READERS’ CORNER: There’s more to reading than Ben Carson’s ‘Gifted Hands’

There’s more to reading than Ben Carson’s ‘Gifted Hands’

by Kennedy Buhere

Ben Carson’s Gifted Hands and Think Big has been the principal book that children born in the early 1990s and beyond have read. There is probably no other inspiring — fiction or no fiction — books this generation of children have read.

In many ways, the two books are unquestionably inspiring. They are built around anecdotes from Dr Carson’s life, and influential role models who brought real meaning to the Think Big qualities.

There are two memorable episodes in Think Big that are really transformative. The first incident is where Sonia, Carson’s mother, says that rich people, including their children, do not spend whole hours and days hooked onto TV (or today’s social media). That they value what brain power can do. And that effective use of his brain could enable him to rise above the challenges presented by life and adolescence.

The second episode is where Carson happens to be the only student with an answer to a question a teacher asked students in a Geography lesson. Earlier, he had followed his mother’s exhortation to spend more time on books than watching TV by enrolling in the community library. The library not only expanded his knowledge, but also made him answer the question and progressively helped him to shoot from the bottom ranks of the class to the top.

I, however, have three difficulties with Carson’s books. The first is that nearly all the students who read them come out with one ruling ambition: To become a neurosurgeon like Carson. It is from the inspiration these two books that students who top the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education and the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) invariably said that they wanted to become neurosurgeons.

The second shortcoming in Carson’s work is that he mentions his mother as the only force in his transformation into the larger than life stature he later assumed.

The third shortcoming is that Carson projects an impression of certainty, the “you see, I have achieved success in life” deportment. True great men harbour doubts about the ultimate meaning of life and continue questioning things. They continue questioning systems, institutions. They even question themselves. They appreciate the ambiguities inherent in life.

In the great biographies I read — regrettably long after I completed formal schooling — I came across not one, but a half a dozen people who influenced, who shaped the life of the great men and women. The influences came directly from the people they interacted with — from teachers, uncles, brothers, grandparents, aunts and the great books they read.

I have in mind Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Mohandas K. Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of my Experiments with Truth, Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life.

One reads diffident, humility, and a self-effacing nature that is almost deceptive. The books are highly readable, admittedly, just like Carson’s. However, one does not find this diffidence, this humility, and these self-effacing traits in Think Big and Gifted Hands.

One great feature about the books by Franklin, Washington, Mandela, Gandhi, Douglass and Keller is that they painstakingly take you into some of the books which shaped their thinking and world views. The books of some of these writers, are saturated with biographies, autobiographies, novels, plays, poems, memoirs, and diaries — that they read.

Ben Franklin has a whole chapter on the books he read as a boy. I first knew and later came to read some of the books that have shaped my thinking from Franklin’s Autobiography.

The biographical books don’t have to motivate you to take the path the great man/woman whose life you read, took. All it must do is to give you another perspective, inspire you, and provide valuable lessons about life to you.

It is for this reason that when the director general in the ministry of Education asked me to speak to the students on the Pupils Reward Scheme (PURES Village) — program for top students which enables them to stay in State House for A week — who visited Jogoo House on July 5, 2016, I instinctively thought about talking to them about other inspiring works of art that they should read. I felt they should go beyond Ben Carson’s restrictive books.

We have poems with ability to inspire.

This is not the place to talk about them now.

The writer is a communications officer at the ministry of Education, Science and Technology

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Why Obama doesn’t read African writers

by Alexander Opicho

President Barack Obama has released the list of books he will read during his summer vacation this August. The list includes both fiction and non-fiction. However, it is so unfortunate that the list does not have any book written by an African or an African American writer.

The books so far on the list are Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins and Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Collectively, these books amount to 2,000 pages. His vacation will last only a fortnight.

Even though Obama reads literature about slavery and black lives, he has never picked any work into his summer vacation reading list by an African writer. Last year, Obama did not pick any literary work by an African. The list, which only had only non-African writers, included All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri , Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates , and Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow.

President Obama is legally an American but with substantial connections to Africa, both at cultural and psychological level. Given that he has a lot of blood relatives and family members in Africa, his choice not to read an African writer is a question of intellectual interest, at public and personal level.

Someone can easily point out that African writers are not writing to the standard that attracts heavyweight readers like Obama, or editorial and marketing muscles by African publishers are not able to access the White House, but still there are currently very good African writers with artistic and intellectual prowess in the station of those writers that Obama has put on his reading list.

Personally, I could have recommended A Brief History of Seven Killings by James Marlon, The Broken Drum by David Maillu, Cultural Forces in World Politics by Ali A. Mazrui, On the Post Colony by Achille Mbembe, A good Muslim and Bad a Muslim by Mamdan Mahmood, Half of the Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Famished Road by Ben Okri and Set Forth by Dawn by Wole Soyinka.

These works by Africans within and in the diaspora deal with post-modern issues ranging from decolonizing knowledge, feminism, social inclusivity, Islam, human migrations, technology, poverty and pure aesthetics just for the sake of art. Above all, we have to appreciate Obama as a reading president. This does not happen everywhere.

Kenyans cannot tell, nor do they have any information about what their president and his deputy are currently reading. This is a challenge. Hence some of us that relish and have a zest for reading are bound to wish a good reading experience and a joyful holiday for president Obama during this summer vacation.

The writer lives in Lodwar, Turkana County

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Make literary awards more visible to us

By Joe Kibui

The award season is here, not only for our men and women in the Rio Olympics but also on the Kenyan literary scene. The differences between the two run deep in matters of prestige and value.

While the one at Rio can be spelt out by every Tom, Dick and Harry, the literary ones need serious ‘googling’ for anyone to actually know what exactly will be going on.

Thus begs the question, what is the impact of literary awards on writers and readers alike, or are they just badges to be worn in bars for free booze? To the writer, these awards are everything; recognition, exposure and a chance to pocket a decent amount of money, considering that the fiction market is still crawling.

After the awards, the writer crawls back to his ‘day’ job and takes a few notes to be used in writing another book with the hope that it will be nominated for another award.

Then comes the reader, who has no clue that an award season is just around the corner and who most of the time is blamed for failing great Kenyan literary minds with what the writers call ‘lack of a reading culture’ and ‘a miserly attitude towards books’.

Unlike other scenes, for example music, it seems like writers rarely capitalise on these awards and do very little to ensure that people read the books they write, forgetting that at the end of the day, a book to the layman is a commodity that needs proper marketing to either be bought or not.

But then again, could it be that the common reader and the judges live in a different literary world? That the awards won are not an interpretation of the reader’s preferences? That there is an increased literary intellectuality attached to these awards?

Pick anyone and the names Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o would be the first to be uttered, but the Nobel prize for Literature evaded the former and continues to play tricks on the latter. Nevertheless, the award has been won by a number of Africans.

The bottom line is, literary awards should translate to long queues at bookshops of readers eager to purchase the books, if not for the love of the written word then to get a glimpse of what the fuss is all about. Furthermore, even in Olympics, not everyone is there to cheer their home team. Some are just there to see what this ‘Bolt’ of a man is capable of.

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Promote our culture in the counties

by Kelvin Keya

Thanks to devolution, counties have established departments and ministries of culture or heritage. It is important that these governments invest heavily in programmes that promote diversity and culture, like constructing cultural centres, libraries, and promoting competitions and activities to help our youth understand values and aspirations.

It is worrying that a good number of youth and children cannot fluently speak their mother tongues. Language and mastery of communication should be anchored from mother languages.

This could also explain the huge identity crisis of young people. I look forward to having cultural competitions, and not just beauty competitions, to enable Kenyans appreciate each other and respect tribe.

Some of the social challenges, such as marriage squabbles, mentorship gaps and lifestyle diseases could be a result of lack of information from history and the way of life as it was in the traditional and cultural set ups.

Yes some traditions could be inhuman, but I believe we need such information kept somewhere in books, videos or in songs to help guide our future.

The writer lives in Kwale County