‘Nairobians’ are atypical of Kenyan readership

By ABENEA NDAGO

Purely on account of prejudice, there are books I cannot touch, even if you gave them to me free of charge. I form my opinion of a person’s literary capabilities after reading a few of their works, short or long. And once I have made up my mind, I do not care whether you win both the Jomo Kenyatta Literature Prize and the Burt Award for ten consecutive years.

I have learned to view those literary prizes with three eyes since the submission process is never completely watertight and anonymous. I think some of the winning entries are just toads with fewer warts than the rest.

The approach is weak in many ways. It ignores the well-known fact that perfection (specifically of the literary type) is often the child of constant practice, almost on a daily basis. You also risk sending future gold into the dustbin.

We should regret that injustice. But even as we do, I must quickly observe that our world is bursting with gems of books, which we need to consume before we die, even if Ecclesiastes warns us against such exertion.

That is why I urge all Kenyan readers to dismiss, with a wave of the hand, any ‘pretender-writers’ who are bent on eating into our valuable time with books that are featherweight in terms of ideas. And I’m afraid much of that is found in Nairobi.

If you listen to what inspires others to write in Kenya, you laugh in the same way Lawino promises you will, should you see ‘the beautiful one’ called Clementine in Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino (1966).

I may be unfair to Nairobi, but I think our capital is a chimera city. And I do not see how its writers can be anything different, their biggest headache being how to deal with a lion-goat-serpent setting in their writing.

I have come to learn that 34 per cent of Kenyans live in Nairobi, and of this number, 71 per cent dwell in informal settlements where we speak mother-tongue and eat traditional food on a daily basis.

FRIVOLOUS

So, you see how wrong and conflated — even selfish — you are to insist only on a certain tiny class of Nairobi in your writing, and project the same as official Kenyan literature?

Nairobi is never wise; it is frivolous and petty. The city has been in existence since 1899, and in its 115 years of existence, Nairobi has never invented a single proverb. What it has in over-abundance are things called mchongoano. And it can take you a whole year, but still you will not have succeeded in convincing me that such things are not just dark abuse and pure gossip (affinities they share with a language called Sheng).

No. I would be surprised if Kenyan readers wasted their precious time on things of that sort. I do not know how newspapers conduct their research on the books Kenyans read, but I can see that serious readers do not waste a minute of their time on such books, even in the face of the most trumpet-like advertising.

Our readers only lose me the moment they begin nurturing the dangerous idea that books authored by Kenyans are meant to be read for free. As I have seen in past classes, cheeks sag as soon as you suggest that texts by Kenyan writers are to be bought.

If a book called Nairobi Cold, for instance bores me to death, then I should reject it even if its author threw it at me for free. Disobeying that logic only implies that the reader was an incorrigible liar all along.

They buy European books mainly because the Kenyan middle class is western in culture, and suggest that books by Kenyan authors be given to them for free, probably because much of individual wealth in Kenya was plundered. Such dishonest readers impoverish their authors in broad daylight.