tree where he and his fellow soldiers used to kill prisoners. Back then, its bark had been hacked up by overzealous machetes and blackened by the blood of so many victims; but when Beah recently revisited the spot, he found “the tree had healed completely and now bloomed a bright, clean green.”

Tough act to follow, but Ambassador Bethuel Kiplagat did so tremendously. Looking like a 70-year-old version of Ishmael Beah, Kiplagat is the kind of fellow whose dignity fills the whole room. So does his deep bass of a voice. He described for us the battles he’s fought not just for Kenya, but all of Africa over the course of his illustrious career. “I realized one day that all these problems this continent suffers are not just political, they are my own personal problems,” he said, leading up to an admonishment against reliance on foreign aid. “Don’t ever let anyone take your problems away from you, because then you will not devote every last minute and mobilize every resource you have to solving it.”

In 1984, Kiplagat became Kenya’s Permanent Secretary to the department of Foreign Affairs. “I looked around the region and the continent, and I decided then that I would do what I could to bring peace to our neighbors.” There’s a long ways yet to go, but as Kiplagat pointed out, some signs of hope have bloomed amidst the rubble. Take, for instance, the fact that only two African nations are left in the hands of a military regime, quite an improvement from the time Kiplagat entered Foreign Affairs. “That was 1984,” he said, and although he’s held various positions in government since, he’s still working at the same goal of peace. Twenty four long years, good people, “and do you think I’m going to give up?”

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

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

Revisioning Kenya: A Narrative for the Nation

A selection of Kenya’s brightest brains and skills will gather at Nairobi’s Ramoma Art Gallery to impart their ideas on forging a future that addresses and repairs the issues thrown up in the post election violence. Speakers such as peacemaker Dekha Ibrahim Abdi; DJ Caroline Mutoko; former child soldier Ishmael Beah; molecular biologist Onesmo ole Moi-Yoi; visionary city mapper, Alfred Omenya; Ugandan inventor Dr Moses Musaazi; youth leader, George Gachara; comedian turned politician John Kiare; scholar Joyce Nyairo and Rob Burnet will put forward their ideas for effecting change in Kenya.

Kicking off with filmaker Judy Kibinge’s award winning film looking at democracy in Kenya, this one-day symposium organised by the Kwani Litfest (KLF 2008) will provide a platform for a series of stimulating talks given by visionaries drawn from Kenya, around the continent, and abroad. Mixing young and old, radical and innovative ideas will be expressed and married to capital. A cross section of Kenyan society both socially, culturally and geographically will be called upon to provide opinion and expertise in their particular field.

Radio Queen Caroline Mutoko, who’s command of the airwaves and cool thinking helped keep people stay calm in the hectic and shocking violence of January, will give us the inside story of what it was like to be live, on radio, taking calls, soothing speaking and helping.

Dekha Ibrahim Abdi, winner of the alternative Nobel Peace prize and Convenor for the civil society group Concerned Citizens for Peace, said; “we need to look beyond what we have and seek positive on-the-ground change and initiative, especially for our younger people. She points to George Gachara, another Revisioning Kenya speaker as an example of the proactive approach required in this country. He set up an sms distress line in the first few days of the violence and within a few days received thousands of text messages and was able to help those in need with supplies, map problem areas and complement police efforts.

Other contributors are more prosaic, but nonetheless practical. Ugandan inventor Professor Moses Musaazi has used his skills to great effect in dreaming up integrated systems to be put into use in a test case scenario at Marsabit Girls Secondary school. In a bid to maximise utlisiation of scarce resources he has cleverly designed simple brickmaking machines, invented DIY biodegradable sanitary pads and developed a compact portable waste incinerator that burns rubbish - and heats water at the same time.

Fighting for political rights is Revisioning Kenya speaker John Kiarie’s goal. When he began a comic routine in university, he had no idea that he would be the nucleus for one of the most important political movements in Kenyas history. In 2007 KJ and the Reddyculass turned their sights on a different prize: empowering the youth to vote. They criss-crossed the country holding huge musical concerts headlined by Kenya’s biggest musical names under the rallying cry of “Vijana Tugutuke!” or “Youth, Arise!”
And arise they did. Kenya’s electoral commission has publically attributed the phenomenal rise in youth registration to the movement. To understand how phenomenal the impact of the concerts was, its important to note that in 2002, of a total of 17M eligible voters, only 11.2 M registered. And of those, just 7% were the youth. But in 2007, 70% of all registered voters were the youth.

In the 2007 elections KJ chose to run, surviving a savage beating from rivals after being nominated as the ODM candidate to run against veteran Beth Mugo. He is currently in court with what he believes is damning evidence proving that he and not Beth Mugo won the Dagoretti seat. He believes his presence in parliament will go a long way to providing Kenya with desperately needed fresh, young dynamic it so desperately needs.

Rafique Keshavjee would be proud of this stance. As a visionary entrusted with developing the Aga Khan’s vision of a university, his approach is an abrupt deviation from the rote learning, and traditional positions taken currently in Kenya’s schools and Universities. “We want to build and encourage entrepreneurs - thinkers. Our goal is not to create employees, but to encourage students to create structures that will not only create jobs, but also provide inspiring design frameworks for value added services,”

Rob Burnet, too, is focused on education, through a different media. He will present information on diffusion theory and how new ideas catch on, particularly in the context of mass media, and with TV soap Makutano Junction, in which he is involved.

Other presenters will speak on the importance of ICT, on the scientist’s gentle approach to thinking differently, on scholarly necessity. Poetry will come from literary Tony Mochama and theatrical presentation from actor playwright John Sibi Okumu.

And Sierra Leonean writer and former child soldier Ishmael Beah, will give a first hand account of the horror of war and dysfunctionality in a country and the lessons that can be learned from Sierra Leone’s experience.

In a recent interview founder of the Kwani Trust, Binyavanga Wainaina, says, “Speakers come from varied backgrounds, and have 8 minutes to deliver their speech. During these conferences you meet people that produce great ideas in all fields.I think that in a post-violence situation it is a great service to provide such a platform, although it does not deal directly with literature. It serves to remind people that a territory of better ideas exist that is beyond politicians and their mediocre ideas. This new territory can be a source of inspiration for writers.”

The topics of human rights, gender, social entrepreneurship, citizens activity and good governance will be contained within these discourses in an attempt to actively assess and create new strands for Kenyans to work with in revising and reworking those elements of society that clearly have failed.

Date: 8th August
Venue: Ramoma Art Gallery
Time:2:00pm-6:00pm
Price:Ksh 1,900/= OR 3,500/= (includes Authors in Conversation Dinner at Kifaaru Garden and Kwanini Booklet)
Concessions:900/=

Click HERE for more details

Click HERE to read the Sunday Nation Review on the Kwani Litfest by JOSEPH NGUNJIRI

Poets and Writers liven up Kenya National Library Services

From Kenya Poet:

A few hours ago, I was at the Kenya National Library Services for the first in a series of poetry and readings that will be held at the venue every two months.

An idea was conceptualized by the Kwani team with an aim of increasing the spaces where literature is shared, and what better place than where it is lying in between book covers waiting to be made alive…

Click HERE to read the rest of this post.

FROM STANLEY TO KAPUSCINSKI - How foreign correspondents have formed the literary image of Africa.

Blogger Bankelele has posted a synopsis of the debate. Click HERE for more.

“We went into the heart of Africa self-invited — therein lies our fault.” (Henry Morton Stanley)

Since Stanley became the first man to cross Africa and write about it for the New York Herald, the literary image of Africa has been inked by foreign correspondents turned writers - Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh among them. Can the continent ever escape the dark romantics? A joint panel discussion of Kwani and Foreign Correspondents Association will discuss.

Panelists:
Chair - Steve Bloomfield is Africa correspondent of The Independent and the Monocle. He is presently writing about football in Africa.
Binyavanga Wainana is chair of Kwani LitFest and a winner of the Caine Prize.
Jonathan Ledgard is Africa correspondent of The Economist and author of a novel, Giraffe.
Mary Anne Fitzgerald, author of “Nomad” and journalist for the London Times and other British publications

23rd July (7.00 pm) @ Alfajiri, opp. Royal Media House, off Dennis Pritt Road

All invited.
Press launch of Kwani Litfest on the same night

Pambazuka Special: The Writer in a time of crises

With over 1000 contributors and an estimated 500,000 readers Pambazuka News is the authoritative pan African electronic weekly newsletter and platform for social justice in Africa providing cutting edge commentary and in-depth analysis on politics and current affairs, development, human rights, refugees, gender issues and culture in Africa.

“Pambazuka News has been featuring more and more African writing. We are therefore especially pleased to bring you this special issue on KLF and some of the broader issues surrounding the political and aesthetic concerns of the younger generation of African writers.”

Special Features this week include:
Mukoma Wa Ngugi - African writing in our time

Binyavanga Wainaina: The writer in a time of crisis

Is the pen mightier than a machete? - Arno Kopecky

Putting on the Kwani Lit Fest - Shalini Gidoomal

Special thanks to the Pambazuka team and especially Firoze Manji.

The in-between world of a hornbill

Sipping over a cup of coffee and smoking far too many cigarettes, Binyavanga said to me, “Now more than any other moment in time, this makes sense.” I desperately needed the reassurance about helping to keep Wajibu going despite the magazine being completely broke. Like everyone else, it was almost impossible at the time to get on with life given the nation’s landscape was continuously being trodden upon by that ubiquitous monster: the post-election crises.

A couple of months and countless cigarettes later, I was running around town like a child wanting to share his new new toy with everyone. We had not only managed to publish Wajibu - we had undertaken the desperate rebranding the magazine needed after twenty odd years of wearing the same clothes. Despite a cover page of cliches, the magazine, filled with refreshing analysis generated by a load of concerned Kenya writers, was embraced by the post-election paradigm.

And whilst most of us were still obsessing about Kenya’s crises status quo, a handful of beautiful minds were busy reclaiming the right to live and express life beyond the grasp of the elections. The Kwani Literary Festival was scheduled for August 2008 but like so many other events had taken a severe beating. Of course there was no intention to ignore the stupidity of our politicians but it was quickly becoming obvious that regardless of the fact that there was a nationwide consensus that writers played a critical role in Revisioning Kenya, nobody was willing to put any money to it. As Shalini was busy picking up the rusted nuts and bolts of the hugely successful 2006 Literary Festival, I could not help but keep reminding her of what she was also thinking: can we do this?

As I sat on our balcony sipping on coffee inhaling toxic fumes from my cigarette and the back end of a 1001 cars, my sister came rushing out to point at the hornbills feasting on the ficus fruits in front of me. Here was a tree sandwiched between a block of apartments, a construction site, and a tarmac road dripping with fruit in a bid to keep reinventing itself. Just beyond the reach of its roots, I pictured the handful of politicians marching over to the Grand Regency in a desperate attempt to convince a few stoned street dwellers that they were in fact, human and they did in fact, care.

Meanwhile, these remarkably clumsy looking top heavy birds filled their bellies with fruit oblivious to the construction men banging away on top of the roofs and my smoke filled presence. They paused for a second when my phone rang but obviously they recognised the ringtone and were not in the least disturbed. There was a feast to be had.

You are right Binyavanga: “Now more than any other moment in time, this makes sense.“

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