E-BOOKS: It’s a Book, Jim, But Not as we Know it

‘E-books are the literary world’s version of fast food’ – Alexander Nderitu, Africa’s first digital

novelist

‘An eBook is considered by the industry intelligentsia to be a book that is in electronic form. It is instantaneously distributed over the Internet within seconds; Gutenberg would be impressed.’ - How E-books Work, www.enovel.com

‘Where the electronic novel really scores is in the features that elevate it beyond the limitations of a traditional printed book: at the click of a key, it will go into Large Print format, a boon for the poorly sighted and for tired eyes. Ultimately the reader, not the publisher, will select the font and size with which he or she is comfortable reading …Electronic books are smart. They can remember where you got to, so no more dog-earing, or losing bookmarks. They have all the search and find features of a word processor – enter a word or phrase and you will find the passage instantly.’ - Horror writer Peter James speaking at a conference. (See Ray Hammond’s DIGITAL BUSINESS: Surviving and Thriving in an Online World, www.hammond.co.uk , Published in book form by Hodder & Stoughton)

In 1998, history was made when the e-novel Angels of Russia was chosen as one of the five finalists for the prestigious Booker Prize. Angels of Russia was a historical novel written by

Patricia Le Roy and distributed over the Internet by Online Originals. This marked the first time that an on-line (Internet-published) book had been nominated for a major literary prize.

In 2000, Stephen King’s first e-book project experienced a hiccup when the servers were inundated with orders, stretching them to 100% capacity. The book, entitled Riding the Bullet, had had been made available only in e-book format on such websites as Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. Stephen King’s initial impression:

‘While I think that the Internet and various computer applications for stories have great promise, I don’t think anything will replace the printed word and the bound book.’

Stephen King went on to participate in other e-book projects. His next e-book, The Plant, was sold in installments through an ‘honour system’ whereby downloaders promised to pay for their copies. 76% cent of readers fulfilled their promise.

In 2001, my first thriller, and probably Kenya’s first e-novel, When the Whirlwind Passes, was published online. Initially, it was a free download.

Also in 2001, India released its first e-novel, a collaborative work entitled The Motive.

Let’s fast-forward to a few years later:

October 25, 2007: Article entitled ‘Internet a Boon for Books’ appears in the Daily Metro (Nation Media House). According to it, the Internet has provided new ways of marketing, experimentation and reaching readers. Penguin has launched a web-based novel-writing competition in partnership with Amazon and Hewlett-Packard. Elsewhere, Pearson - which publishes travel books - has been digitally coding all its travel-related content so that said content can be utilized over Web and mobile phone applications.

2007: Journalist Otieno Amisi[1], secretary of the Kenya Association of Poets, launches a poetry e-book entitled Back to the Future at the Nairobi Book Fair.

November 2007: Amazon.com launches the Kindle e-book reader. Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos appears on the cover of Newsweek, holding up a Kindle. Headline: ‘Books Aren't Dead. (They're Just Going Digital.)’

December 2008: StoryMoja teams up with well-known e-commerce website Mamamikes.com so as to sell books to the Kenyan Diaspora (in addition to locally). Payments can be made via PayPal, credit card, MoneyGram, PostaPay among others. (StoryMoja later enables manuscripts to be uploaded to them directly through their website).

December 25, 2009: Amazon e-book sales overtake print for one day for the first time on

Christmas Day.

February 29, 2010: E-books become the single bestselling category in American publishing for the first time, according to a report from the Association of American Publishers, compiling sales data from US publishing houses. Total e-book sales in February amounted to $90.3 million, overtaking paperback sales which stood at $81.2 million.

2010: Sony - which also deals in e-books - announces that second quarter 2010 e-reader sales had tripled over the previous year.

March / April 2010: Apple launches the iPad and the iBookstore.

August 23, 2010: Amazon releases a statement announcing that, for the first time, the sales of Kindle e-books exceeded sales of hardcover books on its site in the second quarter of its fiscal year. For the period of April through June 2010, Amazon sold an average of 143 e-books for every 100 hardbacks; the figures for June were 180 e-books to 100 hardcovers.

January 29, 2011: ‘eBooks’ is one of the trending topics on Yahoo!

January 2011: Kindle e-books overtake paperback books to become the most popular format on Amazon.com. By May of 2011, the company announces that e-book sales are outstripping hardcover and paperback books - combined.

January 2011: Barnes & Noble shifts focus from hardcovers and paperbacks to e-books. The influential bookseller tries to re-invent itself as a seller of book downloads, reading devices and apps.

March 2011: ‘The future is digital,’ says Kenya Literature Bureau CEO, Eve Obara as KLB launches e-books into the local market ‘ahead of any of the other players in the business.’

In 2011, the rise of e-books is believed to be the main cause of the demise of the giant bricks-and-mortar bookseller, Borders (which took too long to join the e-retailing and electronic book markets). The liquidation of Borders Group sends shockwaves across the book world. Even its main rival, Barnes & Noble, gains little from the folding of the fabled Borders book chain. Barnes & Noble operates 717 superstores and owns the popular Nook e-book reader. Borders had over 400 stores.

2011: E-books become the hottest topic among major publishers, booksellers and other book industry stakeholders. Are e-books ‘cannibalizing’ print? Will bricks-and-mortar bookshops end up selling to the rats? Or are e-books overrated? Do traditional bookstores need to make some adjustments in order to survive in the eBook Age?

2011: E-book versions of popular books like The Da Vinci Code and Rich Dad, Poor Dad proliferate Kenyan computers. They are free, or very cheap, downloads. A blog known as Nairobi Ebooks (http://nairobibooks.blogspot.com ) sells e-books at just Kshs.10 a pop!

October 2011: When the Whirlwind Passes and The Moon is Made of Green Cheese make their Amazon Kindle debut.

2011: Amazon shakes the world of literature yet again by launching its own imprint, AmazonEncore. According to the online giant: ‘AmazonEncore is a new program whereby

Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon Kindle Store, Amazon.com Books Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers.  ‘Amazon gives the self-published a second life,’ says USA Today

Amazon's major rivals, Barnes & Noble and Borders, list AmazonEncore titles on their websites and say that, depending on demand, they may carry them in their physical stores as well.

2011? : Charles Karia, a Kenyan schoolteacher and blogger, publishes an e-book entitled A

Weed in Paradise. In related news Publishing Editor Barrack Muluka says e-books are picking up (in Kenya) as fibre optic cables improve local Internet experience (Quoted in Saturday magazine).

November 25, 2011: Article in The East African Standard newspaper talks of local government departments and libraries digitalizing their documents (‘Libraries and publishers go digital to increase efficiency’). Digitalization involves scanning books, reports and other documents and placing them in an electronic retrieval system. With e-books, libraries will be able to offer e-lending services.

Late 2011: A school in Kilgoris, rural Kenya, is featured on Citizen TV for its use of electronic ‘tablets’ (e-book reading devices). The devices (a donation from an NGO) are being used alongside traditional textbooks but according to one teacher there, a single tablet can hold an entire library of books, making the textbooks potentially irrelevant.

December 9, 2011: Article entitled ‘Smart phones to drive up sale of e-books’ appears in the Daily Nation. According to it, affordable smart phones could enable a boom in e-books sales.

Internationally, e-book sales grew by 116.5% while print fell. By 2014, the article went on to say, 50% of all phones sold are expected to be ‘smart’. Ministry of Information to procure cheap tablet for high school students. Former Apprentice Africa contestant Joyce Mbaya’s e-book, Gibebe, to sell on Amazon Kindle. Master Publishing MD, Agatha Verdadero, is quoted as saying e-book trends as seen in the West are expected to reach Kenya circa 2014.

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[1] Died on January 16^th 2008

The Thing With Publishers

‘Kenyan publishers are not that bad: at least when they reject your manuscript, they write the rejection (note) personally.’ - Alexander Nderitu

‘Publishing must tread the tightrope between art and commerce. Publishers want books they can publish with pride and with passion but to survive, they must publish books that sell.’ – Michael Larsen, American literary agent

I used to be very critical of publishers when I was younger but I have since mellowed. The thing with publishing is that it’s lucrative but risky, hence the much talked-bout ‘air of caution’ that blows throughout the business. Speaking on TV a few years back, a Macmillan Kenya Publishers[1] official said that to produce a quality book, from start to finish, costs about Kshs. 1 million. If that is the case, then obviously no publisher is rich enough to risk a cool million on every scribbler with a manuscript – hence rejection slips.

It’s true that Kenyan publishers have sacrificed many a good pop fiction novel on the alter of text-book manufacture (I told you I’d find use for that expression!) but it’s equally true that schools/schoolchildren are the biggest buyers of books. I got that information from a self-published novelist who realized that the copies he gave to bookshops would never move as fast as the copies he sold to schools. For one, a school would by several copies for its library while an individual would only buy a single copy. He now bypasses bookshops and chases headmasters all over the country with copies of his novel.

The most common reason for rejection slips is sending your manuscript to the wrong publisher eg. Mailing a novel manuscript to a textbook publisher, or a secular manuscript to a publisher who is only interested in Christian works. Even if it’s a good piece of fiction and the editor likes it, he still won’t forward it for further consideration since it falls out of the publisher’s sphere of interest.

The best way to choose a publisher is to analyze their current titles. The book reviews are a good place to start. If a book being reviewed is up your street, then you check out who the publisher is. Some publications even serialize works of fiction eg. for kids. Since the author and publisher are always credited, you can build your own list of publishers dealing in children’s fiction. For the record, those publishers include:

• The Jomo Kenyatta Foundation
• East African educational Publishers
• Oxford University Press
• Heinemann
• Word Alive
• Story Moja

DEFINATION OF PUBLISHING

Let me make it very clear that there is a big difference between publishers and commercial printers. Printers (the people who ‘do’ your business cards, letterheads, calendars etc) don’t publish anything. Neither does your computer, despite the misguided term ‘desktop publishing.’ That’s just ‘printing’. A real publisher does a lot more, including Editing, Cover Design, Illustrations, Handling Legal Issues, Marketing, Distribution etc. In fact, the word ‘publish’ actually comes from ‘publicize’/‘to make public’. If you distribute literature to the public, then that literature is said to be ‘published’. Now that we have the Internet, a document that is being viewed by a large number of people (like those Yahoo!, Daily Nation or e-zine articles) is ‘published’ (albeit ‘Internet published’). On that front, the best example I can think of is the Kenneth Starr Report.

Kenneth Starr was the man who tried to impeach US President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair. When all was said and done, Starr posted his entire report online for free. Such was the frenzy as millions scrambled for the report that it broke a world record for number of people accessing a single document at the same time. The Kenneth Starr report is therefore ‘published’ and was read by more people than would read your average best-selling novel. In contrast to Kenneth Starr, a person who is sitting on top of all 500 copies of his memoir that he had ‘pressed’ by a local printer is not ‘published’. At best, he’s ‘printed’ (or ‘printed and bound’) but he still has a long way to go. Here’s a final illustration, this time from The Holy Bible. On hearing that Saul and his sons have been massacred by the Philistine army, King David cries: ‘Tell it (the story of the tragedy) not in Gath, publish it not in Ashkelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice.’ (2 Samuel 1:20) As the Gutenberg Press had not been invented, he obviously did not mean: ‘Don’t let that story appear in the Daily Nation’ or ‘Don’t send the manuscript to Oxford University Press.’ He obviously meant: ‘Don’t relay the news (of the tragedy)’, or simply ‘Don’t publicize it’.

EDITORS

Every writer needs an editor. They are the unsung heroes of the book world. The reason why self-published books often come up short is because they’re not professionally edited. They usually have typos, logical errors (eg. A character driving a 2011 S-Class Mercedes in a story set in 2008) and weak points (that could have been improved on or done without). The good thing with traditional publishers is that they have editors who can help you prepare the manuscript for the next step. An editor explores issues of plot, theme, characterization and language. He notes the ‘strong points’ and the ‘weak points’ of the manuscript. Some publishers have what they call an ‘in-house style’. It basically means conforming to a certain standard but can involve such small details as the fonts used, single or double quotation marks and the level of detail they want in descriptions. Again, the Editor sees to it that the manuscripts conform.

It has been said that a local editor has about six manuscripts on his desk at any one time. I tend to think that it’s ten or more. It appears that they are usually swamped and that’s why they take so long to get back to you on your manuscript. Some publishers are now hiring ‘readers’, the way Hollywood movie studios used to. This helps the publishers move faster through the ‘slush pile’ looking for publishable material. When Yusuf K. Dawood won the 2011 Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature for his book The Eye of the Storm, his publisher came under fire for having ‘sat’ on the manuscript for years. In a swift rejoinder, through the press, another writer defended the publisher, East African Educational Publishers, saying that the win was actually proof of EAEP’s professionalism in not ‘rushing’ the book (but doing a good job of developing it instead). EAEP has a long history of winning prizes. The inaugural Wahome Mutahi Prize for Literature, for example, went to Onduko Bw’Atebe for Verdict of Death (EAEP, 2006). The secret to their success, according to EAEP’s head of publishing, is in ‘manuscript selection and editing.’

All editors are not created equal. Take magazine editor Wayua Muli, for example. She helmed the ground-breaking Saturday magazine pullout in the Daily Nation. It was definitely a game-changer with its spicy stories, lots of colour and layer of glamour. When she left, the magazine changed (for worse). It later morphed into a woman’s magazine. But if you could get your hands on one of the original issues, you would see the difference. Ms. Muli was also initially at the helm of the E. A. Standard’s youth entertainment magazine Pulse. When she left, there was a noticeable change. She has since taken her magic touch to glossy magazines such as Eve Girl and others. It reminds me of movie director Stephen Spielberg (Jaws, E.T., Schlindler’s List, Jurassic Park, The Lost Word). While the scripts/stories are written by others (Jaws was based on the novel by Peter Benchley; Jurassic Park and The Lost World were novels by Michael Crichton) and acted out by some of the biggest actors in Hollywood, there’s no denying that Spielberg makes every film his own. The effect can’t be defined; it’s just some kind of ‘Spielberg magic’.

SELF-PUBLISHING

A lot has been said about self-publishing. Most people self-publish their books when they can’t get a publisher or they have a book that is unlikely to appeal to a mass audience, like a memoir. Many Kenyans have gone the self-publishing route, which is encouraging because, as we shall see, self-publishing will be much more affordable in future. Kenyans who have no regrets about self-publishing include Anthony Gitonga (For This Cause, Made For Greatness) who mainly writes motivational material.

There’s what is commonly referred to as ‘vanity publishing’ or the ‘vanity press’. This is a situation where a person has a manuscript (probably not publishable material) and simply pays a printing press to produce a certain number of copies. The problem with these invoice-the-author vanity presses is that they offer no ‘book development’. It’s all mechanical. They may as well be pressing restaurant menus or next year’s calendars. Once the author gets his copies, he realizes that the hard work is only beginning: he now has to seek his own publicity; approach bookshops, schools and libraries; handle arising issues (like poorly bound copies being returned); do his own sales tracking and so on. If only he had a publisher!

There’s another more professional approach to self-publishing:

The author approaches a self-publishing firm that charges more but offers further ‘author services’ eg. Editing, Getting ISBN numbers and Marketing. Locally, such outfits include Big Books Ltd. In the digital age, these ‘author services’ firms can be found online and they offer a ‘menu’ in order to fit the author’s pocket. For example, an author may want 500 paperback books with an ISBN number but he can’t afford to take the Marketing option. The best known such company is iUniverse. Others include AuthorHouse, Infinity Publishing, Llumina Press and Aventine Press. If they handle all aspects of publishing, one might ask, then why aren’t they publishers? ‘Author services’ firms do exactly that – they offer services to authors. They don’t analyze/reject manuscripts, they don’t ‘sign you up’, they don’t promote you (eg. Submitting your book to award contests), they take no responsibility for your content, they don’t own any of the rights (you’re even free to engage other author services) and so on. A traditional publisher is more caring; they invest in your work and can be sued over the publication. Once they’re in, they’re in. You can’t order them to just print out a thousand copies and slap on an ISBN number and barcode. It has to be a committed relationship. And anyone else publishing the same book as the first publisher is a pirate and can be arrested. In addition, there are many websites where you can send a manuscript for review. These include BookConnector and Bookpleasures.com.

Another option for the would-be author is the Print-On-Demand (POD) system that has been made possible by digital printing technology. Remember when if you needed to print something commercially, you had to order a certain minimum or incur losses? All that is gone. With POD (next-generation publishing) you can order one copy of anything! Welcome to the future.

POD (a branch of the larger Manufacture-On-Demand paradigm) is not another passing cloud. It’s a new economic model that helps eliminate waste (of money, resources, storage space etc). It’s especially good for specialized books that aren’t expected to sell very many copies eg. biographies, photo albums, books on gardening, interior design etc. Even traditional publishers can make their out-of-print titles available via POD.

Print-On-Demand does not refer to e-books. A POD book is a real book with glossy covers, printed pages and so on. The only difference is that a copy is produced only when a customer places an order. There’s no initial ‘print run’, no inventory.

I am deeply involved with POD systems. In my view, POD is the closest we have come to a ‘Promised Land’ for writers. Almost anyone sitting on a manuscript can now be published, as long as he or she is willing to do their own marketing. You can also buy ISBN numbers and barcodes which enable your book to enter the mainstream book market and may be made available at Amazon.com (by far the world’s biggest seller of e-books) and Barnesandnoble.com.

The first book I ever placed on a Print-on-Demand system was The Moon is Made of Green Cheese but there’s a story connected with how that came to be:

I am a prose writer but I’ve always loved poetry, especially the classics. Occasionally, I pen a poem, usually following a burst of inspiration (For example, I wrote Remember the Lions after watching the movie The Ghost and the Darkness). Since my job as Web Designer compels me to spend almost the entire day online, in the mid-2000’s, I started posting individual poems online to see what other people thought of them. After getting encouraging comments from such websites as Authorsden.com, I started thinking of looking for a publisher instead of posting for free. I downloaded the poems (14 at the time) and sent them to Sasa Sema Publications. I had seen the Sasa Sema founder, Lila Luce, (a wonderful, wonderful, lady) on TV some years earlier talking about her business and calling for manuscripts. Some time later, I received a letter informing me that they could not publish my manuscript. Not long afterwards, however, Lila (who I only recently discovered is the grand-daughter of Time magazine founder, Henry Luce) called me up and said that Sasa Sema would be interested in publishing the material. She liked the poems even the first time, she said, but back then they were not considering poetic works. I asked if I could write more poems so that they would be enough to make a book and she agreed. Alas, my poetry muse visits about as often as Haley’s Comet and I took too long to complete the manuscript. One night, I was watching the news when I learnt that Sasa Sema Publications was being absorbed by Longhorn Publishers. I knew that was bad news for me. I have a very experimental way of writing (‘Rules are what the artist breaks’ – Bill Bernbach) and I doubted that the larger publisher, which deals mainly in textbooks, would take to the poems. Lila forwarded my manuscript to Longhorn but, as expected, they did not proceed with publication.

With about 50 poems in my collection, I returned to the Internet to look for other publishing options and discovered Print-on-Demand for the first time. My poetry book, The Moon is Made of Green Cheese, is currently available on the POD website Lulu.com, both as an e-book (cheaper, faster to get) and a bound copy. Potential buyers can read the first ten pages for free. Free samples of the poems are also available on my official website,   www.alexandernderitu.com    

As of late 2011, The Moon is Made of Green Cheese is also available on the Amazon Kindle.

Lulu.com is a US-based company that provides a robust online sales and distribution platform for a wide variety of products, from photo albums to comic books. Once a buyer orders a book, Lulu prints, binds and ships the book in 4-6 days. US customers receive their orders faster since they’re in the same country as the publisher. In 2006, Lulu.com received a Web 2.0 Award for their Books category. In the Lulu system, the author sets the cover price, chooses the type of binding (stapled, perfect bound etc), designs his own covers (or chooses from group of templates) and retains all the intellectual property rights. You can even decide whether your book will be a hardback or a paperback.

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[1] Now ‘Moran (E.A.) Publishers Ltd’

Out with The Old, In With the New

‘Congratulations to you

With sad regrets

I’m tired of the old shit

Let the new shit begin.’

- EELS, Old Shit/New Shit (song)

‘You cannot hold the past and embrace the future at the same time.’

– Pastor Randy Morrison, TV’s A Commonsense Approach

‘You need to break out of your mental prison

I’m the Free-man to give you your Shawshank Redemption.’

-          Alexander Nderitu, Demons 2 (song)

The end is truly here for the old generation of Kenyan writers whose heydays were the ‘70’s and ‘80’s (Notice that that was before personal computers changed the world forever). So much has happened in recent times that the old writings will have to be confined to the ‘classics’ section of the (online?) bookstores as the ‘dot com’ generation seeks more relevant material and more contemporary storytelling techniques.

Since the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, the Cold War has ended, Communism been eroded, political idealism

shrunk, democracy been eclipsed by ‘corporate-ocracy’, the Internet has been invented, e-books have emerged, entertainment options have multiplied, micro computers have become commonplace, cell phones are all the rage, new world leaders have risen, more wars have been fought (including some ghastly genocides) and the grip of oligarchy has tightened. Early African writing doesn’t touch on any of these issues and its relevance is now in question.

A novel like Things Fall Apart by Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe (about the effect of the coming of the ‘White Man’ on traditional African society) is so old, it is believed to be Africa’s first novel (1951).  When I wrote When the Whirlwind Passes exclusively for the Internet, it was one of Africa’s first digital novels (if not the first). The year was 2001 – exactly 50 years since Achebe penned his signature novel. And reflecting on how much things had changed, my ‘book’ wasn’t even made of paper! And yet, there are those reviewers who would rather discuss Achebe’s novel to this day. Talk of being ‘stuck in time’.

It’s time to turn a page, folks. Life doesn’t move backwards, it moves forward.

This year, I realized that many of the global superstar writers I looked up to as a teenager are now dead – S. J. Perelman, Mario Puzo, Robert Ludlum, Sidney Sheldon, James Hadley Chase. It has come to my realization that we (the ‘dot com’ writers) are the new kids on the block. Even the living greats like Stephen King, Jackie Collins and Mary Higgins Clark are writing or have written their memoirs. It’s a tacit admission that their careers are drawing to a close.

So be it. I am a youth now (under 35 years of age). Soon – in the blink of any eye – I’ll be middle-aged, and then old, and then gone. There’s no profit in fighting the future – we’re going to get off the stage on way or another, whether we like it or not. ‘Everybody has got to die,’ US novelist William Saryan observed, ‘but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.’ Bestselling French novelist Frédéric Dard (himself now deceased) was closer to the point when he remarked: ‘(President) De Gaulle spent his life becoming immortal…and then he died.’ Earnest Hemingway had no misgivings about saying farewell to the world: ‘Let’s give my life a miss,’ he is quoted as saying.

It is with sheer and utter respect that I say, ‘Goodbye, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Francis D. Imbuga,

Micere Mugo…and all other living members of that generation.’ We, the writers of the future, give you a standing ovation for your lifetime achievements. Your place in literary history is assured.

What Ails Kenyan Literature (Part 8) - Purple Prose

‘He that uses many words for the explanation of any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.’ – John Ray, On the Creation

‘The things you say / Your purple prose just gives you away / The things you say / You’re

unbelievable.’ - EMF, Unbelievable (song)

She was a rather annoying fan. She got my number from a newspaper reporter who had done a story on my literary journey. She also wanted to try out ‘this e-book thing.’ I answered all her questions and thought that that would be it. It wasn’t. Almost every day when I entered my office in Lang’ata, I would be informed that ‘she’ had called. She had many questions which she fired like arrows from a quiver and I did my best to answer them all. Some time after I turned her on to an e-book system, I logged on to the website to take a peek at her work (with e-books, you can read the first few pages for free since it doesn’t wear out the books). I was impressed. She had a very vivid imagination and had constructed a wonderful fantasy story. She could be Kenya’s J. K. Rowling and should probably market herself as such. There was just one problem: She wrote in purple prose.

Purple prose is written or spoken high-falutin language; language that is a lot harder than it needs to be. People usually use it in an attempt to impress others, to appear highly educated.

But it gets old really quickly. Listen to this neat description by a man talking to his female psychiatrist in Heywood Gould’s crime thriller, Double Bang[1]:

‘You have beautiful breasts and you wear dark silk so that they can stir around behind it like assassins behind a curtain.’

In the hands of a Kenyan purple prose writer, that sentence would probably come out like this:

‘You are in possession of mammary glands that generate sexual interest when they appear on one’s retina and you clothe your constitution in dark, glossy, materials that allow said mammaries to maneuver not unlike would-be killers hiding behind a textile barrier.’

Notice that when you use purple prose, the sentences tend to be much longer than necessary.

Here are a couple more examples:

Normal prose: People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

Purple prose: Individuals who make their abodes in vitreous edifices would be advised to refrain from catapulting perilous projectiles.

Normal prose: You can't teach an old dog new tricks

Purple prose: It is fruitless to attempt to indoctrinate a superannuated canine with innovative maneuvers.

Phillip Ochieng’ (I Accuse the Press) is a veteran Kenyan writer. I don’t know much about him but I understand he edited an influential political magazine, called The Weekly Review, in the ’80s. He is very highly spoken of, so I suppose he has many fans despite his prose being the kind that keeps sending one to the dictionary. Here’s a sample of Mr. Ochieng’s writing:

‘I am no Pygmallion, the hero of this Pelasgic myth. But I have been a word surgeon all my working life. I have removed from “copy” – the print equivalent of the body – some hideous warts and abscesses which have invaded the justice system of language.’

If you’re thinking, ‘What?!’, then you’re not alone. I must confess that I have never actually finished reading anything by Philip Ochieng’. I tried following his Sunday column but I could never get past the first few paragraphs. Purple was the prose.

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[1] ‘Brutally funny…the guy is some writer.’ – The Philadelphia Inquirer

What Ails Kenyan Literature (Part 7) - No Bestseller Lists

There used to be a Sunday Nation Best Seller List in the Sunday Nation newspaper that was a compilation of the bestselling fiction and non-fiction books from Nairobi’s leading bookstores. The bookstores included Bookpoint Ltd, Prestige Booksellers, The Book Villa, Suba Books and Periodicals, Shams Bookshop and Simply Books. The Sunday Nation Best Seller List has since been discontinued. Hopefully, the two major newspapers, the Daily Nation and The East African Standard will in future maintain bestseller lists.

Bestseller lists are as important as music charts in the recording business. Charts (and awards) help establish some standards and guide both readers and industry insiders. The New York Times Bestseller List, for example, has been guiding book buyers for years. If a certain author is always on the charts, or a certain book is at the top, it makes a potential book buyer curious about that particular author or that particular book.

With no charts, it becomes difficult for bookstores and book buyers to gauge which books to stock or which author is currently ‘hot’. It also makes it hard to analyze trends.

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF KENYAN VISUAL ART

LOUIS MWANIKI

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF KENYAN VISUAL ART
ART EXHIBITION

A Rare Opportunity to View PAINTINGS, PRINTS, AND DRAWINGS by the Late Professor Mwaniki
EXTRAORDINARY ARTIST TRAINED AT MAKERERE UNIVERSITY FROM 1957-1961

Lecturer in Fine Arts at Nairobi University from 1963 – 1972

Lecturer in Fine Arts at Kenyatta University from 1972 - 2010

DATE: Saturday 7TH December 2013 TIME: 3 – 6 PM

VENUE: Paa ya Paa Arts Centre, Ridgeways, 1st right turn into Ridgeways Road, a few metres after Nakumatt Ridgeways, Kiambu Road.

GUEST OF HONOUR: Mr. Tony Wainaina (Managing Partner at Fanisi Capital/Financial veteran/expert in private equity, venture capital and corporate finance. Additionally, Tony Wainaina is an Art Lover and Collector)

Exhibition Organized and sponsored by Prof. Elizabeth Orchardson-Mazrui in consultation with the wife and children of the late Prof. Louis Mwaniki.

Alexander Nderitu Introduces Africa

 (Note: This article was original written in 2006)

‘So geographers in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill the gaps
And over uninhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.’
- Jonathan Swift, author of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’

‘…all on a supernatural scale and under such an immense sky that when you are first exposed to it, you may be seized with both vertigo – from the sheer speed and height of the clouds – and “folie de grandeur”. Such grandiose surroundings were irresistible to English settlers…’ - James Fox, ‘White Mischief’

‘For millions of years, in millions of homes
A man loved a woman, a child it was born’
- David Byrne, ‘Like Humans Do’ (song)

I was surprised, and more than a little amused, as I listened to a BBC Radio programme on Africa earlier this year. A field reporter on assignment in mammoth China wanted to know how deep the locals’ knowledge of the African continent went. The results: It barely scratched the surface. Intermixed with laughter were suggestions that the world’s second-largest continent is composed of lions, elephants and bush. There were mentions of Mandela, South Africa and the film ‘Out of Africa’. No, they didn’t think there were any towns to speak of. Yes, there were plenty of wild animals. But most shocking of all was the suggestion that Africa is a single country. Even an interviewee who had actually been to Africa guessed that there were at most 14 different countries in all.

Africa is not, nor has it ever been, one vast country. It is a mosaic of 54 autonomous countries, most of them designated by European colonialists during the historical ‘Scramble for Africa.’ All attempts to marry up all the countries – to create a United States of Africa – have so far failed. In fact, some individual countries are having the devil of a time staying in one piece as it is: Eritrea was once a province of Ethiopia, Somaliland was once a part of the larger, war-prone, republic of Somalia. Zanzibar wants to cut the umbilical cord from mainland Tanzania.

In terms of acreage, the Sudan is the largest country. From above tiny Uganda in the equatorial regions, the (nearly) 1-million-square-mile Sudan spreads to the North where it rubs shoulders with Libya and the ancient land of Egypt. In terms of population, Nigeria is Africa’s giant. Over 100 million people call this oil-rich West African country home and there are so many Nigerians in the US, Europe and Asia that when most non-Africans think of Africans, they’re actually thinking of Nigerians. In terms of development, the sprawling republic of South Africa takes the cake. Located in, well, the south of Africa, the mineral-rich home of Castle Lager, De Beers, ‘Cry the Beloved Country’, Nelson Mandela, Miriam Makeba, the Afrikaners and the Zulu tribe needs no introduction.

You can’t analyze African social life without bringing in the aspect of tribe. Even in the 21st century, tribal relations are the ties that bind. Most marriages take place between people of the same tribe and, for the most part, voters vote along tribal lines. Conflicts also commonly arise from tribal animosity. The infamous 1994 Rwandan genocide between the Hutus and the Tutsis was the ultimate extension of tribal passion and arguably the darkest chapter in the Africa’s history. You can often tell an African’s tribe from his indigenous name. My surname, Nderitu (pronounced “Day-ri-to”) is a dead giveaway that I come from the Kikuyu tribe of central Kenya. At first sight, all Africans may look the same but in reality most tribes have distinct features that set them apart – height, skin tone, build, dialects, hair, teeth and even talents. Most have their own language and some languages, like Swahili, are understood by different languages. Altogether, there are over 2,000 different languages.

A common misconception is that all Africans are Negroid (Black). All Negroes may come from Africa but not all Africans are Negroes. The northern rim of the continent (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco) is predominated by Semites (the Arab-Jew persuasion). Think Muammar Gaddafi or Bhoutros-Bhoutros Ghali. Coming down, we find the Negroes who mostly live in what is known as sub-Saharan Africa. In Eritrea and Ethiopia, we again encounter the ubiquitous Semites. Moving towards the southern end of the continent, we find the  race with lighter complexions and hooded eyes (Nelson Mandela and musician Usher Raymond have Capoid features, UN boss Kofi Annan is pure Negroid.) Also in evidence all across the land is a sizeable population of Caucasians and other non-Black people. Not to be confused with tourists and other visitors, these descendants of ancient European settlers, missionaries and Asian traders are as African as the Marula tree. Some are even more African than the original Africans. South Africa has the biggest ‘jambalaya’ of races – Blacks, Whites (including Boers), Browns, Yellows and, for all we know, green people from Mars (that’s why it’s sometimes referred to as “the Rainbow Nation”). Despite the spectrum of skin colour, it is safe to say that most of Mother Africa’s children are Black like me.

Eastern Africa is widely believed to be the cradle of human life. We’re told that, eons ago, early humans embarked on an epic journey northwards (called “the Great Trek”). From Tanzania and Kenya, they walked slowly up to Ethiopia, traversed the Sudan, gained Egypt and crossed over to the contested area now covered Jordan, Israel, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. From there, routes diverged with some pioneers venturing further into Asia, others legging it to Eastern Europe and some (probably due to confusion) returning to North Africa. Facts are sketchy but whichever way you slice it, the earliest human remains were found in East Africa (some as old as 4.2 million years). But this history poses some hard-hitting questions. If Africans were the original owners of the land, then how come they had to wait for the missionaries before they could advance academically and otherwise? Where were the Oprahs, the Michael Jacksons, the Bill Cosbys, the Michael Jordans, the Condolezzas, the Mohammed Alis, the Naomi Campbells, Ben Carsons? Why did the African giant have to be awoken? And why, oh why, is the second-largest continent still the poorest? The question of non-development, of Africans’ seeming lethargy, is easily answered by Prof. Ali Mazrui’s famous documentary, ‘The Africans’, in which he narrates: ‘If necessity is the mother of invention, then bounty must be the mother of inertia.’ In a land where you spit out a seed and return to find a fruit tree sprouting, the early Africans were under no pressure to advance technologically. Africa supports, by a mile, the widest VARIETY of plant and animal life – a tribute to her fertility.

Modern clothes were another superfluous commodity to early Africans, especially in the tropics (as the missionaries soon found out). The blazing African sun has played havoc with many a foreigner and even though the locals never suffer from ‘sunburn’ (whatever that is) the temperatures sometimes soar to uncomfortable heights – even for Africans. On the question of poverty, I have no ready answer because the continent itself is imbued with wealth. Most of the diamonds you see gleaming in jewellery boutiques around the world come from Africa. And much of the gold. And the coffee and tea and cut flowers and the cocoa many other “raw materials”, hence “the scramble for Africa” which led to jealously-guarded colonization. In fact, most of the conflicts and political turmoil that you see in the press are all about controlling mineral and other wealth – Liberia (diamonds), the DRC (assorted minerals), Nigeria (oil), Somalia (Heaven knows!)

At any rate, a good many Africans are well off, but the gap between the rich and the poor is the biggest without going as far as the sub-continent of India. While the super-rich command customized cars and even private planes, others are so poor they die from curable diseases like Malaria and their children walk several kilometres to school every day – on bare feet. Also on the subject of poverty, we must not lose sight of the fact that the majority of Africans still live in the rural areas (‘the country’ if you’re American, ‘the sticks’ if you’re British.) In Kenya, for example, more than half the population lives in abject poverty (on less than a dollar a day). You may have heard 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangari Maathai saying that she was so poor growing up that she and her friends used to play with frog eggs! (Wangari, do you have to tell them EVERYTHING? I want to be able to show my face in public when I tour Europe to promote my books!)

But what does it MEAN to be African? If a Negro was born and lives in the US, can he still claim to be an African? What if a Caucasian (I give you best-selling author Wilbur Smith as an example) is born, lives in, and loves Africa? Does that make him a certifiable African? Here’s my circuitous and open-ended answer (and my conclusion to this x-ray of the land of my ancestors):

A long, long, time ago (way before the first man loved the first woman and a child was born) all the continents were stuck together. Various disturbances on the earth’s crust coupled with the spinning of the earth (which makes it bulge out at the sides) caused cracks and, ultimately, separation. You may take it that all continents and islands are jigsaw pieces and all humankind is one large, chequered, family. As I said earlier, the first people lived in the tectonic fragment now known as Africa. Speaking on KTN TV recently, an American tourist ventured that all people should make a Mecca-like pilgrimage to Kenya at least once in their lives because it is our mutual ‘home’ (See the Leakey family’s work on human origins). This is the reason the lack of interest in Africa expressed in the BBC Radio programme amused me so much. Chinese, American, French, German, Russian, British or whatever our nationality, we might all be Africans in diaspora!


Written By: Alexander Nderitu

Alexander Nderitu (www.alexandernderitu.com) is a Kenyan-born novelist and entertainer. He has also expressed interest in fashion design, music production and sports entertainment.