We're heading to Africa!
Over the years we have taken the 3 Books podcast on the road many times ... from recording in Judy Blume's bookstore in Key West to to the back of Jackie's Uber in St. Louis to Jonathan Haidt's kitchen in New York we've gone where the stories take us. And for the first time we are going to the 55-country and 1.5 billion person continent of Africa.
I am so excited to share the first of three chapters of 3 Books recorded in Nairobi, Kenya.
I landed there and went whizzing down busy streets with colourful stalls, wandering goats, people pulling carts full of eggs, women carrying baskets on their heads, endless whizzing bodas (motorcycles).
I visited the lovely home of novelist and professor Peter Kimani — where he lives with his wife Anne and their two boys. Peter is a huge mind and talented writer whose work spans New York Times Notable novels such as ‘Dance of the Jakaranda’ to writing a poem for Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration. Peter has studied at the University of Iowa—the Harvard of writing schools, perhaps!—and earned his doctorate at the University of Houston. He was awarded the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature, Kenya's highest literary honor, and is a professor at Aga Khan University in Nairobi.
Let's sit down outside in his backyard garden, near the mango and orange trees, below the calls of the Pied Crows, and discuss normalizing abnormalities, decolonizing our minds, The Hardy Boys, writing as an extension of living, whitewashing conservation, Peter's 3 most formative books, and much, much more...
Let's flip the page to Chapter 154 now...
Chapter 154: Peter Kimani on conquering the curse of choreographed colonialism
View full transcript here
CONNECT with Peter
Peter’s 3 Books
First book (1:17:21)
Second book (1:32:33)
Third book (1:43:22)
WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER
Quotes
“Writing is just an extension of living.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“I mean, that's what writers of the world do, to keep memory, to memorialize their own origins, to invoke the past, to, you know, understand their future.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“We are still perpetuating the British metaphysical empire. We are extending their cultural hegemony.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“Conservation has been white washed.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“Ancestors were prudent custodians of this heaven that we were given from the onset.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“My biggest risk as a writer will actually be what I write, rather than what I possess. So I've never thought of my safety in the sense of material things.I think of my safety in what am I saying to whom and how.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“I would even argue we haven't even begun telling our story.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“We’ve normalized abnormalities.” — Peter Kimani quoting Ngugi | 3 Books Podcast
“It is our brains that have been colonized not to be able to understand and to unpack the nuances.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“Religion is the most harmless way of accessing a mind of another human being.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“Writing is an act of recovering our past.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“We have to start thinking about this animal we call democracy.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“It spoke to me in that profound way, because I understood my own experience is a story worth narrating. I think that that was the first moment when I thought, maybe I could write my own story.” — Peter Kimani on Weep Not, Child | 3 Books Podcast
“We must remember, even the most advanced societies in the world, their only claim to fame is through the stories narrated by the writers of those countries.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“I see a connection between good reading habits and good writing habits. You cannot become a writer unless you are a reader.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“It's the best way to travel. By reading, you immerse yourself in a culture, in a country, in a community, in a continent that will give you the deepest nuances that you can experience life as known by those who've never set foot elsewhere. You can do your best travels through reading. Read outside your country.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“We must make an effort to decolonize our minds.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
“If you've got this burning desire to do something, but this desire has been nurturing for years, the only way you can make a difference between those who have these desires and making it happen is actually by starting today.” — Peter Kimani | 3 Books Podcast
Show Notes
‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ by Yuval Noah Harari
‘Out of Africa’ by Isak Dinesen
‘Flame Trees of Thika’ by Elspeth Huxley
‘Dance of the Jakaranda’ by Peter Kimani
‘Freeing the Spirits’ by Peter Kimani
‘A Grain of Wheat’ by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
