Kenyan professor Stanley Egara Kabaji has been elected for a second term as the vice chairman of Pan African Writers’ Association. He is based at the Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology, one of the top varsities in the western part of the country.
Professor Kabaji has served as the director of Public Communications and even Deputy Vice Chancellor (Planning Research and Innovation) in the university apart from teaching courses at the nexus of literature, media studies and research methodology.
The Pan African Writers’ Association was founded three decades ago as an umbrella platform collectively representing an amalgamation of writers’ association from African nations and the diaspora.
The vibrant association, founded on the principles of pan-Africanism, is headed by Prof Femi Osofisan – a great Nigerian playwright, thespian and director. Another Nigerian Dr Wale Okediran, a medical doctor with over 10 novels to his name, is the current secretary general of PAWA.
Last week, from June 23 to 25, PAWA hosted in Nigeria the General Assembly and PAWA International Conference on Literature. The event was themed: 'Literature Since Makerere 1962: The African Writers’ Pan-African Agenda for Peace, Security and Cultural Development'.
The event hosted by the fabled University of Ibadan attracted more than 40 authors from the four corners of the continent. Highlights of the summit included: Book exhibitions, keynote addresses, panel discussions, business meetings, excursions, awards and dinner galas.
PAWA has the mission to unite peoples of African descent through cultural cooperation, coordination and collaboration using writers and publishers as agents of pan-Africanism. It is succeeding where many networks of old failed to. This is in part courtesy of its diplomatic approaches that take the continent for what it is – a diverse and vibrant shrine of unity in diversity.
With vice presidents from Southern, Eastern, Northern, and Central African regions, the strategies that PAWA is using to achieve the mission have seen its visibility rise even here in Kenya among writers inside and outside academia.
This is how Prof Kabaji has been able to capture a second tenure as the East African regional vice president of the association. He has risen remarkably over the decades to become one of the most influential figureheads of contemporary Kenyan literature and indeed a beacon of literary criticism across East Africa.
Since January 2022, Kabaji is currently on a research stay at the English Department of Kabale University in mountainous southern Uganda near the border with Rwanda. He is there as part of the regional staff mobility programme run by the Inter-University Council of East Africa.
He has been running creative writing and reading workshops besides developing a master’s degree programme in Creative Writing. He is involved in ethnographic research in eastern Uganda among diasporic communities of Maragoli folks living there. Most Maragolis live in Vihiga county. They are the second-largest sub-community of the Luhyas of western Kenya.
Professor’s anthropological concerns among his people’s heritage go way back to his second and third degrees. His first MA on narrative aesthetics of folktales of Maragolis was awarded in our department at Kenyatta University 29 years ago.
Here, later he did teach me in the nineties. He became my pioneer mentor in literary criticism. A decade later I had the honour of writing with him and others the 544-page tome titled: East African Literature: Essays (2011).
Kabaji would pursue his folkloric research among his people using a gender agenda at the University of South Africa. This culminated in his doctorate award 13 years ago.
Kabaji has taught in Rwanda and collaborated with writers from Tanzania in his capacity as our current chairman of Creative Writers Association of Kenya with more than 100 authors as members.
A vibrant and versatile public intellectual, his combative and informative articles have appeared in most national newspapers for decades.
He has hosted literary programmes on Kenya Broadcasting Corporation radio services for ages. He is one of the founders of most vibrant book club in Kenya today – the Kakamega Book Club.
He has even, lately, established his own YouTube channel, EGARA KABAJI TV, to advance his discourses on literature, culture and education. It already has 7,000 followers scattered across the country and beyond.
His second MA degree in Management and stellar career in university administration saw him appointed by the Ministry of Education last year to head a special taskforce on the crisis of public universities in Kenya.
Prof Kabaji is one of the prolific authors of children literature in Kenya, a field he shares with his wife and reputable Swahili scholar Dr Miriam Osore of KU. He has penned more than 20 titles in the field, including his recent-most, which I am reading currently for review, titled:A Journey to Becoming (2021).
The learned man of artistic gifts and intellectual acumen of high voltage has raised the flag of the country and its arts across the region and on the lofty table of continental representation.
His rural manger in Navuhi over 350 miles west of Nairobi will remember his name for many years – not just for the honour that he has brought to it. We shall all recall the vintage visibility he has accorded Kenyan folk philosophy and folk aesthetics through Maragoli heritage.
His mentors, pioneer Kenyan literary sages, such as the late Prof Francis Davis Imbuga and Prof Arthur Mudogo Kemoli are buried of bones but their legacy lives on through Egara Kabaji.
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