Kwani Sunday Salon: An overview
Photo Credit: Paul Munene/ Kwani Trust.
The day is bright and inviting, surprisingly hot given the endless cold weather Nairobi’s been having, and perfect for sitting under the Arabian themed tents or lounging on the haystacks before the stage in Kwani Trust’s cosy backyard. Mingling amongst the colourful minds of Nairobi’s literature loving community, one’s mind feels enriched. Even before the show begins, it’s a Sunday well spent.
The music fades and Ogutu Muraya starts to tell the true story of Hussein Warutere a 1940s rickshaw operator who, after using the ‘white only’ toilets, was beaten up and hauled off to jail for thirteen years for ‘being a mau mau conspirator and trying to plant a bomb in the loo”.
Ogutu brings Warutere and the situation to life in a hilarious exercise in story telling that leaves the audience in stitches while educating us on the ridiculous and dangerous realities of that period of time. Using only his words, his voice and his gestures Muraya travels across time making an important point rarely made today: colonialism was not a joke or completely in the past, but that does not mean we cannot laugh about it.
2013 Etisalat Prize for LiteratureNext on stage we have readings from the three writers shortlisted for the NoViolet Bulawayo, Yewande Omotoso and Karen Jennings. The three wildly talented ladies discussed important themes making significant points in their readings, covering language, family heirlooms, and politics respectively. A rapt audience listens and responds to the excerpts and in a short space of time we encounter three different worlds and three different perspectives, all of which could have been our own.
KIU gets on stage next, filling the small space with vivid melodies that elevate the spirits of the people gathered at Kwani in an acoustic set featuring their three powerful voices, a djembe and a guitar.
Okwiri Oduor and Kwani? managing editor Billy Kahora, both shortlisted for the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing, are on stage next with excerpts from their phenomenal short stories My Father’s Head and The Gorilla’s Apprentice. The depth with which each describes moments and spaces familiar in some respect to many of us is astounding, and the audience shows its appreciation through silence and applause.
Finally the riveting Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi gets on stage with Kingwa Kamencu for a conversation about her work regaling the audience with insightful and hilarious descriptions and explanations for her work. She recently launched her debut novel in Kampala, Kintu, published by Kwani Trust, which she explains was initially inspired by her father’s mental illness. Blending Ganda oral tradition, forms of myth, folktale and history, the novel Kintu follows the misfortunes of the Kintu clan over 250 years.
“The novel was born out of a frustration at the way the western media portrayed Africa as madness, I wanted to play with this perception of madness.” Nansubuga explains in her welcoming Ugandan accent that she writes to the girls she went to school with, “this helps me keep it simple, something they can read.” She goes on to emphasise the amount of research necessary when telling the history of a people, especially if this history is recorded mostly in the oral tradition of recording the past.
Some more sultry melodies from KIU, who got the audience off their feet and dancing to some of their own compositions and beautiful renditions of Tracy Chapman and Jackson Five, and the audience is left to mingle. In the relaxed and animated atmosphere at the Kwani Trust grounds, writers and readers and other enthusiasts meet and speak amongst each other. The tradition of storytelling and creative sharing is alive for a weekend thanks to Kwani Trust, as the organisation continues to contribute to the growth and strength of literature in Nairobi.
Click here for some more images from the day.
By Ondi Madete
