you wake in the night
lips shaped
around a word that has not
yet
arrived

you close your eyes
wait
for it to grow into a poem

a poem that might breathe itself
into heat, form
into a body merged with yours

and if you entered that body
with every sense
ferocious, tender
nothing witheld

it would become a doorway
you could walk through
clear-eyed
find your country

see it truly
for the first time

and if you stood
in the sticky churning
red mud of your country
naked to the wind
the carrion

refused to shut
your eyes refused
to shut
your eyes

the word would arrive
cymbal in your mouth

sing history
back onto itself, sing tearing
whole again, sing altered
tally sheets clean, blood
back into bodies, blades
back to the forge

sing women
unviolated, infernos
downward to soil, crops
greenly skyward, sing it all
back to the beginning

in a language
none of us
has ever heard

have you ever woken
in the night? Reached
for the body beside you
as if its living warmth
could teach your hands
a new language?

in the dark
it is your own bare skin
the holy innocence of belly
unslashed
the fearless softness of breast
unraped
that whispers back to you

beloved

history is a million terrors
tides that have engulfed your country
you were never going to arrive
in time

it began before you
will not suck itself
back through the doorway
of your longing

and a doorway
is not a body
to wrap you
in the night

a body
is not a poem
that will teach
the language you yearn for

the poem you seek
will never
fit
grape-round, grape-sweet
into the shape your mouth makes
when you wake in the night
lips open, crying
for all we once believed
we knew

all we once imagined
our struggles had made safe

crying
for all those
choked, drowned
in the quicksands of history
the history we did not arrive
in time to drain

beloved

what remains
blossoms out of the skin
of your belly
nudges into your palm
on your breast
a pulse you fit words to
one by one

breathe
see
choose

truth
work
love

you will wake with your fingers
wrapped around them
breathe     see      choose

wake with them salty
under your tongue
truth       work        love

they hold your right of return
to the country of childhood
they map where you will stand
in the scorched erupting soil

breathe   see   choose

they are your passport
to morning

*COPYRIGHT SHAILJA PATEL, 2008, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

**Kenyan poet, playwright, theatre artist, Shailja Patel, is a member of Kenyans for Peace With Truth and Justice. Visit her at

**Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Dear Andile,

I hear your disappointment (Kenya: struggling for peace? - and share it.

Which is why I work with Kenyans for Peace WITH Truth and Justice. This is a coalition of over 40 legal, human rights, and governance organizations (including grassroots collectives representing the youth of Nairobi's slum areas), and individual Kenyans, such as myself. Prior to the elections, many of these organizations were already ferocious advocates for justice and equity for all Kenyans.

From the outset, KPTJ has insisted that any resolution of the crisis must address the injustices at all levels - historic, and current - which precipitated this catastrophe. KPTJ has categorically rejected calls for "peace" and "dialogue" from the parties who are really seeking violent suppression of the poorest and most disenfranchised Kenyans, so that "normal life" may resume for the wealthy.

KPTJ continues to offer an analysis of the violence in Kenya that traces each strand of violence to its source, and to hold the initiators of each form of violence accountable. We have challenged the excessive use of police violence, and "shoot to kill" orders, as well as uneven and selective policing that allowed Nairobi slums and marginalized areas of the country to burn, while police ringed an empty Uhuru Park to prevent peaceful assembly and protest. We have named the specific militia mobilised in Central, Rift Valley and Nyanza provinces, by individual political actors, and described their operations.

Relevant excerpts from KPTJ statements that speak to your concerns:

Calling for peace is not enough. We will only slide into civil war if we cannot see through this. We must resist the fear, name the problem accurately and desist from the build up to the declaration of a state of emergency, the deployment of the military or, worse, the usurpation of civilian governance by military governance. (Muthoni Wanyeki, ED, Kenya Human Rights Commission)

The cause of the current political crises in Kenya is two pronged. First, the poorly managed electoral process dealing with the Presidential Poll result. This acted as a trigger for the Second more entrenched and deep rooted problem that manifested itself in the explosion of violence of a magnitude unknown in post-independent Kenya. The simmering anger that was ignited is a result of a combination of historical injustices from the time of Kenya's colonial past, and the failure of successive governments of Kenyatta, Moi and Kibaki to address comprehensively the problems of inequality of its citizens.

In particular the challenges presented by landlessness, gender inequality, youth unemployment, the widening gap between the extremely wealthy and extremely poor citizens and the marginalization of some communities. Further political campaigns hyped up expectations of Kenyans in promising to redress these issues overnight whereas a structured and systematic approach with realistic time-lines is required to do so. Resolving the issues around truth and justice, particularly around issues of corruption and past violence also meant that the political class on both sides of the divide would have to give up their own in a "no sacred cows" policy which neither was/is willing to do.
(Njoki Ndungu, speaking before the US House of Representatives)

The KPTJ roadmap to a genuine resolution of the crisis includes:

- land redistribution
- transitional justice
- the implementation of a Marshall Plan for the huge segment of Kenyan youth who have been locked out of Kenya's much vaunted 6% economic growth in the past 5 years
- addressing the crisis of masculinity that has funnelled so many young Kenyan men towards militia activity and gender-based violence, to create a new model of Kenyan manhood based on gainful employment and equal relationships

The extent to which KPTJ threatens what you so aptly term "the abnormal normalcy of elite rule" is clearly demonstrated by the fact that our leaders and spokespeople have been labelled "traitors to their ethnicity", are receiving death threats, and have been warned that they are targets for assassination by the state machinery. They include:

Maina Kiai, Chairman of Kenya National Commission for Human Rights
· Muthoni Wanyeki, Executive Director of Kenya Human Rights Commission
· Haroun Ndubi, human rights lawyer, member of Kenya Domestic Observers Forum
· David Ndii, author of report on electoral irregularities
· Gladwell Otieno, Director of Africa Centre for Open Government
· Ndung'u Wainaina, staff member of National Convention Executive Council
· Njeri Kabeberi, Executive Director of the Centre for Multi-Party Democracy

To join the KPTJ mailing list, send an email to [email][email protected]

Thank you for caring deeply about truth and justice for all of us on this continent. And for holding us writers accountable to our words.

there are too many battles
and too many wounds
and I
I can't take it
I don't - want - to know

that Flora Tera
was force-fed feces
mixed with hair
torn from her head
only metres away
from her own home
in Meru
to stop her
running for office

I want to cover my ears and scream
to block out the voices that chant

that Piah Njoki had her eyes
gouged out by her husband
because she did not bear him
Your browser may not support display of this image.a son

I want to be free of the murder
that pounds in my brain

because Ann Njogu was beaten
kicked, dragged
down a flight of stairs
by the police
for daring to exercise
her constitutional right
to free speech

I want to pretend it won't happen to me

did you know that a woman is raped
every thirty minutes
every
thirty
minutes
in Kenya?

I am not a part of this bleeding
this scream
I don't want to challenge argue fight
construct confront negotiate
beg for change

do you hear me??

I want to retreat
to a room filled with
humans
shut out the night
the fear and the pain
hear myself stop
screaming inside

unravel my breathing ask
in a very
low
voice

dare I
claim the right Your browser may not support display of this image.
to a voice
that does not
scream?

Copyright Shailja Patel 2007.
*This poem was initially published in the WAJIBU JOURNAL Volume 22. No 4 (November - December 2007)

Bi Kidude, virtuoso queen of Taraab and Unyago music from Zanzibar, continues to dazzle audiences at the age of 95-plus. Shailja Patel saw her live for the first time at the recently-ended ZIFF Festival of the Dhow Countries.

I.

The woman planted a drum on the grass before her
twisted a soft worn khanga round her hips.
As if she was going to wash clothes, chop vegetables,
hike a child to her back to go to market.
None of us really paid any attention.

The woman harnessed her hips to the drum.
Chest-high, foot-in-diameter uyagi drum.
Placed it aslant between her straddled legs,
settled into position.
Sunken chest erect
shoulders, neck, at the ready,
mouth set over gaping gums,
khanga hiked up skinny strong legs.
Feet placed in the earth
like it was time
to do business.
Like she was going
to work.

Suddenly, we are on
Planet Kidude.
Where men scurry across the mat
place mics, arrange wires, jostle for camera views.
Where she ignores them all
because she has done this for eight decades,
before there were cameras, mics;
decades she hoisted her drum
trudged rich dirt,
the length and breadth of Tanzania
to perform.
Decades she fought off
terror, insults, mockery,
the soul-destroying silence
only the strongest fire survives,
decades she travelled deep and deeper
to the heart of her own rhythm.

This is Bi Kidude.
Virtuoso of Taraab, Uyagi,
woman who at ninety-five, has walked more miles
than most of us have driven,
claimed a lineage
of music rooted
in the lives of the powerless,
stories unfurled in language of street and market,
poetry buried in the bodies of women.

II.

I have never seen a woman ride a drum before
like a goddess rides a tiger
like creation rides the cosmos,
I have never seen a woman ride a drum like this -
I have never seen an artist
male or female,
anywhere across the globe
own their instrument,
like it grew out of their belly
was welded to their thighs.

III.

Then, there were the dancers.

The dancers moved lazily
dropped their cellphones, shook out their khangas
gold at their ears, their necks, their wrists
gold gleamed in their mouths.

The dancers slipped into movement
as a bhajia slips into hot oil
rises to the surface
starts to sizzle.

Now the dancers shake their hips
with precision of balance, control
potency of strength, of muscle isolation
Olympic gymnasts would envy.

They shake their hips
for all of us
who have been taught, coerced
to disown our bodies,
for all women whose bodies
have been stolen from them.

They thrust their succulent buttocks out
with democratic largesse:
tease the old woman in the black buibui,
taunt the white-boy, dreadlocked tourist
who feigns coolness behind his wraparound sunglasses
while I watch his neck turn scarlet
drip with sweat.

The dancers shake their hips for the waitresses
at Africa House hotel, caged
in the most godawful
ugly, cheap, confining,
sweat-producing black skirts, white shirts
to serve drinks to tourists in shorts and bikinis.
Because heaven forbid those who serve
should ever feel breeze on their skins,
heaven forbid those who serve
should move their hips and torsos
freely in clothes that flow,
colours that hum,
we might forget they are servants
we might
see them.

The dancers shake their hips for the women
those waitresses serve. Waxy-pale bikini-clad tourists
at Serena's poolside.
Women who check their bodies daily
for forbidden fat,
outlawed abundance of flesh.
Women of the tragic sisterhood
of liposuction, surgical alteration,
silent epidemic – thirty-thousand anorexia deaths per year.
Women taught that beauty
equals self-annihilation.

These dancers shake their hips
for the six-thousand girl children who today
were held down, legs spread, hands tied, gagged, blindfolded
tortured beyond screaming,
violated beyond horror,
circumcised
for the crime
of a clitoris.

They shake their hips for every woman
infected with HIV
by a man who valued her life
less than his gratification.

These women who circle Bi Kidude
as planets orbit the sun,
circle like temple snakes
sinuous panthers
the source where sound begins,
they are shaking the bounty
of women's bodies
back into the world.

Their hips and butts are saying
YESS!!
YES - to largeness that does not apologise.
YES - to power, knowledge that do not disguise themselves.
YES -to pleasure, claimed and vested
in our mortal beautiful bodies.

III

I will never fear aging again
because now I have heard Bi Kidude
belt out, at ninety-five, without a mic
tobacco-stained waves of sound
sandpapered down to coconut fibre
stronger than cables of steel.

I will never fear aging again
because now I have seen Bi Kidude
whose face has never touched
an anti-wrinkle cream,
an age-defying glycolic acid enzyme peel,
who knocks back whisky, cigarettes
for every ounce of moisturizer I consume,
hypnotise a hundred cameras.

I have felt the power of this woman's neck
her shoulder muscles
surge thunder down arm
to hand to drum;
generate more electricity
than ten Madonnas,
a hundred Fela Kutis with sixteen-piece bands,
take us back to the center of fertile creation
where sound begins.

IV.

I believe in Bi Kidude
the way I don't believe in god.

But if god were a ninety-five-year old, ebony black
Swahili woman,
who claims to be one hundred and twenty,
with a mouth full of broken and missing teeth
hands veined like banyan trees
a drum between her legs,
a kijiti between her defiant, all-knowing lips
a shillingi-mia-kumi note flapping out of her neckline;

if god chanted wickedly satirical shairi
about the dangers of the very deathstick
she sucks on;

if god embraced irony, lust, contradiction
heartbreak, imperfection,
if god flaunted her struggles like a velvet cape,
rearranged the atoms of the world
with the rhythm of her gut

then maybe I would believe
in that god.
That god who is only a name
for the genius in all of us
that makes us our own imam and prophet
our own divinity.

I would call the faithful to prayer:
Bomba Kidude! Kidude Saafi!

And they would holler back: Saafi!
They would holler back: Saafi!
They would holler back: SAAFI!

And we would all be

god.

* Shailja Patel is a Kenyan Indian poet and spoken word artist. Visit her at

* Background on Bi Kidude (Courtesy of Busara Promotions)

She is about 93 or something like that, but still she is the undisputed queen of taarab and unyago traditional music. Bi Kidude is still alive and kicking, touring Europe as well as Africa spreading taarab music. You might wonder what keeps this legendary barefoot diva strong and active despite her age, but as she says herself "everytime I sing I feel like a 14-year old girl!”

Bi Kidude's exact date of birth is unknown, much of her life story is uncorroborated, giving her an almost mythical status. Kidude started out her musical career in the 1920s, and learnt many of her songs with Siti bint Saad. She has performed in countries all around Europe, Middle East and Japan and finally recorded her first solo album ("Zanzibar", Retroafric Recordings) only six years ago, while in her mid-eighties. Recently she released a second locally-produced album ("Machozi ya Huba", Heartbeat Records) with her traditional drums influencing the burgeoning Zenji Flava local hip-hop scene in one of the most remarkable juxtapositions of musical style in modern 'World Music'.

Since fleeing a forced marriage at the age of 13 and escaping her homeland of Zanzibar, Bi Kidude has led an extraordinary and varied career as a drummer, singer, henna artist and natural healer. Her first journey was to the mainland of Tanzania, where she walked the length and breadth of the country barefoot. Fleeing a second unhappy marriage, Bi Kidude boarded a dhow, the ancient sailing vessels of the Swahili coast and journeyed north to Egypt where she became a renowned singer in the foremost dance bands of 1930's Egypt.

With renewed confidence and a new attitude to tradition (by now Kidude had thrown off her veil and shaved her head!) she returned, slowly to Zanzibar where she acquired a small clay house in the 1940's and settled down to life grounded in the traditional roots of society. Her role was as part of the 'Unyago' movement, which prepares young Swahili women for their transition through puberty and she excelled at the art of henna designing for young brides, manufacturing her own 'wanja' application from age old recipes fit 'to make a rainbow shine'. To this day, Bi Kidude performs traditional unyago music and is still the island's leading exponent of this ancient dance ritual, performed exclusively for teenage girls, which uses traditional rhythms to teach women to pleasure their husbands, while lecturing against the dangers of sexual abuse and oppression.

Her many talents were acknowledged by Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) at the second Festival of the Dhow Countries in 1999, when she was awarded "Lifetime Achievement Award for Contribution to the Arts."

Bi Kidude's is a remarkable story, one which challenges our perception of age, and of the role of women in Islam. She has never conformed to the media stereotype of a Muslim woman ever since she removed her veil. To see a ninety-something year old Muslim woman drink, smoke, flirt, dance and drum is a unique experience. To witness the transformation as she reverses the ageing process and changes from a wrinkled granny into a vital shining star is nothing short of revelationary.

For the past three months Bi Kidude has been setting the festivals and concert venues of Europe ablaze, where she has been receiving rapturous reviews of her performances with Zanzibar's illustrious Culture Musical Club taarab orchestra. With her humble manner, incredible stage personality, voice and strength, Bi Kidude is favourite with audiences wherever the group performs.

Midway through this tour, the whole of Zanzibar was thrown into shock and disarray when a rumour spread fast through the island that Bi Kidude had died. From the narrow streets of Stone Town to the barazas of N'gambo and throughout the villages this was the only topic of conversation as the island rapidly acquired the atmosphere of mourning. This rumour continued to spread even long after the offices of Busara Promotions had disseminated confirmation from Bi Kidude's European promoters that on the contrary, she was alive and very well. She may have been surprised to hear that people in Zanzibar think that she has died:

"Sijafa bado. Labda sababu watu hawajaonana nami sasa karibu mwezi. Lakini bado tunaendelea na safari na bado safari ndefu ya miezi miwili. Lakini sijambo, sina wasiwasi miye. Kuimba naimba na nguvu zote ambazo ninazo ili watu wafurahi."

"I haven't died yet. Maybe people are saying that because they haven't seen me around for almost a month. But we are still continuing our tour which lasts for two more months. Me, I'm well, I have no problem. Me I sing with all my strength and continue to make people happy."

In September she will be packing her drums and travelling again, to perform a series of shows around KwaZulu Natal at the invitation of Awesome Africa Festival, culminating in a shared performance with South Africa's legendary Mahotella Queens.

Courtesy of Busara Promotions.

If I could hang, draw and quarter a song, I would do it to this one.

If I could tie a 50 pound weight around a song and drop it off into the murkiest, most sewage-laden depths of the Indian Ocean, it would be this one.

If I could put a song through a shredder, and put the shreddings through a meat grinder, and put the paste through a blender, and put the result in an incinerator, I would do it, three times over, to Hakuna Matata .

Every gifted African musician who's ever been forced to churn out this festering putrefaction of a lyric, to a bunch of grinning tourists, on a hotel terrace, deserves compensation for psychological damage.

Everyone who's ever lived the reality, the complexity, the day-to-day humanity of East Africa, as opposed to the tourist hotel fantasy package, and then had the tinny simplistic sugary crap of Hakuna Matata forced on their eardrums, deserves a free detox treatment at the spas of the same hotels.

Shailja Patel is currently performing at the Zanzibar International Film Festival. She is suffering an acute case of Hakuna Matata - overload. Visit her at

NEXT APPEARANCES
Zanzibar International Film Festival: July 14-23
ABN-America TV, Talking Drum Current Affairs Show, July 20th, 8pm, CST
Dish Network Channel 749, Super Dish required

Tom Gitaa, Kenyan immigrant to the U.S. and founder of Mshale, the African community newspaper based in Minneapolis, talks to Shailja Patel about the ethos behind the newspaper and its impact on the immigrant community there.

It's been a hectic weekend so far for Tom Gitaa, and it's not even Saturday afternoon yet. "I work 24 hours," says the publisher of Mshale, the African community newspaper based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Begun in 1994, as a 2-page photocopied newsletter, Mshale is now a free monthly paper, covering news and issues relevant to the pan-African immigrant community. 15,000 copies a month are distributed through the Northeastern US states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

Gitaa is also the host and presenter of Talking Drum, a current affairs talk show on ABN- America (African Broadcasting Network). ABN airs on Channel 749 Dish Network. He has just returned from a trip to Gambia, to set up local production operations for ABN's coverage of the upcoming AU summit. On his schedule this morning was an interview with the visiting Moroccan ambassador to the US. At midnight last night, Gitaa learned that a pipe had burst at ABN's studio, requiring a flurry of calls to relocate the meeting to the presidential suite at a downtown hotel. After this interview with me, it's back to Mshale's offices to work on the paper for the rest of the day, before heading out to cover a community event this evening. All in a day's work for Gitaa, who says that what drives him is: "the satisfaction of finishing something and seeing that others benefit from it."

Gitaa was born and raised in Mombasa, Kenya. He arrived in the US in 1990 to study business and marketing in college. His career in publishing began when he and two fellow-students, Peter Kegode and Edward Kariuki, noticed the dearth of news from the continent available to Africans in America. This was before the internet media revolution. They began to compile a weekly newsletter which they distributed to other Africans in the local community.

"In 1994, it was a 2-page printed compilation, mailed out to 30 subscribers at $8 / month. After 6 months, we had 80 subscribers at $10 / month, and the newsletter had grown to 4 - 6 pages. 1997 was the turning point. That was when the Kenya Nation newspaper came online. So people no longer needed Mshale to get their news. We switched our content to analysis instead, but didn't fly. Subscriptions were flat for 6 months.

"Then we noticed that the greatest response we got was to local news about the African community here, which no other media was reporting. Any coverage of Africa or Africans in American newspapers presented us as exotic and bizarre. I realized I could do a better job of explaining who we are in this place. Why not do a profile of this taxi driver from Ghana struggling to feed his family? Or that Somali woman who has opened a boutique?

"As a business major, looking at the demographic, I could see this was a growing market. In 1990, there were 20,000 African immigrants in Minnesota. In 2006, there were 80,000, according to state census. My personal estimate is that the number is closer to 100,000. Apparently, Minnesota has the largest population of Somalis outside Somalia - it used to be Toronto, but now Minnesota has taken over.

"In November 2001, we put out our first free edition in newsprint."

What is Gitaa's take on the state of media in Africa?

"Quality is rising. Democratization needs supporting instruments - free press, free speech, free airwaves. There have been complaints that freeing the airwaves from state monopolies has led to a bombardment of mediocre pop culture products from the west. But for me, the key question is - are the airwaves free? Can we say what we need to say? Then we will grow and develop towards it."

What media models did he look to in Mshale's development?

"African American community media, and the alternative press. Their experience is somewhat different from ours, but the business model - advertiser-driven free newspapers - is effective. The subscriber-driven model we began with is a tough model one. A large portion of our readership are student-workers, meaning Africans working to put themselves through college. Or newly arrived immigrants. They move frequently, and they are hard to keep track of for mailing out copies and renewing subscriptions."

It is only in the last year that Gitaa has been able to quit his day-job in marketing, and focus full-time on Mshale. He still wears multiple hats, as publisher, editor, marketing director, reporter. Inevitably, there are conflicts of interest between the different roles.

"My goal as we grow is to separate the editorial role and the publishing role as our funding allows. A lot of advertisers don't understand why it's important to have separation between editorial content and ad content.

"For example, we may have as a major advertiser the owners / managers of a large apartment complex with a lot of African immigrant tenants. Our readership make up one of their key markets. If we receive reports that African tenants are being mistreated, we dispatch a reporter to investigate. S/he will speak to the tenants, speak to the complex managers, draw her conclusions and write a report. We run the report. The next thing we know, the media buyer for this company is on the phone to me:

"Mr. Gitaa, we don't like the way you put things in the article that you ran on the complex. It showed our client in a negative light."

"Next edition - no ad from this client. And if they are one of our two Fortune 500 advertisers, then that may prompt the second Fortune 500 company to take its ad elsewhere.

"Our business model is ad-driven. Ads are our revenue.

"That's where you say: "You know what? Keep your money." As publisher, I am accountable to the African immigrant community. My focus is whatever impacts that community. We will not do anything that will not serve that community well.

"This is what makes readers respect you - when they can see you lost money, but you did not let it influence the content of the paper. It is a difficult choice - you risk going out of business. It's the perpetual dilemma of the publisher.”

Has Mshale also come up against divisions and internal conflicts within the African community?

"Yes, several times. There are deep internal rifts within the immigrant community. When we reported on a few Somali women who are successful entrepreneurs in Minneapolis, it provoked deep animosity from some senior leaders within the community. We were just telling the success story of our people, but their reaction was very derogatory."

Given these rifts, and the diversity of African immigrants - across socio-economic groups, class, nationality, origin - can one even speak usefully of a pan-African immigrant community with common interests?

"You are correct about the diversity. But from my years of building Mshale, I see 3 uniting interests across these differences.

"First is the issue of immigration. All immigrants from Africa, whatever their socio-economic status, wherever they come from, are interested in creating a legislative climate that supports their rights to build a life here, and allows the possibility to bring their families here. They are all equally affected by anti-immigrant sentiment and the conservative ideology of closed borders.

"The most-read page of Mshale is the immigration page. It is written by the legal counsel of Blackwell Igbanugo - the largest black-operated law firm in the US. The leading partner, Eugene Igbanugo, was one of the first advertisers in the initial Mshale newsletter, and since then, there has not been a single issue of Mshale that has not carried their ad.

"The second uniting interest is that of self-development. We all arrive here with a common work ethic, the drive to take advantage of opportunities to realize our dreams. We are all aspiring. But we don't shut our eyes to the need for social support systems and networks, the understanding that people need a hand up to get on their feet.

"I believe in the capitalist system. I come from a family of business people. I can say that it works. But I don't understand, for example, the public outcry over the welfare system from the Republicans. If you look at the big picture, the US welfare system takes less than 1% of the federal budget!

"We are a pan-African newspaper. I take that seriously. I get frustrated with other community papers / media that present themselves as "Pan African", yet 80% of the content is skewed towards a particular region. If you call yourself Pan African, then represent every region of Africa. At Mshale, we try to be a model of broad coverage across every region and segment of the African immigrant community."

Does he see community media such as Mshale having an impact on the coverage of Africa and Africans in mainstream American media?

"Many of our readers are journalists and editors from mainstream media outlets. They use Mshale as the gauge, the barometer of what's going on in the African community here. They read it to stay on top of that niche.

"Our website is an archive of information, and is often used as a resource for research about the African immigrant community. We also field calls frequently from those seeking knowledge on particular countries, regions or communities, for business or study. We have become a reference source on Africa."

Looking back over the 12 years from the inception of Mshale to it's current burgeoning success, what does Gitaa see as the key to successful community publishing?

"Relationship building. In the beginning, when we were just 3 people with no track record, it was very hard to establish credibility, to get interviews. No one knew who we were. But with persistence, and steady presence, they get to know you and to respect what you are doing. We now have very strong relationships with the International Leadership Institute (a leading African American organization that brings notable Africans to the US) and the Minneapolis International Centre (which hosts tours of visiting Heads of State and world figures). They call us whenever something relevant to Mshale is on their calendar.

"All the local immigrant community associations know they can count on us. If they let us know what they are doing, we will give them coverage.

"Mshale tells the African immigrant community that whatever direction we go in in this country, we don't need to forget how we look at ourselves. We need to make sure people know who we are."

www.abnamerica.com

* Shailja Patel is an Asian African poet and theater artist. Visit her at www.shailja.com

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

“African Diaspora: the scattering of people from Africa and the sowing of their cultures globally.” The Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD), recently opened in San Francisco and aims to “connect all people through the celebration and exploration of the art, culture and history of the African Diaspora.”

You don’t have to be in San Francisco to visit MOAD. Its website, offers a comprehensive, multimedia, participatory, virtual experience. You can take a video podcast tour of all three floors; submit a story for the archives projects; view slide shows of art, sculpture, photography, currently on exhibit; and read first-person African narratives from the Middle Passage to the 21st century.

After an hour on the site, you might be tempted to skip a visit in person. This would be a pity. MOAD is as much a model of architecture as it is a museum. A triumph of light, space, elegance and transparency, the building offers numerous clever sensory delights and surprises. The deceptively simple 3-floor, glass-walled atrium structure incorporates a higher-than-average number of seating areas for “rest and reflection”. As you walk into the entrance lobby, you are greeted by a question on the wall: “When Did You Discover You Are African? “

Few museums I’ve visited, in cities around the world, pull off the difficult feat of filling the mind and imagination without exhausting the brain and senses. The very nature of museums often leads to overstimulation. Complex navigation routes through multiple galleries and exhibits can cause tiredness and frustration. There is often just too much to absorb in one visit. MOAD’s offerings are certainly abundant, demanding, and multifaceted. But clearly, considerable thought was given to making them joyfully digestible.

The MOAD experience begins across the street from the building. Through the giant glass wall of the museum, passersby see a 2-story photomosaic of an African child’s face. The mosaic, constructed upon a photo by Chester Higgins Junior, is made up of thousands of photos submitted from around the world, of people both on the continent and in the Diaspora. Many of them are accompanied by titles and explanations, but, disappointingly, the main image of the young girl is not. I wondered what her name was, where the photo was taken. Is she still alive? What is her story?

One of the stated goals of MOAD is to remind visitors that “human life originated in Africa and gradually traveled to the rest of the world.” The point is brought graphically home by a glowing wall display. A few tiny dots of light emerge in the middle. They spread and multiply, creating a map of the world, while a timeline above the map highlights simultaneously the dates of major human migrations. The day I visited, a school group of 9-year olds were riveted by this feature. Their teacher had to force them to move on after 3 repetitions.

MOAD emphasizes its unique identity as a “first voice museum”, one that draws directly on the original testimonies of those who live the art, culture and history it explores. It’s ongoing I've Known Rivers Story Project is an unprecedented effort by an international museum to collect, publish, and archive "first voice" narratives from people of African descent.

Permanent exhibits include:
Celebrations—Ritual & Ceremony
Music of the Diaspora – connecting jazz, blues, and gospel to reggae, rock and roll, and hip-hop.
Culinary Traditions – highlighting Africa’s role as primary producer of major food products
Adornment
Slavery Passages, and the Freedom Theater
Temporary exhibits are curated around four universal themes - Origins, Movement, Adaptation and Transformation. This seems a little simplistic. One questions the thinking behind such rigid classification. Living culture is messy and boundary-defying. As a museum-goer, I prefer to be confronted with its complexity, offered tools to engage with the contradictions and commonalities, rather than told that this particular collection exemplifies “Adaptation” or “Movement”.

For example, in July of this year, MOAD will mount the first solo exhibition in America of Qes Adamu Tesfaw, Ethiopia’s finest living artist. How can a body of work created over a 70-year lifetime slot into one or two themes?

Another question raised by my visit to MOAD is that of accessibility. Entry is free to children, $5 for seniors, $8 for everyone else. No sliding scale that might accommodate those on lower incomes. This seems a particularly ironic blind spot, given the national rate of poverty among African-Americans: consistently double that of white Americans since the Civil War. In addition, the majority of African Diaspora newcomers to San Francisco are refugees from Africa’s economic and military crises. $8 per person for a museum visit is simply outside the budget for households in these circumstances. Even more ironic, MOAD does not participate in the Free Museums Day Program, where entry to all San Francisco museums is free on the first Tuesday of every month. At the time of writing, MOAD’s staff had not returned my calls requesting further information on the reasoning behind these policies.

There is no question that MOAD is an exhilarating, enriching, and exciting addition to the global culture of the African Diaspora. In the breadth of its vision and the aesthetics of its conception, it does important and groundbreaking work. Its task in the years ahead will be to ensure that the very populations it portrays within its walls are equally represented among the visitors who walk through its doors.

Visit MOAD at www.moad.com

* Shailja Patel is a Kenyan poet, writer and theater artist. Visit her at www.shailja.com

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

This is the second of a two-part article that addresses plagiarism in the context of social justice in Africa. It was sparked by the discovery that an article I wrote for this column was plagiarized by the Kenya Times. Part 1, published last week, looked at the dimensions of plagiarism, through several recent prominent cases, both on and off the African continent. Part 2, this week, will explore why it is relevant to social justice.

When I was in primary and high school in Nairobi, our English compositions were peopled by white European characters, with English names. We set them in European or American cities and schools, and inserted ourselves into those landscapes. Our plots were imitations or direct copies of what we read in Nancy Drew mystery novels or Enid Blyton boarding school tales. Or we stole freely from American TV imports – Good Times, Dallas. One of my classmates, in an essay on “The Dangers of Hitchhiking” reproduced, blow by blow, an episode of the American sitcom, “Diff’rent Strokes” which had run the previous night on Kenyan TV. She didn’t even change the names of the characters – she simply cast herself in the starring role. The English teacher commented: “You should use your own ideas in future!” – and gave her a mark of 75%.

In all those years, only one teacher ever challenged this slavish postcolonial erasure of our own lives. Ironically, he was a British expatriate. He asked my Standard Seven class why we used English and American names, locations and plots in our compositions, instead of Kenyan ones. We stared at him, confused, a classroom of 11 year olds, who had never been told that our reality had any place in literature. Finally, one girl raised her hand: “That’s what is in the books we read.”

Generations of Africans have grown up consuming media and culture from which they are absent. Believing that “real” writing, “real” music, “real” art must imitate, or even better, reproduce, what is imported. That the language spoken on the streets of Harare or Lagos has no place in newsprint. The dramas enacted daily in Nairobi matatus scrums, Cairo markets, Freetown suburbs, do not belong on our TV and movie screens. Is it any wonder then, that journalists on the continent routinely plagiarize work from multiple sources? That editors run it without question?

There is a political dimension to this trend. Authentic voices are also voices that question and challenge the status quo. Threaten those in power. Growing up, I watched several original TV dramas, piloted in Nairobi, shot down at birth by protests in Parliament that they were “immoral” and would “corrupt our youth.” Their crime was to deal honestly with the economic, social and sexual realities of a generation facing 70% unemployment in a country ruled by oligarchs. I never heard similar protests raised about the soft-porn American films that certain Nairobi cinemas specialized in. Or the imported soap operas that were the most exciting offering of the state-monopoly TV station.

So many journalists, aspiring writers and artists, never learned how to report the world through their own eyes. To trust their own perceptions and the language available to them. A perfect demonstration of the fear that authentic voices induce in the establishment was the reaction to Kwani?. Kenya’s first journal of homegrown writing broke new ground by carrying pieces in Sheng, the street language of Nairobi. A University of Nairobi literature professor actually tried to ban his students from reading Kwani?. One can only speculate on the source of his unbearable discomfort with an idiom outside his academic authority being presented as valid living literature.

The theft implicit in plagiarism impoverishes us all. It is no secret that how we receive any message is shaped by the perceived source. The voices most likely to be silenced through plagiarism in Africa are those of marginalized groups – women, youth, ethnic minorities, those outside the formal education system. Several African women writers have shared stories with me of submitting their work to national magazines and newspapers, receiving no response, then seeing it turn up a few months later under the byline of a male staff journalist. Each time this happens, it feeds the myth that women, or African Asians, or youth in the informal sector, are not a part of the public discourse, have nothing to contribute to the cultural and political life of our societies.

In “Purple Hibiscus”, the brilliant debut novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a teenage Nigerian girl refuses to take the customary English name for her Confirmation into the Catholic Church. She argues cogently that English names are no more Christian than Nigerian ones, and her spiritual coming of age is not an occasion to disown her own identity.

There is a way in which all of us who came of age on the African continent in the last three decades have been taught to disavow our creative identities. To be ashamed of our own thoughts and language. To hold them up against the BBC, the New York Times, CNN, and find them lacking. The shame is reinforced by editors who will not take risks on original writing, by repressive political regimes that allow only parroted sycophancy in the place of real writing.

In my article plagiarized by the Kenya Times, I wrote:

“What can poetry do, right now, in Kenya? […] Inspire us to trust our own intelligence and passion, our hunger for art that is real and hard and truthful; messy and complex and bloody. Above all, art that is ours. Trust that our own voices are the thick grain, the juicy greens, we have been hungry for.”

It’s time for us all to refuse to be robbed further by unchallenged plagiarism.

* Shailja Patel is a Kenyan poet, writer and theater artist. Visit her at

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Two weeks ago, I discovered that an article I wrote for Pambazuka News, “Hungry For Live Poetry” about Nairobi's First Poetry Slam, was apparently plagiarized in its entirety by a journalist for the Kenya Times. Neither the Kenya Times editors, nor the journalist, Otieno Amisi, have responded to my emails.

The original article is at:

The Kenya Times version is at:

http://www.timesnews.co.ke/03mar06/magazine/magazine3.html

Initially, I wasn't sure whether to be flattered, outraged, amused - or all three. I sent out an email to several African writers and journalists in my circle asking:

“Has anyone else had this experience? Is it worth challenging - either the guy himself, or the editors of the Kenya Times? Is it symptomatic of a larger culture of journalistic plagiarism that's going unchecked and unchallenged in Kenya?”

One response, from Kenyan arts organizer and writer, Dipesh Pabari:

“This sounds very typical. If I ever want to get things in the paper I literally write it myself and they publish it under their name […] that is just the way it works.”

A pragmatic view. If the goal is to disseminate information and get media coverage, then perhaps one should just play the game and accept “the way it works”. But what about those of us who write for a living? What about material that we consider creative output, product for livelihood - whether it takes the form of words, audio, film or image?

Plagiarism has always been a hot topic in the world of books and arts, where the currency is creative ideas and the artistic output they generate. As I write this, legal action is still ongoing over allegations that Dan Brown, author of the 40 million-copies-sold global bestseller, “The Da Vinci Code”, copied his plot from another writer.

This month in Africa, plagiarism has made literary, academic and media waves. South African journalist and author, William Mervin Gumede, is battling accusations that his highly acclaimed book, “Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC” uses other writers' work without proper attribution. Another South African, Afrikaner poet Antjie Krog, is said to be considering litigation against Stephen Watson, head of Cape Town University's English department. Watson claims she stole phrases and ideas from late British poet laureate Ted Hughes and his own work. He says Krog “lifted the entire concept” of her 2004 collection of Bushmen poems from his own1991 collection of Bushmen prose. Neither seems to see the innate irony; that both of them might justly be accused of plagiarizing, or appropriating, the voices of Bushmen.

Is this all just elitist squabbling, among privileged literati in their ivory towers? Does it have any relevance to social justice and the daily lived culture of the majority of Africans?

Consider the case of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. Few people are unfamiliar with the song and soundtrack. Fewer still know that it was written by a South African musician, Solomon Linda. It became a chart topper in the West when legendary US folk singer, Pete Seeger (incongruously famous for his own songs of social protest) covered it in the 1950s. In subsequent decades, it has been recorded by over 150 European and American artists, racking up hundreds of thousands of album sales. Most recently, it became a global “brand” as the theme track for Disney's megahit, “The Lion King.”

The song's original writer, Solomon Linda, received 10 shillings for the copyright in 1952, from Gallo studios in South Africa. After the release of “The Lion King”, Linda's family sued Disney for royalties on the use of the song. An undisclosed out-of-court settlement was agreed just this February. Sadly, it came too late for Linda, who died 1962, aged 53, of kidney disease. And for his daughter Adelaide, who died in 2001, of AIDS. Both could have received life-saving medical treatment from less than one-tenth of one percent of the $15 million grossed by the song worldwide. (Source: Emma MacDonald,The Age, Australia, April 22, 2006)
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/when-plagiarism-robs-the-poor-of-inspiration/2006/04/21/1145344270049.html

Next week: Plagiarism and the colonial mentality; how plagiarism impoverishes Africa politically and culturally.

* Shailja Patel is a Kenyan poet, writer and theater artist. Visit her at www.shailja.com

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Ellen Kuzwayo, South African activist, writer, feminist, icon, died 3 weeks ago. Obituaries and tributes to her ran in every major media outlet on the African continent, not to mention the New York Times, Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper. So what can I possibly add to the chorus?

I met Mama Kuzwayo when I was a student in the UK, at the University of York. As Minority Rights Officer on the Student Union, I received a call one day from Agnes Sam, South African author of the short story collection, “Jesus Is Indian”. Living in York at the time, she told me that The Women’s Press was arranging a book tour for Ellen Kuzwayo, to promote her autobiography, “Call Me Woman”. Would we be interested in having her appear on campus?

I’d never heard of Ellen Kuzwayo. Or “Call Me Woman”. The irony of my Kenyan education was that my access to African writers and writing was confined to text books in our literature curriculum. Outside that, we read Danielle Steele, Harold Robbins, the European and American writers we found in our school libraries.

So I had no idea that she was the first black writer to win the CNA Prize, South Africa’s highest literary honor. I knew nothing of her illustrious history as a teacher, social worker, anti-apartheid activist, until I read “Call Me Woman.” Then I was riveted. Not because it was great writing. On the contrary, her style was pedestrian, a chronological recounting of facts and events. It was clear that she did not write from a love of language or literary craft.

And yet, each page of “Call Me Woman” rings with a uniquely powerful and utterly compelling voice. The voice of Ellen Kuzwayo brought the reality of a whole generation of black South African women to the world. Women dispossessed of their land, their freedom, their very bodies; women who survived displacement, disenfranchisement, violence at the hands of both the apartheid state and husbands and fathers. In a narrative all the more striking for its lack of embellishment, “Call Me Woman” painted a portrait of courage, resilience and intelligence that would not be extinguished, all harnessed to the struggle for dignity and self-determination.

Mama Kuzwayo wrote her autobiography to tell the story of lives that were unseen, unknown. During the 1980s, a time of terrible repression and violence under the Botha regime, in conditions of daily struggle and uncertainty, she took on a task that would have daunted far more experienced writers. Simply because it had to be done. Her life story still holds up as an outstanding historical document of South Africa’s history in the 20th century, told from the viewpoint of black South African women.

By the time of Mama Kuzwayo’s arrival at York, I had read “Call Me Woman”, and I was in awe of her. I wondered why someone of her stature would come all the way to the North of England, to speak to an overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and politically provincial student population. At the time, there was still debate in British media and society over the wisdom of sanctions against South Africa. Only one other African had ever spoken at York: Kenneth Kaunda in the 1970s. It was a lesson to me in global hierarchies of power: that a 76 year old South African woman, already a legend in her own country, should need to generate the support of white British students, younger than her grandchildren.

When she arrived, I was mortified that we had to make her walk across the campus, for over 20 minutes, in the icy, windy dark, to get to the auditorium where she was to speak. Clearly tired from travelling, she made no complaint – she radiated patience and humour. It made me deeply uncomfortable that the associate from The Women’s Press who accompanied her, a young woman only a couple of years older than me, addressed her bluntly by first name, as “Ellen”.

When she spoke, to a half-empty auditorium, she was a mountain. She spoke without notes, of the episodes that had shaped her as an activist and a woman, she laid out the economic and political extremities facing her people.

In the Q and A that followed, I listened to her dissect both ignorance and racism with unwavering dignity and rapier analysis. To the clichéd: “Don’t sanctions just hurt poor black South Africans?” she responded:

“If we said we want sanctions to stop, we would be saying we want to be slaves forever. Who wants to be a slave forever?”

A British male student began, in the guise of a question, to lecture her about overpopulation in Africa. She answered him with a pithy and devastating exposition of the dismemberment of African families and communities under apartheid.

After the talk, and book signing, I took her to her room for the night – another icy, windy walk across the dark campus. She stumbled several times, and I realized again how old she was, how exhausted. Her room was a stark college bedroom, tiny, cold, unwelcoming. I made her a cup of tea, rubbed her feet, tried to make her comfortable. We talked of Desmond Tutu’s recent visit to Kenya, where he declared that detention without trial anywhere on the continent was a violation of human rights. The speech had drawn a hailstorm of abuse from the despotic Moi regime. There was so much I wanted to ask her, but I was both shy, and reluctant to tire her further. When I said goodnight, she took both my hands: “Thank you my dear, for spoiling me a little.”

The next morning, the feminist newspaper on campus, which I had helped found, interviewed her over breakfast. Three of us from the editorial collective reveled in the richness of her relaxed conversation. She introduced us to Ubuntu – now a standard catchword, but then a concept little known outside South Africa. How it was explained, contained, in the Zulu proverb: A person is a person because of other people. She had the most eloquent hands I have ever seen. They etched her words on the air, punctuated her phrases. Fifteen years later, they still speak from the yellowed newsprint photographs we took of her.

After that breakfast, she left to return to London. She hugged me warmly, gave me her address in South Africa, made me promise to send her a copy of the interview when it was published. I did. I never met her again. But over the years, she remained an icon and hero for me. A reminder of what it means to claim your power, in the face of every force that denies your humanity, and then to offer your whole self in service to that humanity. I remembered her when I came across a quote from St. Francis of Assissi: “There is no use in walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.” And even later, when I encountered the words of Gandhi: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

As I browsed the web for her obituaries, I came across an interview with her by British writer, Nicci Gerard. It was published in the New Internationalist, in 1985, five years before I met Mama Kuzwayo in York. Of everything I read about her, this was what stayed with me:

“She says: ‘I am who I am and my life is my own.’ She knows that ‘before you feel hopeful for your country you must feel hope for yourself; if there is no hope for you, you can’t look ahead.’ She says that she lives with fear but that she is bigger than that fear - ‘you must go ahead and damn the consequences.’”

(See full article at:

I have often regretted not having the courage to ask her, when I had the opportunity, to say more about her time in detention and how she survived it. How she endured a violent marriage with spirit unbroken. I wanted to mine every nugget I could from the wealth of her political experience, her years of activism, writing, organizing.

These words seem like the answer. As does her book – which I return to again and again, and continue to find fresh value in. As does the memory of a woman larger than exhaustion, larger than the ignorance of those around her, larger than fear.

* More on Ellen Kuzwayo:
www.shailja.com

* Please send comments to [email protected]