The earliest—and arguably the best—idea I have encountered on how to stop bad behaviour came from one of my teachers. She suggested that, if you really wanted to scare people into quitting tobacco smoking, you just needed to compose a powerful poem on the dangers of turning your mouth and nostrils into chimneys.
That you need to summon fearful images of the kind that Caribbean poet and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and Irish Romanticist—later modernist poet—William Butler Yeats compose(d). Or to ‘drop’ on the cigarette packet the ethereal rhymes of modern-day Nairobi spoken-word artists, dozens of whom lit the blogosphere at the height of the Gen-Z protests in June this year. More of that later.
I found the suggestion of using literary art to shape behaviour plausible because many of us started smoking tobacco through the same hypnotising power of poetry and advertising. Boys looked forward to the public movies every third and 17th day of the month.
A truck on whose back was mounted a canvas screen – onto which the movie was projected - would make its way to Runyenjes town in Embu, and on other dates to other urban centres. In between marvelling at the courageous antics of Rambo, Chuck Norris, Terence Hill, and Bud Spencer, we were inundated with moving adverts where ace footballers scored multiple goals after smoking the brand of cigarettes being advertised. These adverts made smoking appear so cool that some girls would not have given you as much as a second thought if you were not "man enough" to pull at a packet-plus of sticks every day.
So, yeah, that’s the power of poetry. The good and sad thing about poetry is that it cuts both ways. It can be both a force for good and the curse of a nation. The worst human pogroms have been perpetrated by people who used the gift of the gab, well-crafted writing, and other literary stylistics to push their agenda. From the days of colonialism to the digital age we are living in, the antagonistic duality of the power of oratory is there for all to see.
In the colonial days, some members of African communities would be singing war songs in the forest, while another group was lulled into docility and subservience by the “praise and worship” songs they had learned under European missionaries.
Fast forward to Gen-Zs. Today, social media platforms have showcased an outpouring of youth talent on a scale many of us did not know existed in Kenya. From West Pokot to North Eastern, TikTokers have honed their craft to the level where big brands are approaching them to push their products in the villages, a phenomenon further fuelled by the upsurge in e-commerce.
These youths can go beyond making people laugh by imitating politicians, satirising stock characteristics among dominant ethnic communities, and other forms of entertainment, to help push the national agenda.
Think about tourism, health, and other areas where messaging is required for government policy to work. If we identified community influencers from the blogosphere, we could end up striking the double blow of harnessing talent for the common good and creating thousands of jobs for the youth. Even as we think of ways to raise tax from every stream, including the digital space, let us also come up with creative ways of harnessing creativity as a force for the greater good.
For the alternative is quite stark. If we do not provide a conducive environment for this outpouring of youth talent to thrive, some evil schemes could take advantage of the high levels of unemployment to marshal that talent towards nefarious ends. Already, politicians have started scouting for talent among Gen Zs, especially those who have already made a name for themselves on social media.
This was after the politicos realised that the crowds they pay shifty campaigners to mobilise ahead of poll rallies are nothing compared to the huge followership these self-made social media artists command.
Imagine if we organised for the top 50 writers in Kenya to sample the hospitality of the best 50 hotels in the country. Then the pieces they come up with are published alongside pictures that show the best of places in Kenya by the best photographers. You just need to put such a magazine or coffee book in the lounges of all airports and major hotels so that tourists can see what else they missed on their current itinerary.
Simultaneously, the huge following these writers command could be directed toward sampling the scenery and attractions so foregrounded, and the upshot would be a win-win for the Treasury, the art industry and the hospitality industry. Methinks it’s a more effective and worthwhile strategy than flying battalions of Africans to stand at exhibition stands (pun violently intentional) and cream off per diem on foreign junkets.
