I’m writing in response to Prof Egara Kabaji’s article titled “Sorry state of our creativity and crisis of shrinking minds” (‘The Saturday Standard’, November 29, 2025). In the article, Prof Kabaji began by referencing an event co-organised and hosted by Daystar University in August this year. where creative writers met to discuss, among other things, the importance of having, and belonging to, such collectives as the Creative Writers Association of Kenya (C-WAK). I should, perhaps, mention that I attended the aforesaid event and agree with Prof Kabaji’s representation not only of its impressive attendance, but also of the scope and loftiness of its agenda.
Prof Kabaji, in his article, however, omitted the all-important fact that the event was youth-dominated, a near-accurate reflection of the demographic hue at most literature fora in our country lately. A majority of literary events across Kenya, especially during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, have been either youth-organised or youth-dominated, partly because younger writers have been, and continue to be responsible for the now-fashionable self-publishing frenzy. Up to three out of every five newly stocked titles at Nuria Books are self-published or authored by a young writer.Many local writers’ collectives today, including Qwani? and Rafinki, have predominantly youthful memberships.
At the Goethe-Institut Nairobi, where we meet every last Saturday of the month for the Lydia Gatirira-convened Amka Literature Forum, young, up-and-coming writers account for the majority of both attendees and manuscript submissions. A careful consideration of all this would, no doubt, goad my friend (Prof) Kabaji’s readers into a strong repudiation of his portrait of a majority of our young people as book-averse, gadget-hooked wastrels. If the youth-led anti-tax protests of June-July last year taught us anything, it is that our young people are, not only valiant, but also fecund—and fiendishly so. The digital invasion is, in some respects, an unwelcome disruption, yes. But it has yet to cause despair-level damage to the local reading culture. The real crisis faced by our society is not one of non-reading.
The ‘shrinking of minds’, the real crisis, is both a symptom and the result of our collective, national unseriousness about virtually everything that matters—and ought to matter.
Mr Baraza is a Nairobi-based novelist, short-story writer, satirist, playwright and historiographer. vickersbaraza@gmail.com
