Oral East Africa>Part 1: The village writers At the hut of the story

Written by Otiato Guguyu

I only met Mr Henry Chakava once, may his soul rest in peace. It was a chance meeting last year during Taban Lo Lyong’s visit to promote his fascinating book After Troy. (A must read especially at this time that the Eurocentric myth is coming apart).

Other than that I only knew people who knew Mr Chakava, and all attest to the larger than life figure of one of Kenya’s great geniuses whose accomplishment are enviable.

He opened the door for publishing and brought us some of the best African titles from literal giants like Barbara Kimenye, Okot p’Bitek, Mazrui, Meja Mwangi, Marjorie Oludhe-Macgoye, and, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, that we grew up with and discovered the world through.

He notably exemplified, the effort to build an African Publishing house as he steered towards his ideal “Autonomous African Publishing House model. He presided over the acquisition of the British Multinational Heinemann (East Africa) and changing its name to East African Publishers but did not attain the level of success he had envisioned for the industry.

The Model Publishing House

That with a capital of $250,000, Africa could fund a publishing house that covered every aspect of what was needed, from establishing aims, studying and understanding the publishing environment, carefully evaluating human resource requirements, training, book pricing, and markups for profitability and return on investment, and other practical advice on how things ought to be done.

Instead we have to contend with the underfunded local houses operating on the margins, publishing one storybook or two now and then and hoping they will be recommended as supplementary reader for schools.

I am not privy to the workings of the world of publishing in this country, growing up it chilled me with tales of how small a percentage writers earned. As an aspiring writer I always wondered why Kenyan publishers used glaring photocopy white paper on books with terrible graphics.

Self Publishing

I did try to submit some manuscripts when I was in college, but all got rejected. Knowing it is the labour of the game I even tried by pass the gate keepers and self-published a small anthology, ‘Bottled Up Tears’, teaming up with two other writers Jones Baraza and Beryl Achieng.

It was a fascinating feat, but we were not well organized, and the sales were mostly the people in my circles that I could guilt-trip to buy the book. I had crowdfunded for the printing costs from them anyway, and if they were to get their money back, they needed to buy the books. We never reprinted them.

I had a brief peak into the industry this one time as a cab reporter. I was sent to the airport to receive Ngugi wa Thiongo on one of his visits into the country. In the newsroom, literature is covered by the Saturday team, and this was a late evening flight and they just needed photos. I was sent anyway, just for courtesy, to accompany the photographer. But for me it was a fascinating experience I would get to meet Kenya’s greatest writer in person.

It was brief photo op meeting of the jet lagged writer that ended up being little more than introductions. When I introduced myself as a journalist, conscious of my little standing as a cab reporter, he smiled brightened up and grabbed me. Then he said I was his only colleague there, the rest of the welcome party, the publishers, were not. I felt like a lamb meeting a more experienced lamb among the wolves.

Recently however I have been pulled back into the world of publishing when I got a chance to shoot a small piece for an upcoming documentary on Mr Chakava. A short clip on one of his protégé, Florence Mbaya in Mudete Chavakali.

Published author

It was a winding drive, slanting, vertical climbs and dips into Marragoli land, green and forested. The roads are good so we got to Mudete quite fast and called our host. She asked us to come up a few meters after the police station and branch off onto a marram road that would bring us to secondary school, and her home would just be a few meters past, a green gate that we could not miss.

From my experience going to rural area’s every marram road is the same and estimation of distances are very conservative. So I ask her if she could send us a Pin on Google maps, but she quickly confirms my fear that her fascination with technology is limited to basic utilities.

But she is confident we will not get lost, and said it in an assured way like she was in on a secret, we would discover later.

It was quite easy following her descriptions of the turn just where some motorbikes were being washed, the turn and the slope, the ascension past the tea bushes, primary and secondary school and true to her word, a green gate straight from a page of a novel.

Mrs Mbaya had one of the most beautiful homes I have ever seen. Its simple elegance, grounded beauty, explorative choices of plants and birds. She had this brick driveway that you imagine has some moss carpet that then stretches away in a carpet of perfectly mowed lawn grass.

She met us in the red top which she appears in on the back of her first book, welcoming us, and pointing out where we should park. ON THE GRASS! I told NyarSindo there was no way I was doing that. But she insisted, and we tiptoed onto her lawn. She welcomed us into her little Victorian terrace with comfortable chairs and dark tinted glass tableau that could host women for tea.

The joinery in her furniture was not local, until later she explained that she had spent her first marital years in Europe accompanying Ambassador Boaz Mbaya, the stalwart diplomat who has served as ambassador to France, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia and the Holy See and also as a permanent delegate to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) in Paris, France.

Her home is warm and cozy, inhabited and well light. She had on her wall small frames of exotic places, ornamental gifts and this huge wall to wall glass cabinet, that a friend gave her in Europe, which she says slipped into one of her walls like a piece of puzzle.

From Europe she also brought a discovery of herself, brought out in the book that made her ‘a writer’. She had taught English and Geography at Parklands Arya Girls Secondary School in Nairobi, when she quit to join her husband on foreign service.

Power of endorsement

While in Rwanda she was grounded and related even found deeper historical and linguistic ties between her native Kimaragoli and Kinyarwanda. Frozen out in Europe, she found a set of letters on an ancient typewriter that begged to be punched and conversed with like a companion, and out came her first novel, A Journey Within.

She tells us the book was initially rejected and she had bottled it up despite what she was told about it by everyone who had seen the manuscript.

Despite many telling her how good her book was, she had shied away from presenting it to Mr Chakava, who as she indicated was born just around the corner because she felt like her book needed to deserve publication.

“When I finally met him I explained that I had a fear of bringing my book because people could have said that you published my book because you come from where I come from, and by that time, I did not even know his home," she said.

"He said no way, I am going to put my pen to paper and give you a contract if your manuscript is not good enough," she said.

It is quite embarrassing when a writer asks you if you have read their book and you have not. While we might fear it might limit what you can talk about, Mrs Mbaya was disarmingly graceful once we admitted our ignorance. She enlightened us, she has several titles to her name A Journey Within, Heritage High, Sunrise at Midnight, and the Morning After all of which I will read.

Marketing done right

I asked her as a writer to another if one could live on writing books, given all her titles and she frankly told me it was not possible, not with the percentage and the kind of marketing we have.

Mrs Mbaya said in her case, she was lucky to get a call from Mr Chakava in 2010 when she was on a week's visit to the village. He advised her to visit local schools and push her copies directly to students.

"He told me, you know what you do, market your book. I asked him How? he told me go to the nearest secondary school and they said, Ok we are ordering 20 copies, I call Nairobi, send 20 copies to Gaigedi, next I went to Vokoli Girls they took fifty, then I went to Mukumu my old school, there they took 200 copies

She said she went to so many schools in Western Kenya some of which she had never heard of and her direct marketing worked, each school always bought at least ten copies which ensured that she not only sold out her first print, but also ran through her reprint.

As a local writer, I have always struggled to see the future of publishing in Kenya. But having experienced the disruption of traditional media by technology, the future of the book in Kenya might as well lie in the business ability to shift online.

Walter Bgoya, Mr Chakava’s friend from Tanzania Publishing House wrote that despite the advancement in technologies what we have only managed to create are mushrooming of small publishers and self-publishers who are fostering marginalised fields of knowledge including local language publishing, poetry, and autobiographies.

I told Mrs Mbaya that I wanted to try something new, at Orals East Africa. Something I had experimented with last year at Maudhui House. A system that I saw worked with Substack and Ghost where writers get 90 percent of their sales post costs and taxes.

What if we sold books online, on this website at a lower price, or even broken down to chapters? We were still in the initial steps of setting up a virtual library of East Africa fiction, non-fiction, and poetry and hopefully, if the idea works, I could approach writers like her.

“Yes she says, I have this thing with Blinkist where they give you a bit of summary and suggest titles to me, maybe that's where publishing will go,” she said.