/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOKS-KENYA: Joining a Budding Cultural Renaissance

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Katy Salmon

NAIROBI, Jan 28 2003 (IPS) - Young writers look set to become the latest artists to join Kenya’s budding cultural renaissance with the launch of ‘Kwa ni?’, a new magazine masterminded by the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing winner, Binyavanga Wainaina.

Wainaina is not shy about his ambitions for ‘Kwa ni?’, slang for ‘What for?’ in the Kiswahili language, due for release in late March.

For one, he hopes to bury, once and for all, the long-standing cliché that Kenyans do not read. ”I think there are a lot of Kenyans who can’t find things to read. There isn’t that much that’s interesting to read that’s Kenyan,” he says provocatively.

”So why not do something that’s interesting, that’s engaging? That just questions things intelligently and goes a bit more in depth into things? Why are we who we are? Why are we the way we are?

”If you have good fiction, that is about Kenyans, for Kenyans, they will read it. It’s as simple as that. We need no gimmick,” he asserts.

Wainaina shot to fame last July, when he scooped the prestigious Caine Prize for his short-story ‘Discovering Home’. He has since become a controversial figure through his articles in the local press, which have led to accusations of arrogance and egotism.

‘Kwa ni?’ is likely to make similar waves.

It brings together diverse talents from well-known local script-writers, like Judy Kabinge (Baraka Film’s ‘Dangerous Affair’) and Andiah Kisia (M-Net ‘s ‘The Aftermath’), to ”people who have just been writing but didn’t have faith to submit” to photo-essays by respected photographers like Anthony Kaminju and Andrew Njoroge.

What holds these young talents together is a desire to break away from the traditional, political style of Kenyan writing, like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, to a more open debate as to ”who we are”.

”The style that is coming up is partly to do with examination of identity. What we’ve become and why we’ve become that way and odd little contradictions we’ve got within ourselves,” says Wainaina.

”We are now suddenly interested in ourselves. We are not looking out to find out what is in America but, ‘Damn, we are interesting. There is a lot here’.

”I think the next five or six years will be about investigating ourselves, we’ll be a bit self-centred but I think good writers and good art will come out of it,” he predicts.

”Kenyans are ready to think again and those how aren’t. you know where the old KANU went!” he laughs, referring the Kenya’s ruling party that was ousted in the December elections after nearly 40 years in power.

For Wainaina, this self-examination is urgently needed. He is scathing in his criticism both of his country’s leaders and his fellow Kenyans, whose ” servant mentality” he blames on the education system inherited from the British colonialists.

”It was never about thinking freely. It was never about creating freely. It wasn’t about discovering for ourselves. It was about somebody else telling you what you are, who you need to be,” he says.

This, he charges, has made Kenya a country where ”in order to thrive you sucked up and the rest of you put your heads down and prayed”.

”What we became is a society which was afraid to examine itself. The sycophants are right at the top – the ex-choir masters, those people who towed the line during the good old government days. The artists are at the bottom of the pile,” he says.

Wainaina is optimistic that all this is starting to change – and that this renaissance is already being reflected in the country’s art.

He points to the way Kenyan music has taken off over the last couple of years, with local artists now dominating the airwaves. The success of artists like GidiGidiMajiMaji reflects a new-found sense of self-confidence and pride in being Kenyan that has, until recently, been sorely lacking.

”I think there is so much pent-up creativity. All that has been needed is simply confidence. We just didn’t have the confidence to make things happen for us and now the confidence is coming,” Wainaina says.

Wainaina hopes a flourishing arts scene will help Kenyans develop a more positive sense of identification with their country.

”It is the artists who actually create what the country is. They see things and they put them together in whatever form of art they are doing.

”People look at them and say that is what it means to be Kenyan. A constitution doesn’t make a country. A common experience does make a country but that common experience needs to be expressed in an art form,” he says.

With their first new government since independence in 1963, Kenyans are bubbling over with optimism, hopeful that their new president, Mwai Kibaki, and his team will lift them out of deepening poverty and in to prosperity and development.

While praising Kenyan voters for giving Kibaki his landslide win, Wainaina says it is now time for the artists to make their contribution.

”It is absolutely necessary, if we are going to get out of where we are and become a country that can support itself and not rely on aid and donors, if we are going to build a country that is well bonded – that has an idea of who it is.

”We have taken the first big step. This is the point where the commentators, the artists, start to reflect this country, start to show it to ourselves. That’s our job. That’s what we are here to do,” he says.

The enthusiasm with which people have pitched in to get ‘Kwa ni?’ off the ground gives him confidence that Kenyan artists are up to the task.

”The reason we have been able to get it together is not because we had any money but because everybody wants this. And that says a lot,” he says.