My literary palaver in Thika and a bright band of literary angels

Writers and readers alike, literati of every shade, began this week on a profoundly gloomy note.

The final departure, on Monday, of our beloved diminutive giant, Yusuf Dawood, a surgeon with a pen, and writer with a scalpel, is an incalculable loss to all of us. I will, however, not write extensively on Daktari Dawood, my personal friend too, today for two main reasons.

One is that many of my worthy colleagues have written and are writing about him and his work in this very publication and other media.

Secondly, I had already decided to tell you about two experiences I had in Thika last Saturday that uplifted my literary spirits and strongly reassured me of Kenya’s literary future.

Indeed, now with hindsight, I think my Thika adventures were telepathic favours to buoy me up against the sorrow of losing Yusuf Dawood. I am now also seeing the young people with whom I interacted in Thika as worthy inheritors of Dawood’s great literary tradition.

My main assignment in Thika was to deliver an inaugural lecture for the Kendeka Literary Prize for African Literature.

The sponsors and organisers of this annual short story competition, first won by a Nigerian writer in 2020, noticed me when I congratulated, in this column, Scholastica Moraa, the 2022 Kenyan winner of the prize.

I also complimented the Kendeka Prize founders on their initiative. I related this to the late Chinua Achebe’s observation that only African prizes should really matter to African writers. But African prizes cannot matter unless they are created and awarded, hence my support and enthusiasm for enterprises like the Kendeka.

New African writers

Conceived by author Andrew Maina and his like-minded colleagues, the prize aims at encouraging new African writers by assessing their unpublished short stories, awarding the best among them and publishing them together with the others that make the shortlist.

An anthology, titled I’m Listening, from the first editions of the prize, is already out and is due for launch soon. To enhance the literary value of the prize, the sponsors have now added the feature of the “Kendeka Lecture”, to be delivered alongside their other activities. For my many literary sins, I was chosen to give its inaugural edition.

I must confess that, even for a battle-hardened campaigner like me, this was quite a daunting task. Add to that the kind offer of the august Mount Kenya University’s offer to host the lecture at their magnificent Mwai Kibaki Convention Centre at their Thika campus.

I had heard a lot of good things about MKU, and I knew several of my former colleagues and students who had joined its academic force, but this was my first visit to their campus.

Another first for me was that I was delivering an “inaugural” version of what was obviously envisaged as a long series of such lectures, stretching into the hazy future. How could I set a reliable tone?

Latching on to the literary foundation of the Kendeka prize, I went to basics and pitched my lecture as “Why literature matters and literary prizes matter”.

This enabled me to share with my keen and largely youthful audience my perennial concerns with literature, relating them to the current cultural and educational trends and challenges.

I raised literature, once again, as the flag for all the humanities, without which we cannot run a civilised society, regardless of the strident hue and cry for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).

I revisited my core definition of literature as a form of creative communication using language as its medium. I reminded my fellow literati that creative or “artistic” communication is not dreamy, fanciful self-indulgence.

Intellectual process

Rather, it is a tough, conscious and deliberate intellectual process comprising close observation, incisive imagination and precise expression.

This kind of literature matters because, like all good communication, it connects people (writers and readers) through the path of message, purpose, medium (language) and feedback. Then I said that literature matters because it tells stories.

Stories matter because they are records and exchanges of experience. The storing, recalling and sharing of experiences is what enables us to live and develop as individuals and as societies. Humans are a storytelling species, but storytelling is not a luxury or pastime.

Lived or direct experiences and narrated or vicarious experiences, like those in literature, are all stories and guidelines on how to live. The richer your storehouse of stories and the smarter your ability to evaluate them and apply them to situations, the more successful you are likely to be in your journey through life.

As if in a practical answer to my lecturing antics, Scholastica Moraa, the reigning laureate of the Kendeka Prize, was also in Thika, to launch an anthology of poems authored by her and three friends of hers.

Dreams and Demons, published by Nib Point, an emerging entity in Kisumu City, impressed me with not only its production quality but also the elegance, maturity and literary competence of these young women.

Those of you close to me know how hard I am to please, especially when it comes to verse. I have very strict expectations of anything claiming to be a “poem”. My criteria include sound, symmetry, precision, economy, figurativeness and structure.

I also expect sentiment (genuine feeling, not sentimentality) and social concern. I am glad to say, without generalisation, that the quartet of contributors to Dreams and Demons, Scholastica Moraa, Winnie Madoro, Anyango Nyar Aketch and Emily K. Millern, come closer to my expectations of good verse than most “poetry” I have recently read.

Incidentally, the launch, at a leafy country resort on the banks of the Chania, also struck me with the youth of the participants, both the authors and their guests and supporters. Hardly anyone there was even half my age! Seeing such young people seriously and competently involved in literary activities lifted my heart.

There are many deserving hands for us elders to pass the literary torches and batons into.

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and [email protected]