By now, we agree that the literature scene in Kenya is thriving. We agree that it was problematic how we all grew up reading stories about white children who ate tarts and pies for tea and had adventures in the snow. We agree that the people who keep telling us that Kenyans don’t read are wrong, plain and simple. And we agree that this is an exciting time for literature lovers, what with all the developments that allow us to have no excuse for not reading.
Every week, there is some event happening in town where readers and writers come together to have conversations about anything and everything. Book swaps and book drives are being held much more frequently than before. Books are being sold online and on the streets. Book clubs meetings are a legit form of hangout. Everybody has a blog (or two) or follows a blog (or twelve). The way I see it, it has never been such a cool thing to be a reader. Being a book-lover is cool these days. Our time to shine has come.
Perhaps, the most important thing about the current reading culture is that the stories we read are now stories about us. They are stories we can identify with, stories in which the characters sound like us and look like us. They are our stories. And now we are all saving coins so that we can afford books by African authors. Inama Bookshops serve us well but you’d be bending over those dusty rows of cookbooks and romance novels a long time before you stumbled upon a book written by an African author. Even harder would be looking for a book by a Kenyan. Not that we go there looking for books by Kenyans anyway.
And right there is our problem. A problem that nobody seems to find worthy of the effort needed to solve it. Heck, it’s a problem we don’t even talk about enough, if at all. Why aren’t we interested in reading books written by fellow Kenyans?
I was 12 years old the first time I read a book by a Kenyan author that I genuinely enjoyed. I can’t even remember its title or the author’s name; only that it was about Martin and Patrick and a problem with a drug ring. I read that book four times before I lent it to someone and never saw it again. I know that if I were to come across it now, ten years later, I would read it again. It was that good. So quality is not the problem. I don’t think it is.
Despite the conversations happening about why Kenyan writers are not featured in various literature shortlists in Africa, I don’t believe that our writers are bad writers. We enjoy their work online, after all. And while we struggle to keep up with books being published by writers from western Africa and southern Africa, we don’t seem to care as much about what is coming out of our own people. How many of us can say that they have read a book by a Kenyan this year? And I’m not talking about Ngugi wa Thiong’o or Meja Mwangi. No. We have had so many writers coming up since them, and while we respect their work, we must wonder about the stories about our present.
Publishers in Kenya focus their efforts on educational material and of course we protest about it. But it is a business, they work with what works. Some time back, around the time Charles Chanchori’s story about an Uber driver was all up in everybody’s timeline, I read an article about how willing (or unwilling) Kenyans are to pay for what they read. We love what our writers produce for free, whether on Facebook posts or blogs. But not many of us would go to the lengths of paying for that content, no matter how much we learn from it or enjoy it. If our publishers were to put more effort into Kenyan books, would we buy them?
There are a few questions we need to deal with. Do we secretly (or not so secretly) feel that the stories that come out of Kenya are not as good as the rest of the African literature we consume? Is it simply another case of Kenyans loving foreign things, like foreign music, foreign clothes, foreign brands? Are our writers just not working hard enough? Why don’t we buy and read our own books?
I recently found out about Nyana Kakoma, a Ugandan writer, and one of the artists who will be featured in this year’s Storymoja Festival. Nyana is the founder of Sooo Many Stories, a platform that promotes Ugandan literature. Nyana came up with the concept because she felt that Ugandan literature wasn’t getting as much love as it deserved, and she wanted to do something that would change that. Even on the website, it is communicated clearly that the stories she publishes on her platform are written by Ugandans; people of other nationalities can contribute only by writing about Ugandan writing. She gets it. She understands that the stories of her people matter, and is determined that they will be heard.
In fact, the whole thing reminded me of another Ugandan writer, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (author of the novel, Kintu), who, in a recent literature gig at the Goethe Institute in Nairobi, said that it is important for African writers to write their environments. She reminded us that as it is, we don’t need to have gone to New York to know what it looks like. We have read so many stories about landscapes in other countries that we already know them. What about our own? Again, she gets it.
As much as we enjoy literature from the rest of the continent, we seem to be missing a point somewhere. We are a part of the continent, and when we talk about African literature, we must also be able to talk about Kenyan literature. We need to read about our country and about our cities. We need our current way of life to be available for the rest of the world to marvel at. We need to read more about people who speak in a mix of English and Kiswahili and Sheng. We need to see our schools, our childhoods, our politics, our food, our matatus in the books we read.
There is, then, one more thing we need to agree on. That our stories matter. That our stories have a place. That we have no business appreciating the stories of other people if we cannot appreciate our own. That our children will be clamouring for books written by Kenyans, and that we will buy them because we will know that it is good for them to see themselves when they read. Until we do, until we agree, we will continue to see an incomplete version of ourselves in the books we read: people who look like us but are not us.
