Couple of blogs of note

After my earlier complaint I went looking for interesting local Kenyan writing with a “literary” bent, here is what I unearthed.

African Bullets and Honey – lots of interesting perspectives for a foreigner like me, it is written by someone (who is nameless in the blog) possessing great skill and talent. While the political insight was fine, I found the travel blog postings rather delightful with the right touch of humor and introspection.  I detect a touch of Chatwin and Dickens (Dickens did write a couple of travelogues – “Pictures from Italy” being one) in terms of style ? I think such personal first hand accounts of African experiences in  a foreign land are few and far between, this blog is a pointer that we need more! (Highly recommended, particularly the posts about the trips to Russia and Latvia)

Kwani Blog – this has an interesting mix of Kenyan writers. A lot of the poetry is dire, but the writing is generally high caliber and issue-tastic.  A notable collection of young writers to look for.

Calamity Jane

Since it is the duty of every white person in Kenya to reason out Kenya’s problems…… :

The population has a high literacy rate, but is uniformly illiterate. The first sign of an illiterate society is bad taste.

Lets start with the bookshops in downtown nairobi (and the bookshelves of a few Kenyans I know). Few have a habit of reading books or real literature.

The most popular book in Kenya is the Bible — that famous book which we used to whitewash their innocent souls. Now, Kenyans have made it their own.

The second kind of book is the self help book, the likes of : ‘who moved my cheese’, ’seven habits of highly effective people’, ‘how to get closer to god’ – the likes of which make even the bible look good.

You must be wondering where the classics figure into all this ? Dickens ? Kafka ? Gogol ? Conrad ? They don’t.

This illiteracy is reflected in the media where moving images with background noise and a few simplistic words comprise a news report. A mere shake of hands is trumpeted as a sign of hope and comparisons are drawn to the middle east process – all this with little historical analysis or self examination of their own history.

It is the same media and the intellectuals who lament a country going down the drain. But did a nation ever really exist? What they really worry about is not their nation but the loss of their little comfortable consumer realities (Oh…What would we do without supermarkets?).