Tribute to great author whose life was Kiswahili

In the gloom that continues to cover the country was added another excruciating stroke of pain and loss with the passing last week of Ken Walibora, a gentleman, scholar, and consummate professional who made his chosen profession seem easy with the panache and almost casual way he delivered excellence.

The unified dirge across the country mourns a loss come too soon at only 56!

I worked closely with Ken on two projects that inevitably were intended to sustain the use and growth of Kiswahili in Kenya and in the region.

One was the consolidation of the SwahiliHub project within the Nation Media Group and the other was the Tuzo ya Fasihi ya Ubunifu, a project to promote creative writing in Kiswahili, sponsored by NMG, the Embassy of France and Spotlight Publishers.

Ken, together with Mr Hezekiel Gikambi, the Swahilihub project manager, were the drivers of the creative writing project.

They thought through the concept, enlisted the support of the embassy and the publishing house, both of which were very enthusiastic, and generally shepherded the process for months over and above their regular dockets.

REPOSITORY

They prepared the proposals and stoically persevered the many iterations we insisted on, selected experts with whom they worked first to shortlist the numerous entries and later to evaluate the finalists and get the winner.

Out of that sterling effort, a fantastic novel in Kiswahili, Nyota Njema Mawinguni, was published by Spotlight in 2015 and the Kiswahili genre had a new author in teacher Amos Nandasaba.

The joy and satisfaction that Walibora exuded was the utter contentment of a man happy to have notched yet another milestone in his very firm commitment to nurture the writing, speaking and publishing in Kiswahili.

The project did not continue as he had hoped, but that did not dampen his spirit for he was driving the same objective on so many fronts.

In the Swahilihub project, he joined Hezekiel to bring to life a grand plan of NMG to establish and nurture a self-sustaining repository of what we called “everything Kiswahili”.

NMG’s top leadership had earlier been challenged to reflect on what role the company could play to promote and popularise Kiswahili. And NMG then owned the only national Kiswahili newspaper in Kenya.

QUALITY EDITOR

Swahilihub was NMG’s response to that challenge - build an extensive and comprehensive interactive online portal that stored and served up as much information on Kiswahili as possible.

In there could be discussion platforms, university researches and published thesis (master’s and PhDs), information on Kiswahili culture, et cetera.

There could be a dictionary and a teach-yourself-Kiswahili tool. It could publish books and other materials, run cultural and music festivals, et cetera.

It could be the engine that run NMG Swahili newspapers — Taifa Leo and Mwananchi (published in Dar es Salaam).

Hezekiel was the initial project manager but he was soon joined by Ken, who had been headhunted to come and be the Kiswahili quality editor.

They worked very hard to get the project up, with some success. The Hub was created and we started populating it. The concept was very enthusiastically received by Kiswahili scholars, teachers and organisations, a huge contributor to that being the tremendous respect they had for Walibora.

Walibora bent his destiny to his will through grit coated in cheer. And his Maker did sing along with Ken to make such beautiful poetry of life and work. Rest easy, worthy colleague.

The writer is a former chief editor at Nation Media Group and is now managing partner at Blue Crane Global; [email protected]; @tmshindi