Serious questions about children's literature in Kenya's month of books

September is the month when Kenya celebrates books. And for more than two decades now, the Kenya Publishers Association (KPA), in partnership with Sarit Centre in Westlands, has been hosting the annual Nairobi International Book Fair.

Two days ago, I called KPA’s CEO James Odhiambo and it is now confirmed that the 27th edition of the book fair is scheduled for September 23 to 27. The fair will feature a weeklong series of activities, topped by the awarding of the winner of the biennial Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature at the gala night marking the end of the fair on Sunday, September 27, 2026. This year, the prize will only be awarded for the English Literature category, as the other areas lacked adequate entries.

One of the highlights of the book week, especially in the opening days, is seeing the enthusiasm children exhibit as they move from one publisher’s exhibition stand to the next, sampling books and sitting to read. You see genuine sadness in the faces of those who cannot afford to buy a book they have been devouring in a reading tent but have to return it, sometimes even before reading the entire book.

Such moments shake some long-held beliefs about a reading culture in Kenya to their very roots. And the first question that comes to mind is whether the age-old lament that Kenyans do not read is true.

According to the World Bank’s latest learning poverty estimate for Kenya, 79 per cent of children at late primary age are not proficient in reading. In 2015, Uwezo Kenya assessed children aged 6 to 16 on their ability to read and comprehend English and Kiswahili texts at Class 2 level and found that fewer than four out of 10 Class 3 children could read a Class 2 Kiswahili story.

These studies throw up serious questions. Is reading the same thing as literacy? For those who see this as a pointer to a lack of a reading culture, are we conflating the ability to enjoy a story with the ability to read, and in a second language such as English? Would children enjoy reading more in their mother tongue, for those who know their people’s tongue, or in major African languages such as Kiswahili? These are valid questions because every time you market your English storybooks to a bookseller, they often ask whether you have some in Kiswahili. And for market-based reasons!

As I have said before, publishers need to invest more in research, especially around children’s books. More often than not, even as we complain that children are spending more time browsing the internet or gawking at screens, what we offer may not necessarily be what they want to read.

I have taken time, around November and December, to read some of the storybooks that private schools especially recommend for learners and sometimes you wonder whether it is for lack of knowledge about other more engaging books in the market or whether the sellers of these books do a better job of marketing than those who have the real gems.

Now, before you accuse me of presuming to understand better than everyone else what is good for children, allow me to give you some background.

Two decades ago, most local publishers either sold storybooks, especially for lower grades, from other parts of the world or had just a few or none at all. Only the multinationals had graded reading schemes, which largely gave orature and African fables a wide berth.

So, my first major assignment in publishing was to come up with two series of graded reading schemes from scratch. One in English and one in Kiswahili and from an African perspective. We put together a team of authors, artists, designers and pre-press experts. And of course the bean counters from Finance, the guys who see everyone and everything as a cost.

Once the scripts were ready, we embarked on a pilot phase, where we would go into real homes and schools, not talk to parents and teachers, but observe reactions to our effort by the very target consumers of our project. The children themselves. As the children read the dummy books, we asked them to point out the stories, illustrations and pages they liked most.

And it turned out that most of the readers everyone back at the office had swooned over, including the honourable sales team, did not get as much as a second look. The ones that really moved them were the ones we were even considering shelving for revision.

After analysing the reactions, it was clear that children wanted to see more of themselves doing things that children like to do. Unsurprisingly, none preferred pages where parents and teachers were giving instructions and sermons at the assembly ground or in classrooms. We came away with the invaluable lesson that, while good stories should teach children lessons, those lessons need to be experiential rather than instructions by adults, which dominate many class reading lists.

Such findings open your eyes to the fact that we live in a world where, before we become adults, we undergo a lifelong lesson about not being a child. A world where ‘childish’ and a ‘big baby’ are insults. Why, our communities even conduct cultural rites to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood.

So, given that it is the parents, teachers and publishers who determine what children should read, there is an almost cognitive dissonance between what children read and what they would love to read. I have seen efforts to have children write their own books, but in most cases you see in those books a lot of ‘parental guidance’ and ‘editorial intervention’.

So, as we celebrate the East African book month, we need to ask ourselves a serious question. Is it that the algorithms on social media are better at guiding children and even adults to what they would love to see, or is it that we do not read?

The answer, methinks, lies in drawing a line between children’s literature and writing for children. The two are not necessarily the same thing. Writing for children requires us to understand the world from the child’s perspective rather than simply bringing our adult ideas about childhood to the page. We also need to unlearn adult tropes to write better for children and invest more in research. And to stop sitting back in offices and serving the world, including children, our adult literary tastes.