Chapter 154: Peter Kimani on conquering the curse of choreographed colonialism

Listen to the chapter here!

Peter:

I mean, that's what writers of the world do, to keep memory, to memorialize our origins, to invoke the past, to, you know, understand the future. We haven't even begun telling our story. It is our brains that have been colonized not to be able to understand and to unpack the nuances.

We have to start thinking about this animal we call democracy. We must remember even the most advanced societies in the world, their only claim to fame is through the stories narrated by the writers. 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.

Neil:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to 3 Books. This is the only podcast in the world by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. You are listening to chapter 154, 54, 54 of our show.

Thank you for joining our 22 year long pilgrimage. Every single chapter of the show, we talk to one of the world's most inspiring or interesting people and we asked them which three books most shaped their lives. And I cannot wait to talk to you today about Peter, or PK as he's often known, Kimani, K-I-M-A-N-I, a wonderful Nairobi based novelist who I cannot wait to introduce you to if you don't already know him.

But before we do, I am vibing right now. I am vibing. I have just had the most wonderful trip to Africa to sit down and interview Peter and two other guests.

We're going to do like an African expose, expose, introduction. For me, it was my first trip to Africa and my mom's from there. My mom is from Nairobi, Kenya, and she hadn't been back since she had left when she was 18 and I hadn't been there ever.

So seeing an opportunity to amplify some of the voices and the stories to get from there, from Africa. I mean, Africa is not a country. That was the first slide on a Walmart presentation I remember from 10 years ago when Walmart bought like a retail there.

Africa is 55 countries, 1.5 billion people. And it has been the subject of a tremendous amount of colonization, slavery. There's been a de-peopling there.

There's been a kind of cultures torn apart, ripped apart as European colonists in the mid 1800s sort of divvied up the land, made a lot of new lines. How do I know this? Not very well, but just through regular ongoing conversations with the people I was meeting, with the people that were driving me somewhere, the people in the hotels.

There is a line that Peter says in this interview that we need to begin by decolonizing our minds, which sort of hit home. And it's going to be a bit of a thread line through some of these conversations. And before we jump into Peter, and I can't wait to introduce you to him.

I'm going to tell you all about him. I want to start as I always do by reading a letter, one of the pieces of feedback from the 3 Booker community. You can always send me your letters at my email, neil.globalhappiness.org, or you can put it as a comment or a review online. Those are always great to help share the show, but I'm not too fussed about them because I want to be intrinsically motivated. This letter comes from Devin. She writes, in regards to our Jean Chrétien chapter that we dropped three months ago, she says, Wow, it is incredible how sharp Mr. Chrétien still is. It's maybe not a surprise that the books he chose are about simplicity and perseverance. Man, I miss politicians like him. He pissed people off, but he managed to do it in a good way.

I suppose that explains his approval numbers. He hit the nail on the head about lying. You've probably seen clips of Kamala Harris talking to Stephen Colbert, who he was essentially congratulating her for predicting so many of Trump's moves during the campaign.

She dejectedly admitted she didn't foresee the capitulation of so many strong groups and voices. That was definitely my favorite chapter so far, but it wasn't because of the books. And then she adds a PS, which is really interesting, saying, By the way, I'm about to board a flight here in the Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada airport, and they have these vending machines there.

I'll hold up a picture if you're watching on YouTube. Vending machines that run by the Halifax library, where you slide in your library card and you can take out a library book from a vending machine in the airport. Imagine that.

You're at the airport in Halifax. You're about to go on a flight. Say you're going to Africa.

And by the way, I met people in Africa from Halifax who had flown to Toronto and then I think to Amsterdam and then to Africa. And you could just be like, You know, I don't have a book. I'll just take a book out of the library.

Genius move by the Halifax public library librarians. I know there are many of you out there. Check it out.

Halifax. We got to check out how Halifax is doing that. Maybe spread the word around.

All right. Now I'd like to talk about a value of the show. I like to, you know, 3books.co slash values. I'm going to have a whole bunch of values listed for the show, things that we espouse and believe in. As always, you can skip forward. We don't have ads in the shows.

You can all skip forward to the conversation. But the value I want to talk about today is a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.

This is actually a quote. It's a shortened quote because it has like other little, you know, it's like some guy said this, some guy said that, but that's the line. It comes from Game of Thrones, George RR Martin.

And it just is a profound and simple way of amplifying the many over the self in my mind. You know, I like a lot of us, like I'm sure all of us at some point, you know, I can get obsessed with myself. How am I feeling?

How am I doing? What's wrong with my life? What's going well?

What's going, what's not going well. There's just endless trivialities that come in the nature of living. And I find that this quote helps minimize my own self-worth in a healthy way.

It reduces and diminishes my ego in a healthy way. It makes me think about the lives of others. Not just other people.

I mean, you can read a book like Black Beauty and you're a horse. You know, I mean, it's just other situations, other places, other times in the world, other places in the world. A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.

The man who never reads lives only one. And, you know, there's a gender bias there built in there, but the idea is strong. And it's part of what gives rise to me feeling passionate and excited about bringing forth some of these voices that I heard in Africa from this trip and sharing them with you.

And I'm one person. I don't know most things, right? Like I'm a tiny little person.

And to be able to speak confidently about what's happened in different African countries and different African people is not going to be something I'm ever going to be able to confidently do. So that's why I'm trying to think of this, you know, this mantle, this stage of three books as a way to expose and learn and share my curiosity with all of you so we can all learn together. So I was there a few days, right?

I was just in Africa a few days and I've done three deep interviews there with a novelist at his home. That's this one. A bookseller in his bookstore, which is really a fun one as well.

And a photojournalist, son of maybe the most famous photojournalist ever in the world. He's the son of a family who's passed away in his studio, which is really cool. And we talk openly.

The Threadline definitely is about, you know, East Africa and Africa rising and just hearing some of these stories that we don't get to hear. So we are going to talk about normalizing abnormalities. We're going to talk about Out of Africa, a famous book you might've heard of.

We're going to talk about Plato, writing as an extension of living. We're going to talk about the Hardy Boys, about whitewashing conservation, the tale of Adlon Watts, and so many of the stories that came about along the way. Join me in this sort of garden setting.

We're going to be outside. You might hear pied crows, P-I-E-D, honking and screeching in the background. You might hear the wind go through.

If you're watching on YouTube, we'll put up the video of the conversation as well. After the conversation, PK's lovely wife, Ann, who took the day off to support this interview, she had been cooking all morning. She welcomed my mom into her kitchen and they made chapatis and they made like the stewed greens.

You know, there's so many different kinds of stewed and wilted greens that I had that have vegetables I'd never heard of that I can't get here. You know, fresh chicken. And when I say fresh chicken, I mean like fresh chicken, like chicken from the backyard chicken, you know, chopped up and cooked and marinated.

So we had this kind of following. The sun was shining as it does almost every day. I passed a sign on the highway there and it says, welcome to Nairobi, the city under the sun.

And I thought that was a really profound and simple way to put it. Who is Peter Kimani? Well, if you don't know him, he was born in 1971 in Kenya.

He's an award-winning Kenyan novelist, best known for his award-winning novel, Dance of the JaKaranda, which was a New York Times notable book, a book that I've read and loved and recommend. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, New African, and Sky News. So he's also a journalist on the side.

He's also a professor. He did school at University of Iowa and got his doctorate at the University of Houston, and now is a professor at the Aga Khan University in Nairobi. And he was awarded the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature, which is Kenya's highest literary honor.

A former international writing fellow, and he was also selected by NPR to compose a poem for Barack Obama's inauguration, which we're going to talk about that as well. Peter is a kind and sagacious soul. There's a lot to learn from him, as you will very soon hear as we flip the page together into the next chapter of Three Books.

Thank you all for being here. Thanks so much for listening. If you are here, stick around to the end.

When I play your voicemails from 1-833-READ-ALOT, we share a little bit of a word cloud, sound cloud, geek out a little bit about the show. Stick around to the end. It's always a fun hangout here.

Thank you so much for being here, and let's dive in now. Hi, Peter.

Peter:

Hey, Neil.

Neil:

Thank you so much. I feel like I am in the very, very lucky position of flying around the world, collecting stories and moving them around. I feel like I'm sitting in an actual heaven, both in Africa, then in Kenya, and then in your home.

I feel very blessed and lucky to be here. Thank you for having me.

Peter:

Well, the pleasure is all mine and wonderful to meet you and welcome to our house and our country.

Neil:

And our continent. I've never even been to Africa before. I'm embarrassed to say.

I always say no book guilt, no book shame. So I should also say no travel guilt, no travel shame. But I've never been to Africa.

My mom was born here in Pangani neighborhood of Nairobi in 1950. She left in 68 and this is her first time back too. She's in the kitchen with your wife, Anne, making chapatis.

Peter:

Yes.

Neil:

Because you're such a hospitable host that you are even entertaining my mom through cooking with her.

Peter:

Well, thank you. Well, writing is just an extension of living. So we intersect those two.

So hosting people, welcoming you and your mom is a really delightful pleasure.

Neil:

Writing is an extension of living. Yes. I love that.

And, um, before we kind of get into things, a few table setting questions. First, I have to ask the basic question of, um, first of all, is it Kenya or Kenya? I should ask that.

Kenya.

Peter:

Kenya.

Neil:

So why does my mom, when I grew up, she always said Kenya. Then I would say Kenya, people would say where?

Peter:

That's one of the colonial aberrations that our country, even the name itself is indeed a corruption of, uh, British history. Tell me more.

Neil:

Well, I did not know this.

Peter:

Yeah. So the two, the two or three elements to our name, uh, that, uh, the, the mountain that the country derived its name from, uh, is called Kirinyaga

[Neil]

Kirinyaga? Yeah. I'm not saying it right.

Peter:

Yes.

[Neil]

So are you trying?

[PK]

Uh, this is in Gikoyo. Uh, and, uh, that's a language spoken by a majority of people in central Kenya, where this mountain is located. Uh, so when the Brits came, um, uh, it was, uh, the hallowed ground of the Agikoyo.

They used to pray facing Mount Kenya. So, uh, so, and, uh, this, this mountain also had ostriches. So ostriches, um, are called Nyaga.

So the mountain with the ostriches, that's what it means, but because they couldn't pronounce Kirinyaga, they invented Kenya.

[Neil]

Oh, so Kenya is an aberration of Kirei Nyaga. Yes. Can I, teach me how to say it or, or how to spell it or...

[PK]

K-I-R-I-N-Y-A-G-A. Okay.

[Neil]

K-I-R-I-N-Y-A-G-A. Kirei Nyaga.

[Neil]

Kirinyaga

[Neil]

And they could not say this, so they said Kenya. Kenya.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And then Kenya is a further aberration of this. Yes.

[PK]

So, um, so it's, it's a, it's a physical, uh, feature that gives the country its name. Uh, but, um, even how it is spelled, I think there was a huge discussion surrounding how it should be spelled because on the other side of the mountain, you have the Kamba community who call it Kenya.

[Neil]

Kenya.

[PK]

So it's K-I-N-Y-A. Kenya. Kenya.

Yeah.

[PK]

Yeah.

[PK]

So they said, if you're going to be honoring, uh, this physical feature, why don't you spell it properly as, and, uh, this, uh, this means K with an I, but it's a squiggler on top to, uh, to, to change this from Kenya to Kenya. So Kenya, in other words, K-E-N-Y-A is an invention, uh, that, that makes no sense from local languages.

[Neil]

Right.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

But yet it's still used today. And then the Kenya aberration that my mom uses, I have heard it sometimes here. So some people do say it.

It's not like just my mom. Well, if it was just my mom, I'd ask more questions, but it sounds like it's a percentage of people still use the long E.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Maybe they're trying to say this old word. I don't know.

[PK]

Yeah. Only, only, uh, when you go to English vowels, you find, um, now K-E like key, you know, uh, key that you use to open a door. Then, um, we use K-E as key like K-I.

Yeah. Give me, give me your keys. I may have the keys.

So those who spell or pronounce it as Kenya, uh, probably, uh, reflecting the more common usage of K-E. So instead of Kenya, they say Kenya.

[Neil]

I see. I see. So it would be better if not better, not judgment, but I should try to slowly change my language back to Kenya.

If not Kenya, Kenya, if not Kirinyega, you know, there's a lot of historical kind of like in Canada, by the way, the, the, um, you know, French explorer, um, Jacques Cartier, uh, 500 years ago from France asked through an interpreter, the local native population in Canada, what the place was called. And he said, Kanata, which meant the village. And in, um, Cartier's notebooks, which is called bref recit, he wrote, they call this place, the village, the villages, Kanata.

So he took the word for village and labeled it the whole place and it's broadened that, but you see, once again, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a indigenous or first nations word brought about by a colonialist explorer and conqueror and taking over-ish type of vibe, you know.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And it's hard to evaluate, but I'm just sharing the Canada version of this.

[PK]

Yes. Yes. And I think that's a good point you make that, uh, these are not just, uh, accidental or, or innocent linguistic experiments.

They were, uh, in other words, as, um, my friend Ngugi wa Thiong'o taught us for 60 years, um, uh, you know, the burial of indigenous cultures were part of the conquest. So, so you've got, uh, you've got countries and physical features, um, like the fresh, the largest freshwater lake, uh, Lake Victoria honoring the Queen of England.

[PK]

Exactly.

[PK]

So, so what happens to Namlolwe, which is what, uh, the Lua people who inhabit that side of the world.

[Neil]

And Lake Victoria is touching which countries?

[PK]

Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

[Neil]

It touches three countries.

[PK]

It is a three African countries.

[Neil]

Newly lined countries for the last hundred plus years, but obviously thousands of years, it's like touched many peoples. Yes. And it was called, you gave me the name of the lake.

[PK]

Namlolwe.

[Neil]

Namlolwe. So is there indeed a movement to rename it or to try to change this name back?

[PK]

Yeah, there is, um, we can say heightened awareness. Uh, people are more, more, more attuned to, um, that past and, uh, the desire to resurrect, you know, buried African memory, uh, you know, supplanted with, um, European, uh, European inventions. Uh, so, so Namlolwe should have been the proper name for Lake Victoria, the source of River Nile.

[Neil]

Um, source of River Nile. Yes. That's what it's called.

Yes. That's the translation.

[PK]

Well, uh, Lake Victoria, the lake itself is the one that gives birth to the River Nile.

[Neil]

Really?

[PK]

Yeah. Yeah. So that's the riverhead.

Yes.

[Neil]

It's the riverhead. Lake Victoria, which you, Nam, I'm sorry, I just can't get. Namlolwe.

Namlolwe.

[PK]

L-O-L-W-E.

[Neil]

W-E. Namlolwe.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Okay. Is the source. And the desire to resurrect buried African.

Memory. Memory is growing and strong. However, as I understand from Amitra from Paralaxy, who's been helping me since I landed, he's like, you know, sometimes you pull up a, he didn't say this, my paraphrase.

Sometimes you pull up the carpet and the ground is missing underneath. Like it's because he was explaining to me so much was translated through the oral tradition.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

That when you squelch the history for multiple generations, the oral tradition has almost some, in some cases, a permanent breakage in it. It's hard to resurrect.

[PK]

Yeah. Yeah. It's, the kind of erasure we, we are experiencing because they served a particular purpose to perpetuate histories, to narrate, you know, human civilizations.

I mean, that's what writers of the world do to, to keep memory, to keep, to memorialize their own origins, to invoke the past, to, you know, understand their future. So when, when you think about Africa's history, I think that's one of the travesties of our past that when, when, you know, many, many African and Asian, even Latin American societies were colonized. The first thing the colonizers tried to do was to invent new histories that seem to only begin with the arrival of, of the colonialists.

So, so when you talk about the desire to resurrect and to, and to revive that past, there is a generation of young people, you know, my son, I was 18. He doesn't speak our, my first language, neither does he speak my, my wife's language because we come from two different communities, but he speaks Swahili, which is his first language. So we can say he represents perhaps a generation of young Kenyans who are somewhat as, as, they're not strongly footed as, as I was, because I can speak and write in Gikuyu.

[Neil]

Languages?

[PK]

Gikuyu, which is, or Kikuyu. So Kikuyu is the anglicized pronunciation. Gikuyu is a proper.

Gikuyu.

[Neil]

I mean, this is going to happen the whole conversation. Gikuyu, my notes are already filled with me trying to make sure, cause I'm going to, I'm so sorry. I'm going to say these words and they're going to sound not the proper way, nor the British way, but in this even worse way that I'm trying to learn them as we speak.

So you, your first language is Gikuyu and your, and your wife's is?

[PK]

Kamba.

[Neil]

Kamba.

[PK]

Okay.

[Neil]

But he doesn't speak either, but he has Swahili and there's a new generation of?

[PK]

Kenyans who do not have an indigenous language. So, but, but you see, in our case, we have a very deliberate desire that he gets grounded in the language of his environment, which is Swahili. So he speaks, both boys speak fluent Swahili.

It's a language of the environment. And, you know, there are opportunities for him to build on other languages, but he's got Swahili. If you couldn't get Kamba or Gikuyu from me, he's got Swahili as this common denominator, that that's a language that's spoken within our country.

It's a national language. Also the official language in this country.

[Neil]

Any other countries have Swahili as official language? Yes.

[PK]

Tanzania.

[Neil]

Tanzania? Not Tanzania.

[PK]

Tanzania, which my mom says Tanzania as well.

[PK]

Yeah.

[PK]

And, and, uh, it's widely spoken around, uh, East Africa, East and Central and parts of Southern Africa, nearly more than 200 million speakers.

[Neil]

It is a language of commerce. It continues to thrive. Yes.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

Unlike so many languages that are very...

[PK]

All the way down to Mozambique.

[PK]

All the way down to Mozambique.

[Neil]

Okay. Now I started a few minutes ago. This is, the great nature of a conversation, like the Nile, it flows like a river, but I said, I feel like I'm in a heaven.

And I normally start by describing the scene. And, you know, a lot of our listeners are all over the world, and this is a show buying for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, book sellers, and librarians. So this is a book people podcast, book nerds, literary students of the world.

And we take great, great pride in our 3 bookers, we call them. And because we have this really literary, wonderful, kind, generous, thoughtful, very thoughtful community. So for those that may be listening in Canada, or in the United States, or in England, or in India, or in China, or in Australia, I'm thinking of the countries that I see on the list of the listenership.

Where are we right now? And I mean that in the grand sense. Could you help us zoom in to this map of the spinning blue planet into this continent a little bit, describe the continent a little bit where we are, the country, if you want to use those lines, or maybe not use those lines, the part of the city we are, and then into your home, if you don't mind.

And it's open ended, but just people are listening, they might be walking a dog, they might be at a gym, they might be driving a truck. Where are they with us? And we have the chairs here with us.

They are here now, they can hear the crows, they can hear the birds. From Africa to Kenya to here, where are we?

[PK]

So we are in Kenya. The country is Kenya. That's, you know, the country properly in the heart of the continent of Africa, the eastern part of Africa.

And so Kenya is neighboured by Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Somalia. Those are our immediate neighbours. You might even extend to Rwanda and Sudan.

So we are properly in the heart of Africa and the ocean. So yeah, Kenya is one of those.

[Neil]

The Indian Ocean, right? The Indian Ocean. That's what they call it, the Indian Ocean.

They call it that here still? Yes.

[Neil]

Just to make sure, I don't know. They didn't change it to England Ocean. No, they didn't.

Just like they changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. It's to your point about rewriting histories immediately. First thing he did, changed the name of the Gulf to America, right?

[PK]

Yeah. And Kenya we can say is a country with...

[Neil]

Before Kenya though, may I ask? Africa, to those who have never been. We know that our three million year Homo erectus history originates here.

We are aware that our 300,000 year old Homo sapien history originates here. We have proof, we have bones, we have carbon dating. We know our people somehow came from around here.

Yes. And so where around here and where did we go and what is the story here?

[PK]

Indeed. This indeed is a cradle of mankind because archaeology has proven to us that the earliest man existed around the area called Turukana, which is in Kenya. A place they call Olduvai Gorge.

So the earliest remains of man were traced to East Africa. And Kenya has such fascinating natural features because you've got a coastal line that nestles the Indian Ocean. You've got the mountain towards the central part.

You know, the second highest peaks in Africa are in Kenya.

[Neil]

Second highest peak in Africa is in Kenya? Yes. Which is Mount?

[PK]

Mount Kenya.

[Neil]

Mount Kenya. And the highest peak is?

[PK]

Kilimanjaro.

[Neil]

Kilimanjaro.

[PK]

Which is in Tanzania.

[Neil]

Which is in Tanzania. So both the two highest are here.

[PK]

Are in East Africa.

[Neil]

East Africa. Yes.

[PK]

You've got a desert.

[Neil]

And by the way, sorry to say this, East Africa, when you see people say East Africa here, they're referring to all the countries you just articulated. This is the East Africa. No, we didn't miss any.

[PK]

No.

[Neil]

So it's Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia.

[PK]

Sudan. Sudan.

[Neil]

And it's like...

[PK]

A bit of Rwanda and Burundi.

[Neil]

Am I guessing 500 million people or something?

[PK]

Yes. Is that about it?

[Neil]

About half a billion people in the world live in this cradle of civilization. Okay. Yes.

[PK]

And...

[Neil]

Second highest peak.

[PK]

Yes. And so you've got the coast. You've got the coastal line.

You've got the mountain. Coastal line. I'm sorry.

[Neil]

I thought you said coastal line.

[PK]

Coastal line. Yep.

So we've got the Indian Ocean with all the breeze, the warm breeze on that side. You've got a cold part, Mount Kenya can be freezing at some point. It's got snow peaks.

So very extreme cold on that side of the world. So you can say it's a land of contrasts. You've got the plains, the dry savannah land.

[Neil]

That's what people say when they refer to like Maasai Mara.

[PK]

Maasai Mara. They refer to the plains. Yes.

[Neil]

Yes.

[PK]

You've got the warmer parts towards northeastern Kenya, which has desert and semi-desert. Like there is a place called Chalbi Desert. It's a desert in Kenya.

Yes. I did not know this.

[PK]

Okay.

[PK]

So we are indeed...

[PK]

It's everything.

[PK]

...land of all natural beauty and meshed in one land, which explains why the Brits never really wanted to leave Kenya. They wanted to stay here.

[Neil]

And they're still here.

[PK]

In perpetuity. Yeah. And they never left.

And they never left. They never left.

[Neil]

They never left.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

So there's still a lot of Brits here now.

[PK]

Yeah. We are conversing in their language. This is an enduring legacy.

[Neil]

The podcast is being recorded in English from England, from the Engle tribe.

[PK]

So we are indeed subjects of the crown. We are still perpetuating the British metaphysical empire.

We are extending their cultural hegemony.

[Neil]

Yes. Yes. So this is the...

Thank you. Because I was asking for a pretty hard level there. And you zoomed us into Africa, the cradle of civilization.

How far is this place from here? I mean, now I'm desperate to go visit there. Can you go see...

Is there a museum there or something where there's... They found the remains. Like there must be...

Here's the oldest bones. Like what did they have there?

[PK]

The remains are likely to be at the National Museums of Kenya.

[PK]

Okay.

[PK]

Which is again modeled around the British museums. So if the Brits have not loaned those bones, they will be found at the National Museums of Kenya.

[Neil]

Aha. I see. Because there's ownership and so on.

And this is similar to... I had a past conversation with Kamini Guruswami, who is actually my wife's midwife for the birth of our children. And we interviewed her and she made the statement that, you know, they should return the jewels in the museums because they're stolen from her land, our land, their land, right?

And so... And to be honest with you, a few days ago, I was just in Rijk Museum, R-I-J-K Museum in Amsterdam. One of the largest museums in the Netherlands.

And as I'm touring around, it's beautiful, wonderful museum. It's the Dutch masters and Renoir and Van Gogh and Van Gogh. And they have a crown there, a giant red velvet crown full of gold that was presented to a West African king in 1500 in exchange for permission by the VOC, which is the first international company in the world, the Dutch East India Company.

First international company in the world ever. To capture enslaved people and take them back. And in exchange, they gave him a crown.

And they have the crown in the museum.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And it's not like the descendants of the descendants of the descendants of the descendants that feel this way, but we have this. And then the write-up is astonishing. I took a picture.

I was like, wow, like they gave the guy a crown and they said, can we take the people? They did.

[PK]

Some of the absurdities of our past. I mean, a very familiar story. One of the guys who resisted, I know we shall get into the story of Dance of the Jacaranda, but the railway line, you know, was, its construction was resisted by a community in the Rift Valley for nearly 10 years.

And the guy who was leading the young, young, young fighters, like the seer, they called him the Orcoyote, the spiritual leader of the community. When the Brits finally, a military commander tricked him into a peace meeting only for this guy to show up and his gun down, his head was chopped off and sent to the Queen of England. So, the example that you're narrating, you know, severing, you know, torsos, some of those gestures, the colonial gestures of mutilating or dismembering, you know, physical bodies was also an attempt to just disconnect, you know, the body from the soul, disconnecting the mind from the body.

Also, you know, disconnecting the cultures that hold people together.

[Neil]

Wow. So, this is partly a story of Africa. Most countries here have had a colonial heritage, though not all.

I hear Ethiopia, maybe less so, maybe some countries less so. And then we zoom into Kenya. You've described the natural beauty.

I was in the Kenya National Park yesterday and I got to see right in front of my eyes a 2,000 pound rhino with its baby looking at us. And I've read the book, Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. And he makes the argument in the book that the only reason the large game remains here with the people, which we killed all the large game in Australia and North America and every other, we killed because we co-evolved with them here.

But everywhere else we landed and then we saw something big and we killed it. You know, we killed the giant 500 pound Moa birds in New Zealand. We killed the giant buffalo in North America.

We killed everything everywhere except here because we co-existed with it. So, there is some heaven feeling here. You feel the sun, you feel the light, you feel the energy, you feel the people.

I've been here just 40 hours and I feel almost like my soul has sparked and has rejuvenated. And when I came here, I was in Amsterdam and Simon Sinek spoke after me and I said, I'm going to Africa. And he said, you're about to fall in love.

He said, you're about to fall in love. That's what he said.

[PK]

That sounds very appropriate. I can tell you, Neil, one of the things we are experiencing in this country, well, conservation has been whitewashed because our ancestors, not just in Kenya, but in large parts of the continent, took care of the wildlife for centuries.

[PK]

Millennium.

[PK]

For millennium, yes. Because when you think about it, we never took elephant tusks or the lions' skins or the teeth or horns of this and that big animal. It is actually only the royals, the chiefs, you know, the leaders within the community who wore maybe hats that had certain features from animals and those, whether it's a Colobus monkey, whose skin was used to maybe make a garment for a royal.

The rest of the community took care of the animals. So now the commercial hunting of this wildlife has come with the colonial expeditions. You might remember that even hunting was legalized for those who could afford to pay for their permits.

So like the former American president Roosevelt came to Kenya in 1920s.

[Neil]

Theodore Roosevelt.

[PK]

Yes. And you had, you know, prominent writers like Hemingway coming to this side of the world in the 30s, 1930s as a professional hunter, come and pay for a license and then you can come and kill any animals. The plunder and the chaos that started with the commercial hunting was something that was unprecedented in our past.

So we've been, our ancestors were very prudent custodians of this heaven that we were given from the onset. And so what you're seeing, I am certain, we needed to find ways in which we can connect the environment and the animals that inhabit those spaces and the needs of those people who live within those spaces. Because the government has now criminalized any acts of even discovering even small animals.

People cannot hunt for meat in Kenya because apparently there is an interesting part that virtually every wild animal in this country has a tag, electronic tag, and they can trace zebras and say, we haven't seen this zebra, this number 243 in this cluster. There's so few left. There's so few left.

[Neil]

Yeah, we're talking thousands. Yeah, very few. There's just thousands of rhinos left.

There's just thousands of, you know, these hippos. There's just thousands, we've killed them all.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

And because of the tags, they can now track if you kill one that you get in big trouble.

[PK]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you do.

[Neil]

So I hear hunting is still allowed in some parts of Africa, like Namibia, maybe South Africa. You know, so it's not like it's eradicated.

[PK]

No, no.

[Neil]

But it's at least the government here has figured out that conservation is a vital source of nutrition for the vastness of this community and culture. Now Zuma's saying 60 million people live in Kenya. I think, what is it, four live in Nairobi?

This is the capital. About five million. Five million in greater Nairobi.

So where are we sitting now? And then we'll get into your books. And I got a million questions on those.

So the introduction here, you know, for those listening. But I hope they're finding it. This is fascinating to me.

And I have so many side questions.

[PK]

Thank you.

[Neil]

There's a bug right on your microphone. I don't know if it matters. We don't want to kill it.

We just want to give it a different home for a moment. Okay. They want to be heard.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

That's a great line. They want to be heard. And so does the pied crow.

If you hear that squeaking in the background, that rah, rah, rah, that's a pied crow. It's like an American crow that people will be familiar with, but it has like a lighter head. And it's like a cousin of the American crow.

[PK]

And it's a recent resident here. I didn't, I never used to hear that sound until like a year or two ago.

[Neil]

Oh, and we're not in Nairobi proper, right? We're in a surrounding.

[PK]

We are on the outcasts, outskirts of Nairobi, about an hour from the city center. Depending how fast you drive.

[Neil]

I got here in like 30 minutes. He was bolted and it was fast.

[PK]

Because we have the expressway that allows us a very quick dash. So you are fortunate because at times, Nairobians complain of the strangulating traffic that tends to be in rush hour. And I think our people have this hard mentality.

So they go to work at a certain time. They return home at a certain time. So we are on the fringe of the city.

In a part that you can say is an extension of the larger Rift Valley.

[Neil]

Okay. Oh, okay. The larger Rift Valley you define as?

[PK]

You've got these very interesting natural features. Like the plunge, you know, hundreds of meters down towards the escarpment. On the other side going to Naivasha.

So we are in Kajedo County. But I can say it's an extension of the larger Nairobi metropolitan area. Because most people who live here actually work in Nairobi.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And as I was coming here, I was taking a video out my phone out the window. And I don't know if it was exaggerating. But the driver said, pull your phone in quick.

There's a motorbike behind us with two people on it. If it's two people, then the guy in the back will grab your phone.

[PK]

This may or may not be true. You know, we've got some, I don't call it paranoia. But, you know, we can say, you're likely to have your phone grabbed anywhere in the world.

Anyway, whether in a street, in the streets of London.

[Neil]

An expensive small thing. Having AirPods on people lost.

[PK]

Yeah. And so when he came here some 10 years ago and he moved here, we've been here for 10 years.

From Nairobi.

[Neil]

Just from the inner to the outer of the city.

[PK]

Yes. And I was in the, you know, I grew up in Nairobi. And I was looking for some room to think, some room to write.

And I was looking for a place that I can actually get to breathe. Because Nairobi felt like it was suffocating. One of the concerns I had was that everybody was living behind a wall.

You know, a stone wall, gated communities. And then beyond the gated community, which has its own perimeter wall around us, people are all behind stone walls.

[Neil]

So there's a gated community and then inside the gated community, there's a stone wall around every individual house. Yes, yes. With wires on top.

[PK]

Yes. And I told my wife, I'm not going to live in a prison in my own house. So we're not going to have a stone wall.

So we had a natural hedge around our property until maybe some three, four years ago. She kept complaining she needed to have a stone wall for her own. We've created walls in our minds that people feel exposed and vulnerable.

I do not. So the only trade-off we had, I said, we're going to have a stone wall, but you're going to have grills so I can see outside and my trees can thrive. So that was a trade-off.

[Neil]

What do you mean she had walls in her mind? What do you mean by that? She grew up in Nairobi.

She's very comfortable here. She's part of the community here. Where'd the walls come from in her mind?

[PK]

Well, people have, we can say security is psychological. You might feel most insecure when you are in the most unsafe spot in the world, depending on how you visualize and understand your own safety. So this is what I think, Neil.

If anybody really wanted to take my car or some music stereo, they don't need to hurt me to get those items. They have ways in which they access those things. And 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.

[PK]

Wow.

[PK]

Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

[Neil]

Wow. And there's a, we got to get into the books because there's so many of the things you've set up here in this really helpful kind of opening, you know, 20, 30 minute contextual over story is so great. We have a geographical view now of where we are.

We have a cultural and colonial view. We'll touch on cultural and colonial instances many times. It's very present, this in the air here.

You know, I mean, I asked my driver when I got here, should I go to the Karen Blixen museum? I mean, she wrote the most famous book everyone's heard of out of Africa. And you know what he said?

No, do not go. And so I said, oh, okay. So I typed into chat GPT, what are the reasons to go or not go?

And it said three reasons to go cultural history. She was a friend of the land. She's a, you know, she talks about the stories of the people and he said, that is a lie.

How can you be a friend of the land when you steal their land? And I wrote that back to chat GPT and it apologized to him. The AI said, we're really sorry.

It's true. Land was taken. It's through the colonial gaze.

So it just is, you can feel it in the air here. This is not a story that's finished. Absolutely.

It's a story that's in the middle of the book here.

[PK]

I agree. It's an unfinished story. I would even argue we haven't even begun telling our story.

It's our turn to tell our story. And I think what, um, uh, when you read out of Africa, what Karen Blixen, um, um, a British colonialist, uh, who wrote a story that was a memoir of her time growing up here, which is quite a famous book. Actually, Danish, she was, she was a Dan, um, who, who made a home in Kenya in 1930s.

Um, uh, bought, bought a farm in a locality that's now memorialized in her name. It's called Karen, uh, estate, uh, the poshest side of town.

[Neil]

They've named the whole part of town after this.

[PK]

A neck of land, an empty piece of land, um, going for maybe half a million dollars.

[Neil]

Wow. Dollars.

[PK]

Am I talking the right figures? No. Nearly a million dollars.

Million dollars.

[Neil]

A million dollars.

[PK]

An empty, an empty piece of land.

[Neil]

Yeah. It's actually about. Which would be like 130 million Kenyan shillings.

Yes. Completely unaffordable. And just to, for reference, you know, in our, we're, we're leaving a hundred shilling note on our pillow in the hotel room as a tip.

So 130 million Kenyan shillings for one acre of empty land.

[PK]

Right.

[Neil]

Not just unaffordable, almost unimaginable.

[PK]

Unimaginable anywhere in the world, anywhere, even in Canada. Um, so my, my response to this guy who said, you know, don't go to this is because she, uh, Karen Blixen, uh, represents one of the abnormalities of this continent. Uh, and, um, once again, I can invoke my name, my, my mentor Ngugi

He said we've normalized abnormalities. So why should we remember Karen Blixen? A Dane who comes to our land, inhabits, uh, lives among, among us for 15 years, runs, uh, an enterprise, an agricultural enterprise, growing farm, high estate fields, the coffee estate fields.

And then she returns to, to her country of origin and publishes a memoir. Um, and she calls it out of Africa, but we're in Africa. We are 55 countries in this wide world.

Um, and, um, she takes her very specific, very specific experience in a small part of this country to typify a continent wide phenomenon. So this, this is how, uh, colonial writers.

[Neil]

It makes me want to, honestly, I get, I get choked up because it's so, um, and I'm, and I feel so ignorant too, at the same time, I got this joint emotion of so desperation to learn the stories that you're desperate to share.

[PK]

So, yeah, we're starting somewhere because we're only beginning to tell our story. So this is what happens. She, she writes her memoir, um, a very specific experience, which becomes, uh, globalized.

So specificity becomes typicality. So, so she typifies, you know, this is Africa, although she was in a small part of this continent in a small community. Um, and, uh, so you can see this trope has been replicated for 200 years by missionaries, colonial writers, uh, travelers, um, all of them writing about.

In fact, if you read, um, um, Elspeth Hatchley's, uh, memoir, uh, the, um, uh, the flame trees of Thika, another colonial writer. The flame trees? Of Thika.

[Neil]

Of Thika.

[PK]

How do you spell it? T-H-I-K-A.

[Neil]

That's Thika. That's another memoir from Kenya or somewhere else?

[PK]

Another colonial writer from Kenya. Yeah. You find, uh, again, her family, uh, situated in, uh, central Kenya, growing coffee.

Um, they become cultural signposts, but these are foreigners who are supplanting the interpretation of the people they find to be the signifiers of this experience. So they become the spokes persons of, uh, these communities. So that's not the problem.

The problem is when you read out of Africa, um, there's an interesting trope that you find not just in, uh, um, uh, Elspeth Hatchley or Karen Blixen, it's even extended to Ernest Hemingway in that, uh, Africans in those texts are treated as mute or, um, uh, or daft. Daft. Unintelligent.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, I know what you mean. Yeah. Yeah.

[PK]

They lack sophistication. They're not developed as characters. In other words, I am, I am, I am gently saying they don't have to be gentle.

They're very racist interpretations and depictions of these communities. Yeah. And yet when you go to a supermarket in, uh, in Ottawa, you're going to find a coffee brand exported to that side of the world, branded out of Africa, evoking, uh, and, uh, um, maintaining these, uh, cultural imperialism.

It's not been accepted by, by, by Kenyans and Africans. In other words, uh, these, these are manifestations of colonial nostalgia and even Africans are invoking such terminologies. So that's why when I talked about, uh, the colonial, the metaphysical empire, uh, it is our brains that have been colonized, uh, not to be able to understand and to unpack the nuances.

[Neil]

Yeah. Cause as an example, you mentioned missionaries and it sticks in my head just because two things, one at the airport, I saw a whole string of people coming off, um, with huge suitcases, uh, all white. Um, no judge, no judgment through this conversation, but just explain our stories that we can openly discuss.

And they all were in suits and ties with shirts. And I said, is this a baseball? I said, is this a football team?

I thought it was a football team from a school. Yeah. And they said, no, we're missionaries.

Yes. And this was recent. This is a day or two ago.

[PK]

Wow.

[Neil]

And so, um, it's not like it's, and I asked the driver, the first driver I met, I said, um, you know, what, to what manifestation is colonialism still present? And he said, it's our religions. It's the first thing he said was, it was a surprise for me.

I thought he was going to say like statues.

[PK]

He's right.

[Neil]

He said the religions are the first form of cold currently existing colonialism. Yes. That was a, I didn't understand that.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

But you said, you know, and I, and again, no judgment because I've had elder Cox and elder Corona on this podcast. I had a wonderful conversation with them, two Mormon missionaries, far from home to 18 year old boys who I interviewed at the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They have a wonderful story to share.

However, for the year that they are doing this missionary work, they can be exposed to no other form of news media or visual media other than the one book, the book of Mormon and the one TV show, the Mormon TV show. They have this for a whole year and they imparted. And I asked them how many people, you know, have converted to the religion.

They said zero. So in my head, I was a bit left thinking, I wonder if they, you know, I wonder what manifestations and ramifications are of this type of thing around the world.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You don't fly to the States and teach them your religion.

[PK]

No. Well, You don't yet.

[Neil]

Maybe the stories to coming out of Africa are going to, we're going to be going around and saying, try to do it this way. Well, Try to do it that way.

[PK]

Well, the thing about religion, and this is a, that's a fascinating question in a variety of ways. The first is that it is the most harmless way of accessing a mind of another human being.

[Neil]

Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow.

Religion is the most harmless way of accessing the mind of another human being.

[PK]

So because you pose no threat, you are advocating for things that are unseen. So there's no burden of proof that you need to prove to me God exists. And the moment you initiate this conversation, which is essentially what Chinua Achebe is telling us in Things Fall Apart, the moment you enter a community that way, then you start making inroads.

So, so it's a very, it's a very gentle, gentle space because you're not arguing about difficult questions.

[Neil]

Yes.

[PK]

They're very soft. So, so the colonialists understood that, you know, the, the, the ideology when they came to Africa was triple C, Christianity, commerce, and civilization.

[Neil]

Well, wait. So the, this is a written known proof of, of they had a little PowerPoint presentation in the back room.

[PK]

Yes. Yeah.

[Neil]

500 years.

[PK]

It was indeed. Christianity, commerce. That was a PowerPoint presentation.

Yeah. That's when they set three C's. These are our shows.

They're going to, uh, yes, they're going to present these triple C's.

[Neil]

Really?

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

Really? It was a thought of articulated, specific, purposeful, like my TED talk is called the three A's. Awesome.

Yeah. They had the three C's of colonialism. Yes, they do.

Christianity, commerce, and civilization.

[PK]

Yes.

[PK]

And this is how they're connected. This is how they're connected. So Christianity was how the early missionaries, uh, and they were sponsored by church organizations, by the way, uh, um, the, the, the greater Livingstone, David Livingstone, Dr. David Livingstone, the Scottish explorer was sponsored by the church mission society, church missionary society, uh, um, John's peak. They were all affiliated with church.

[Neil]

Started there.

[PK]

Yes. Started there. So.

[Neil]

And with the philosophy underpinning this, like one of helpfulness, like one of like, sorry to say this, and I know this is going to sound horrible. Okay. But was it one of, let us help these quote unquote savages, uh, learn the ways of truth and meaning that we have been so blessed to discover.

[PK]

And yet though in the dark ages for, for millennia before, you know, Africa had a very, very sophisticated civilizations where 2000 years before the earliest civilizations in Europe, in Greece and elsewhere were reported, which Timbuktu, um, um, when, when, uh, uh, when, when, when you look at, uh, one, one strand of history that's teaching ancient Africa, Ethiopia, uh, you know, uh, you know, when Ethiopia was being. Egypt.

Vandalized. Uh, and.

[Neil]

But our story for me, I'm sorry to say this in my education is it started in Athens. The foundation of democracy.

[PK]

Well, when you read, when you read, um, uh.

[Neil]

Rome.

[PK]

When you, yeah.

[Neil]

My history goes to there.

[PK]

When you read, uh, Plato, you're going to find, um, they were, uh, they were accessing civilizations that were in Northern part of Africa. Um, I'm trying to remember the name of the philosopher who was hacking to the superiority of the philosophers on the other side of the border. Carthage, Carthage.

If you read Carthage, you will see they were advanced scholars of literature, of religion, of philosophy.

[Neil]

Yes, yes, yes. But I am so ignorant to ask what, because I do not even know. I'm embarrassed, you know, but I thank you for your, you're letting me have the dumb question.

[PK]

We are starting to tell our story now. Timbuktu.

[PK]

Yeah. And Carthage, Ethiopia. Addis Ababa, is it?

Or am I getting it wrong? Aksum was the earlier civilization. Aksum.

[PK]

Aksum, A-K-S-U-M.

[PK]

Yep, Aksum, yeah.

[PK]

You go to, you go to, um, the ruins in Zimbabwe. Mwanamutapa Kingdom in Zimbabwe. You go to Sudan.

I mean, the ancient civilizations that were thriving way ahead of any European philosophy, even a glimpse of it.

[Neil]

Because we were here first. All of us. The royal we, the human we. We started, and we, history repeats. We go up, we go down. We have empires, we have failures.

It's like, woo, woo, woo. We just started the same brain still, so we're doing the same things. And then it happens that some of this gets erased.

A lot of it gets erased. Absolutely. Books get burned.

The libraries get destroyed. The famous libraries in the Middle East have been burned, and we have nothing from them. So the histories get tarnished and blurry.

And then we have the advancements of the modern technologies where they get advanced, where they get blurrier, faster. You know, the Gulf of, change the name of the Gulf overnight. You know what I mean?

Stuff like this. So we are, we are. Go, go.

Yeah, sorry, sorry.

[PK]

Yeah, I wanted to connect the three Cs, the triple Cs, because they are connected with that campaign. That Christianity is only 200 years old. Africa had- 2,000 years old.

[PK]

Jesus, 2,000 years, right?

[PK]

Jesus, 2,000 years. But then when they started making inroads in East Africa, it was only 200 years. I see, I see, yeah.

Remember, the contact between East Africa and other parts of the world was a lot more advanced. The Portuguese were here 500 years earlier, in 1490s, yeah? You had the Chinese explorers in East Africa, and this has been proven by archaeology.

So you've got the Arab, you've got Indian sailors. So East Africa had contact with the rest of the world for such a long time, until late 1890s, when the Brits start making inroads into the interior, because you didn't have any way of accessing the interior other than walking or riding, riding a horse or a donkey. So it's only when they started now making inroads into the interior that, you know, slave trade, game trophies, the trade between Arab traders and indigenous communities, and of course, the rise of the Swahili on the coast, from the interactions between Arabs and Africans.

But I wanted us to stick to the triple Cs, because we had, for many, many years, Islamic civilizations on the coast. The Zanzibar, you go all the way to this African coastline, Somalia, you had established Islamic civilizations. But Christians are arriving to preach something different.

So when they start making the inroads into the interior, this was also connected with now, connecting the dots, and, you know, having this PowerPoint presentation, this is how we're going to market our product, is that it is preaching about values of Christ and values of another faith as a counterpoint to Islam, because the traders, the Arab traders, were also Muslims who are trading with, you know, human cargo. So Christianity is presented as a panacea to a social problem.

But then the larger...

[Neil]

Solution to the problem, the panacea to the problem.

[PK]

Yes, but the larger problem isn't in East Africa. It is that there is the abolition movement in Europe, that slaves and slave trade are no longer permissible in those hemispheres. So why did they come earlier?

But because the markets were no longer going to operate. The auction, slave auctions, were going to be... There were enactments of law.

William Wilberforce...

[Neil]

Slavery was beginning to be outlawed across the Western world, including in the United States. Exactly. Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln.

[PK]

1776, yes.

[Neil]

Also, the Emancipation Proclamation was in the 1800s, I believe. 1800, yeah. And then you're saying the abolition movement was starting to kill their markets.

The money was going to be lost. So then they did what?

[PK]

Right.

[Neil]

Then what happened?

[PK]

So this is how we are connecting the dots. So the larger Western world no longer accepts slave trade as a viable business. So they say, you preach unto them the gospel of Christ.

And so Christianity is the first front. The second one, and they're saying, let's do legitimate business. Stop enslaving your brethren.

So following Hot on Heels of this, we have the missionaries, explorers, early travelers who are writing about, what have you found? What's the climate there like? What are the business opportunities?

So early missionaries are coming around the same time as explorers. So you're preaching the gospel. You've got some intel about these communities.

And so when you look at now what follows, they have binges of this enterprise, the Imperial British East Africa Company. A company. Starts there.

Registered and licensed by the Queen, Her Majesty, the Queen of England.

[Neil]

Yeah, it says it on the logo, the crown of the logo.

[PK]

Yes, yes. And when you go to Nairobi, by the way, that building, there is a building on Moy Avenue. IBE, Imperial British East Africa Company still exists to this day.

[Neil]

Really?

[PK]

On Moy Avenue, yes. Wow.

[Neil]

What's it used for today?

[PK]

Just a commercial building. Right.

[Neil]

But the East Africa Company, you're talking about tea and spices and sugar, and this is beginning the larger trade as a commerce. That's the second C.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

And what's the third C? You call it civilization.

[PK]

Civilization.

[Neil]

So the metaphysical part of it?

[PK]

Yes, yes. We come from Europe. We are civilized people.

Your cultures appear to be perpetuating superstition, although Halloween is practicing this side of the world.

[Neil]

Oh, you could argue a lot of religions. It's perspective, but you pray to animals. You may not wear as many clothes.

You may kill animals and eat them without cooking.

[PK]

Right. My point is the three threads were connected. And they were choreographed.

[Neil]

Another C.

[PK]

Yeah, it's another C. Yeah, they're choreographed to appear to be harmless intervention of, you know, these outsiders who wanted to come into our countries. And we can see the model used in East Africa, in Kenya, in Uganda, in Tanzania was replicated across the continent. Yes. So they decided there were different parts of the world, but the model was the same. So in Kenya, in Zimbabwe, in South Africa, those became settler colonies. So the Brits actually made homes in those three countries.

They made a home in these locations. So you had settler colonies because they wanted to live there in perpetuity. They had no desire to leave.

In other parts of the continent, they applied indirect rule, like in some parts of Nigeria or Uganda. So that means you are maintaining the traditional structures of governance. So you're using indirect rule.

You're using the chief. If you want to tax people, you don't come and do it personally, but you're using the chiefs. You are declaring them to be...

Give them the crown. Yeah, give them a title, chief of chiefs or paramount chief, you know, glorified titles. But the point here...

[Neil]

Walk through them, be invisible, be in the background. Exactly. Don't see it.

Exactly. And then the chief pays the taxes to you at the end. And this is, by the way, my own story, because my mom, I've mentioned, is born in Nairobi in 1950, right?

She's Indian. You can look at her. Her skin is brown.

She's from India. She's never been to India, my mom. She's never been there once because her dad was transplanted with pay.

It wasn't through the enslaved trade, but with pay. The British, because they were ruling India too, you know, India didn't get independent until 1947. So in the 1930s, 40s, her dad was transplanted to run an administrative job for the railway.

Yeah, yeah. And that, of course, was the pathway into the interior. But the government job raised eight kids.

My mom's the youngest of eight. Her origin, she considers herself Kenyan. She's grown up here.

I'm starting to call myself half Kenyan.

[Neil]

Yeah, you did. I mean, I'm starting to feel that when I'm here.

[Neil]

But look at the history. Look why we're here. Like why we're here because of the same three Cs.

Yes. That PowerPoint went viral.

[PK]

That's true. That's true. And Neil, if we may even extend the triple Cs to the railway line, you can see it was configured.

[Neil]

So tell us now about Dance of the Jakaranda, your wonderful novel, which I've just told everybody about my book. I'll put it in front of the coconut water that you gave me, poured from a fresh coconut, which you cut in your own kitchen and poured for me. That's so everybody knows.

If you're looking at this on YouTube and you're looking at my water, and you're wondering why it's cloudy, you're like, oh, I wonder if the water's good over there. This is the opposite. This is like I'm drinking like nectar from the earth.

Like it's chopped coconut. What's he called? My mom calls it?

[PK]

Mandafu.

[Neil]

She's been raving about this. She's been going on about this my whole life.

We go on any vacation she asks for Mandafu. She's been for 56 years since she left. She's been looking for this drink.

[PK]

Yes. Wow. And here we have it.

[Neil]

Yeah, but when you move it around the world, it doesn't taste the same, right? You're talking about Dance of the Jakaranda because of course you talk about the story here. Just tie this to your book because I have to get to your three most formative books.

Normally by this time in the conversation, you know, I've covered the three books, but the opening is not an opening. It is the story. It is what we were talking about starting to tell the stories.

I'm here to help collect and share stories from 55 countries, a quarter of the countries in the world, more than a quarter are in this continent. And I'm sorry to say this, but when you walk into a North American bookstore, where are they? They're like missing completely.

Like completely.

[PK]

It's one of the erasures of our past and our present. So we can say, Neil, in writing, it's an act of recovering our past.

[Neil]

Writing is an act of recovering.

[PK]

Yeah. We are trying to recover our past and Dance of the Jakaranda does precisely that because I return to the founding of this nation. The colony that the Brits made in late 19th century and the vehicle that they used to access our nation and its heart was the railway line, which I discover represented an interesting metaphor.

Just in the way that the train is laid as a virtual and literal penetration of the land. It's an ion, a piece of ion cutting through the land from the shores of the ocean.

[Neil]

It's very sexual in some sense, like a raping almost.

[PK]

It is a rape. It is a rape. And, you know, getting through the country until it terminates at the headwaters of Lake Victoria or Namlolwe as natives called it.

I found if I wanted to narrate the experience of my country and its peoples, the singular visual, you can say spine that connects all these histories was represented in the railway. By the same token, you can say how the Brits envisioned this. It wasn't to develop or ease movement for locals.

It was to harvest everything and anything that the land could produce and ship it out.

[Neil]

Including all the animals and the people.

[PK]

Including the animals and the people.

[Neil]

So, unfortunately... But there was no slave trade here, was there? Yes.

In Kenya in the 1800s?

[PK]

Yes, there was slave trade there.

[Neil]

Nobody wanted the slaves in England. What did they do with the slaves?

[PK]

So what we're doing, we should remember, and this replicates the cycles of exploitation, is that the train tracks, the railway tracks, in some instances, followed the tracks that were used by the slave traders. So where people were cutting through the forest line or the forest, they literally followed or replicated the same route, or route as Canadians would call it, to follow the very path that those who were exploiting our country and region had done. Finally, something that I tried to espouse in this book is that we find that the very exploitation that had been done by the Arab traders, you have the Brits coming in to perpetuate the same trajectory, get into the land and get anything you can manage.

Because every train station evolved into a township, we maintained this train economy for 50 years. So all the major townships to this day in this country are situated in areas that were serving the interests of the British economy.

[Neil]

Of course, because that's, yeah.

[PK]

We did not, areas that were of course not productive were cut off. And what we didn't do until maybe some 15 years ago, we recognized this is an abnormality. This is not a normal configuration of a national economy.

We need to get everybody integrated into the country and for them to feel they have a stake in its future. So what we have now evolved as, you know, federal, you can say federal or devolved units of government, we call it county administration, where you've got fragments of, you know, governments scattered around the country, was supposed to cure this colonial aberration that our beginnings were structured around the railway line, whose primary motive was to take away the produce or the peoples or the products that the land could produce.

[Neil]

And that's a work that's ongoing today. Can you have optimism, history, awareness? I noticed this everywhere.

There's an urgent and yearning desire. Boniface Mwangi, our guest in chapter 104 of this podcast, is now running for president of this country. With love and courage as his motto and for, you know, being a kind of a moral and spiritual, I would say, like thrust is what I'm sensing from a distance into this country.

I'm sensing other people going for president also have the same vibe and aesthetic, arguing that the current head of state, I don't know him, but it's understanding that that pang in the background is that that's the understanding I'm hearing from like the stuff I read.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah, I might be biased because I don't know, from such a distance away.

[PK]

Yeah, you can say. I mean, are there many ways of looking at that question? And I will say for writers who are engaged in politics or write, we can say writing is a political act, no matter what you're writing about.

[Neil]

Exactly. Yeah, of course.

[PK]

And what our country teaches us, because I'm interested in politics, not as a politician, but as someone who reflects about our past and what the present appears to tease out, is that we have to start thinking about this animal we call democracy. What is it exactly? If it's Western democracy, because the model that we have replicated has worked or has not worked.

Mainly, you can see what all democracy teaches us, actually, is its limits. If you see the kind of chaos in Europe and North America, the kind of individuals who are ascending to power because of democracy, they are telling us there's so huge limitations of democracy because anyone can go to a podium with a megaphone. And money.

And money. Lots of it. Yes, the megaphone is a platform that allows you to be hard, fine, wide.

So you have to fundraise enormously to be able to put adverts that saturate the media space. So we are saying without that kind of characteristic, you've got no real prospects for the Mwangis of this world from having a meaningful and realistic shot at the top. Because we have maintained structures of power in ways that power perpetuates itself.

So those individuals who make it to the national platform in Kenya, at least in most parts of Africa, is that you have to have very deep pockets. How do you make money unless you're crooked in Kenya? I mean, to have the kind of money that people say will be a meaningful budget for a national campaign, you're talking of some two billion, maybe three billion Kenya shillings.

That's more than 200 million.

[Neil]

You need $100 million to run for US president. And never mind the gerrymandering, which is a whole separate issue. Like Ralph Nader was our guest on a past chapter of this podcast.

He ran for president four times, famously in the US. And he says the electoral college is an abhorrent mutation of what the founding fathers intended, which in the US, the electoral college, of course, dictates who represents you. I mean, democracy started with 100 people probably.

And now it's trying to apply to like 500 million people. Well, it's going to have all kinds of mutant metastasizations. Argument, I guess, is what's better.

So that's kind of the, you know, that's where we get to local politics being such a big deal right now in the world. In Toronto, where I live, there's a lot more conversation locally about your councillor and about your mayor than there is about the premier and the prime minister, because there's things that affect you on a daily basis, whether there's a bike lanes or do we build more roads, or whether people are discussing this locally. Locally is kind of, you know.

[PK]

I was watching a film on one of the mayors of Canada, the famous one.

[Neil]

Oh, okay. Rob Ford.

[PK]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Neil]

A crack-smoking Toronto mayor died while in office at a very young age.

[PK]

And I thought that's a very Kenyan, that's a very, looks like a very Kenyan politician.

[Neil]

Oh, really?

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah. It's quite humiliating that he's our only known mayor. We have a wonderful mayor right now, but things go up and down.

Now, just before we get into your three informative books, which, by the way, I'm eager to talk about, Dance of the Jakaranda. I'm going to hold it up here to the camera. We can flash it on screen.

This is, you know, New York Times said, it's one of the most notable books of the year. And you've been talking about the penetration of the railway. I have found the opening page of your book so evocative.

I wondered if you might, for anybody watching this or listening to this, please get this book. Please, you know, support the resurrection of buried stories. And would you just, I don't know if you would be willing to read the first paragraph or first page for us.

[PK]

For sure, sure.

[Neil]

It's so mesmerizing. It really captures, I think, what you're talking about.

[PK]

Thank you. In that year, the glowworms in the marshes were replaced by light bulbs. Villagers were roused out of their hamlets by a massive rambling that many mistook for seismic shifts of the earth.

These are not uncommon occurrences. Locals experienced earthquakes across the Rift Valley so often, they even had an explanation for it. They said it was God taking a walk in his universe.

They believed this without needing to see it. But on that day, the villagers saw the source of the noise as well. It was a monstrous snake-like creature whose black head, erect like a cobra's, pulled rusty brown boxes and slithered down the savannah, coughing spasmodically as it emitted blue-black smoke.

The villagers clapped their hands and wailed, Yo kine! Come and see! The strips of iron that those strange men planted seasons earlier, which left undisturbed, had grown into a monster gliding through the land.

The gigantic snake was a train and the year was 1901, an age when white men were still discovering the world for their kings and queens in faraway lands. So when the Railway Superintendent, or simply Master, as he was known to many, peered out the window of his first-class cabin that misty morning, his mind did not register the dazzled villagers who dropped their hoes and took off, or laid their hearts away from the grazing fields in sheer terror of the strange creature cutting through their land.

[Neil]

Ah, that is one of the best-written paragraphs opening any book I've ever read. It's so, if you fall into that the way I did, the visual, the metaphorical, you can feel the story underneath the story there. The cobra-like head, the spasmodically emitting blue-black smoke.

It's a real powerful work.

[Neil]

Thank you.

[Neil]

You're a very gifted writer.

[Neil]

Thank you.

[Neil]

And you were shaped like all of us were by the books you read, including from a very young age, The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon. Published originally in 1927 by Grosset and Dunlap, The Hardy Boys covers typically feature vivid dramatic illustrations about the mystery or suspense inside, about their two teenage sleuths, Frank and Joe Hardy.

You know, they're sneaking through a darkened room, or they're confronting a shadowy figure. Franklin W. Dixon, D-I-X-O-N, for those that may not know, was actually a pseudonym used by over 30 ghost writers.

Characters were originally created by Edward Stratemeyer from New Jersey, who lived from 1862 to 1930. Leslie McFarland, a Canadian journalist, was one of the first writers. He wrote about 19 of the first 25 books.

But there's been, like I said, 30 writers since. And the books have been revised and heavily revised from 1959 to today, to the point where now there's many series. My kids have read these yellow paperback Hardy Boys, the blue paperbacks that came out in the 80s, the old original hardcover.

This is a series that has grown and mutated vastly. I think we know the story. For those that don't, Frank and Joe Hardy are teenage amateur sleuths.

They solve mysteries in their fictional hometown of Bayport, which by the way, in terms of coloring stories, it was never revealed where Bayport was. There was no state. It wasn't even said because they wanted the reader to visualize it as if they were their own town.

For Dewey Decimal Heads, you can find this under J-FIC for Juvenile Fiction, by the way. Peter, tell us about your relationship with the Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon.

[PK]

Yeah, I must have encountered the Hardy Boys when I was about 13 and 14. So those are very vivid, you know, moments of one's evolution. And I remember being struck by these youngsters who were immersed in what seemed like very dangerous endeavors.

And so my first understanding of, you know, empathy for reader or readers is that I was invested in their pursuits. I was worried, you know, sick for their investigations and hoping that they're going to crack this and come out of it safely. Because a child, it's interesting about the universality of the human experience.

Because I grew up in a small village in central Kenya and I'm reading stuff about North American townships that I have no idea about. And so it was an extension.

[Neil]

Two guys named Frank and Joe. Two names you probably never heard of before.

[PK]

Yes, and so what I find fascinating about reading and writing and how the two are connected is that we grew up on a melee of British fiction for younger kids. So it was called the Lady Bird series.

[PK]

I know this, yes. Lady Bird series.

[PK]

Lady Bird series. So I have never really connected all these readings. But when I went to study in the States as a grad student and I was teaching, you know, freshmen.

[Neil]

You were at the University of Iowa and then the University of Houston.

[PK]

Yes, yes, indeed. And I was teaching a freshman comp. And, you know, I'm guiding these youngsters to write their biography of how they learned how to read.

And I recall, you know, the Lady Bird series then I have the Hardy Boys series. And it occurred to me that it was that investment in reading those texts. And of course, they were illustrated, many of them with blonde, blonde, blonde hair and, you know, white skins and blue eyes.

And then in Houston, I have kids who look like those kids from those texts. And I realized my journey in writing and reading are so connected to those foundational texts. So even my quest for knowledge and travel around the world, you can say has been spurred by reading those formative texts.

[Neil]

You, I mean, maybe it helped propagate your desire to study and work over in the U.S. Yes. In some sense, or you were surrounded by the stories that you had implanted in your head. From a young age, or had implanted in your head with the emphasis on the had.

[PK]

The curiosity of seeing the world and the way I see the world has, has, I can say, was impacted by those foundational readings.

[PK]

Yeah.

[PK]

And so the curiosity that drives me constantly.

[Neil]

Yeah. Is there, is there any, like your kids, 10 and 18, two boys, when you were raising them, did you pass them the Hardy Boys? Are there African literature stories or African, similar children's books that exist that you're able to provide, or are they not here?

[PK]

I am laughing because only yesterday, so there was an Nairobi International Book Fair that just ended, I think yesterday.

[Neil]

Oh no, I just missed it.

[PK]

Yeah. Yeah. And I know, and for some reason it never occurred to me, it was happening this very week.

So I went there on Sunday or Saturday. And I picked one storybook for my youngest son who is 10. And it's called the Tales of Abunwasi.

[PK]

Tell me, yeah.

[PK]

So...

[PK]

Tales of... Abunwasi. Abunwasi.

[PK]

Abunwasi, A-B-U-N-W-A-S-I. I'll show you a copy of it.

[PK]

Yeah. Tales of Abunwasi.

[PK]

Got it.

[PK]

Yeah.

[PK]

It's like a guy who engages in tricks. It's a coastal fable from coastal Kenya. We grew up essentially reading about this guy engaged in all manner of tomfoolery.

And I thought my son might enjoy this. So I came home with a copy and I gave it to him yesterday. So I said, you can read this.

It's a storybook. And then he frowned and said, well, I'm reading some other books for school. I don't want to be confused by reading too many books.

And I said, no, it's for you to read when you are on holiday. And he said, well, that would be my time to play. So he doesn't.

So that's my long way of saying they don't read what we read. They are reading other things, mostly online, mostly on phones. Really?

So even with the schools? Yes. Well, the school will have their books.

But then they tend to connect the reading with schoolwork, which is a shame.

[Neil]

I've heard this also from Bule, who runs the bookstore. And that reading is a forced upon academic pursuit, rather than a pleasure-based, agency-based.

[PK]

Yes, he's very right.

[Neil]

Culturally, unfortunately. Hence his 2,000 plus self-published authors as stories. He's amplifying stories much more than I am trying, though I'm trying to amplify his as well.

So Tales of Abunwasi, you'd give us. You have a relationship with America. You have this American book series.

You, of course, have studied in University of Iowa. You, of course, have taught and been a professor. You got your doctorate at the University of Houston.

You've been a professor at University of Houston. You're now a professor at Aga Khan University here. I wonder if, two things, you could tell us about the relationship between...

Because the United States is 70% of the world's global economy. 70% by market capitalization. And it has an outsized weighting on the rest of the world's language, culture, behaviors, and beliefs.

And there's a history here between this part of the world and that part of the world. We've talked about British a little bit and Dutch. But I wonder if you could tell us about the relationship between the US and East Africa, both then and now, today.

And I wonder if you, as you could tell us the story, could you weave in here how you were asked to write a poem for the inauguration of Barack Obama? I mean, I just have to hear about that too.

[PK]

Well, it's one of those networks that you begin here and then somebody knows you from some other place. So I went to the international writing program in Iowa in 2007.

[Neil]

One of the world's most famous, for those that may not know. Marilynne Robinson, I think, is a teacher there, right?

[Neil]

Right, right.

[Neil]

Who wrote Gilead, who's chapter 15, which album, one of his most formative books, long story. This is, the University of Iowa is like saying, you know, the Harvard of writing.

[PK]

Yeah, you may say that.

[Neil]

With Syracuse, maybe, or some other school with George Sanders in it.

[PK]

Right. Yeah, so I was lucky to have networks from that school. So when NPR were looking for poets to compose poems to honor Obama at his inauguration, they reached out to me and two other poets who also are from Iowa network.

So they had three poems, one from Kenya, another from Europe, and another from North America. So I was asked to write and record for him. And then it was broadcast on NPR on the day of inauguration.

And I call it freeing the spirits.

[Neil]

Wow, what an honor. Yes. First black president of the United States to be asked to write a poem for his inauguration on the public broadcast.

I mean, they're broadcasting the inauguration. And then relationship. I mean, obviously there is the Obama's heritage that he was half Kenyan, though he was born in Hawaii.

And I mentioned that only because it became a source of controversy where he was born. You remember the argument, of course, by future president was that he was born here. That was actually the argument.

But the argument against his eligibility for president was that he was born in Kenya. That was the argument.

[PK]

Sure.

[Neil]

That he was from here. Though we're all from here.

[PK]

Yeah, I mean, I think this illustrates to you the power of stories and storytelling. Because the entire Trump presidency was only made possible by that fiction that Obama was born in Kenya.

[Neil]

That was the start of it.

[PK]

That was the start of it.

[Neil]

That was the root of his popularity in politics.

[PK]

Yes, yes. And his access to a national podium in America was to deny Obama being American and the whole birtherism movement based on a fiction. So that's a power of fiction.

If you think about it, that...

[Neil]

Birtherism. I haven't heard that word in a while, but that's exactly what it was, right?

[PK]

Birtherism.

[Neil]

I forgot about that word.

[PK]

Right. And so when Obama was running for president and, you know, his honoring his extended family and his connections to Kenya, of course, Kenya became a point of focus for North America or for the US. But you can say Kenya in a great sense.

If you think about the Anglo-American interests that have been manifest on the continent for such a long time, you might not remember or you might not be aware of this historical fact, but even the major world war, the Second World War. Please, yeah. In 1945, it only ended because America developed the atomic bombs that were made possible by uranium mined from the mines in DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1941.

So in other words, the resources of Africa, Africa is a continent, um, whether, whether, whether, you know, it's, uh, it's human beings that are being exported, uh, to go work for them or, uh, you know, imposing that you produce for us in your country through colonization or taking actual resources like gold, uranium, coca, tea. Ah, coca.

[Neil]

Yes. Coca-Cola. Yes.

From the coca leaf from Ghana. Yes.

[PK]

Right.

[Neil]

Yes. Is that right? Yes.

And it had caffeine in it. Yeah. Oh no, it had cocaine in it.

[PK]

And, and, and you might even extend this to Switzerland and this chocolate business that's become a diet of European families. Those are resources from this continent.

[Neil]

Nevermind music or art or, or clothing and stuff.

[PK]

Right. So the Anglo American interests, um, uh, so, so the connection between, um, this continent and, uh, in America and, uh, perhaps Obama coming in, uh, partly to, in a sense, uh, become this symbolic figure, uh, that is, um, you know, Kenyans and Africans are notoriously religious, um, seeing this as a reenactment or an evocation of the biblical Joseph who is enslaved, but then he comes to save his country.

So, so Obama gained these mythical, mythical proportions. The people were seeing him to symbolize something larger than the man himself. So again, if you think of the Bible as a, as a story or series of stories, that's the power of how human narratives are, you know, enacted and reenacted to gain more power than even the authors ever envisioned.

[Neil]

Absolutely. Um, okay. I have about five other questions about the Hardy Boys, but in the interest of time, we're going to move forward because you've been mentioning Ngugi, your, your mentor for so long and we've been hinting at it for so, so long.

Your second most formative book is Weep Not, Child, which is Weep Not, W-E-E-P, then Not, N-O-T comma Child, Weep Not, Child. Like Do Not Cry, Child, Weep Not, Child by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. And I'm going to, you know, it's N-G-U with the curve, which is called what?

[PK]

Squiggle.

[Neil]

Squiggle, G-I with the squiggle, then lowercase w-a, that's the second word, and then Thiong'o, which is T-H-I-O-N-G apostrophe O.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Who lived, by the way, from 1938, born in Karimitu? Kamireto. Kamireto, sorry.

In, in, in Kenya colon, Kenya.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And he died a few months ago in May of this year. I'm sorry.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You have a deep relationship with him. I just saw your whole Ngougi bookshelf inside in Georgia, USA. I guess he was living there at the time.

Often considered East Africa's leading novelist. This book, by the way, was the very first book ever translated out of Africa to the wider world. Yes.

That's what I know about it. I have an old Penguin Classics cover with like a black ribbon at the bottom with the author's name in all caps and the book title in the smaller caps, you know, and there's this like evocative either sunrise or sunset orange scene with the three silhouettes of two young children, one holding a baby, a spear planted over beside, outside a hut, maybe another hut or a rock in the distance. Your cover is quite different.

It's paperback with, I want to say green, yellow, and orange. I don't want to call these abstract images, but I cannot tell what they are.

[PK]

They are abstract.

[Neil]

They are abstract images with similar kind of unadorned cover. What is this book about? Weep Not Child is a moving novel about the effects of the Mau Mau uprising on the lives of ordinary men and women in one family in particular.

Two brothers, Njoroge and Kamau, stand on a garbage heap and look into their futures. Njoroge is to attend school while Kamau will train to be a carpenter, but this is Kenya and the times are against them. In the forest, the Mau Mau is waging war against the white government and the two brothers and their family need to decide where their loyalties lie.

Unfortunately, the Dewey Decimal System files this one under 896. I have replaced it there, to be honest with you, African literature and English because when I look it up through all the official things online, it puts it into English literature because the Dewey Decimal System itself is a function of colonialism.

[PK]

Absolutely.

[Neil]

So it doesn't even have a place to go in the whole categorization of the system. We talk about the lack of books, there isn't even a spot for them in the library classification system. Peter, please tell us about your relationship with the Weep Not Child.

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o.

[PK]

So I must have been in form one, so high school as a 15-year-old kid.

[Neil]

We might call grade 10, 10th grade or freshman or sophomore.

[PK]

Right.

[Neil]

Yeah, just equivalent size. Sorry to the form one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[PK]

So early high school education. So very curious about the world and you've got, you've got, when I look back, you've got no way of seeing the world. You don't know how the world functions, you've got no way of seeing the world, but it is a book that helped me clarify, you know, what had gone through unconsciously.

So I am 15, I read this story and they're narrating an experience that mirrors like a community where I lived in the village. People who had names like, you know, mine and other kids in the village. So having grown on these westernized notions of fiction, it was the first story that I read that had names and a setting that mirrored my own environment.

[Neil]

You saw yourself.

[PK]

I saw myself in the text. And so, and these youngsters are going through a life that is turmoil, you know, the war of liberation, because you've got freedom fighters who are trying to resist British occupation of our country. And so the story spoke to me in a manner that I had never experienced any kind of fiction.

There was this connection that this is me, this is my experience, this is my country. So when I read Weep Not Child, I remember being entranced just by this universe I had entered. I had read other stories in other contexts.

So 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.

[Neil]

Permission to be a writer.

[PK]

Yes, yes, essentially. So when I encountered in the same year, I encountered, you know, more writings by Ngugi. It fortified my desire to actually consider writing.

So by the time I got to the second year in high school, so I'm about 16, I'll confidently tell my classmates, I think I'm going to be a writer. I want to be a writer. So this sounds audacious.

Yes. But because I had no idea what it meant to be a writer or the enormous, you know, tasks that are required into the making. It looks easy.

It looked easy.

[Neil]

But when you read this book, I mean, the writing is very simple.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

It sounds easy.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

Sounds like you could do it.

[PK]

Yes. But what's vital is that the invocation of the desire is what makes that possible or plausible. So I'm saying, having read him, I want to become a writer was something I may never have had the courage to even imagine that as a possibility.

And what's fascinating is that when you read Ngugi's own memoirs, he says how his own invocation of his desire to become a writer is sneered not just by his classmates, but even the teachers in this colonial school that he attends.

[Neil]

It's, sorry, you said mirrored? Mirrored?

[PK]

Yeah, when he sneered.

[Neil]

Oh, sneered at.

[PK]

Sneered at.

[Neil]

Oh, so when he told them he wanted to be a writer, they said, you aren't, you can't do it.

[PK]

You can't be serious.

[Neil]

You won't be. And he had no Ngugi to be inspiring him.

[PK]

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so that's what I found interesting, that even Ngugi going through Alliance High School, one of the earliest and one of the most prominent colonial schools, was that they were sneering at his invocation of this possibility of him becoming a writer.

[Neil]

Even the act of wanting to become a writer itself, pre-writing, is itself an activist act.

[Neil]

It is, it is.

[Neil]

A political act.

[Neil]

It is. Absolutely.

[Neil]

And for anyone watching this or listening to this that's thinking about it, like, this is why we're here. Like, do it. Like, put down your story.

Tell us your truth. Like, speak about what you know, what you're learning, because it's the only way our cultures can evolve and how we learn and share. And like, it's the path.

[PK]

Absolutely. Still. Absolutely.

Absolutely. I mean, 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.

[Neil]

It's all that we have left from them.

[PK]

It's all that we have, yes.

[Neil]

And it might be all that we have from today. It is. In the future.

I mean, it depends how long the silicone lasts on the hard drives. But even Kevin Kelly, who's a past guest of ours and the co-founder of WIRE Magazine, and you know, a real big tech futurist now in his late 70s, I believe, or mid-70s, um, he says that printed word is more durable than technology. He says that now, even him.

You know. I believe that. So you read this book.

You were inspired to become a writer. I've just seen your bookshelf and you have a whole Ngugi collection. He's the most prominent writer.

And by the way, I was embarrassed to discover that when I ordered this book, in order to read it in advance of this conversation, I had another Ngugi Nyong'o book on my bookshelf, A Grain of Wheat, which I had not read. But it was on my bookshelf. We all have this knowing of big, lots of books on our bookshelf we have not read.

And I was like, that means somewhere in my past life, someone told me somewhere, somehow, I should read this book. And I purchased it or I found it or I saw it, but I never read it. And I was like, now I have a two by him.

So I've read one.

[PK]

Wonderful.

[Neil]

And for those that are new to Ngugi and new to kind of African stories through literature, what would be your syllabus? What would be your syllabus? What would you be?

What would you start with? What would you tell us to read?

[PK]

Well, if you're speaking about Kenya, Ngugi will be a good beginning to understand.

[Neil]

Say all you've read is out of Africa. Say that's all you've read.

[PK]

No, start with that. You know Africa.

[Neil]

You don't know 55 countries.

[PK]

Right, right.

[Neil]

By the way, when I was at Walmart and I worked there from 2006 to 2016, and we were purchasing a share of MassMart, a South African retailer conglomerate, a PowerPoint circulated inside internally at the company.

I can say this now it's been many years to all the executives, just the executives got to see his PowerPoint of us teaching ourselves about Africa. And the opening slide said, Africa is not a country.

[Neil]

Yes.

[Neil]

That's the opening slide. And then the second slide showed a picture of the United States and China and India, and all these fitting in the silhouette of Africa.

[Neil]

Right.

[Neil]

Just the second slide was, and this is how big it is.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil]

Because on the map, we flattened the earth. It's very huge. And Greenland's huge.

But Greenland is tiny. Yes, yes.

[Neil]

So now we've read out of Africa. We know Africa is not a country. That's all.

Now what's the syllabus?

[PK]

So Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

[Neil]

Conveniently, the next book for us to discuss. That's where you would start.

[PK]

Yes, that's where I'll start. Partly because its own inspiration is quite inspiring. You know, Achebe, a young man studying at a local university in Nigeria, encounters a very racist colonial text.

And he thought the way those characters are depicted didn't convey the kind of complexity of the people he knew.

[Neil]

This is 1940s.

[PK]

1950s.

[Neil]

40s, 50s, okay. It was published in 1950s. He's born in 30 in Nigeria.

So he encounters these racist texts in his teen years, 20s or something.

[PK]

20s, yeah, at college.

[Neil]

And he says, this doesn't match my version of my people.

[PK]

Yeah, yeah. So he said he's going to write his own story. And he's very young and also invested in narrating his own country in a way that he knows it.

So when Things Fall Apart was published, Heinemann was the publisher.

[PK]

In 1965 in London.

[PK]

Yes, yes. So they had started what they called African Writers Series.

[Neil]

Right, which is why Ngugi's book, which you just talked about, came out in 1964 by Heinemann.

[PK]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they were among the early authors being published under that imprint. And what made Chinua Achebe get as widely read as he was that Heinemann had this policy of publishing these books simultaneously across the continent and Europe and North America.

So a writer becomes a global phenomenon almost overnight. So those distribution networks have since dissipated. So when I read Things Fall Apart, what was important for me was that it fortified an idea that African writers can tell their stories and they are telling their stories.

But the connection between Ngugi and Achebe was actually not the storylines for me. The logic that I applied was the book blobs both said these guys had served as journalists. That Ngugi had been a journalist on The Daily Nation and Chinua Achebe had worked at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation.

And I thought, this is very useful career guidance. Then I'm going to become a journalist. Then I'll become a novelist.

That was the only indication.

[Neil]

Because that was the path that was illuminated by both of these writers that you read in your formative years. That you become a journalist. First, you learn how to write non-fiction or report, reportage or whatever.

Then you take those skills and you apply that trade to fiction or to stories.

[PK]

Well, that sounds very, very rational. It wasn't very rational. For me, I thought I'm going to become a novelist.

But then books, I realized books take a long time to get published. They get even longer to write. So what can I, what was the other career possibility?

Then I found journalism, having these two guys having been journalists. Then I started nurturing interest in journalism as perhaps something to hold me over as a way to write my books. So my...

[Neil]

Hold you over, like earn an income.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

To provide cover.

Yes. Pre-advance. I'm talking to future writers and current writers.

[PK]

Pay the bills. Yes. In the meantime, keep writing your big book. That's exactly what I did.

Because when I got into the newsroom writing for the Daily Nation, one of the largest newspaper around the region, I also embarked on my first book, which I wrote through my work as a journalist. And I will be writing my fiction in the evening. So I'm writing nonfiction during the day to pay my bills.

And I'm writing fiction when I go home. And in a couple of years before the rooster crows, I'll show you a copy here. That was the first book that I got published.

So as...

[Neil]

What year?

[PK]

That was 2002.

[Neil]

Right. Yeah. You were how old?

[PK]

I was 30.

[Neil]

30. Your first book published at 30. And I'm saying that because the vision for when we go on to become a writer came at around 15.

The first book came out 15 years later. This is good for people to hear this. Yes.

15 years it took.

[PK]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. To get that dream into reality. And then I read Chinua Achebe and I find my idea, Ngugi's idea.

So my life as a writer or my life in writing is becoming more and more clarified by these readings. So I see a clear connection between good reading habits and good writing habits. It is a very clear connection.

You cannot become a writer unless you're a reader. So good reading habits yield in good writing habits.

[Neil]

What would you tell people to become better readers? Which, by the way, the number one driver for people to listen to the show is, oh, this guy's had a podcast about books. I should do that more.

Like, that's the universal. I would like to read more. That's thrust to the work I'm doing here.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

So now, since you know, that's the thrust. Yes. What is the solution?

What is the advice you'd give someone who's trying to develop stronger and richer reading life?

[PK]

Right. The most immediate, of course, we've got contemporary fiction that's, you know, marketed aggressively. You've got, you know, festivals where writers are getting unveiled.

But also look at not just your own immediate environment, but also look at books in other contexts. 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.

[Neil]

So read outside your country, read outside your land, read outside what you know.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

Not just the contemporary stuff, but the stuff that comes from places and civilizations and times and experiences that you know nothing about.

[PK]

Absolutely.

[Neil]

Try to find the most juvenile or most accessible book. Don't be judging yourself. Because if I read the biggest, most advanced literature from like Russia, sorry, but like, I'm going to fail probably on the first try.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You know, and I feel bad about myself. Find the thinnest Tolstoy. Find the thinnest Tolstoy.

Don't start with necessarily Anna Karenina. Although it's accessible. I know the writing is very accessible.

Don't get me wrong. I'm just saying, lower the bar.

[PK]

And I can say, to just build on the Tolstoy analogy, is that it's interesting, you know, Tolstoy writing nearly 150, 200 years ago.

[PK]

Yeah.

[PK]

And his stories appear to be speaking larger truths about our very moment in Kenya, in the U.S. universally. So fiction holds universal truths about our existence as a human species.

[Neil]

Absolutely.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

What are you working on now?

[PK]

I'm working on another historical fiction set in Kenya in 1990s. It is my first book that's set in Nairobi, my city of boyhood. So you can say I'm confronting my childhood and my boyhood.

It's an interesting moment for world history, but the end of Cold War, collapse of the Berlin Wall. And, you know, African society is getting reconfigured because the tensions between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. have dissipated. And there is quite a bit of turmoil in many parts of the world.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[PK]

So I'm trying to see this young man emerging out of this chaos to his coming of age at a moment of deep crisis. And yeah, trying to distill that moment and also returning to my own haunts as a young man coming of age.

[Neil]

Right. Because you were 18 in 1990.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

Right. So you have the awareness of what will happen in the years preceding and up to that. I'm excited for this book.

I want to read it now, but I know I have to wait till whenever it comes out, which I know writing time is very malleable. It could be. Yeah.

You don't have a pub date.

[PK]

Not yet.

[Neil]

Not yet. But when we do.

[PK]

But it is coming soon, hopefully. Yeah, we'll keep it posted.

[Neil]

Okay. Okay. That would be great because we will talk about this.

I could have hold this chapter until then, but I would rather release this right away and then talk about that when it comes out.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, A-C-H-E-B-E, as you mentioned, published in 1965. Bahaineman Achebe lived from 1930 in Nigeria, died in 2013 in Boston. We've talked about Ngubi.

We talked about Franklin W. Dixon. We've talked about really conquering colonialism through...

I wrote a phrase that you said earlier. You see how I take notes in the middle of the speech, or speech, in the middle of the interview? And so at the end of the interview, I have like pages of all these notes, and then I have to type them all up and try to remember everything I talked about.

So once a writer... I said to my kids, the difference between a writer and everybody else is a writer writes. A writer writes it down.

So when you say something funny, you see me run over and grab a paper.

[Neil]

He said, why are you writing this down?

[Neil]

Because I'm a writer. What do you think a writer does? I'm like, that is the spirit.

Everybody has good ideas. Everybody has a funny line. Everybody has a thing they want to remember.

The only difference, the only difference is the writer writes it down.

[Neil]

That's it, right?

[Neil]

We talked about conquering the curse of choreographed colonialism. PK, this has been a pleasure. I don't know.

I mean, I know we're probably both starving, and we're sitting in now the midday sun. Do you have time for like a quick, fast money round questions? Okay.

Hardcover, paperback, audio, or E? Hardcover. Hardcover, because?

[PK]

It's enduring, lasts forever. Yeah, yeah. And in the beginning, there was a word, and the word was published.

The word was written, so published.

[Neil]

Okay. Yeah. Remind me of our conversation with Timothy Goodman.

I said, why hardcover? He said, because it's the original. It's the OG.

How do you organize your books on your bookshelf?

[PK]

Well, in a manner that only makes sense to me. Could be periods, could be authors, could be regions, could be subjects. So it's a mishmash.

That only makes sense to me.

[Neil]

Well, but having said that, you showed me your study. You showed me your bookshelf. You had a Ngugi bookshelf, but then below that, you said, here's books from Africa.

You said, here's literature from, you had a Canada. I saw Canada on there.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil]

By the way, you were hanging a bag from James Daunt or Daunt Books. And as you know this, he organized his bookstore by place. It's an almost unusual bookstore because you think Kenya, and then you find the books, fiction and nonfiction.

Through that, he organizes the books from that geography.

[PK]

And the one thing that we missed in my study is that I have Ngugi and me portrait on the wall.

[Neil]

Really? Yeah. What did you learn from him directly that he told you that you could share with us?

[PK]

Well, we, you know, my encounter with Ndugugi started with fiction, but then I write, I get published. Then I mail him a copy in California. And I told him, you're partly responsible for this journey.

And I'm writing to thank you. Wow. So when I finally made it to the States, I went to visit him in his very university.

[Neil]

Because he becomes like you, becomes a professor. Yes. Yeah.

You went into California.

[PK]

Yes. And he's probably an old man at this time. So 2003, he's not too old.

He's late sixties. Okay. So I got to know him for nearly 20 years.

So it became the beginning of a lifelong friendship. And so we're meeting for lunch for maybe an hour or so, was extended into four, five, six hour encounter. You know, he's been to my house.

He's been here. Wow. And I went to his home many, many times in the States.

Wow. And then I was seated in this very space when I received a call from him. And I sat in this very pagoda and I answered his call.

And that was on the May 25th, which is Africa Day. Celebrated by African Union is Africa Day. I was sitting in this very pagoda on Africa Day, May 25th this year.

And Ngugi calls me and we have a chat. And 72 hours later, he was gone. So he was essentially saying farewell to me.

So I was sitting here when he called me last, we chatted. And then, you know, I received the news that he had gone. So we had a very...

[Neil]

In his late eighties. Yeah. So you know him from his late sixties to his late eighties.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

What a special time frame for the friendship to form. When he was so, I'm assuming at this point in time, most incredibly wise.

[PK]

Yes. And what's remarkable is his clarity of mind. He remained very clear to the very, very last hours of his life.

And so although we had this writer, older writer, younger writer relationship, he's really the father figure in many ways, because he was the father of Kenyan fiction.

[Neil]

First writer translated outside of Africa.

[PK]

Absolutely. And so getting him to also be involved in my day-to-day life. He came here, he met my son when he was, you know, like a month or two old to bless the boy.

You know, come meet my family. And you know, he was also my doctoral supervisor. I don't know if you know that.

I did not know this. He was on my committee.

[Neil]

Okay. My research has failed me.

[PK]

Yeah. He was on my doctoral committee. So, so a mentor in every sense of the word.

[Neil]

And is there a piece of wisdom he's left you with? Or a piece of advice that you might want to share with us?

[PK]

Yes. Lots of, lots of it. Um, so the idea of this, uh, the decolonial project, um, that should be one of his flagship, uh, you know, legacies to this continent, that we, we, we must learn, we must make an effort to decolonize our minds, to decolonize our people, our communities.

And then we're going to, to have the opportunity to rewrite, uh, you know, our own histories. So, so the, the other wisdom that I like to share about, about Ngugi was a question he kept, uh, no matter what we're talking about, he would always ask me, are you writing? So as you said, a writer writes.

So that's a message I like to convey to, um, to our audience as well. That if you've got this burning desire to do something, but this desire has been, uh, nurturing for, 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.

Starting today, not tomorrow, not today. Just start today. Write something today.

That's what, that's the wisdom I gained from him. Constant nudging, constant reminders. Are you writing?

Are you writing?

[Neil]

He just kept asking that. Yes. Because you would tell him what's happening and he'd ask if you're documenting it.

[PK]

Yes.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

Write something today. We must make an effort to decolonize our minds, to decolonize our people, to tell our own stories. Are you writing?

Are you writing? Write something today.

[PK]

And every story is valid.

[Neil]

Don't say I can't, I'm not interesting. I'm boring. I don't know.

I don't have. Every one of us believes this.

[PK]

We all have incredibly interesting stories. We just don't believe in it or don't understand the value of what you have.

[Neil]

Peter Kimani, this has been an unbelievable conversation. One I will treasure, savour and remember. I hope the beginning of a lifelong friendship through our 60s, 70s, 80s and hopefully far beyond.

I really am grateful for your time, for your space, for your energy, for inviting me into your continent, your country and your home. Thank you so much for coming on Three Books.

[PK]

You're so kind, Neil. Thank you for coming home.

[Neil]

Hey everybody, it's just me again. Just Neil. Wow, listen back to that.

Theory-wise and just mind-expanding, Peter Kimani.

[Neil]

I walked away from that conversation in that sun and I walked around Peter's garden with him and we had that delicious lunch and he gave us a tour of those mango trees and those orange trees. If you're watching this on YouTube, I took video kind of on the drive in and out of the town he lived in about an hour outside of Nairobi. And so I'll paste some of those videos overlaying the interview so you can see kind of the context, the visual context of that day.

And just a really warm and talented soul. He was on his way to Senegal the next day to give a keynote speech at a conference on literature. And just a shame to say, you know, knowing so little about African novels and stories, I'm like, Peter was a wonderful kind of way in.

He gave us three more books to add to our top 1000, of course, including number 553, not an African book, but The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon. We're going to swipe the whole series off the board here and add it there.

And then two African books following. Number 552, Weep Not, Child by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. And I did read this book and I loved it.

And he's got a whole bunch of famous books. A Grain of Wheat is another one I have on my bookshelf. And number 551, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, A-C-H-E-B-E, which I actually am like eight pages in right now.

I have it on my bedside table. I'm trying to read that while simultaneously trying to read Dune, which I'm like 500 pages in. I can see that the remaining 300 pages is getting closer.

That was a book, by the way, you might remember, was suggested to us back in chapter 151 from Penn Holderness. So you can see sometimes I'll read the book a little later, depending on how big it is and how much time I have and so on. What are some quotes that jumped out to you from the show?

I wrote down a few. Writing is just an extension of living. For those of us who are writers, and I'm going to include a lot of us in that, don't you think that's true?

Whether you're keeping an emoji trip diary, as I did when I went to Nairobi, or you're writing down interesting Swahili phrases that you hear, as I did when I went to Nairobi. Like, what am I doing? Am I going to publish that?

Am I going to put that out there? No, I'm not. I also wrote a trip diary for myself.

You know, a 10,000 word document just on my own trip. You know, and I was in Amsterdam before that and Bucharest before that, two new cities I hadn't been to before. So, I just want to keep a record of what I noticed and experienced, so I can revisit it.

It's an extension of living for me. I completely agree with that. PK, again, we've normalized abnormalities.

He was quoting Nagoogi there, but... I mean, that just feels so true today. There's just so much weird stuff going on and we amplify it with our algorithms that reward controversy and inflammatory reactions as the net benefit of, you know, their business model.

And so, because our human brains have evolutionarily old parts in them that are, I won't say turned on, but we're certainly stimulated when there's blood or something's dying or... You know, I was just walking home this morning from dropping off my kids and I walked by, like, a dead squirrel. Like, it could see my brain, you know, instinctively looks at it.

Like, what happened? Did it get hit by a car? There's blood all over the sidewalk.

I have to be careful. I can't touch it. It's dangerous.

Well, that's the same kind of reaction we get from disaster, right? And from anger. And those who know how to manipulate those algorithms, you know who I'm talking about, can just create inflammatory behavior in order to manipulate the algorithm or to control the storyline in order to...

It's just, it's endless, right? So, we have to decide to change the channel ourselves. It's hard.

And that's why, back to the value we talked about at the beginning, reading is a great pathway and Archimedes' lever into these bigger thoughts. Thank you for being part of the physical exercise that it is to kind of do this work. It's hard, right?

I don't always want to read a book. Like, I'd rather just scroll through something stimulating online, but I have to plug my phone downstairs and lock it in a case safe and buy an alarm clock and change the batteries. Like, I have to leave books at my bedside table and get a dimmer on my lamp because I don't like...

You know, I'm doing this stuff to try to create the kind of private place where my mind can... I'm picturing like pizza dough. My mind can kind of stretch a little bit and expand more naturally.

Another quote from PK is, we must make an effort to decolonize our minds. Of course, a theme of this conversation. He says, I see a connection between good reading habits and good writing habits.

You cannot become a writer unless you are a reader. Amen. Writing is an act of recovering our past.

I love that one. Religion is the most harmless way of accessing the mind of another human being. Like, that was powerful.

That was powerful. I just think about that. Religion is the most harmless way of accessing the mind of another human being.

And then he also said, in terms of colonization, we are still perpetuating the British metaphysical empire. We're extending their cultural hegemony. We also have the three Cs of colonization, which I'm going to talk about a little bit more.

I'll kind of put that in some of our artwork and stuff for the show. You made it. You're at the end.

That was a long conversation. We went on a big trip together there. That was a voyage.

That was a journey. Thank you so much for being here. And now, if you're still here, if you made it past the three second pause, I want to welcome you back into the end of the podcast club.

This is one of three clubs we have for three bookers, along with The Secret Club and The Cover to Cover Club. How do you join The Secret Club? Just give me a phone call.

It's 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. It is a real phone number. You can drop the T off if it doesn't work, because it's eight letters.

It's readalot, actually, but I wanted to make it into a word. So it's readalot. And let's start off, as we always do, by going to the phones.

[Jill From Washington]

Hey, Neil. It's Jill from Washington. I continue to enjoy all of your podcasts, and I just finished the one with Robin Sloan, which I wish that I had been able to listen to on half speed, because my brain is still whirring.

I'm still processing all of the things that he said and thinking about it. And I did go to Amazon and purchased Moonbound and Mr. Penabra's 24-Hour Bookstore, which I can't wait to read. He was very interesting.

And thank you for bringing on great people with great ideas. Love your podcast.

[Neil]

Thank you, Jill, from Washington, for giving us a call, for listening to the show. Amen on Robin Sloan. Chapter 152 with Robin Sloan, he's just such a big brand, and he talks so fast, and he also assumes a lot.

I don't mean that in a bad way, but you can tell his mind is going 1, 3, 5, 7, and sometimes I'm like, wait, what's 2 and 4 and 6 again? So I know what you mean about half speed, but that also is the massive mind required to write a big novel. Let me know what you think of Moonbound.

I am curious what you think, because Ginny Urit, she was our guest in Chapter 148 when she came to Toronto to hang out with us for the day. She was like, what is Moonbound? I couldn't get into it.

It wasn't really my cup of tea. And she's a voracious reader, and she reads a ton. So obviously, as always, not every book is for everyone, but I really liked it.

I'm curious what you think. But it's also really different from Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour. So I was like, whoa, they have some things in common, but also one's a little more like...

Mr. Penumbra's is a little bit more like the Da Vinci Code type of vibe. Anyway, let me know what you think. Also, if I play your voicemail on the show, as you know, Jill, or maybe you don't, and Devin, who I read your letter, just always email me, send me your address, and tell me which of my books you would like me to sign.

It'd be my pleasure to sign and drop one in the mail to you as a way to say thanks. And if you're listening to this and you're like, wait, I want a free book. Well, that's easy.

All you have to do is call. It's 1-833-READALOT. And what am I looking for in a call?

Anything. You can have a reflection on a specific guest. You can have your dream guest that you want to add to the show.

You can have a point of controversy or a complaint or something that you didn't agree with a guest said, or you can share one of your formative books. That's all. What's one book that changed your life?

Because we talk about three over like an hour or two, but it'd be nice to hear your one or two or three over a minute or two. Like what other books change people's lives? We're collecting and sharing books on this show kind of more than anything else.

All right. Now, let's move on to the, but you know what's interesting? I, you know, I kind of usually do a letter here, but I want to tell you guys, I posted this little clip on YouTube a couple of days ago called Why Reading Feels So Hard by David Foster Walsh.

It's an excerpt from an interview he did like 30 years ago, something like 20, 20, 30 years ago on a German TV station talking about the speed of things. Well, in a couple of days, this tiny little clip has 79,000 views and 352 comments. Some of the comments are everything was so fast and it was 2003.

Okay. David Foster Walsh died in 2008. Imagine if he was alive to see the state of the world now.

Back then it wasn't half as bad as it is today. Great. The Dark Chum adds, during the pandemic, I started reading all the books I wanted to read but never did.

Since then, I've now read 100 novels and many nonfiction. I'm so glad I've made that decision. Read if you want to.

The time is now. I love that. Kenneth Bennett adds, being a teacher has made me aware and appreciative of quiet spaces I used to have on background noise, whether a show or music, but now I can have nothing on in my home for hours and it has become peaceful.

I'm not there yet. I like that. I aspire to that.

That's a good, that's a good vision. For me, Kenneth. How about this one from Pixie Dust 1664?

I live in rural Appalachia, Virginia, and my internet and power go out all the time for weeks. Wow. I use a generator a lot just to survive.

I do notice how quiet it is, except for birds and wind. I love it. I don't have anything but my phone to begin with.

Isn't that amazing that we are now sort of visioning these luxury worlds that are just kind of plain, quiet nature? You know, that's the luxury now. Sometimes I go to this sauna and cold plunge place in Toronto called Othership, and like the most common thing I hear afterwards, people are like, wow, I can't believe I went 75 minutes without my phone.

Finding peaceful, quiet times. Just plain empty spaces. Reminds me a lot of Michael Harris who wrote that book, Solitude.

If you haven't read that, I highly recommend it. If loneliness is alone and sad, solitude is alone and happy. I should probably revisit that book myself.

All right. Now, you know what? Such an articulate fellow.

I think it's time for a word cloud, people. Let's jump in and play a word cloud now.

[PK]

Austriches are called Nyaga. They couldn't pronounce Kerenyaga. They invented Kenya.

Namlolwe should have been the proper name for Lake Victoria. So Kikuyu is the anglicized pronunciation in perpetuity. We are extending their cultural hegemony.

The strangulating traffic typify a continent-wide phenomenon. Foreigners who are supplanting the interpretation panacea to a social problem. The whole birtherism movement based on affliction, invocation of the desire.

[Neil]

Holy cow. A lot of interesting words there. All those indigenous words at the beginning were so fascinating.

Kerenyaga, the word for ostriches, Nyaga. Typify, strangulating, supplanting. Um, but I'm gonna...

Birtherism, remember that whole thing? And we won't talk about that. But I'm gonna talk about a word that I realize I've been pronouncing wrong my whole life until right now.

[Neil]

Hegemony.

[Neil]

Hegemony. I always thought that was hegemony. Like cultural hegemony.

Fine, with a hard or soft G, but either way, it's hegemony, according to the dictionary, ladies.

[Neil]

Hegemony.

[Neil]

Hegemony. I just find that word so interesting. And according to Miriam Webster, it means the preponderant influence or authority over others.

Another word for it is domination. The social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group. Hegemony.

Where did this come from? It is an ancient Greek word. It was originally the noun hegemonia for authority, rule, or political supremacy.

PK's quote, of course, was around, we are still perpetuating the British metaphysical empire. We are still extending their cultural hegemony. Hegemony.

Domination over others. I hope that books have domination over your mind, over the next moon. I'll be back on the new moon with a re-release, with a classic chapter, as always.

And until next time, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Take care, everybody, and talk to you soon. you

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