|
Kwani?
Editorial by Binyavanga
Wainaina
Lately I seem to meet all kinds of interesting
people. Mostly young, self motivated people, who have created a
space for themselves in an adverse economy by being innovative.
I have met a guy who engraves glass with exquisite skill;
another guy who designs clothes, bags and other products for
factories. I have met people who never studied music, but who
have created a style of Hip Hop that is completely Kenyan;
writers who never studied literature who are writing at a level
I did not know existed in this country.
I have met a film director who managed to make a film in
three weeks, with virtually no budget, who made another in Sheng
using unknown actors. I have met an artist who is twenty one
years old, and who must have Kenya's largest art exhibition --
all around the streets and alleyways of Eastleigh and Mathare.
His name is Joga. I have met a writer, who has the power of
words to evoke place like no Kenyan I know. He works as a
gardener in Nairobi. His name is Stanley Gazemba.
To me this says we are finally becoming a country. When art as
expression starts to appear, without prompting, all over the
suburbs and villages of this country, what we are saying is: we
are confident enough to create our own living, our own
entertainment, our own aesthetic. Such an aesthetic will not be
donated to us from the corridors of a university; or from the
ministry of culture, or by The French Cultural Centre. It will
come from the individual creations of thousands of creative
people.
It is only a matter of time before this country is known
around the continent as a country of creative energy. It is
about time.
Breaking new ground always provokes ridicule. When I
interviewed Kalamashaka, they told me people would boo when they
attempted to sing in Kiswahili. In the old Kenya, people with
new ideas were ridiculed. They threatened the position of those
who had stopped having new ideas.
So I shall call this new generation, the Redyculass Genration.
This is the Kenya that kwani? is about. We are a
magazine of ideas. We seek to entertain, provoke, and create. We
are open to all Kenyans, wherever they may be, who want to say
something new.
Between these covers, you will visit some interesting worlds:
the world of a pot-bellied Kenyan mayor who suspects that he is
about to lose his power; the world of an expatriate European
desperate to become a macho Kenya Cowboy; the world of a
young girl pondering the implications of womanhood in a salon in
the 1970s. You will meet a UN worker who falls in love with a
smell; you will enter the minds of three great Kenyan icons. You
will rise and fall with Richard Onyango.
Kwani? would not be in existence if it was not for the
time, and work and monetary support of so many people who shared
the dream. I would like to mention them here. . . .
* * * * *
Kwani? is a registered Trust
For subscription, visit website www.kwani.org
for more information. Source: Kwani 2003 / published by Kwani Trust /
P.O. Box 75240 00200 / City Square, Nairobi. * * * *
*
Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal
servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in
hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous
travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal
Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm
hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always
involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise
Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing
tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy
eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man
who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work
permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He
is an enemy of development, always using his government job to
make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set
up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated
intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row
suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his
mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.
—Binyavanga
Wainaina. “How to
write about Africa.”
* * * * *
The Moi regime had told us if you deal with your issues we will
become like our neighbours, like Somalia, we will fall apart –
so keep quite, don't ask questions. That was the most damaging thing, more than
the economic problems for me. Forty years of people telling you
who you are, what to do and how to behave. If you didn't behave
in the right way, you were a non-person.
Living in South Africa and periodically
coming back to Kenya, my relationship with officialdom in Kenya
was just insane. Unfortunately Moi's personality and the way Moi
did business became Kenya's way of doing business. We took our
cue from him. I remember I had left my passport in a pair of
jeans in the washing machine and everyone was telling me that I
was going to be arrested because the passport was a privilege
and not a right.
I remember
going to get my birth certificate and going through all sorts of
problems from people who wanted me to cringe and crawl because
of their perverted sense of self-importance, of "Mtukufuism"
(Holiness). It was still a who you knew, who you are, sort of
thing. It was as if you wanted to do anything in Kenya, you
needed a godfather, who you would bow to and say, "Your
holiness, please help me." Everywhere was broken down into small
feudal spaces.—Binyavanga
Wainaina.
Voices of Kenya’s Voters
* * * * *
Children were in school, long lines of
spittle reaching their desks, as they tried to keep awake. Even
Daniel Arap Moi, Kenyan the president, who usually woke up at 4
am, was now taking his nap – trying to summon his favorite
dream: that the entire nation of Gikuyus were standing in line
at his gate to await execution, cash and title-deeds in hand, to
hand over at the gate.
Idi Amin Dada hunched over Mrs. Gupta Shah like an insistent
question mark, jabbing. She was chewing hard at a bit of
blue-gold and red sari, trying to keep from screaming out loud;
they had put on a movie on the video and set it loud to muffle
the sounds: some Bombay song: Chal Chal Chal Merihethi….on the
screen Idi could see a pouty maiden at the edge of a cliff, and
a man with a giant quiff of hair, and sideburns sang in a shrill
voice.
She leapt off the cliff, and he followed her in a few
seconds…they lay draped elegantly at the bottom of the valley;
their fingers touched and they died, then the nasal Hindi music
escalated in intensity, went beyond drama, beyond melodrama, and
achieved genuine Bombay Belodrama. Idi Amin Dada jabbed deeper
into Mrs. Gupta, his plantain sized fingers digging deeply into
the folds of her stomach, which usually undulated serenely
between two wisps of sari as she hummed her way through the day.
—Binyavanga
Wainaina
A Day in the Life of Idi Amin Dada (short story)
* * * *
* Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan
writer, is the founding editor of
Kenya’s only literary Journal, Kwani?. He lived and worked for ten years in South Africa. He
has been writing from Nakuru, Kenya for the past two years. He
is now based in Nairobi, Kenya. He has been published by various
literary journals around the World. He writes regularly for the Sunday
Times (South Africa) and the East African (Kenya). He
has also written for the Guardian (UK), The Mail and
Guardian (SA), The Cape Times and the Cape Argus
(Cape Town).In July 2002 he won the Caine Prize for African Writing -
Africa's most prestigious literary prize. The Caine Prize for African Writing is named
in memory of the late Sir Michael Caine, who was Chairman of the
Booker Prize management committee for almost 25 years. The
patrons of the prize are three African winners of the Nobel
Prize for Literature: Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer and Naguib
Mahfouz. The two African Booker Prize winners, J. M. Coetzee and
Ben Okri, have joined the Council of the Caine Prize.
* *
* * *
|
One Day I Will Write About This Place: A
Memoir
By Binyavanga Wainaina
Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his
middle-class Kenyan childhood out of
kilter with the world around him. This
world came to him as a chaos of loud and
colorful sounds: the hair dryers at his
mother’s beauty parlor, black mamba
bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the
music of Michael Jackson—all punctuated
by the infectious laughter of his
brother and sister, Jimmy and Ciru. He
could fall in with their patterns, but
it would take him a while to carve out
his own.
In this vivid and compelling debut
memoir, Wainaina takes us through his
school days, his mother’s religious
period, his failed attempt to study in
South Africa as a computer programmer, a
moving family reunion in Uganda, and his
travels around Kenya. The landscape in
front of him always claims his main
attention, but he also evokes the
shifting political scene that unsettles
his views on family, tribe, and
nationhood.
Throughout, reading is his refuge and
his solace. And when, in 2002, a writing
prize comes through, the door is opened
for him to pursue the career that
perhaps had been beckoning all along. A
series of fascinating international
reporting assignments follow. Finally he
circles back to a Kenya in the throes of
postelection violence and finds he is
not the only one questioning the old
certainties. |
 |
* * *
* *
* *
* * *
 |
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
* *
* * *
|
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
|
 |
* *
* * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
update 29 March 2010
|
