The highly acclaimed 58-year-old author, storyteller and founding member of Storymoja Africa shares her journey and insights with Damaris Agweyu.
Muthoni, when did you first understand the power of books? It was after reading a book called 'Son of a Woman' by Charles Mangua. It was the first book by an African writer that I had ever read. I was 10 years old. The book actually belonged to my father who would, every morning, go and sit in his car to read it. Unlike other books, he' d never bring this one in the house. Seeing him do this, I was incredibly curious so after he'd finished reading it, I'd wake up very early every morning to 'wash the car'.
Once I got my hands on that book I was completely absorbed by it. What shocked me was the fact that it was written from a very Kenyan perspective. It helped me understand so many things and for the first time in my life, I could see that Africans could tell their own stories. This book had such a profound effect on me and looking back now, I think that was the point at which I knew I wanted to write.
So by the time you were 10 you could read and fully comprehend the contents of an 'adult book' Yes. Right from the start I've always been a reader. I got punished for reading story books when I should have been reading text books, I would be the one hiding the book beneath the book, reading under the covers and so on.
Did your parents encourage you to read? Oh yes! I developed the habit from them. My mother was into biblical stuff and my father left a good scandal- he read a lot of African literature which was fairly salacious at the time. We grew up in very isolated place called Dundori which is a part of the Aberdare forest.
Our house had belonged to an ex-District Commissioner who was an old bachelor mzungu and judging from the library he left behind, a keen reader. A lot of the books were agriculturally oriented but there were also Greek myths, Dickens, Shakespeare and the like.
I had 4 other siblings and my father insisted that all of us read every kind of book in that library and write a book report afterwards. Both my parents were very harsh but if you were seen reading, there were no chores and so the minute I would see them, I'd rush to grab a book (laughs).
And so your career choice would be obvious I imagine. It wasn't that obvious. I thought I wanted to be a journalist but my parents were very strongly against it. I grew up in the 60s as one of the first post-independence generation children so you have to understand there was this fear that if you went in the artistic direction with your career, then you weren't contributing to the development of Kenya which needed hard working people in the sciences or law or accounting.
By the time I was deciding on my career choice, Moi became President and started persecuting artists, specifically writers. My parents didn't want me to put myself in a vulnerable position and in those days, there were hardly any female journalists.
They said if I really wanted to write, then I should just do it as a hobby. There was a lot of back and forth and as a consequence, I did badly in my A- levels. I ended up in the US where I studied Business Administration with a major in marketing; eventually I started working there in market research then came back here and worked in advertising.
Did you enjoy that? I really enjoyed the team dynamics and figuring out how to make things work. But then I was constantly disturbed by certain things. I wondered, 'why am I persuading someone to buy an expensive detergent when they clearly can't afford say, to buy a book for their child?' I mean surely it's not so critical in terms of where you spend your money.
And then I was offered a Chief Executive position but in order to do that, I had to accept accounts that I didn't even want to have anything to do with. I should also say it would get quite frustrating when clients failed to implement things as advised. These concerns led me to quit and start my own market research company with 2 other partners.
As part of that business, one of the contracts we got included visiting schools and in the process, because I always liked stories, we started a children's magazine called Maneno magazine. I eventually sold this side of the business to one of my partners and closed down the research side.
Why? My husband was posted to Cairo and I decided to move with him. At the same time, my mother was really ill and needed a lot of care. I would do a lot of travelling back and forth but the fact is, you can't run a young business from a distance. If it had been today, maybe, but in those days the internet wasn't what it is now and in research particularly, people buy into you the person and the results you produce for them. So I found it just wasn't working. Closing that business was a tough decision but there is always a silver lining- while in Egypt, I discovered online classes and took up writing.
What were you writing? Fiction. From the moment I wrote my first story I knew this is the world I am going to inhabit. One of the things I learned was the importance of peer reviews- constructive criticism from others. So we'd all exchange stories and I quickly discovered everyone online was American- just because this concept spread there first- but they would ask such gaspingly weird and dare I say, stupid statements; things like 'do you live on trees?', 'I can't believe you eat spaghetti...'
A common frustration to date. Indeed. And so I started looking for and found the most amazing African community on a site called Zoe Trope; there were writers like Binyavanga Wainaina, Rasna Warah, Billy Kahora, Parsalelo Kantai, Chimamanda Adichie. Binyavanga was talking a lot about wanting to start Kwani and I joined the group that called itself the founder members.
We were fully reliant on NGOs for funding and it was when some foundation let us down and that I suggested we have a commercial orientation for Kwani. I did some research with university students and came back with what I believed we needed to do: produce very small books in bigger print, at a low cost, with sagas that people love and simpler language or so intriguing that people wouldn't mind the language.
I got obsessed with the idea of making a commercial try at publishing and Binyavanga told me, 'if you think it's going to be so easy then go and do it yourself'. That basically was the genesis of Storymoja- We were 5 founding partners who put in some money and produced the first 2 books and launched August 2007.
Which books were these? Crown Your Customer by Sunny Bindra and Tracking the Scent of My Mother which I had written.
'Tracking the Scent of My Mother' was rather a big deal if I remember correctly. It had just already been shortlisted for the Caine Prize that year so there had been a lot of press and this was one of the reasons we chose to publish it. But we had no idea how to run a publishing house because we all came at it as writers- we didn't even know what font to use!
Tracking the Scent of My Mother is in comic sans because we got some young guy to design it who as it turns out doesn't read and he thought the title sounded like something young (laughs). And that was just our first mistake. With my marketing background, I had to estimate the size of the market to decide how many books to print and I naively used the classical marketing rationale. I worked out that the potential market would be half a million and wanted to produce just 10% of that. We ended printing 20,000 copies of each book. Now I'll say this to spare anybody who's thinking about getting into publishing, never print more than 2,000 copies until you are sure it's going to take off.
Anyway, we launched with a storytelling festival in December 2007 and called it the Nyama Choma Fiesta. The idea was to fool people into coming to the Impala Grounds thinking they are coming to eat Nyama Choma and then we would unleash all these amazing writers on them, Oyunga Pala, Sunny Bindra and all these other cool guys talking about books. The event would end with a story telling competition which would also help us gather stories for the next lot of books.
But there would still be some Nyama Choma, right? Oh, there was Nyama Choma alright. We were so sure we'd get tons of people so we got 30 goats to sell on site which, in hindsight, is ridiculous. Maybe 10 goats were consumed by a very small group of about 300 people. After the function, I ended up filling my freezer and calling friends to ask them to store boiled goat and now I can tell you for free boiled frozen goat will last (laughs).
In the end, the competition was won by the now very famous Eric Omondi who was then a university student at Daystar. We convinced Linus Gitahi who was the CEO at Nation Media Group to offer an internship as the prize. So Eric got his internship there and the rest is history.
Some good came out of it. Absolutely. But then later that year, the post-election violence happened. We had just received 40,000 books and now they were sitting in my garage at home because not a single bookseller was interested in distributing them.
It was only the following year in July that I managed to get into Uchumi supermarkets and because we were now in Uchumi, Nakumatt's Books First followed suit and took some books. I spent literally every Saturday in 2008 and 2009 in either Uchumi or Nakumatt standing in the isle stopping people and hawking my books, I'd be like, 'hello my name is Muthoni, would you like a Kenyan book, I've written this one will you support me'.
And did they support you? Let's just say I got a lot of information in terms of what people are interested in. I heard a lot of comments around people wanting support Kenyans but they would be like, 'you know we don't read, if you had books for children we might consider'. In a way this pleased me because I've always liked children's stories. I used to make up stories for my children literally every night when they were growing up so I thought, hmm, that's even easier than writing for adults. So in 2010 we started the children's stories.
We launched through a spelling competition between schools and got Citizen TV on board. We managed to penetrate 8 constituencies which was an interesting journey because then I realized there's something very wrong with our education system.
We came across some teachers who can't spell, we saw the stark differences between the children in different schools- you cannot take a child from most public schools or low cost private schools and have then compete in a fair way with children in upmarket schools let alone the international schools. The way they are taught is so different and so their learning outcomes are so different.
How exactly? Well you meet at standard 7 child in a public school and they are struggling just to communicate and you can tell it's the language. When you give them something to read, it's at a standard 2 or 3 level, on the other end, the children in the more privileged schools are reading at a much a higher level than the books that are targeting them. I became very aware of how we are excluding and disenfranchising children through our education system...
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