Kenya's rising culture club

On his desk lie two books that rose from the ashes of the burning, looting, rape, and slaughter that gripped Kenya for weeks after the elections and killed 1,500 people. “Kenya Burning” is a glossy volume of photos, some of them shockingly gruesome, from that time. The fifth edition of Kwani?, the yearly journal whose success begat the publishing house, contains works of fiction, reportage, cartoons, and photography that deal with, among other things, the bloodshed and its social and political context.

Kahora depicts Kwani? as a youth-driven challenge to the grip of a staid African canon that has diminishing relevance for Kenya’s youth. That spirit is captured in the publishing house’s name – “kwani?” means, approximately, “so?” in Swahili.

Back in 2002, Kahora says, the generation of Kenyan writers that started Kwani? as an informal culture club – led by Caine Prize winner Binyavanga Wainaina – did so out of a sense of necessity. Many had returned to the country after sojourns elsewhere during the repressive 24-year reign of strongman Daniel Arap Moi.

“These are people who have grown up reading people like Ngugi wa Thiong’o,” Kahora says, referring to one of Kenya’s most famous authors, who published much of his writing in the 1960s and ’70s. “And they’re thinking, Man, it’s all very well to read about Mau Mau” – the anticolonial insurgents the British called terrorists – “to read about neocolonialism, to read about Marxism. But the Kenya today is all about overpopulation, it’s about HIV/AIDS, it’s about crime and insecurity. I want to read that stuff, you know? I want to see my present.”

The need to be relevant has strongly shaped the stories and media that have come out of the movement. Kwani? has made a conscious effort to give its books more mass appeal and reach a broader audience. That’s one big reason for the open mic nights. And while the books are mostly in English, many passages are peppered with sheng, the Swahili-English patois that is common in Nairobi. The covers of the more recent journals are comic-bookish, using motifs borrowed from pop culture and consumer products; pull quotes appear in choppy, faded typefaces. Kahora calls the aesthetic “funky.”

The subject matter is dead serious, though, even if the tone of the writing is sometimes irreverent. The most recent issues contain essays and interviews written by writers that Kwani? commissioned to scour the country in the wake of the election violence. Next to the essays, there are poems and reprints of desperate texts sent by people trapped in the fighting. Similarly to reports from organizations like Human Rights Watch, the books bear witness to bloodshed.

But they also add a comprehensibility and immediacy to the Kenyan turmoil, which can simply look like inhuman madness in other media, both domestic and international.

“The official reports are still written in a language that really doesn’t get to the heart of what’s happening,” Kahora says. “But if you go to the streets and talk to people – how do you capture that voice? How do you get to that place? It’s not only about violence. It’s about unemployment. Crime and insecurity are [also] related to that kind of violence.”

Kenya, in fact, is just one of the nodes of a youth-powered African literary revival. There are, for example, Cassava Republic, Farafina Trust, and affiliated Kachifo Limited in Nigeria. Perhaps the most well-known book coming out of this generation is “Half of a Yellow Sun,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (Kwani? distributes the book in Kenya.)

Kahora sees it as the silver lining of a new African era of weaker states and instability.

“I think Kwani? is a symptom of a renaissance,” he says, “because there are a lot of things taking place. A lot of political freedoms are coming through. A new generation is coming of age.”

Previous

1 | 2