Sunday Salon- September 21

A Prose Reading Series
NEW YORK - NAIROBI - CHICAGO
http://www.sundaysalon.com

Margaret Ogola
Onduko bw’ Atebe
Philo Ikonya

Four readers, four unique voices, in a tranquil outdoor setting.

An evening of entertainment for discerning lovers of the written word.

7-9pm, Sunday 21st September
Kengeles, Lavington Green
Entry Only KSh300
Free entry before 6.30pm
Free entry for all Sunday Salon Alumni

ABOUT THE WRITERS

Onduko bw’ Atebe
Onduko bw’ Atebe emerged on the literary scene late 2005 with the publication of his book: The Verdict of Death. In 2006, the book was nominated and went on to win the biggest prize in the country – The Whome Mutahi Literary Award.
A fervent believer in the writing and reading faith, Atebe has since then gone on to join and work with other writers and writers’ organizations that profess, promote and spread the gospel. He is the Secretary General of the Kenya Organization of Writers’ Association (KOWA) He is also the secretary to the Literary Awards committee, run by the National Book Development council of Kenya (NBDC-K). Last but not least, he was recently elected the Vice President of International Pen – Kenya Chapter.

Philo Ikonya
Philo Ikonya is a journalist and media consultant. She is a linguist and understands Latin, Kiswahili, Gikuyu, Spanish, and Italian. She has had various stories and poetry in both English and Spanish. Her short story, “ Let the Dove Coo her Song” was published in Periplo, a literary magazine. She was also recently elected as the President of the International Pen - Kenya Chapter.

Margaret Ogola
Margaret Ogola has won the Commonwealth Best First Book in Africa and the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 1995 for her first novel The River and the Source. She has since published two other novels, I Swear by Apollo and Place of Destiny. Margaret Ogola is a paediatrician and the medical director for The Cottolengo Centre for orphaned children.

Open Mic, Tuesday, September 2

Next month’s Kwani? Poetry Open Mic will feature Karest Lewela. Buried deep in the essence of African Renaissance, Karest is touted as an advocate for social justice. A lover of the alternative sound, Karest’s diction is well thought out, incisive and bound to inspire thought and introspection. No stranger to controversy, Karest weaves creatively in between difficult issues without being prescriptive. His poetry is often cryptic, his free style is rich in word play and his performance on stage is resounding.

The event is hosted by Cindy Ogana and held every first Tuesday of the month at Club Soundd. Poets (not singers please) who wish to take part in the Open Mic session should attend the sound check strictly between 5 & 6 pm on the day of the event. No late entries will be accepted. Please bring a printout of your work with you.

The event starts promptly at 7pm on Tuesday 2nd September, and entry is only KSh100.

Revisioning Kenya - not your problem? by Arno Kopecky

“Revisioning Kenya,” hosted by RaMoMA gallery on a sunny Friday afternoon and billed as the highlight of Kwani Litfest 2008 (with stiff competition from the cocktail party at US Ambassador Michael Ranneberger’s house), 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?”

Arno Kopecky is a Kwani? editor.

Sunday Salon: Enter at Risk, by Arno Kopecky

Heads up – the Ugandans are here. Two swept in from Kampala to dominate last night’s Sunday Salon: Kalundi Serumaga, a verbal assassin of a journalist, and David Kaiza, who recently traded in journalism for, shall we say, ethnotravelogue-ism.

Serumaga preempted his reading – a slow-roasting of the Kenyan intelligencia for the worst of all academic crimes, naivety – with an apology for meddling in Kenyan politics as an outsider. “Then again,” he informed the audience, “you are not Kenyans either. Kenya wasn’t built for black people, after all, and if you find yourself here it is either as a visitor or a servant.” And later, only half in jest, “genocide is only a problem when it isn’t carried out successfully. If you wipe a people out entirely, there is no one left to seek justice. The problem we have in Africa is that the colonialists never finished the job.”

I spent the rest of the evening hiding under a table. That was where Kaiza’s narrative found me and pinned me to the floor, this time in wonder instead of self-reproach. In April, Kaiza had been commissioned by Kwani? to trace the origins of the Luo – his people – following the post-election violence in which they figured so prominently; we joined him, transfixed, on a journey down the Nile, through the founding kingdoms of Uganda, and into the various tribedoms of Kenya, where ethnicity is no longer quite the unambiguous source of pride it once was. Or was it?

“What has tribe ever done for women?” demanded Philo Ikonya, the poet, almost-politician, and spokesperson for the kingdom of Woman, during the Q & A afterwards. I raised my head above the tabletops to listen better. “Why should I take pride in a community that expects me to stay in the kitchen?”

Bantu Mwaura, dreadlocked theatre artist and another of the night’s presenters, sprang to the defense of his black Nilot brothers. “Patriarchy was introduced by the white man,” he announced. “Until they came we were all very matriarchal.”

I sank back out of sight and let Rasna Warah take over with an explanation of the origins, not of her people, but her newly published anthology, Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits. Warah, a columnist for the Daily Nation and 17-year veteran of the development world, described how she realized, about five years ago, that aid work in Africa was: 1) part do-good morality play (‘missionaries’), 2) part cold-blooded capitalism (‘mercenaries’); and 3) completely out of touch with reality (misfit). Good for nothing, in other words, except the consciences and bank accounts of its architects.

“Damn,” whispered the German lady hiding under the table next to me, “it took her twelve years to figure that out?”

A fitting irony to close the night on – this denigration of NGOs, the United Nations, and all western-origin development projects, at an event sponsored by those very institutions. But last night’s Salon was only the beginning; plenty of time and opportunity in the Litfest ahead for the sparring to continue, and the one thing we can count on is that it will.

Arno Kopecky is an editor at Kwani?

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