African Literary Metadata
MENU

Popular Cultural Responses to Kenya’s 2010 Constitution: Machakos Book Workshop

Between 1–4 October, team member Nicklas Hållén visited Machakos University, where he and Dr. Charles Kebaya ran a second of three planned PhD and MA student workshop on popular cultural production in Kenya. The student participants have been working diligently on six different projects which will be collected in a co-authored book that is scheduled to be published in late 2025. Its tentative focus is Popular cultural production and the 2010 Kenyan constitution, and many of the chapters focus on the issue of popular culture in different kinds of social movements and protests.

The workshop was successful and the discussions about the drafts for the different chapters were animated and constructive. Since they will be collected in a co-authored volume, all the attendees are responsible for the quality of all texts. This method of co-authorship brings with it many interesting challenges – chief among which is perhaps the question of how one can reach consensus on the degree to which views can differ within the group without it becoming a problem for the project as a whole.

One topic that came up in many of the discussions is the so called Gen-Z protests and Mama Mboga (market lady) Revolution in Nairobi earlier this year. Other topics that were discussed included rural literary production and sustainability, the futures of literature in Kenya’s minority languages, and how non-political popular music has been re-purposed by Kenyan social movements.

The materials that participants are analysing will all be included in the ALMEDA database.

The next workshop is planned for early 2025 and we look forward to ultimately celebrating the launch of this co-written book in both Kenya and in Sweden!

Nairobi Spoken Word dataset

We’re delighted to share the completion of a project carried out by poet and Swahili lecturer (at the Centre for African Studies, Copenhagen University) Lisa Mumbi Macharia. This dataset documents over 10 years of spoken word poetry performances in the city of Nairobi. Mumbi recorded 628 performances from between March…

Read more

Report on activities in 2024

Click here to read more about our activities in 2024

Read more

New postdoc to catalogue Khangas

The Khanga/Kanga/Leso is a traditional cotton cloth with mixed designs, colors and messages worn by women along the coastal regions of Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar. The popularization of the Khanga can be traced back to 1887, when the Kaderdina family founded the Hajee Essak Limited company, which pioneered the mass…

Read more

Lecture: Flora Losch on West African audiovisual archives

Join us for the next lecture in the ALMEDA seminar series! Flora Losch (EHESS – Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) will present her research on West African audiovisual archives – past and present. The lecture will be held on Zoom Time and Date: Wednesday 27 November, 13:15-14:45 CEST,…

Read more