"Imagining Ourselves,” (IO) an ambitious online project featuring personal stories by hundreds of young women from more than 100 countries around the world. The women were asked to respond to one question: "What defines your generation of women?"

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers in Johannesburg describes herself as a “refugee from legitimacy.”

Amanda Tumusiime, Ugandan visual artist, makes works in oils.

Monique Wanjala, social economist from Kenya, has changed the way “my brothers treat women” by coming out to her family about her HIV+ status.

Zimbabwe’s Netsayi sings of the longing for connection on the journey to claim herself.

Iman Shaggag of Sudan recalls the forcible circumcision of her childhood friends.

Nigerian photographer, Toyin Sokefun, captures women both owning and disowning concepts of female beauty.

What do all these women have in common? Their songs, stories, films, artwork, photos, are in "Imagining Ourselves,” (IO) an ambitious online project featuring personal stories by hundreds of young women from more than 100 countries around the world. The women were asked to respond to one question: "What defines your generation of women?"

Produced and presented by the San Francisco-based International Museum of Women, IO sets out to capture the voices of women in their 20s and 30s – a generation poised to take the reins of global leadership. Launched on March 8th, International Women’s Day, in Arabic, English, French and Spanish, the exhibit logged an astonishing 65,000 “hits” in 24 hours. In its first week, over 200,000 hits were recorded. Contributors from 154 countries posted comments, responses, and their own stories. By mid-April, the numbers had risen to 3.5 million hits, from 130,000-plus unique visitors, in over 170 countries.

Clearly, IO taps a global need – for young women to share their visions and voices, and to connect with their peers internationally. African contributors range from the famous – Hafsat Abiola, Rokia Traore – to 20-year-old Odette Mukeshimana, orphaned at 9 by the Rwandan genocide, and left to raise her 6 siblings single-handed.

In a week when South Africa’s Jacob Zuma was acquitted of rape, when we heard of UN peacekeepers and aid workers in Liberia and the Congo extracting sex from 8-year-old girls in exchange for food and money, IO is a vital injection of nutrients for the artist-activist soul. Not because it offers escape from the grim realities African women face. On the contrary. In the words of Kenyan journalist, Mary Kimani, who has covered Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC for the last 6 years:

“The poems I have sent in are not romantic poems. Imagination is not just about things we would wish to be, but a lens through which we can also see truly. There is a place for dreams, it is the place that tells us all that we can be if we were allowed wings and could soar. But all real dreams must be firmly anchored in reality.

“What defines my generation of women? In one word: resilience.”

This resilience is the hallmark of the African contributions to IO. They are juicy, vibrant, outrageous, creative, defiant, humorous, stoic, determined. They are charged with talent, fuelled by razor intelligence, honed and polished by professional skills and training, driven by vision and purpose.

The resilience shines through the groundbreaking performance of the Vagina Monologues in Lagos, a production that prompted the First Lady of Lagos State to declare: “Every woman is on that stage.” It infuses the passion of South Africa’s Monica da Silva, who pioneers community homeopathic treatments for HIV+ children. It underpins the words of 18-year-old Marie Josee Nyirabisabo, as she describes her YWCA training in literacy, reproductive health, microfinance, and her business plan to generate income for herself and her two younger siblings.

The one gripe I have with IO is the limitations of its search tool. The site carries no single comprehensive listing of every story, event, and contributor, so tracking down the African voices becomes a treasure hunt. But the hunt throws up endless riches – compelling photos and visual art, uniquely individual voices, powerful film and music. The site is beautifully designed, both clean and rich, visually striking, yet clutter-free. I’m not surprised that the average visitor stays 20-30 minutes.

“Women catch courage from women whose lives and writings they read,” wrote the renowned American writer and scholar, Carolyn Heilbrun, “and women call the bearer of that courage, ‘friend.’” The great strength of IO is that its genuinely interactive design allows this ‘catching of courage’ to take immediate form alongside each exhibit in the posting of comments and responses. So for example, Lisa Russell’s short film on obstetric fistula in Niger, elicits a story from Sudanese Iman Shaggag, about the childhood friend who, after circumcision, had no interest in any game other than mutilating her dolls just as she had been mutilated.

Scheduled to run for four months, March – June 2006, IO presents a different theme each month, with featured contributions and conversations online, and linked live events around the world.

The opening theme for March was Love. Notable contributions include:

Ugandan artist Amanda Tumusiime’s oil paintings of the Kiga Hug. The vivid textured images show the greeting embrace of the Bakiga of Southern Uganda, “The Kiga Hug is a personal invitation to cherish, love and embrace the future with a purpose.”

The story by Monique Tondoi Wanjala (Kenya), of her journey from a newly-married “enthusiastic Christian wife” who believed AIDS only affected “promiscuous people”, through the discovery that she had been infected with HIV by her husband. Wanjala takes us through her cycle of denial, despair, and the choice to move forward, educate herself and others, come out as HIV+ and become an advocate and activist. “For me, knowledge is power.”

“Unfolding Posture”, by multidisciplinary artist Heba Farid (Egypt): a series of photos of a woman’s body turning under water. The views of limbs, hair, torso, fluid and distorted, become a metaphor for all the shifts women address in IO.

Nigerian Toyin Sokefun reflects on beauty, in photos of women claiming, manufacturing, and contemplating their physical selves.

And finally, Hafsat Abiola interviews Amina Lawal, an illiterate villager from northern Nigeria, made famous in 2001 when an Islamic Shari’a court sentenced her to death by stoning for bearing a child out of wedlock. Two of Lawal’s responses stand out with heartbreaking starkness:

Q: What are your expectations for your life?
A: I leave my life to God.

Q: What were your dreams when you were growing up?
A: We had no dreams. We were not brought up to think that we could dream.

In April, the theme was Money, perhaps the most crucial determinant to women’s ability to define themselves. We meet Winnie Gitau, who against all odds, started her own health foods business in Kenya - and revolutionized the market for holistic products. Her story demonstrates the challenges faced on the continent, even by educated, professional, middle-class women, in financing business ventures.

At the other end of the spectrum, Carolyn Asapo (Uganda) describes her work with the Village Enterprise Fund, which offers start-up capital to rural women. “My wish is to have a world where challenges are transformed into opportunities.”

Culture and Conflict is the focus for the current month, May. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, South African writer, delves into the complexity of mixed-race heritage in the apartheid years.

“ I am the colony of their forbidden love,
where Africa's son
and Scotland's grand-daughter
dna-ed, denied their offspring”

And ends with a clarion call to all her sisters:

“No ring adorns the marriage of myself to myself,
it is endless and golden.”

Netsai Mushonga (Zimbabwe) narrates her evolution as the founder of WPP (Women’s Peacemakers Program), and Director of Women's Coalition.

“I was alarmed when my distant cousin was killed by her husband and then not arrested. He was made to pay a cow to his in-laws and got a younger fresher woman. That memory from my childhood sticks out to me as I finally realized that women's situation was akin to slavery.”

Tessa Lewin’s short film, “Conscious Dreaming” is a charming, whimsical, thought provoking, musical animation piece. In just a few minutes, it captures the dilemmas of all young women negotiating the quest for self with the longing for connection and stability.

It’s hard to click out of the IO site. It feels like walking out of an electric conversation between a group of women, a conversation that bubbles with laughter and inspiration, throws up fresh argument and challenge moment to moment, leaves your brain and imagination crackling. Perhaps the most important thing IO does is make my generation of women present, in their own voices, through their own lenses, for all the world to see and hear.

Hafsat Abiola says, of her interview with Amina Lawal: “I meet so many women who are still waiting for permission to be present. Ultimately, Imagining Ourselves must be Imagining Ourselves Authorized.”

Mary Kimani sums it up:

“When I hear the term 'Imagining Ourselves', I think reality and hope mixed together. It is who we are now and who we want to be. It is love and pain, joy and anger, hope and fear all mixed together. We imagine ourselves whole, human, complete, and that has never in any language or culture, translated to perfect or ideal. It has always translated to complex, multifaceted, and annoyingly human.”

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers wraps up her poem with uncompromising solidity:

“Here we are then. Here we are.”

Imagining Ourselves Curriculum available for educators, partners and community organizations to download from the Museum Website at:

http://www.imow.org/education/curricula_exhibit_io.php

* Shailja Patel is a Kenyan poet, writer and theatre artist. Her work features in Imagining Ourselves this month at:
www.shailja.com

* Please send comments to [email protected]

The crowd at Cody's, Berkeley's legendary bookshop, is multicolored in every way – skin, clothing, headgear. On this Saturday night, over 100 people have filled the upstairs space to see and hear Wole Soyinka read from his new memoir: "You Must Set Forth At Dawn." The chairs are all taken. People stand at the back, pressed up against display tables and bookshelves.

When Soyinka enters the room, his trademark shock of white hair moves like a beacon to the podium. At 70 years old, he has been through gruelling physical trials, including 22 months in solitary confinement under the Abacha regime. He's on a book tour so jam-packed with interviews, readings, signings, speaking engagements, it would exhaust a 25-year old. And even more tiring, one would imagine, is the recurrence of the same questions, over and over, at every appearance:

What do you think about the conflict over oil in Nigeria?
Is there hope for democracy in Nigeria? In Africa?
What are the responsibilities of The African Writer?
What Can We Do About Darfur?

Also recurrent in every audience: the self-important windbags who don't even have a question. Who simply want to trumpet their nanosecond of African Experience:

"I was in Ghana in the Peace Corps in 1972..."

"I visited your country in 1981 and I was told it was a very dangerous place for Americans…"

Yet, he fields them all. With grace, humor, energy, presence, attention. Stays awake. Stays engaged. Stays responsive.

Tonight, he reads an excerpt that describes his departure from Nigeria, 10 years ago, by "shall we say, an unorthodox route". A 10-hour journey by pillion on the back of a motorbike, through bush and forest via smugglers' routes, across the border. He describes the very real physical dangers and hardships: branches slashing his face in pitch darkness, risk of capture; then renders them surreal with an equally vivid evocation of the two fantasies clung to throughout the journey: a long, cold shower, followed by a long, cold beer.

His firm resonant actor's voice reminds us of his decades in theatre. It has an unhurried, hypnotic quality that redeems his frequently-rambling, verbose sentences that can seem clunky and tedious on the page. He draws out syllables, "agonized in-ten-si-ty"; aerates the prose with pauses, visibly savours the memories his words conjure up for him. "I'll sing the praises of whatever brings me solace."

So a terrifying flight into exile also becomes an ode to beer, an adventure story. The passage could be a metaphor for Soyinka's own life and work, marked by his capacity to hymn the tiny comforts of life, the minutiae of human longings, as a defiant counterpoint to the larger oppressive forces of history.

Questions about his work as an artist bring out the different strands of thought that have made up his opus.

Q: African literature in past decades has focused overwhelmingly on the encounter between African and European culture. What are African writers most concerned with today?

A: We've moved into a stage of internal probing. An inquiry into the internal states of contradiction that have prompted the state of affairs on the continent. Issues of power, and the alienation from power, of the people being governed. We're really probing into the social interstices of our being, the philosophical givens. We've become far more inward looking over the last few decades.

Q: Africa is frequently discussed generically, as a single continent, ignoring the multiple nations and cultures.

A: This is not just a mistake the West makes. Even some African intellectuals do it as an act of choice – a sensibility that denotes unity – "don't split up Africa – we're one." It's a nice sentiment, but it lacks a basis of reality.

Q: You write in English, but what is your relationship to your mother tongue?

A: Colonial language was forced upon us. Just as colonial boundaries were enforced to serve administrative and economic needs of the colonial power. After independence, these new nations required, for the same administrative, economic, legislative purposes, a national language. Which was usually the colonial language – English, or French, or Portuguese.

So my generation grew up bilingual. We had our mother tongue, and then we had English – the language of exchange, mobilization, commerce, courts. From a political aspect, it was also the language of unity.

Q: Is Heinemann's African Writers Series broad enough to cover West Africa literature adequately?

A: The series is very uneven. While it did pioneering work, it also tended to do away with standards. That was why I originally refused to be published by it. But it was also a marvelous instrument for giving new voices an avenue for publication.

Q. What are the roles and responsibilities of the African writer who lives abroad?

A: The same as the role of the writer in any part of the world. Which is no different from the role of the bricklayer, or mason, or carpenter – that is, the role of a citizen. A human being, a community member.

The writer has one advantage: the tool of instant communication. As a citizen, the writer's role is to inform, sometimes to entertain. When I seek something to read, I don't reach for a political tract, I reach for a poem, a beautiful poem. But the very act of entering another's experience enlarges and strengthens me to return to the cauldron of political engagement.

So as a writer, you must find a way to enlarge your vision of humanity.

* * * *

Many might say that with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Soyinka reached the apogee of achievement as an artist. He could afford to rest on his laurels. But he continues to delight in new adventures, to bring undiminished zest to his face-to-face encounters with audiences around the world. Perhaps this appetite for dialogue, this sustained creative energy, are the finest testaments to his work. They are living proof that art can, and does, revitalize, rejuvenate, reinvent, in the face of all challenges.

I want whatever he's on. And I want to still be on it when I'm seventy.

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

* Please send comments to [email protected]

In the museum map for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wangechi Mutu's work is listed as: "Site-specific gallery installation by up-and-coming artist. Visitors may find certain works in this exhibition challenging. Parents/guardians are advised to preview the exhibition before sharing it with children."

One might be forgiven for thinking that Mutu, born and raised in Kenya, now based in New York, has already "up and come". Her work resides in museums of modern and contemporary art in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. It has been exhibited at prestigious art museums and galleries in London, Paris and Tokyo. It has received critical attention in numerous glossy journals and publications.

"Beauty" and "horror" are the two words most frequently used about the Mutu opus. She creates collaged images of women, using clippings from fashion magazines, news magazines, and porn magazines (which feature, she's asserted, the most realistic brown skin). Smooth shiny arms that end in manicured talons, sexy stiletto-shod legs, emerge from bodies which are continents of mineral, wood, plant, forest, flesh, rock, jewel, feather. Close up, we see that each of these bodies is mutilated in some way – amputated, pierced, shattered, bleeding.

"There are elements and references to violence, but my work is not about violence," says Mutu. "It concerns what brings about violence, and ideas of power – female power, how history is proscribed or worked out on the bodies of women."

The installation I viewed in San Francisco is entitled "The Chief's Lair is a Bloody Mess". One wall of the white box gallery space has been gouged with dozens of small holes, like gunshot wounds, tinged with red pigment. Three chairs dominate the center of the room, poised on extended spindly stilt legs. A bottle of wine hangs over each one, drips on the chair and spills on the floor, drying to sticky odorous bloodstains. These "thrones" are a satire on Western global hegemony: "A leader can sit on his seat and tell people to go out and fight the wars he has created." Yet the ease with which the same seats could be toppled, as they wobble on their perches, suggests the precarious base of military dominance.

In the collage "Bloody Old Head Games", a tiny figure, half-female, half-bird, perches on the elbow of a gigantic standing woman with scars and dark patches where we would expect to see breasts. A pistol in the hand of the avian woman points directly into the skull of the main figure, spews an explosion of red and brown particles. The eye moves down the picture to a girdle of pubic hair that morphs into long dangling strands of a grass skirt, over a leg raised as if to dance. Mutu plays a head game with the viewer, challenges our preconceptions, seduces and frightens, lures and repels.

The work of an African artist exhibited in the Western world is never free of imposed expectations of "authenticity". San Francisco museum curator, Tara McDowell, says of Mutu's work: "Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, she creates work that reflects her African identity and heritage as well as a politics of place with which she is deeply familiar, having spent years exposed to the mutilations that are common in parts of Africa debilitated by civil strife and the diamond trade."

Wangechi Mutu was a schoolmate of mine at Loreto Convent, a private Catholic girls' school in Nairobi. The mutilations referred to may be common in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Congo – they did not figure in the experience of upper middle-class Nairobi schoolgirls in the 1980s. While Mutu admits to a "Catholic-obsessed mind", and clearly draws on the iconography of the ritualized sacrificial body, we see at work in McDowell's comments the unexamined racism of "collective representation". Anyone hailing from the African continent is assumed to have first-hand experience of every aspect of the social, political and economic history of every region of the continent. This is the only way their art can be legitimate. Unlike Western artists, Africans may not address a subject simply because it engages them – it must reflect some aspect of their own heritage.

If Mutu's work does indeed reflect a politics of place, it is a universal place she explicates herself: "I position myself as a violator, a person who destroys. There's something horribly satisfying about it. People have to clean up after you. Someone has to come around to heal the wall. And it takes a lot to repair. It's also about creating that cycle of responsibility that's part of the performance of this piece. Women's bodies […] are like sensitive charts - they indicate how a society feels about itself."

It takes creative courage to gouge out a white gallery wall. It takes intellectual and artistic courage to recontextualize mass-produced images of the female body in ways that may still be misinterpreted. Mutu's work has been reproduced on magazine covers with captions such as "Fashion and Art", or worse, "Sex Sells". But there is a deeply satisfying aesthetic fused with a radical politics here. A holy mess that draws us into the best kind of head game - one that forces us to re-examine our conditioned responses to the imagery that surrounds us.

* Visit for more information. Shailja Patel is a Kenyan Indian poet and spoken word artist. Visit www.shailja.com

* Send comments to [email protected]

Hailed as "First Rate" and "Inspiring!" by the New York Times, Children of Uganda is an internationally touring dance and music troupe, composed of 22 young Ugandans aged 6 to 20. All the members of the company have lost one or both parents to AIDS. They live in homes and boarding schools supported by the Texas-based Uganda Children's Charity Foundation (UCCF). Children of Uganda was originally founded to teach orphaned children the songs, dances and stories that were in danger of being lost, as AIDS continues to shred the social and cultural fabric of Ugandan communities.

On opening the program for the Children of Uganda performance at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center, I was confronted by these stark facts:

- There are 2.4 million orphans living in Uganda today.

- They make up 10% of Uganda's total population, 20% of Uganda's population under 14.

- 1.1 million of them have lost one or both parents to AIDS.

- AIDS kills over 200 people a day in Uganda.

Yerba Buena's marketing materials say: "But what if the response to this heartbreak was dance and drumming, light and joy? Can art heal wounds this deep? Sometimes it's riskier to respond with joy than sorrow; the Children of Uganda invite you to take that courageous leap."

Does this make you feel a little queasy? Should anyone be required to respond to tragedy on this scale with "dance and drumming, light and joy?"

"People may think they're going to feel bad, but what they see is the antithesis of that," says Alexis Hefley, Texan American founder of UCCF. "It's an amazing production about hope and ethnic dance. It's happy and inspiring." Hefley was a banker until 10 years ago, when she visited Uganda in search of "meaning and community". She is a staunch advocate of the abstinence programs promoted by the Bush administration and Uganda's first lady, Janet Museveni. "Abstaining until you're married, then staying faithful to one partner is the most effective way to prevent HIV transmission."

The program states that Children of Uganda serve as "goodwill ambassadors for the 2.4 million orphans living in Uganda today" and "increase awareness of the HIV/AIDS crisis in their homeland."

Perhaps I'm cynical, but haven't Bono, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt already cornered that market? Will greater "awareness" and "goodwill" give Africa ownership and control of its own resources, from oil to diamonds to soil to water? Create just, equitable terms of trade? Supply cheap antiretroviral drugs and accessible healthcare?

The financial goal of the tour is to raise $1.5 million for UCCF's orphan support programs, in donations and gifts from individuals and institutions. The foundation does not receive money from tickets sales of the tour, nor do any of the performers get paid. Financial statements and performance ratings for UCCF can be found on the site of independent charity evaluator:

To meet this goal, the young performers are on a 5-month, coast-to-coast tour of the US, during which they will play 31 cities in 20 states.

"If someone is tired, they don't have to dance," says Hefley. "We make sure to build in 2 days off for each 5 days of performance." The exception to this is a New York run of 7 shows in 6 days, but according to Hefley, "There are rest days going into that run, and afterwards."

A teacher travels with the troupe to monitor the education of the primary level children. The students are also given academic assignments by their teachers in Uganda. But the tour itself "is educational," according to Hefley. She cites trips to Disneyland and Universal Studios as examples of activities arranged for the children in their time off stage. And what are they like on stage?

The show is breathtaking. The New York Times is right to call it "first rate". Striking set and costumes, lighting design that enhances without dominating. The program offers the audience a spectrum of music and dance, drawing from all regions of Uganda, as well as material from Kenya, Rwanda, and the Congo. It showcases an impressive range of East African instruments, vocal styles, and complex, compelling movement.

The performers combine technical excellence with controlled exuberance to infuse the intricacy and grace of the dances with youthful power. Director Peter Kasule creates a show that allows individual personalities to emerge, from the showmanship of crowd-pleasing 6-year-old soloist, Miriam Namala to the dignity, superb athleticism, and reflective depth of the older dancers. Kasule's own charisma and stage presence are central to the show. At 24, he is a veteran performer of several Children of Uganda tours, and is currently on leave from his studies in music technology in Santa Fe. As narrator and master of ceremonies, he commands the auditorium, and the audience. He charms, beguiles and teases them into a sequence of arm movements, clapping out a harmonic rhythm, chanting in Luganda.

There are moments of delightful, subversive departure from the "traditional." As when we are told, gravely, that women were never allowed to touch African drums, as a drum touched by a woman would "lose its sound." In the very next piece, the boys abdicate the stage, the girls come on, and take over - on the drums.

So is Children of Uganda an uplifting and joyful experience? Without question.

Is it a good thing for American audiences to see these gifted and energetic performers, and to be educated about the context in which they make art? Absolutely.

Will the $1.5 million that the tour aims to raise, improve the lives of a small number of Ugandan children orphaned by AIDS? Yes.

Is it a valuable experience for young performers in any field to tour internationally, to perform on world class stages to packed houses, with state of the art production technology to showcase their talent? Of course.

Then why does Children of Uganda leave me with more questions than answers?

Consider, if you will, a parallel scenario for the US. Hurricane Katrina left 1.5 million Americans displaced, homeless, destitute. Devastated the rich cultures and communities of the African-American South. Thousands of children were orphaned. Suppose some benevolent well-meaning Nigerian banker, in search of meaning and life-purpose, decided to organize a global performing tour of orphans from Louisiana. The Children of New Orleans would tour the US, coast to coast, doing traditional dances of Creole and black Southern heritage. The tour would raise money for their own clothing, shelter, education, and the support of their "brothers and sisters" in orphanages.

Would America be able to confront itself in the shape of the Children of New Orleans? To accept that the tragedy of a natural disaster, combined with a criminal abandonment of black citizens by their own government, could become a "happy inspiring production about hope and ethnic dance?" Would the middle-class, theater-going audiences of America sit through "dance and drumming, light and joy", and emerge uplifted rather than unbearably disturbed? Or would they tremble with the exposure to their own indifference and complicity?

Dance does not destroy death or erase grief. Drums do not dissolve genocidal tragedies created from criminal indifference, corporate greed, centuries of exploitation. That the children of Uganda can still find a language of joy in their bodies, articulate it with grace and power, share it with such incredible generosity, should be a source of deepest shame and discomfort to audiences of the developed world. It should not leave them feeling good.

* Visit www.childrenofuganda.org for more information. Shailja Patel is a Kenyan Indian poet and spoken word artist. Visit www.shailja.com

* Send comments to [email protected]

Is it fair to talk about a film I haven’t seen?

That depends. Is the film The Constant Gardener? Then one might argue that it fails, as every Western film set in Africa has failed, to treat the continent as anything other than backdrop to the main story. The main story, it goes without saying, is the drama of the white people.

A few years ago, I borrowed a set of rules from brilliant American cartoonist, Alison Bechdel. In one of her Dykes To Watch Out For cartoon strips, she has a character say:

"I don't go to a movie unless:

1) It has at least two women in it, who
2) Talk to each other, about
3) Something other than the man in the movie."

I tweaked that for my Africa-films filter. Any film set in, and ostensibly about, Africa has to:

1) Have at least 2 African characters in it.
That's characters. Servants, waiters, extras, are not characters.
2) The two African characters have to talk to each other, about
3) Something other than the white protagonist(s) in the film

I avoided seeing The Constant Gardener because none of my friends who saw it could vouch that it met my 3 rules. Each snippet I came across about it fed my conviction that it would only irritate me beyond belief. Like hearing how the Western actors had been “shocked beyond belief” by the poverty of Nairobi slums. Like actress Rachel Weisz, describing the beauty of “Lake Magadi covered with flamingos.” There are no flamingos at Lake Magadi, Rachel. That’s Lake Nakuru.

Last Sunday night, Rachel Weisz won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Constant Gardener. In her speech, she paid tribute to the brilliance of her director, the John Le Carre novel the film was based on, and reeled off the customary list of personal thanks. She did not mention Africa, Kenya, or Kenyans. She did not even hint at the supposed central theme of the film – giant pharmaceuticals testing drugs on impoverished Africans.

It would appear, then, that it’s perfectly possible – in fact, the norm – to make a film that claims to be about Africa, shoot it in Africa, market it with relentless repetition of the word “Africa”, without actually seeing Africa. Or Africans. I see no reason not to accord such a film the same invisibility when I write of it.

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

* Send comments to [email protected]

The music over the PA system, when I arrive at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, is relentlessly American. Kenny Rogers, Whitney Houston, muzak you can’t name but you’ve heard a hundred times before in a hundred generic interchangeable locations. It sounds especially ironic to me this time, given the purpose of my trip.

16 hours ago, in the UK, I posted the following entry on my blog:

“Migritude and I are going home. To an audience that may love us or loathe us, but cannot possibly be bored or indifferent. An audience more intimately connected to what we have to say than any other in the world.

The novelist May Sarton has a line in one of her books: ‘Perhaps, in the end, this is why one is a poet. So that once in a lifetime, one can say the right words, to the right person, at the right time.’

Almost 3am now. 6am in Nairobi - sunrise, and trees erupting into bird chatter. On Kenya Airways flights, Local Time At Destination is rendered in Kiswahili as Saa Ya Kinyumbani Ya Mwisho Wa Safari.

Literal translation: Time of the home at the end of the journey.”

I grew up in Kenya during the Moi years. When those who spoke out were routinely arrested, detained without trial, beaten, tortured, exiled, killed. We read daily news stories about journalists, activists, even students, jailed for “sedition.” Every so often, our literature teacher would tell us that such-and-such a poet had been “banned” – and we dutifully crossed out their name and poems in our school text-books.

We were taught that Kenya attained independence peacefully. Without bloodshed. The slaughter of over 300,000 Kenyans in the war of independence, the subsequent betrayal of the country by the establishment of one-party rule, was never mentioned.

I grew up in a world where brown-skinned Kenyans were “the Asians” - their Kenyan citizenship and nationality subject to constant question and attack. Black-skinned Kenyans were “Africans” – the real Kenyans. Africans of other nationalities – Ugandans, Somalis, Congolese – were suspect and unwelcome refugees, invisible in public life.

Now I’m going home to do excerpts from my one-woman spoken-word theatre show, Migritude, in which I unfold voices of Kenyan women telling of rape and torture in British concentration camps during the Mau Mau years. Speak the pain of growing up brown in black-majority post-colonial East Africa. Reclaim and celebrate the dignity outsider status. Do not disguise my radical queer politics. I am terrified. I don’t yet trust that we can speak of these things, even in the new multiparty Kenya, without consequences.

And beyond that, I have no idea how Nairobi will take to spoken-word theatre. Or slam poetry. Who will come out to hear my work? June Wainaina, PR and Marketing Manager of Kwani?, the groundbreaking Kenyan literary organization that is presenting me in Nairobi, tells me: “People here have never seen anything like you. We expect to sell out your show at the Carnivore.”

When Youssou N’Dour sang at Nairobi’s legendary Carnivore restaurant in 2005, he drew a capacity crowd of 4,500. We draw slightly less. A lot less, in fact. Only 59 tickets sold (we’d projected 200). Not even enough to recoup Kwani’s costs – or pay my artist’s fee. Most glaring, and personally disappointing, is the absence of my own Asian African community, aside from a few progressive activists, journalists, and friends. We learn important lessons from this about PR, community outreach, marketing, and choice of venue. But the press is there in force. KTN, the national TV network, films the entire show. Journalists from Kenya’s two national dailies bombard me with questions after the performance. Features on me and Migritude run in the papers every day for the next four days.

And the response to Migritude from those 59 people there is nothing short of electric. They surround me on stage afterwards, almost overwhelm me with eagerness, appreciation, thoughts, questions. I am amazed at how my work has sliced through ethnic and socio-economic boundaries. Some of the most enthusiastic responses and persistent questions come from a group of MCs and b-boys, who, I am later told, were all street children until a few years ago. One of them tells me how powerfully affected he was by the integration of history, politics, economics, into my poetry. He asks: “What obstacles will I face in writing like this?”

Someone else, Asian African, tells me he was moved to tears by Shilling Love, a piece about my parents’ sacrifices. He was embarrassed by his emotion, until he looked around and saw another listener, Black African, also crying. “I have never had this experience before,” he says, “of Asian and African sharing the same tear.”

In subsequent days I do back-to-back meetings, interviews, radio spots. I am asked repeatedly for my thoughts on “Indians in Kenya.” My recurring response is: “I don’t really have any knowledge about Indians in Kenya. But I have a lot to say about Kenyans of South Asian heritage.” I watch the eyes of Black Kenyan journalists widen with sudden understanding, and it affirms my faith in the vital importance of words. I am a poet because I believe that language shapes the reality we inhabit. When we reclaim and reinvent the language used to define us, we also claim the space and power to act politically.

Some journalists tell me that they have never heard South Asian Kenyans voice the radical politics they hear in my work. I point out that just as Black Kenyans who challenged the ruling powers post-independence were exiled, imprisoned, or killed, so also were dissenting Asian Kenyans silenced – through assassination, deportation, removal of citizenship.

On the night of the show, the TV crew tells us they will run segments of Migritude on KTN’s Art Scene program the following week. Later, we hear that the director of the show was concerned about the political content. Rather than cutting it, however, she chose to delay screening until her superiors approved it. Self-censorship? Over-cautiousness? What elements of the content caused the concern? All part of the ongoing conversation about saa ya kinyumbani. What time is it right now in Kenya’s history? Has the time finally arrived when we can have these conversations?

* Kenyan Indian poet and spoken word artist Shailja Patel has featured at New York's Lincoln Center, and venues across the US. She has drawn standing ovations in London, Glasgow, and Nairobi. Excerpts from her one-woman spoken-word theater show, Migritude, have aired on BBC radio, NPR, the National Radio Project, and Pacifica Radio, generating responses worldwide. Migritude was recently selected for the International Women Art Festival in Vienna in 2006. (http://www.shailja.com/)

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