One Saturday in late July, I attended a show called Story Sosa, at the National Museum in Nairobi. Billed as ‘an experiment in live storytelling’, the event consisted of five stories with themes including the racial construction of artificial intelligence, the dynamics of lynchings in Kenya and the significance of everyday objects. They explored what women’s hairstyles can tell us about Kenya’s post-colonial history, and offered a fascinating glimpse into the Asian experience in East Africa through the eyes of three generations of a family folding and frying samosas.
Each story had been researched and written like a traditional print magazine story. The authors were Kenyans already distinguished on the international stage as journalists, artists, writers, poets and performers. They presented them to us through a captivating and entertaining mix of recitation, video, animations, and music. It not only felt like the tales came alive as they were told, but that the storytellers had shared with us an intimate portrait of a part of the world and of themselves, and afforded the audience a chance to experience it. It was everything journalism aspires to be: not just a set of facts on a page, but living, breathing stories that fire the imagination and speak to the heart as well as to the head.
