Asante, Nairobi: Part I

7 + 1/2 min. read

(c) Daniel Eliashevskyi

My current academic journey is affording me travelling opportunities that I wouldn't have immediately hoped. I find it ironic that jobs I had in the past with more obvious travel prospects didn’t fulfil their promise. I wouldn’t have assumed, for example, that my next opportunity to visit Africa beyond the Sahara would come through studying. It's a privilege, not a given and one that I grasp with both hands.

At some point in our first year, my research group and our supervisor, Brigitta decide to submit abstracts to present as a panel at the 20^th edition of the triennial ACLALS (Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies) conference in Kenya’s capital, summer 2025.  It will be only the third to be held in Africa in the conference’s 60+ year history.

There are many academic and personal reasons motivating the decision. 2025’s theme, Transcultural Multipolarities: World Literatures, Global South, and the Future of the Humanities has some salience to most of the team’s projects. By coincidence, one of the keynote speakers, Simon Gikandi has made a significant contribution to my theoretical framing, as well as that of my colleague, Maddox.

The conference is only every three years. And did I mention it's in Kenya? I recall my former manager, Ama —from The Trade Union Organisation  — describing Nairobi as one of her favourite cities.  I haven’t been South of the Sahara since my last (embarrassingly long ago) trip to Nigeria in the late 2000s.

To the team’s delight, our collective abstracts are accepted back in winter.  It’s really happening. In the meantime, there are updated research proposals to submit and/or articles to write and/or other conferences for which to prepare.

I remain relatively discreet about the trip; neither secretive nor as vocal about my excitement as I could be. I want to place my feet first on Kenyan soil before I start going on about it.

That doesn’t prevent me being practical. I speak to some of the many Kenyans at my Belgian church, Fresh Wine Ministries, to get some insider info; places to stay, for example or where to do my hair.

As the date nears, with visas acquired and vaccination concerns allayed, I realise out loud to Maddox, that ACLALS will be the first time I’ve left the European continent since before COVID-19.

Most of my colleagues, including our supervisor, will be extending their stay in Kenya for holidays. I, on the other hand, will only be remaining for the duration of the conference. I choose instead to ration my annual leave and funds for other trips.

Our teammates, Geraldine – or G – and Elif have gone ahead to Nairobi to participate in another conference. It happens to coincide with Kenya’s Gen-Z anniversary protests (below, left), which turn fatal – again – on the instigation of the authorities.  My colleagues are therefore holed up for the first few days of their trip.

Gen-Zed protests, Kenya June 2025
Courtesy of Getty images

Maddox, Brigitta and I are all booked on the same flight, due to arrive the evening before the conference. Even if all were to go to plan, by the time we made it to the hotel, the evening would be far spent. In the end, our flight is delayed by over an hour and the queues at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport are so long and sluggish, I get flashbacks to the days of COVID certificates and whimsical travel regulations. 

The city is shrouded in darkness by the time we make it out to the streets. We start to relax into the fact we’re in Nairobi. We’re accosted countless times by drivers offering taxi services. Brigitta already has a chauffeur, recommended by an acquaintance. Except he’s AWOL for a while, having arrived too early for our late-landing flight.

We leave behind ironically tropical climes in Belgium for the more modest temperatures and overcast skies of Nairobi. I’m later told that this time of year is not the best the region has to offer weather-wise. Whilst it’s mild – early 20s - locals consider it cold and dress accordingly. The temperature notably drops at night.

Our other colleagues have already checked into the hotel. Having lost an additional hour to the time difference, Brigitta, Maddox and I make do with little sleep. I try to stretch plane food already in my system stretch, as my colleagues opt for room service.

The accommodation is fair. Whilst the room is spacious, the shower is initially lukewarm and I’m not overjoyed to see some kind of cockroach or centipede scurrying across the bureau that first night. On the positive side, the double bed has a firm mattress, I have a decent view and there is a flatscreen TV. I alternate between the Afrobeats channel and a national news station critically dissecting the recent uprisings.

The next morning brings a welcome cornucopian continental breakfast with strong Kenyan inflections. The catering staff are formally dressed à la silver service. The appealing music policy alternates between Smooth Jazz renditions of Afrobeats or 90s R&B and classic West Coast Jazz.

After breakfast, most of the team – minus Brigitta – make our way to the University of Nairobi for the ACLALS opening ceremony. Brigitta is sleeping in after waiting up for her daughter, Annette’s delayed early morning flight. They will join us later.

The bar is already set high by the incredibly good swag we receive on registration; gorgeous, locally-produced artisanal tote bags in an array of colours, emblazoned with images of women in headscarves, maps of Kenya or the African continent. If that weren’t enough, inside are customised flasks and quality stationery. On entering the main lecture theatre, my colleagues and I are greeted with the jubilant, a cappella strains of a student-based choir, singing in Kiswahili about their beloved land (later translated for those of us non-speakers), with nifty footwork to boot.  As part of the opening proceedings, we acknowledge the recent loss of Kenyan literary titan and (post)colonial scholar, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, with a minute’s silence. His departure naturally looms large over the conference. Later that afternoon, the versatile group of students return to perform a tantalising excerpt from Thiong’o’s play I’ll Marry When I Want.

Led by undergrads, the entertainment throughout the conference is amazing. The students bring us performance poetry infused with song, dance interludes, theatrical teasers…On the penultimate day, before Ugandan author Goretti Kyomuhendo’s keynote, the students even lead us in the exhilarating dance craze that has taken on political significance: Anguka Nayo by Wadagliz Ke. Two of the male dancers stand out in particular; for their talent, as well as the infectious conviction with which they throw themselves into each performance. More generally, the student volunteers are full of warmth and a boundless energy that elevates the conference experience.

 In between sessions, the auditorium speakers blast Smooth Jazz versions of Afrobeats hits (again). I see a different side to Elif and Geraldine especially, as they sing along and bust a move. In the lobby, the artisan tradeswoman responsible for our gorgeous tote-bags, spreads out her equally attractive and diverse wares. It gives me gift ideas. The expectation is for us foreigners to haggle.

G suggests we ask a daughter or son of the soil to act as intermediary to ensure we’re not taken for a ride. Fortunately, promising connections have already been made during and after panel discussions, as well as at lunch.

ACLALS is awash with likeminded scholars I’ve met at previous conferences or whose texts are part of my ever-growing bibliography. It’s practically a who’s who of Anglophone and/or postcolonial studies.  Intriguing parallel panels are scheduled annoyingly at the same time, forcing us to make frustrating choices. First World problems, I suppose.

I attend sessions about the role of women in Kenya's identity-building through storytelling or as agents in resistance struggles; another about Stuart Hall’s complex relationship with subjectivity; another by an Irish academic whose talk on Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, serves as a deft and suitably interdisciplinary synthesis of the conference’s main themes. On another day, I attend a paper on (Re)claiming Black Identity, Resilience and Race… based on the travelogue by my Afropean.com confrere, Johny Pitts, no less.

Yvonne Owuor's keynote
(c) E.U.Pirker

If there’s a thread that runs throughout the conference, it is the ever-evolving relationship former British colonies in the Global South have with English – or rather, Englishes  –  questions of ‘ownership’ and reappropriation; how interactions with English map on to linguistic, cultural and ethnic identity; negotiating contradictions that are at once discomfiting and potentially empowering. English, as described by one keynote speaker, is ‘porous, promiscuous, persistent…’. The concept of Commonwealth is also indicative of this contestation; stinking of imperial culpability, as observes Brigitta, yet begrudgingly useful for reassembling those who bring a multiplicity of experience in, with and around English.

The geopolitical realities outside these air conditioned rooms inevitably encroach on this space, where one could feel like anything is possible merely through the exchange of ideas. Yet the urgency of worldmaking in this time of ever-more painful transition anchors our conversations.

Apart from the brilliant Gikandi (who, for health reasons, can only join by Zoom), key note speakers include award-winning Kenyan novelist, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ – son of Thiong’o. 

Owuor describes herself as a logophile, beholden to a turbulent love affair with the English language, riddled with colonial friction – all sentiments to which I can only respond: Me too. Fellow keynote, Kyomuhendo speaks of how English imposed itself through colonial education policies, becoming the language of instruction and no longer a foreign tongue. She relates this process with an air of understandable ambivalence. Repeatedly, I hear familiar and infuriating stories of how African pupils were chastised for speaking local languages in the vicinity of school.

I envy Yvonne and Goretti’s multilingual repertoire, which naturally includes indigenous languages. A colonised person can have a much more agentive relationship with English when it’s not their mother tongue; a term, for me, that stings with rupture.

Owuor’s poetically humanist keynote is excellent. She incorporates Korean philosophy, apposite citations from the Gospels and makes unambiguous references to Zionist slaughter in Palestine, as well as war-torn Congo and Sudan. These horrors cannot be contained if the underlying logics are not addressed, she warns. Given its spread, English(es) can – should be –  harnessed for alternative worldmaking. Kyomuhendo echoes this rallying cry as she describes how she’s transformed the colonial imposition into a tool for her own writing and literary activism.

Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V - coming soon