Print culture

Except perhaps in Nairobi, it seems to be very difficult to buy any books in Kenyan 'bookshops' other than

1. Christian literature


2. school textbooks


3. crappy 'How to Succeed in Business' self-help books

Very occasionally there's the odd second-hand Robert Ludlum thriller, and there are some street vendors who have small, eclectic selections of very old, dirty torn novels which I think were probably donated to some 'charity collection' somewhere in Europe or the US (so far I've found Tuck Everlasting and a 1968 edition of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). But there's clearly no real demand for fiction or serious non-fiction, and no adequate distribution.

This is a major contrast to other Majority World countries like India, which seems to have an incredibly diverse and demotic print culture. On every street corner in Delhi you can buy anything from Mein Kampf to old copies of Subaltern Studies (actually, Mein Kampf seems to be particularly prevalent – maybe India gets sent all the copies confiscated from schoolkids and neo-Nazis in Germany).



The few attempts I've seen to compensate for this here - like this community library in Sipili, funded by Bakewell Rotary Club - are basically rubbish. (I'm sorry if any outraged Derbyshire Rotarians are reading this, but you should know).

Sipili's community library consists of a few shelves with a rag-bag of old charity-shop-style 'collected' books from Europe, basically consisting of dog-eared John Connolly thrillers and 1960s geography GCSE textbooks, rather than any systematic selection of decent books. I assume that the cost of shipping books is also very high. In India the majority of commercially available books are printed by India's massive publishing industry. In Kenya there seems to be fairly little major commercial printing or publishing industry anywhere. Maybe there's a larger publishing industry in other East African countries which distribute books across the region – I'm not sure.

On the demand side, though, I don't think the difference is to do with differential literacy rates: adult literacy is currently running at about 74% in Kenya (compared to around 61% in India), and both the 'How to Bring God into your Life and Grow Your Business' books and the two main newspapers seem to go down a storm everywhere. I genuinely think Kenya has an impoverished literary culture which isn't simply to do with economic poverty – India's the counter-factual. Maybe it's something to do with a hollowed-out middle class? Or a lack of an established pre-colonial print culture (unlike India)?

Any thoughts that are a bit less implicitly racist than these?

Men and women

At the 'Masaai Market' in front of the building where I'm staying, there are a row of massively competitive stall-holders (male), all trying to sell the same carvings, postcards and (sometimes) dog-eared copies of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the khaki safari 'trucks' that periodically arrive from safari parks in the southern Rift to disgorge pink tourists for half an hour with the locals. (Don't get me wrong, I'm as pink a tourist as anyone; but I try not to wear paramilitary rancher hats and hiking boots to go to the bank, and you'll be pleased to know I'm yet to use the 'Bear Grylls-endorsed' craghopper trousers I bought in a shameful moment of paranoid weakness in Debenhams last month).

Since everyone's selling the same thing, and I have to pass by them every day, I don't want to buy from any of the stalls (especially as one of them is run by my landlady's boyfriend, so choosing another one could be social death).

Several women also sell bags of mangoes and oranges in the market. When I finally plucked up the courage to speak to them, I learned that although they stand in different places, Josephine, Naomi, Lilian and Dorothy all work together, sharing profits. As a result, I often buy mangoes (more mangoes, in fact, than I, my landlady or her niece can possibly eat. It's becoming a bit awkward).*

Lesson: in a market where everyone knows each other, so favouritism carries a real social cost, collaboration may be a better strategy than competition. Or at least, the marginal cost of profit-sharing over competing may be smaller than the marginal social capital cost of competing over profit-sharing.**

*Obviously the comparison isn't 100% accurate – I am always going to buy mangoes more often than postcards – but I also go a long way outside the market to buy books.

**Would anyone like to correct this cod-economic-speak?

Kenyan business plan I

I couldn't post on this blog last weekend because there was a power-cut all day in Nakuru. A chronic lack of capacity in Kenya's power system means that this is a pretty regular (that's to say, frequent but totally irregular) occurrence.* Lists of pre-planned blackouts are published in the ad sections of the Daily Nation, one of Kenya's two main daily newspapers, but often only a day or so in advance, and by the time you buy the paper it may already have started.

Given the ubiquity of mobile phones, I reckon you could make a packet of money by getting these lists early from the power board (as the papers presumably do), and getting people to sign up to receive cheap text messages when there's going to be a power cut in the area in which their phone is currently receiving signals.

If each text came with a Crazy Frog ringtone alert, we'd probably be millionaires. Anyone fancy becoming East Africa's next mobile service entrepreneurs?

*One interesting solution to this is being constructed in the southern Rift near Naivasha, to the south of here – an Israeli-built geothermal plant, Olkaria III, intended to extend Kenya’s existing geothermal power generation there to around 25% of all Kenya’s power needs. It seems like a good project. Although as a World Bank guaranteed project, part-financed by the German government, it seems a shame that the donor funding and the guarantee is being paid to a Cayman-Islands registered holding shell for the Israeli/US company, presumably tax-free.

In an ironic 'guns and butter' twist, heavy equipment for this plant was shipped into Mombasa last year on the same ship carrying an expensive load of weapons from Eastern Europe.