The September issue of National Geographic is dedicated to Africa and features a large article on Nairobi penned by the friend of SLS and permanent SLS-Russia and SLS-Kenya faculty member Binyavanga Wainaina. The article is superb and the photographs are fascinating: http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0509/feature2/index.html

Six Kenyan writers and one Ugandan writer--all Kwani? contributors--participated in the Summer Literary Seminars-Russia 2005.

Kwani? contributor Uwem Akpan's short story "An Ex-Mas Feast"--first published in Kwani? 2--was reprinted in the New Yorker's Debut Fiction Issue, June 13th & 20th, 2005.

Brian Chikwaya of Zimbabwe won The Caine Prize for African Writing, 2004 after the judges were locked in a four-hour session deciding between him and Kenya's Parselelo Kantai.

Brian won with his story, 'Seventh Street Alchemy', from Writing Still, Weaver Press while Parselelo's story, Comrade Lemma and the Black Jerusalem Boys' Band, was recently published by Kenya's only literary journal, kwani? 02.

Parselelo is one of Kenya's leading investigative journalists, and the editor of Ecoforum. His Ecoforum cover story, A Deal in the Mara, has thrown light on the business practices in the Mara Conservancy. His short story, "Speak Kingoso Please, This is The Mayor's Parlour", was published in kwani? 01, the first edition of Kenya's literary journal. Clearly, this is a young man with rare and diverse talent in writing. He was recently awarded a Reuters fellowship at Oxford University for a year.

For the third year in a row, a Kenyan writer is one of five writers selected by the Caine Prize for African Writing's prestigious panel of judges. In 2002, Binyavanga Wainaina, won the award for his story, Discovering Home. It was the first time in the history of the award that the judges decision was unanimous. Binyavanga came home and founded kwani?, a unique literary journal, with the aim of publishing the myriad of talented writers frustrated in their efforts at publication. In 2003, Yvonne Adhiambo Awuor won with her story, Weight of Whispers, published in kwani? 01.

The other nominees were Doreen Baingana of Uganda for 'Hunger', from the Sun Magazine; Monica Arac de Nyeko of Uganda for 'Strange Fruit', from Cook Communication, online magazine AuthorMe and Chika Unjgwe of Nigeria for 'The Secret', from online literature magazine Open Wide.

The writers selected are currently in London, attending a busy programme of events. This includes a reading of their works at the Royal Overseas League, a symposium at London University's Institute of English studies and a colloquium for the British Council. The cash prize for the award is a cool Ksh1.5m. The winner of the Prize was announced on Monday 19th July at the annual award dinner in Oxford, at the Bodleian Library.

Hongera, Parselelo, you have done us proud!

June Wanjiru Marketing Manager Kwani Trust

REVIEWS:

Where Celebrities Stage Exits By Tony Mochama

Early last month, two major international stars concluded their illustrious careers in St Petersburg, the Russian city that is fast gaining a reputation as the last stop for singing stars before they blaze away into posterity.

Sir Paul McCartney performed his curtain call show at the Palace Square in the city centre, while Cherilyn Sarkisian, better known as Cher, did her swan-song at the Ice Palace at the Petersburg suburbs, both to ecstatic crowds, perhaps because of their fame, more probably because endings and goodbyes are always that much more poignant.

"We love you, Paul," chanted the McCartney crowds when the former Beatle made his appearance.

"Privet, Piter! Privet, rebyata (Hi Petersburg, hi guys)" Sir Paul, 62, answered in Russian, obviously moved, before proceeding to move the 65,000 strong crowd with All My Loving, Yesterday, Let It Be, Hey Jude and other Beatlenik songs.

"It was like a prayer," Kolya Vasin, 59, told Society, ‘a final prayer!’

A few days later, it was the sexagenarian Cher who was giving her final encore in St Petersburg’s Ice Palace, where many a Russian czar and their royal entourages whiled the winters away before the Bolsheviks made them meet their ice-chilling ends through executions. Cher even shed a tear during her farewell show, sighing, "It’s been a fantastic voyage, a great life."

Larissa Lusta, 24, enthused: "Isn’t she fabulous?" Then went on to answer her own question, anyway, "Cher is a striking and powerful woman, and proves that even grannies can be very cool."

Not everyone was enthralled by the two performers though. Mikhail Piotrovski, the director of the famous Heritage Museum just round the corner from the Palace Square issued a press statement calling for the banning of rock concerts near the venue."It ( McCartney concert) was horrible. The loud music set off museum alarms and the vibrations had plaster falling off the walls. The Hermitage has survived even world wars, but this Beatle’s show had the noise level of fighter jet-planes. These concerts must be stopped." Another celebrity hater was Juliano Kapua, an opera director, who told us: "Cher is so unattractive I wish I’d used my money better by going to watch Niakroshus’s production of MacBeth instead." Then, almost as an afterthought, "She is Armenian, though, and that’s close enough to being Russian. So she can’t be all bad."

Why would world celebrities choose St Petersburg as the stage for their swansongs, though? Alexei Arkadi, a local pop commentator, says, "Like everything in this city, that too remains a mystery. But think about it. Where else would you rather post your farewell postcard from?"

So that it is almost a relief to see a poster that promises that, the following week, Pink, the young pop-star, will be in St Petersburg to perform, complete with sex dolls that resemble rival diva Christine Aguilera.

For in a city of goodbyes, it is nice to believe in life afterwards, in a place where many stars have come to take leave.

-- from Society, The East-African Standard This review posted 8 August 2004

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The Stone Hills of Maragoli by Stanley A. Gazemba

Review by Richard Bartlett, African Review of Books

Having spent a week at the London Book Fair and seminars related to books and Africa I realise how much work has to be done. Not just when it comes to Africa, but especially when it comes to enlightening ignorant and patronising Europeans as to what our continent has to offer. Too often the debates veered away from literature and got stuck on literacy. There is no arguing that literacy levels in most of the countries on the continent are less than ideal, but when discussion on the need for literacy leads to the conclusion that it is not worth speaking of literature, Africa is being done a serious injustice.

Then along comes a gardener, yes he finished school before dedicating his working hours to "tending grass and flower shrubs", who creates a tragedy of such dimensions, such variety, and originality that it should remind us of how serious that injustice is. What makes The Stone Hills of Maragoli so special is that it has no pretensions about attempting to address issues of modernity, of city life, of "clash of cultures", of the rural-urban divide or other themes that are too often the substance of popular African novels. Yet the issues it deals with are as immediate, even if they are beyond the gaze, beyond the limits of the urbanity that attracts most writers.

"There are constant diversions that are the reality of lives lived in the search for something beyond subsistence"

Stanley Gazemba has situated his novel in rural Kenya, in a village whose most important employer is the local tea estate. The central character is Ombima whose dream is to save enough money to build a house of brick with a roof of corrugated iron, so he and his family can move out of their hut. That dream is far off as the novel opens with Ombima resorting to stealing fruit and vegetables from his employer's fields just to feed his family.

From there we are introduced to the quotidian drudge of life as a labourer, where tending the vegetable garden is a job to be relished because it saves the back-breaking work of tea picking in the heat of the day. We are introduced to the many methods used by the tea pickers to avoid that final arduous task of taking the harvest to market. But more important than the nature of the work are the lives of the myriad characters who live in Maragoli. In this aspect, Gazemba has created an epic in that we are presented with a panorama of characters who add numerous layers to a story which charts individual idiosyncracies that comprise a community. This is not an introverted narrative of one person's trials and tribulations - it tells of an entire community shut off from the advances of globalisation due to one simple fact of their lives: poverty. This is life on the fringes, on the periphery where people cannot see beyond the stone hills - not because they lack vision, but simply because they lack the means of disrupting the cycle of poverty.

There is Ombima's wife Sayo and his two children Saliku and Aradi, who revel in their first trip to the nearest town, and its fairground, travelling a matatu taxi for the first time in the week before Christmas. Ombima's best friend and colleague Ang'ote falls in love with Rebecca, a woman much older than him, and they hide their relationship out of fear of both being ostracised and teased. Divorced from the daily grind of village life are Madam Tabitha, a teacher, and her husband Andimi, a businessman who owns the tea plantation which forms the focus of the villagers' lives.

Gazemba takes us on a tour not just of the village but of the events that comprise the lives of a community that lives on the periphery of the visible world. There is one story which weaves its way through the narrative, of the labourer who somewhat unwillingly begins an affair with the lady of the estate (which ends in a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions), but what makes the novel so appealing are the constant diversions that are the reality of lives lived in the search for something beyond subsistence. The dilemma of squandering savings on spoiling the children with a Christmas excursion, meaning the new roof will have to wait. The girl who comes down in the night with some inexplicable illness and dies soon afterwards, and it makes sense that we never know what caused her death - the doctors and nurses who treat the child never tell the parents what their daughter suffers from, and there are no expectations for such knowledge - it makes no difference and means nothing because the family did all they could and suffer no less for this absence of neat categorisation that comes with the privilege of education.

There are rats which live in the thatch roof and the cattle are kept in the kitchen at night, the men squander their earnings in the local beer hall, there are arguments between couples over matters of finance, of bringing up children and of trust. Among all of this the affair between Ombima and Madam Tabitha develops as Madam becomes all the more demanding and the man begins to turn his unwelcome situation to his own advantage. Ombima discusses his dilemma with his close friend who commiserates and then uses this information to advance his own position. Thus betrayal on a number of fronts reaches its climax as tragedy on the stone hills of Maragoli as the Christmas procession passes in jubilation below.

Gazemba, the self-confessed gardener who has published many short stories, has created, in The Stone Hills of Maragoli, a work which reflects this expertise in shorter fiction. It is as if Gazemba has woven together a number of stories and crafted a novel - but it is remarkable because it works so well. It is powerful because it offers no pretense of 'great' literature. It tells an ordinary tale of love, celebration, betrayal and revenge, but places all this in a context that is at once familiar for its emotional impact and unfamiliar for its cultural environment. It is an easy novel to read, but disconcerting at the same time for readers who have not experienced life in Africa beyond the city limits. Gazemba gives no obvious clues to slot the story into a particular environment - the cars, telephones, architecture, shops give few hints as to whether this is set in 1950 or 2000. That being said, however, this is undoubtedly a novel of post-colonial Kenya. It is a comment on how the lives of ordinary people have progressed but changed little, on how slowly the trickle-down effect takes place when it comes to good governance and wealth management. But it is told by an insider who has an eye for detail and a twist of phrase that frees the characters, and their environment, from being cast in a mould of indifference Gazemba succeeds in creating a great book because he does not attempt to abuse this dichotomy of un/familiarity to appeal to a particular type of reader. He has written an epic tragedy of Kenya that illustrates how far modernity has yet to go. And how easy it is to commit an injustice with a world of good intentions.

The Stone Hills of Maragoli 2002 Stanley A. Gazemba Acacia Publishers, Nairobi, Kenya 267 pages

The Stone Hills of Maragoli was awarded the Jomo Kenyatta prize for Kenyan literature in 2003.

Richard Bartlett is the co-editor of the African Review of Books

http://www.africanreviewofbooks.com/

This review posted 20 April 2004

FEATURE

Odd theme for an off-the-wall show, by Tony Mochama

M. J. Gitau isn’t a genius – but neither is he a crank or a quack. When he recently held an art exhibition in Nairobi, it wasn’t to display the usual paintings or photographs. Instead, he had newspaper and magazine cuttings, especially the Financial Times, all stuck on carton, framed and hung up carefully at a private show he held in, of all places, an empty office in Hughes Building.

As anyone who watched the film A Beautiful Mind knows, those are the actions of a mind dangerously in imbalance with itself. So, is MJ schizophrenic?

"No," he asserts. "Sometimes, things may not be what we think they are." The first picture of his series featuring a tree dressed up as a woman is Not What We Think It Is. It is followed by Obvious, but Intrusive, where a model cups her bare breasts in her palms, followed by one featuring a woman with an ample behind and labelled, Don’t Watch My ***!

Gitau has cut the picture of a woman on all fours into two with the message: Equals Divided Attention!

His theme then slides into feminism, with pictures of sizzling butch women in male ties (to show "She-male" power, perhaps), complete with the British High Commission’s controversial "Bottom-line" advert in the picture to show a "She-male sitting on men kind," before he moves on to the, literally, fatalism of seduction.

Again, MJ resorts to the medium of popular advertisement. Kiss FM’S controversial ad when it began, showing a stripping woman saying "The Music is so hot I need to take my clothes off" is followed by warming pictures of Cartier watches ("Start counting your days") and a SARS conference to, bizarrely, warn against the HIV/Aids threat.

Oddly enough, MJ’s last and favourite picture of the show is one of Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton arm-in-arm, but to him it shows "aspirations" whereas one would have thought of it as naturally belonging in the "feminist ambitions realised" section. So, what inspired Gitau, an unabashed idealist, to put together this odd show?

"I am 26, so I did these 26 pictures, which all have a similar theme," he says. "When I am 27, I’ll do another 27 ... All the way to 120!" Talk about idealism.

Similar theme? Perhaps, with a little stretch of the imagination. The challenge for this idealistic artist will be to, someday, actually create the art, as opposed to merely creating continuous captioning to tell the tale.

from: http://www.eastandard.net/society/features/feat4.htm