poetry

The centre of Nairobi is a very ripe onion. Layer upon layer upon layer upon layer. A tourist can “do” Nairobi in a couple of hours. Start at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, drive past the houses of parliament, with the cursory nod to JK’s tomb, up Langata road to the Nairobi Safari Walk where in 45 mins a lady in cultured tones (through pre-recorded messages shared via loudspeakers) will challenge you to think of the Hyena as a friend not a foe, the obligatory visit to the Maasai Market for a bunch of spears you will never be able to get past airport security, rounded off with a meal at the Nairobi Java Coffee house before getting completely “plastered” on Dawa at Carnivore. That is the top most layer, the one most sensible people throw away before cooking with the onion. You can peel and strip and peel, layer upon layer in this magnificent city.

The Goethe-Institute, Nairobi and Alliance Française de Nairobi in association with the Kenya Cultural Centre have come together to remind us of several missing layers that in the same movement take us back to our traditional roots while also revealing our future to us.

For the past three days I have been watching Kiswahili (with some English and little bit of German) performance literature at Jukwaani! – a four day festival of literature as performance. Kiswahili poets and storytellers from up and down the East African coast holding fort in the cultural embassies of German and France, surrounded by an amazing traffic jam of Japanese, Korean, British and yes German and French cars, Nairobi is now spelt cosmopolitan.

A session called “Swahili Poetry” is simply magnificent. Moderated by Prof. Abdulaziz we hear from Ahmed Nassir, Ahmed Sheik Nabhany, Amira S. Msellem, Mahmoud Mau and Abdilatif Abdalla. What you see is not what you see. A poem about a family feud offers lessons on fighting corruption for example. Globalisation, infidelity and yes even love are all dealt with. However the strengths of classic Kiswahili poetry are also it weaknesses for how much influence does this poetry have on the people, does it move them, does it influence them, does it bring about changes? Is the message to hidden, in this age of instant communication who has the time to search for the hidden message of each piece? It was widely acknowledged that the greatest challenge facing the Kiswahili poets is that very few people know of them, their work is hard to find, making it next to impossible to engage in their discussions. After a couple of hours of feeling very irrelevant and inadequate it was good to see relevance again. If there ever was a problem that blogging was created to solve then this is it, giving people with a lot to say but nowhere to say it a place where they can say it, in their own words without relying on anyone.

These are voices that need to be heard. Take Abdilatif Abdalla for example, one of the most well known Kiswahili poets and scholars. Abdalla holds the inevitable distinction of being probably the first Kenyan post independence political prisoner as Kenyatta felt it fit to throw him in jail for sedition for his pamphlet, “Kenya Twendapi?“. He was incarcerated in Kamiti, Kenya’s most notorious prison. He shared with the audience that his three years in solitary confinement there rather than break him simply strengthen his convictions. Those convictions and the convictions of all the Kiswahili poets, storytellers, and artists can be shared and distributed rather easily through blogs. Like I keep saying, blogging is the most African thing you can do online today.

Jukwaani! Is a project by Goethe-Institut and Alliance Française in association with the Kenya Cultural Center. It is a joint initiative supported by the special fund for cultural projects established by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of both France and Germany created on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty sealing reconciliation and friendship between the two countries. The festival is held in conjunction with the conference “Swahili poetry in performance” organized by Bordeaux and Bayreuth universities and IFRA at IFRA-BIEA.

For other perspectives on Jukwaani! check out Harvesttone and the Professor.