Africa is a Literal Brothel

This year my desire to make something out of the dogs life that writing is I was inclined to try aggressive marketing.

Writing for profit only is something am very familiar with, doing take away cats for some collegues who never get around to doing their assignments including foreigners from the writing jobs so popular in colleges. 

But this is different I wanted to write for literature competitions. I reckoned I could make the Caine, a Story moja or something. All you have to do is track the latest competition and do a write up. Those things really pay believe me, and what better way to earn than by doing the thing you love most? Well I’m of a different mindset if it means slaughtering Orpheus at the foot of the god of money where everything seems to have been sacrificed already.

With the updates in social media and my connections with fellow scribes I got quite a number of well paying writing competition.

I got to start most of them but boy I never got round to finishing any story leave alone enter the competition or dream of winning.

I blamed my incomplete works on  lack of inspiration and the fact that most of my stories were below the word count or it just exhausted me trying to force my stories to the themes (Truth be told though i was just lazy).

But recently reading some of the stories that won some of the awards, floating like flakes of manna among the Jews, it felt like my fellow scribes just struggled on to finish the stories that I had given up on. It’s like they did it so mechanically that at the end of the day the story lacked something.

I liken this situation with what happened to fine art. If you go to Nairobi law courts on a Saturday you’ll be impressed by the amazing gallery. But only after you are through with the first vendor that you’ll realize you do not have to continue with the viewing all the dead bodies because they are wearing the same suit! All the paintings are similar, all the artifacts are similar and the lack of more creativity is downright frustrating.

These competitions are well intentioned yes but writing just to impress judges beats logic of the nobility of Orpheus, art for its power and purity. It’s this whoring of art that has carvers and painters just replicating work to please some white tourists who want to take away an animal or a Maasai or a naked child.

We should not sit back and praise when masters of the written word write dumb stories or make shallow approaches on perspectives we know they had better capacities to handle just because they want to satisfy some word count condition or are forced to themes they barely care about just because they want to make some money.

It’s worth it to earn from writing, but the competitions claiming to bring to life the best works when they dicatatively inhibit the freedom to write without borders with their million conditions should not claim to be the best writers have to offer.