Kenya

“From the Dark Wood to Paradise: Dante Alighieri at the University of Nairobi” (2021)

November 7, 2021 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“The University of Nairobi’s Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Literature, the Italian Embassy, and the Italian cultural institute collaborated on a conference dubbed ‘From the Dark Wood to Paradise: Dante Alighieri at the University of Nairobi.’

“During the event, excerpts of the audiobook version of From the Dark Wood to Paradise were read to the participants in English, Kiswahili, and Italian; some parts of the Divine Comedy have been translated into 33 languages including Swahili.

“(The event) also included a segment for the collaborators to share their perspectives.

“Speaking at the conference, the Italian Ambassador to Kenya, Ambassador Alberto Pieri noted that some Italian words are used in Kenya and across the globe thus showcasing the undeniable influences of Italian culture to the world.

“‘There is no better partner in terms of culture than Italy because culture goes back to the Greco-Roman period. Aspects of culture and technology like road-building are drawn from that early cultural heritage. As a university, we would like to see this collaboration grow into a full collaboration where we are able to interact in terms of theatre and languages’ (Dean Faculty of Arts, Prof. Ephraim Wahome).

“‘The Italian language has been part of the population of the country of Kenya for a long time. Malindi for example has often been referred to as Little Italy since the late 60s because of its cultural inclination’ (Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Stephen Kiama).

“‘He is part of what came to be known as three crowns of Italian literature. The others are the writer Giovanni Boccaccio well known for his text and Francesco Petrarch the father of the Renaissance movement. Indeed, the works of the three crowns of Italian literature have been known to comprise an entire teaching unit in English and literature departments the world over signaling the importance of the contribution of the Italian language to world literature’ (Alex Wanjala, Dept. of Linguistics, Languages, and Literature).

“Dante Alighieri at University of Nairobi concluded with the screening of the film The Sky over Kibera by Marco Martinelli (Teatro delle Albe).” [. . .] —University of Nairobi, October 27, 2021

See also the related post about The Sky over Kibera here.

The Sky Over Kibera (2019 film)

November 5, 2021 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“THE SKY OVER KIBERA is an art film: it tells us about the ‘bringing to life’ of the Divine Comedy in the immense slum of Nairobi, Kibera, where the director has worked with 150 children and adolescents, reinventing Dante’s masterpiece in English and Swahili. And he does so with his poetic and visionary style, interweaving other images with the filming of the play, sequences shot specifically in the slum to carry out the alchemical operation of transforming theatre into cinema. Three teenagers from Nairobi offer face and voice to Dante, Virgil, and Beatrice: they are the guides that lead the viewer into the labyrinth of Kibera, where the ‘dark forest’ in which the poet is lost is more than just a metaphor: in Swahili, Kibera means ‘forest.’ Around them a chorus swarming with bodies recites the tumult of being both beasts and damned, thieves and murderers, devils and corrupt politicians and poets who indicate the ways of salvation: between songs and acting, frenetic races and wild dances, the 150 protagonists give life to a fresco full of moving poetry, further confirmation of the universality of Dante’s masterpiece.” [. . .] —Teatro Delle Albe

View the trailer here.

Image credit Andrea Signori

Contributed by Silvia Valisa (Florida State University)

Adoyo, Rain: A Song for All and None (2020)

March 10, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

Adoyo’s Rain: A Song for All and None is a genre-crossing novel published by Zamani Chronicles in 2020. Rain is at the same time the oral history of several generations of a fictional Kenyan family, centered on Maya, a Dream Walker—endowed with a clairvoyance that grants Dreamers a cross-temporal empathic vision of human history—and an incisive interrogation of the history of colonial conquest in Africa. In the “Afterword” Adoyo (a scholar and teacher of Dante) describes the relationship of the novel’s relationship to the Divine Comedy:

“And each of the multitude voices and stories flowing into Rain is a vital tributary to a dynamic polyphony that explores and illuminates the conflict between sanitized histories of colonialist aggression and the unvarnished accounts of their savagery. It will not surprise readers familiar with the voice of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia that the Great Poet’s most important animating influence in Rain is the way it emboldens this story to draw back the veil of recorded History and bear witness, with an unflinching and conscientious gaze, to the brutality of the agents of colonial dominion — figures celebrated for the Age of Discovery whose incursions wreaked unconscionable horrors on peoples around the world for Coin in the name of Church and Crown and set the precedent for presumptuous appropriations like the Scramble for Africa centuries later. The poetic voice of Dante artifex also permeates the comprehensive structure of Rain, from its general architecture to the network of internal memory manifest in the story’s narrative refrains, as well as the musical rhythm and flow of the storyteller’s language. The most dulcet tones of Dante’s voice resonate deeply in the contemplative strains of Rain devoted to singing the unspoiled beauty of Nature in the bounty of Africa’s expansive savanna grasslands, gleaming equatorial mountain glaciers, opulent Rift Valley, cascading waters and wending rivers, and shimmering Great Lakes.” –From the “Afterword” of Adoyo’s Rain: A Song for All and None (Zamani Chronicles, 2020)

Annual Fires in Nairobi’s Gikomba Market

July 28, 2018 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“Kenyans have woken up yet to another fire in one of the country’s largest open-air markets claiming at least 15 lives and destroying property worth millions of shillings.

“The Gikomba fireballs have become an annual occurrence. Here, a look at them between 2012 and 2018.” — Fredrick Obura, “Dante’s Hell: A Fire, a year, that is Gikomba for you,” Standard Digital, June 28, 2018

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