Storymoja Hay Festival 2010, Nairobi

The Storymoja Hay Festival 2010, held in Nairobi at the weekend, was billed as an arts festival that would include poetry, literature, debate, discussion and other events.But what I took away from the festival owed a lot to the free copy of 'Living Memories', by Al Kags, that was included in the ticket price.

This was a collection of stories from older Kenyans, what they could remember from earlier times. These stories were disturbing, but also very moving. Some of the memories were from the thirties and forties but most were from the fifties, specifically, the Mau Mau years. I have read about the vicious treatment meted out by the British before, but these stories all added something to knowledge of the period that no amount of academic writing could.

I hope Al Kags and others manage to collect and publish lots more oral accounts, not just of bad times, but also of ordinary times, good times and things that have been forgotten by some and were never known by others. Occasionally I hear stories myself, but there is no substitute for oral histories being collected while it's still possible.

Sadly, there were not that many visitors on Saturday, the only day I was there. But I wouldn't be surprised if people were put off by the 500 shilling ticket price. This is not the way to make arts and literature more accessible.

This high cost is quite a contrast with the Maker Faire exhibition that took place at the end of August. This had no entry fee and was very well attended, despite coinciding with the promulgation of the new Constitution.

For people interested in poetry reading, storytelling, debate and discussion, there were certainly opportunities at the Storymoja Festival. And perhaps it seems negative to ignore these and complain about the cost.

But the lack of interest in literature and reading in Kenya, as well as arts in general, is disappointing. Children are brought up seeing reading as a chore, never as a form of entertainment. Even if it can't compete with TV and the rest, it should appear somewhere on the list.

However, there is one particular factor which ensures that most children will not be exposed to much literature in the near future, and that is the costs involved. The few bookshops in most cities sell a small range of books at exorbitant prices, most of them being published abroad. The choice for children is even more limited than that for adults. At the festival, much of what was on offer could as easily be bought in a Nairobi bookshop.

There was clearly plenty of sponsorship for the festival. I spoke to some people who had been involved in the lead-up to the event and a lot of things took place that might not have been obvious to visitors. The free book of living memories is just the sort of thing that should have been subsidized, rather than expensive VIP entertainment. But that book is a great example of how much more could be done.

If money is availabe for such events, perhaps some of it could be spent making literature and the arts in general more accessible to people, and more relevant. Most books were being sold at European prices, even many of the books by African authors. And the locally published books, at several hundred shillings, are still too expensive for most Kenyan people.

For those who went to the festival, what can they take away? If they have developed a desire to hear more poetry or stories, where will they go next? Other events are similarly priced and usually held in expensive Nairobi venues. How many people were, as a result of attending the festival, signed up for a mailing list so they can be kept informed of such events and anything else related to literature and the arts?

There was another exception to the high cost of most of the items that people could buy. An educational publisher, the name of which I don't remember, was selling indigenously produced comics. They were comic versions of folk tales, very simple, but very beautiful. It may be because they were published in the 1980s that they were only priced 5 shillings. But even 25 shillings or more might have attracted a lot of buyers. The series is called 'Pichadithi' (from 'picture' and the Swahili for story, hadithi).

My views of the festival are somewhat mixed. I can see clearly, just as I could after the Maker Faire, that there is a lot on offer in Kenya, but that there could be a great deal more. Similar to the inventions and creative items being exhibited at the Maker Faire, there are incipient stories, poems, novels, plays and much more. But a lot of work needs to be done to allow them to become real and more still to make literature and the arts accessible to everyone.

Who Will Educate the Educators?

After leaving Maker Faire Africa on Friday, inspired by much of what I saw there, I returned to Nakuru, where many of the town's residents stand or sit in the same places every day, staring at passers by, shouting the odd bit of abuse and joining in any commotion that happens to relieve the monotony.

I admit, I was a bit annoyed when I compared how some people do amazing things with their time and others do not. I always have to go through the same thought process; first I get exasperated and then I remember that there can be reasons why some people energetically pursue things that benefit them and others while some people seem condemned to get up every day and stare into the middle distance until it gets dark.

The vast majority of exhibitors that I talked to at Maker Faire were well educated and some were clearly from well off backgrounds. This means nothing on its own. Those with lots of education from well off backgrounds can also end up doing little with their lives. And some from poor families with only a basic education achieve great things.

But some of the exhibitors were also wondering why some of their fellow Africans didn't do what they were doing. And one reason I would suggest is lack of basic education and training in skills that allow people to prosper, or at least to get by better than they do now. When I attempted to demonstrate to people around Nakuru how they could make and use simple technologies, they went through a few phases: they were curious, even surprised; they raised objections; they became silent and sat on their hands.

I admit, they may not have had the best teacher. But I think there is something about education beyond what is imparted by a teacher and embraced by a learner. People didn't sit on their hands because they were unable to cut out shapes using patterns and stick things together with glue. They are well able to do such things and many others. I would guess that most of them could have done much of what the exhibitors at Maker Faire did.

What people gain from education, I hope, is the ability to make what they learn part of their day to day lives, whether this involves various bodies of knowledge or sets of skills. What people with a poor education receive is lists of things to learn off so that they can get the requisite number of ticks in order to graduate to the next class. These ticks are rarely, if ever, of any use to people thereafter. But once people have mastered the pretence of being educated, they have no way of taking their education further.

I'll say it again, people with education and training may not necessarily do much with it. And those with little education and training may spend their lives enhancing what they have got and benefiting themselves and those associated with them. But that seems like leaving things to chance for the majority, while allowing a minority quite an advantage, whether they use it well or not.

Development projects can be very narrowly focused. For example, many education projects focus on a few indicators, often the ones that show the project in a favorable light but give little benefit to the recipients. They might concentrate on enrolment but not attendance, exam results without any evidence of learning or the ability to continue learning after school has finished, gender parity without any change in genuine inequalities, etc. 'Success' in development projects can resemble the 'success' of students who have received a poor education.

HIV projects can involve huge amounts of money and produce amazing statistics about the number of HIV transmissions prevented, the number of deaths averted and the number of condoms distributed. Yet people are suffering from and dying from very ordinary diseases that are easy to prevent and cure. Health is not just a matter of disease or being free of disease and it's even less a matter of one virus (which is still endemic in many countries in the world, despite hundreds of millions having been spent on 'prevention' programs).

There seems to be an emphasis on size and magnitude and the measurement of these development projects, as if there is some great prize to be won on the basis of a few hackneyed quantities. Is the aim of development not to ensure that there are fewer millions of people receiving little or no education, suffering from and dying from preventable and treatable illnesses, unable to afford basic nutrition or water and sanitation? Of course you have to count people, but people are not indicators, nor are health or education.

Many of the projects at Maker Faire were about things that matter to people in their day to day lives, food, water and sanitation, agriculture, communication, income, energy, lighting, raw materials and the like. There was less emphasis on education that I would have expected, unless you count some electronic device that 'helps children learn to read'. But these are all concerns that are raised when you go to villages, slums and isolated areas.

Levels of education, especially among girls and women, can be shockingly bad. Many primary school teachers are said to have a low understanding of the subjects they teach and even those who know more don't manage to impart much. But education is not just a process of 'attaining' a set of facts or skills. It is the preparation that everyone needs in order to ensure the education and health of themselves and their families and to ensure that they grow up to be able to provide for themselves and their families, in turn.

A lot of development is dominated by quantities and measurement, a set of boxes to be ticked, regardless of the irrelevance of such processes to people's lives and livelihoods. The Millennium Development Goals, mentioned several times at Maker Faire, are the epitome of such a lifeless and administrative view of development. People need basic things, education, health, nutrition, income, water and sanitation and infrastructure, but they also need to be able to provide themselves with these and other rights. These are not things you can pack in sacks and send them off in an aid convoy.

Significant feats will not be achieved by hordes of administrators with clipboards (or technological variants of clipboards) recording a handful of indicators as people die prematurely and needlessly, though this is a great way of spending billions of dollars. I suppose development will only achieve anything when it has put people in developing countries in the position where they can do the development. So far, we have not been very good at this (and I include myself, of course).

That development needs to be sustainable, that it needs to give rise to further development, seems clear. But it also seems to matter a great deal who is doing the development, who is able to do it, whether it is outsiders from developed countries or insiders from developing countries. Which is very similar to the conclusion I came up with yesterday! I could go on, but tomorrow is another day.

Maker Faire Africa; an Exhibition of Brilliant Ideas

I was in Nairobi yesterday to visit Maker Faire Africa, a trade exhibition for people who make things, invent things, develop things and use things to achieve worthwhile ends. The exhibition divided roughly into crafts and technologies. The crafts ranged from highly original to original variations on a theme. And the technologies ranged from pretty low tech, through intermediate and right up to high tech exhibits.

Many of the exhibits were familiar to me in some way, largely through the blog Afrigadget.com. This blog searches for and covers any really good ideas and they are often just the kinds of ideas I've been searching for, in one way or another.

For example, I work in a place where sisal is grown but no high value goods are made from it here and no local people make anything more than a pittance as a result of working with the crop. But I came across a set of jewellery made from sisal, made in Rwanda, something that people here could easily make (I include links where possible but the majority of them didn't work for me). There was also a man who had developed a small machine that one or two people could use to make sisal string and rope. At present, the industry is dominated by a handful of foreign owned factories that date back to the 1950s.

I have also been trying to persuade people that they could use a lot of their organic waste to produce fertilizer or to compress into briquettes that can be used instead of charcoal, wood or other expensive fuels. There was a company exhibiting that makes presses that can be used for producing oil (from seeds), produce low cost and highly resilient bricks and compress fuel briquettes. There was also a group of people producing low cost fertilizer from organic waste. There's a shortage of affordable fertilizer here and far too much dangerous waste, so there's nothing like a product that has a whole range of benefits.

The issue of water hyacinth infestation in Lake Victoria and other inland waterways has long been an environmental challenge. Yet, there was already plenty of technologies and knowledge about how to use the hyacinths as biomass to make into fodder, fuel, fertilizer, furniture, household goods and anything else people can make, depending on their ingenuity. After all, the infestation is relatively new in East Africa but not in Asia. I saw an example of the many possible products, yesterday, made from water hyacinth grown in Nairobi Dam.

Bicycles are a very familiar and useful technology here and there were demonstrations of how to use them to charge mobile phones and other devices. Also, there was a young man demonstrating a bicycle powered maize shucker. People beat maize cobs in sacks at the moment to get the grain off the cob. The bicycle shucker is far quicker and more efficient. This young American man working in Tanzania also had an excellent command of Kiswahili, I was envious. A similar technology can be used to grind the maize, which could save people a lot of money and time as well.

While there was some medium to high technology being exhibited, much of it seemed of little interest to the places where I work, where most people don't have electricity, let alone TV or computers. Even internet cafes are expensive and slow and few people would even know how to use them, or have any inclination to do so. Technophiles forget that basic education is a prerequisite to many things, technology is just one of them.

Anyhow, there was a man from South Africa demonstrating a small (but scalable) telecommunication system which would be ideal for villages, especially where they have also looked into some locally available source of power, such as wind or solar (or a combination). It was unsurprising to find that this man had worked in development for many years and understood some of the hurdles that people face, instead of producing something that has no application in the sorts of places it was intended for.

Spanning design and craft, there were some young women who were making solar powered LED torches, which use local wood and are shaped to have a large surface available for the solar panel. The panels come from Switzerland, which probably explains the high cost of the torches. I also met a man from Malawi who had built a device that cooks ugali (maize porridge, the Kenyan staple, revered but ultimately tasteless, nutrition free and responsible for high rates of diabetes here. He was very enterprising and well informed and it's not his fault that the staple food is not ideal!). He also worked with windmills and other technologies. I'd love to see people building and using windmills in Kenya.

On the craft side of the exhibition there was some amazing ceramic work by a small company called 'Beauty for Ashes Pottery'. Most of the ceramic work I've seen here is just copies of copies churned out for tourists and it's refreshing to see genuine art mixed with this practical and indigenous skill. There was also a young design student who had pushed the boundaries of jewellery and accessory design using recycled materials and I regret not having any contact details for her. But I think the word will get around.

A man who used recycled materials to produce the most bizarre looking novelty glasses got a lot of well deserved attention. An example can be seen on the Maker Faire site at the moment, but you'll have trouble visualizing the length he has gone to in using highly unlikely materials. Other designers used well-known recycled materials to make commonly made products, but some had modified processes in interesting ways. There were the predictable accessories made from the caps of beer bottles but one woman was creating a nice effect by covering each cap with cloth so the bags, wallets, etc, looked a bit like armour plating. Very eye-catching.

On both the design and the technology fronts, there was a very noticeable presence of Kibera, people from Kibera, organizations with Kibera in their name; it's almost a brand. Perhaps in NGO-speak it really is a recognised brand. Journalists seem unable to mention poverty in Nairobi without mentioning Kibera and a handful of factoids about it. But journalists seem unable to mention anything that isn't also mentioned, frequently, by other journalists. And they don't seem able to mention things that haven't been hyped, that's just the way journalism works, it seems. They rub our faces in what we know already, perhaps in the hope that we won't notice that there is anything else.

You'd think there were no other slums in Nairobi, when in fact the majority of Nairobeans live in a slum that is not Kibera. The majority of Kenyans live in a slum that is not in Nairobi. But then, those slums haven't had films, computer games, pop videos and documentaries in them. They are not home to hundreds of NGOs and thousands of development projects. It's hard to believe that there is anyone poor left in Kibera but if there are (and I think there are many), what the hell are all these organizations and their millions of dollars doing?

I didn't get to talk to all the exhibitors, that's just a list of the ones I did get to talk to. Most were very fired up by what they were doing and they all had a spark of originality, also the desire to produce and do things that are needed, rather than copying what millions of others are doing. There was a real spirit of adventure in most of the people I met, I think anyone who meets them and sees what they are doing will want them to succeed, will want to think that they will hear more about these and other great ideas.

I suspect there are many 'makers' of all descriptions around Kenya and other African countries but they can be very hard to find. I've found that myself, other people working in community development have said the same thing. Almost all the people I talked to had some, probably good, access to the internet and other technologies, even where their work is not technological. But some of the people who organized the event have put a lot of effort into finding the best exhibitors and I think the next fair will be even bigger.

I warmly congratulate the people who organized the Maker Faire Africa exhibition and those who exhibited. I was very impressed, both with those who demonstrated things I had heard of but not seen and those who demonstrated things I had not heard of, despite searching high and low for good ideas. I hope people who can benefit from these ideas get to hear about them so that those who develop the ideas can prosper and produce more good ideas. Some people say that development must come from Africans themselves, and I agree. And there is some evidence that this is already happening.