 VDJ Khalifa, all the mixers you're now listening. So the mixers of VDJ Khalifa, it's social friendly on why in the morning, and you're used to entertainment. But today we focus on a source of entertainment that is not really popular with the Kenyan youth, and we're about to understand why. In studio with me is Mukoma Wangugi, who is a novelist, a poet, an activist, and a scholar, an associate professor at Cornell University in New York, Karibusana. Yes, Ante. If I missed anything. Your camera is on 4. All right, no, I don't think you missed anything. I say this all. Well, let me think. No, no, no, yeah, you said everything, yeah. Any words that I left out? No. All right. No. Karibusana. Yeah, Ante. To why in the morning. So before we start this conversation, VDJ Khalifa, do you have a microphone? Do you read VDJ Khalifa? Yeah. You read? Yeah. Which was the last book you read? I think Nikiwa High School. You're going to talk about that. Yeah. Salah, how long have you been in the country? Well, I've been here since the last two weeks or so. Yeah, but before this, I was in Ghana visiting the slave castles. And yeah, and because I'm touching the relationship between Africans and African-Americans, I was in Ghana. Have you found anything we have in common, apart from showing off? Well, yeah, I've been saying this, you know, I guess by now people have heard, but Malcolm X was in Kenya. In 1964, he came to Kenya, met with Jaramogi, Kenyatta, met with Pyogama Pinto. What most people, yeah, and also he gave us a speech at the Kenyan Parliament. But what most people don't know also is that both Malcolm and Pyogama Pinto were killed or assassinated within four days of each other. Yeah. Wow, I never knew about that. Yeah, we knew. So we have a lot of similarities. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And I've been saying, we should at least have a plaque somewhere saying Malcolm X was here. I appreciate the legend. Yeah, and also another thing a lot of people don't know is that Thargood Marshall, who was a Supreme Court in the US, a black Supreme Court justice, he was an advisor to the Kenyan Constitution in the early 60s. And now we have a Constitution that is quite similar to the American Constitution. Yeah, I was reading somewhere the other day that he actually is one who put in the Bill of Rights in the Kenyan Constitution. But I need to read more around that. So I can't say for sure beyond that. So you are very proud to be black, and you're representing black people as an African, as a black African. Yeah, well, as a black African. But I've been in the US for over, you know, I went there in 1990. Well, I was born there. So technically, you could say I'm African-American. Though culturally, of course, I'm Kenyan. Yeah, so you could argue that I've been struggling with both identities. Not really struggling with both, but coming to terms with both. So eventually I told myself, well, where can I be everything, you know? I see you didn't pick the accent so much. But from the titles of your books, like Nairobi Heat and the other one about Nairobi. Blackstone Nairobi. Blackstone Nairobi, exactly. You seem to have a lot of interest in Nairobi. Is this where you were after being born in the US? No, no. So I was born in the US. We came back when I was very young. But I grew up in Limuru, in Limuru Town. So you could argue Nairobi had always been fascinating because for us to come to Nairobi, we had to put on our Sunday best, you know, vassal in our faces, you know? Yeah, so I guess in that regard, Nairobi was always sort of a mystery. You know, in a lot of ways, I'm a village boy. So I've always had that fascination. But then of course it's also, you know, the place where, you know, decisions are made. You know, it's also you could argue the cultural capital. So yeah, so yeah, it's always been a fascinating place. Yeah. All right. I can't say your name sells you out. I can't say not so many people don't know the fun fact about you. You're the son to Ngugi Wadyongo. So I was reading somewhere that the translation of your book, Nairobi Heat in German, was really received well in Germany. And when your dad got to Germany, he was actually introduced as your dad, instead of being introduced by his name. So being someone who's not living in the shadow of the daddy, your dad being a legend in Kenya, legendary writer in Kenya, how have you managed to do this? Well, I think, you know, as a writer, as a writer, you have to believe in yourself, right? You know, you have to believe you're better than other writers. So there's a part of me that believes I'm the better writer than my father. You have to have that confidence otherwise then, you know, but of course there's also doubt. You know, yeah, you know, there's that somebody who said a writer is a half confidence, half doubt. Yeah. So that is what makes a writer. Half confidence, half doubt. Yeah. But in Germany, so I joke with him because I tell him, well, I have one country here. He has the rest of the world, you know. So I need to capture more territory from him. All right. We were talking about being African earlier. And there's this quote that stands out for me. And it goes something like, as an African and a black person, I feel that I have the duty to love all the places I call home. Love need not always to be pleasant. It can be demanding, defensive, angry, and wrong. But it's always want to build not to destroy. Yeah. What were you going through when you wrote this? Well, I mean, it's experience that. Yeah, I mean, part of it was deciding or trying to come to terms, like I said earlier, trying to come to terms with being of multiple heritages. So owning my US heritage and also my Kenyan heritage. But also, what's the duty? If you say you love a place, or actually if you say you love somebody, what duty do you have to them? And in that quote, I was trying to argue that we have a duty to be critical. We have a duty to be political. And especially for the youth I should add, I think the youth have a duty to be revolutionary. Yeah. In fact, earlier today, I was thinking, when you think of all the revolutionaries, Je Guevara, Steve Bico, Amilka Cabral, anybody you name, actually, the revolutionaries in their 20s and 30s. Yeah, so if we have a duty, we have a duty to change the society we're in if we love it. I like that. 1982 is a special time that stands out in the history of your family. Were you already born in 1982 first before? Yes, I was born in 1971. So you were alive and kicking in 1982. Yeah, so I have memories of 1982. All right, how was it going through this? And did you even understand what your family was going through? Yeah, because we grew up in a political home. So I actually have even earlier memories of when my father was sent into detention by the Kenyatta government. And some of my memories around that I would try every now and then would be told we can go visit him. And then at the last minute, the visit would get canceled. But part of it was because the government wanted him to put civilian clothes to come and see us. And then after we leave, then he was supposed to put back his prison clothes. Yeah, so I have memories of that. 1982, of course, there was the coup first and foremost. So I have memories of the coup. But then also trying to understand his absence. But we grew up in a political home. So even though I couldn't articulate all the politics behind it, at least I knew he wasn't a criminal. He understood what he was doing. Because those were the years when the refugees of him and other what they called political dissidents. So every now and then you turn on the TV and you see the refugees being burned. So for us to survive, I think we had to have an understanding politically of what was going on. A very huge percentage of Kenyans who went through the 844 system must have interacted with one of your dad's books. Personally, I interacted with The River Between. Me too, actually. In secondary school. All right. So how was it? Had you read it before you went to high school? No, no. I don't think so. I don't think so. I mean, I don't think I'd read it before I went to school. But it was sort of funny then being expected to know more than I knew. You always got to be on the spotlight for that. To be on the spotlight. There are questions that I really couldn't answer because I was just a student. Yeah, then in college also, we studied a grain of wheat in my literature courses. And now I teach him, actually. And now I teach him. But he also teaches Nairobi Heat, so. All right. So he teaches what your dad teaches about you. All right. So Nairobi Heat, tell us about Nairobi. Yeah, so Nairobi Heat, the history behind Nairobi Heat is, I guess you could argue, the seed that gave birth to Nairobi Heat is actually a funny story. I was coming from a party at this point. I was a UW Magistrate. I was coming from a party maybe around 3 o'clock in the morning. And then on the third floor, where I lived, I found a white woman who was passed out from too much drinking. It was a party school. That's all we did, really. Which school is this? UW-Madison, University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was also a good school, maybe I should add that. And so I called the police, the ambulance, and then the policeman who came with the ambulance was an African-American. So at some point I was standing there with the African-American cop and me there as an African, and this white woman. And I just realized I had a novel there, and then it didn't take much. Yeah, so Nairobi Heat, you have an African-American detective investigating the death of a white woman where the suspect is an African. So let me say, if I didn't drink, I wouldn't have gotten that story. You wouldn't have gotten inspired. So something good comes out of everything. Exactly, yeah. All right. So I'd like to get to know your activism side, because you describe or you introduce yourself from time to time as an activist. What are some of the things you are participating in that make you an activist? Yeah, so I'm actually debating that now as I get older, right, where I should keep using that term. But I've been involved with Pan-African movements. When I was in the university, we started an organization called Africa Without Borders. The whole idea that we need a borderless Africa. But I would say most of my activism really is through writing, through my political columns, through my literature, and teaching, and so on and so forth. All right. So we need a borderless Africa. Recently, we had the Honorable from South Africa, Julius Malema, who actually recommended that we have Swahili as the African language. So do you think language is really the solution to uniting Africa? Considering we have Swahili as the national language in Kenya, but it doesn't really help during elections. Yeah, I mean, it's a political question. So suddenly, you could argue that the more we know our languages, the more we are aware of ourselves. And the more you know yourself, the less likely you are to attack somebody else, right? The more confident you are in your own culture, the less likely you are then to attack somebody else's culture. It's the same thing with language. But it's mostly a political question, right? So under the same time, we don't kiss Swahili, which I support through my work with my buddy, Connell, kiss Swahili Praise. At the same time, we don't kiss Swahili to become a colonizing language. So I think it's a question of reviving and putting resources into all our languages. But suddenly, the question of African unification, it's political. And we also have to ask ourselves, do we want to unify under a hyper-capitalist, exploitative Africa, right? Or do we want to unify in a more, in the vision of Kuruma, so a more socialist, egalitarian Africa, yeah? So I'm ready to say you're a socialist. You could say that. I mean, I go with Steve Biko, right? Because Steve Biko's asked whether he's a socialist, right? This was before he was killed, of course. And he said that because of the inequalities, because of the high inequalities in South Africa, whatever solution comes forward has to be socialist in nature. And that's the same thing in Kenya. You can't have one family owning, and I'm talking about the Kenyatta family, owning 565,000 acres of land. And then we try to build democracy on that level of inequality. We need land redistribution. We need the redistribution of resources. There's no other way we can build democracy on great inequality. Critics will say socialism, it breeds laziness. No, no, it may be for the rich. You know, no, it doesn't. First, if you consider the amount of work people do anyway, right? Whether they are laboring out in the shambles and so on and so forth. They wake up very early. Yeah, exactly. If people by nature want to do fulfilling work, people by nature want to be productive, you know? So it's something that was used to defeat socialism. In fact, it's actually the Kenyans, Tom Boy and so on and so forth, when Nkrumaw was arguing for a greater united Africa under socialism. It's actually the Kenyans, Tom Boy and so on and so forth who argued that Africans are naturally socialist, right? Which is actually untrue, right? Because otherwise we wouldn't have any inequality. Yeah, no, no, I wouldn't say it breeds laziness. I think actually it's the other way around. I think people would be more industrious if they were doing fulfilling work that's also making sure they're okay in terms of... Do for what? Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. All right, so we have a VDJ Khalifa right here. The last book he read, it was in high school. I don't know about the rest of the people. So there's something to say about the reading culture in Kenya. Yeah, well, you shouldn't admit that, actually. It's embarrassing, yeah. All right, so we have your book Topic Chats. I make it sound like an album now. Topic Chats in Germany. But in Kenya, we are not talking about it so much. What is the problem? And you grew up here, you're a renown writer now. Yeah, I mean part of it is the publishing industry here. You know, so okay first, let me start with the reading culture. People read, right? Generally people read, if you think of the Bible, right? You know, the Bible, everybody reads the Bible. And at St. Paul's University, where I'm the visiting professor for this month, they have a Bible translation center, where what people there said was that they believe that God speaks to you in your language, right? Otherwise, you can't be chilling somewhere and God comes and speaks to you in Russian, right? I mean, so yeah, so there's that question then of making literature available to people in the language they speak. In terms of the youth, yeah, I mean, it depends on what you call reading, right? There is this critical Ikeola from Nigeria who says, well, I mean, they're reading Facebook, you know, they're reading tweets and so on and so forth. So, yeah, I think it's a question of, and yeah, you can put a poem, yeah. And reading tweets. Yeah, but we need more independent publishing, you know, if indeed a reading culture is gonna flourish. So we have the Mabati Cornell Swahili Prize for African Literature, what, in which you're a co-founder, right? Yeah. All right, why Swahili? Well, because it was, the way we thought it would be the most symbolic, right, you know, before we talk about the symbolism and everything in a scale of one to 10, how good is your say? Two. Two. But you still... Or maybe negative two. But you still have two, right? I'm a product, I'm not a very proud product, I should say, of the Kenyan educational system. But you can still communicate. Yeah, in the streets of Nigeria, I can communicate. Yeah, so, but the reason behind it was, yeah, to have it as a symbolic gesture, you know, where we set up these structures for publishing, translation, you know, and hopefully in the long run, we'll be able to do workshops and so on and so forth, set it up as a symbolic structure for other languages then that they could follow. And one of the ideas we had was actually to rotate amongst languages, but you know, there's only like three of us, so ideally other people should follow example of other African languages. This time around you're hosting it in Tanzania. In Tanzania, yeah, so, yeah, and this time around we have a Kenyan winner, otherwise generally it's been Tanzanians who have been winning. But that's because, well, the educational system is in Kiswahili, whereas for us, we take Kiswahili as a subject, you know. All right, all right, all right. So this time a Kenyan is winning. So you get to know who's winning before the opportunity. Yeah, yep. All right, that's how your award works. Yep. It's different from the rest that we used to. Yeah, no, no, no, the winners have been announced. They were announced, we announced the winners about two weeks ago. All right, so they're going to be at the event pick in that one. So they'll be at the event pick in the awards. Yeah, it's a total of, No surprises. No, they're not surprises. Yeah, not everything is known. I like this. So you chose the best day, or the worst, to come to this show. It's called Social Friday. And you look like a serious person. Not really. As a student professor. You look like you don't like games. But I'm about to play a game with you. All right, okay. Since you're a once man. This game is called, tell me the first thing that comes to your mind. Oh, oh. Mm-hmm. So are you ready? Yeah, all right, okay. All right, so the first word is Nairobi. Nairobi heat. Not so much fun to eat. USA. Racism. Seafood. Don't eat it. Calligraph Jones. Who? Calligraph Jones. Who is that? Ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, sorry. Omoilo. Octopizzo. Okay, who is that? Uh-huh. We are sorry Octopizzo. All right, English Premier League. I hate it actually. You hate it actually? I don't understand the obsession we have with the English language and the obsession with the English Premier League. I can't even tell you who is playing, but I did watch the World Cup in my difference. You enjoy football. You just don't understand the craze with English Premier League. We've come to the end of this. Thank you very much for coming. How did I do in the game? You did quite well. People got entertained. That's all I can say. You need to do your research. Calligraph Jones and Octo Pizzo. Do you listen to hip-hop music, by the way? Well, it's like Nas from the generation X. It will be very tough to compare Nas to them, but just figure out. Their flag, Kenyon Plug, is so high when it comes to music. I really like the guys, so you can check out their music. I'm pretty sure you know Zautiso. Everybody knows Zautiso. Okay, I'll just say I do. If the same we shouldn't admit, I wouldn't admit I don't. I have four of your books right here. We have The Hurling of Words at Consciousness. This is a poetry book. It came out in 2007. Right there. It's not online. We have The Mrs. Show, a novel by Mukoma Wangugi. This one is online. Amazon. They can find it. We have Killing Sara, Mukoma Wangugi. That's online, but that's also Blackstone Nairobi. It has a different title in South Africa. Okay. Why this way? That's the title that for me worked. The Americans wanted Blackstone Nairobi. But the publishers in South Africa agreed with me. Because Killing Sara, I mean, don't you want to read it? The title is catchy. I appreciate that. Alright, so it's online as well. And then we have The Rise of the African Novel, Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership. That's online as well. That came out in March last year. It's my latest book here, but that's looking at the literary history of... I can't argue that's my more serious side, actually. This is your more serious side. There's this line, Politics of Language. Can you make me understand what this is? Yeah, in the book, I'm just trying to understand why we privilege the African novel that's written in English. And then the politics around that. Why we sit in here speaking English as opposed to Lese Kiswaili. So it's trying to understand how we got trapped, if you will, into an English metaphysical empire. Challenge me, brother. It seems when you are all alone sitting somewhere, you ask yourself a lot of questions. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, don't you? Moukama or Gugi or Dwai in the morning, you can find his books on Amazon. Alright, and then you can share with them your social media handles, your camera is number four. Yeah, sure. And also Nairobi Hit is available here in Nairobi Bookstores. MoukamaWaGoge.com. That's www.moukamaWaGoge.com. That's my website. Twitter, it's at MoukamaWaGoge. Facebook MoukamaWaGoge. So, yeah, just Google MoukamaWaGoge. So I tried the introduction with the pronunciation of MoukamaWaGoge. Oh, yeah, no, you did. Oh, yeah, yeah. I did well. Thank you very much for coming to Wai in the morning. We appreciate you so much. No, thank you for having me as well. Alright, yes, we'll have a sidebar right after this. Alright. There's a lot we need to talk about. Sounds like a plan. Sounds like a plan. Alright, VJ Khalifa is about to take it away. As we wait for Hilda Wathithi and Kalami Valkos, they have a lot of great stuff lined up for you on Social Friday. Don't forget the hashtag Social Friday. I go by the name of Barry Mosses, or it's Barrymore on every social media platform.