Kenya in the throes of great artistic rebirth

By Jenny Luesby

NAIROBI, KENYA: Driving with the radio on this weekend, a song came on that I hadn’t heard for years, from a sad and iconic film that touched me greatly at the time. It was a love story that I haven’t seen since, called The Graduate. He lost the girl.

But it brought to my mind the many ways that literature and powerful stories stay alive inside us and shape our view of the whole world around us, even when we have stopped thinking about them at all.

unique perspective

In some catalogue that span through my head, I began to think of a book written by a Chinese author about the Chinese Diaspora of south London, which changed my understanding of the Chinese community forever, or the way in which reading Going Down River Road, when I was in my early 20s, gave me a perspective in Kenya that has never left me, and only been affirmed countless times by the experiences around me.

Literature has a power all of its own to bridge divides, shine a light of understanding and tolerance, and achieve a recognition of truths that we have only half known until a tale draws them out in front of us.

Yet still fresh in my mind is a meeting I was at some months ago where one of our own professors of literature spoke of how East African literature has been held back for close to half a century by an assertion that the region is a ‘literary desert’.

As an economist by background, I cannot claim the smallest knowledge of literature. But it does seem true that for so large a population, our breadth of arts and literature, now growing, is still scant when compared with some other cultures.

Years ago, I used to write a quarterly country report on Iceland, which had a population of just 300,000 people at the time, and yet a national theatre, a replete range of ancient myths, playwrights, novelists and a book publishing industry.

With the rise of Twitter, in which Kenya is close to leading the continent, some have argued that the 140-character quip is now the final death knell for the 40,000-word story, for poetry of a thousand words, even for our attention span.

I have likewise been told, more times than I can count, that ‘Kenyans don’t read’, only to, simultaneously, interview youngster after youngster who tells me of their love of writing, borne of their love of reading, the books their father had in the home, the books they read in their childhoods.

It seems to be not true that ‘Kenyans don’t read’. But it seems to be true that somewhere in our divided history we have taken our time to celebrate and value our own literature. We have talked, often, as if we only have one author.  We have not even selected a Poet Laureate, as the greatest poet of our generation.

But our arts scene is changing. Literary festivals are growing larger and becoming better followed, our films, even our animations, are winning global awards.

Renaissance

Yet it can seem, at times, as if the world is more excited about our bubbling literary takeoff than we are ourselves. The BBC ran a story last week about how African Arts are rising as the next big thing on the Western arts scene.

But our own artistic debate remains more concentrated around who is allowed to write plays for school children to perform at drama festivals, than the fact that we seem to be moving into an extraordinary artistic renaissance, across every art form.

Indeed, not so many years ago, reporters would write, somewhat regularly, about how and why the Kenyan music scene had become stillborn, even as West African, and Tanzanian music had taken wings of its own.

The degree and pace of change since then has seen us now growing our own vibrant music scene. But literature is rising more slowly. Yet if it is lost in our short-quip, fast moving 21st Century, it will be a loss to us all in our breadth, depth, emotional life and wisdom.

For the writers and story tellers are surely there, the plot makers and satirists. Some have even written to me of their passion for words and tales. For sure, the hours of thought and drafts and reaching for insight are happening. Maybe it is only time we cast off our ‘desert’ label and draw forward, celebrate, promote and engage with our next generation of Kenyan writers.

For among whom will be the literary icons that become touch points for generations ahead. And in their hands lie our capacity for greater understanding of one another, and the forging of ‘we’.

To Kenyan literature, let it be our very next renaissance