Powerful words from Eric Wainaina’s single Ukweli meaning Truth in his latest album called “Twende Twende” loosely translated to mean let’s move with some frantic urgency.

This song was commissioned as a call for justice in the mysterious death of Father Anthony Kaiser who was reported as having committed suicide despite evidence that indicated the contrary.

We went out to meet Eric a GenerationKenya juror and award winning Kenyan musician at his Lavington base at Kifaru that hosts his studio Enkare.

Enkare is a partnership between Eric, his wife Sheba Hirst and Tim Rimbui aka Ennovator. It is a commercial recording studio that began in 2004.

While waiting to meet with Eric we stumbled upon all kinds of activities at the same, a live band was prepping for an upcoming gig, a music theatre group was going through the motions of their production and a sultry voice was practicing her voice chords somewhere about. We sat at the reception welcomed with steaming mugs of tea from Mary the lovely office assistant to fight off the nippy Nairobi chill as we waited for Eric to conclude his rehearsals.

Two cups of tea later, we watched as the last of the young musicians left for home after rehearsals. In their eyes there was an eagerness, all of them friendly and taking a moment to say hello. There was a lot of happy banter, chatting and laughter as they streamed out of Kifaru.

Eric came to personally meet us at the reception and as he led us to his office and we opened up to a burst of color; an orange wall more like the colour of sunset embers speckled with African art and a portrait of his wife Sheba. It was a warm setting filled with little trinkets like pictures and awards all around him. His keyboard was close by the window. He always carried a dicta-phone with him to capture any musical inspiration that came to him wherever he was. Then the naissance of his songs began to take form on his keyboard.

Eric Wainaina has stood out as a renowned Kenyan musician and composer.

His musical journey began when his father bought a second-hand grand piano from an expatriate move sale in 1977 when he was just 4 years old. The piano was really meant for his brother and only sibling Simon Wainaina who then thought that football was much cooler than sitting indoors and playing music scales …

His initial dabble on the piano were not spectacular, but he grew up in a home that nurtured them to follow their dreams. His parents, George Gitau Wainaina and Margaret Wangari Wainaina provided a diverse learning experience in addition to their academic studies.

Like many other kids those days, he enjoyed playing old LP records in the house 45’s and 78’s and his school St Mary’s was well known for putting up annual musicals. He feels that these were great music influences in his early life. Music surrounded him in the various choirs at church, prize days in school, inter-school music festivals and it slowly ingrained in him.

Family time was spent mashing pillows and wrestling with his dad and brother in the living room. He watched wrestling when the wrestlers actually wrestled and not just the banter and rhetoric that it has evolved into these days. The days of Big Daddy and Jack Haystacks….He watched football Made-in-Germany on Saturday afternoons and got up to the usual shenanigans that young Kenyan boys get into.

But music persistently crept into his life. His turning point was when he came across an a cappella song by Take 6. He played the song over and over. He especially enjoyed playing the stereo in the bath for hours to the chagrin of those waiting to use it after him; he closed his eyes soaking in the soap suds and the voice blends that brought out this remarkable new sound to him.

The fascination was intense. He and some school friends formed a group and decided to belt out an a capella number for a prize-giving day at Mary’s School.

“The lead singer started the song and I was the second voice and you know for school kids it’s always a nervous thing and some kids in the audience laughed at the start, but when the voices blended in together there was complete and utter silence. And I remember feeling from that moment that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.” says Eric.

He went on with music and with his friends formed a group named 5 Alive who made waves round the country with their talent. This was not enough for Eric though and he was determined to pursue a musical career. He got a scholarship to study music at Berklee College of Music in Boston USA. The college is prestigious and the environment was very musically charged. This is where he perfected his skill and brought it back to Kenya.

“I realized very early that I needed to bring something different to Berklee, the culture there is predominately R&B and Jazz. I needed therefore to find my Kenyan roots for my artistic and creative inspiration and this meant coming home regularly.”

“Also I decided to come back home to bond with my “Kenyan-ness.” You see many African musicians who made it in the world were predominantly big at home first, then you sort of rise from the surface at home to the external markets who begin to notice you.”

His business canny acknowledged the fact that he needed to create a niche market in Kenya and so the longevity of his musical career was because he remained consistent and persistent singing songs of relevance and telling Kenyan stories.
“I made a pact with myself that whenever I travel around the world with my music, the world would take me on my own terms and not the other way round but for that I needed to root myself at home first.”

So I asked Eric what being a successful Kenyan musician entailed.

“Playing a musical instrument is an integral part of composing and arranging your song. It gives one a sense of autonomy and this cannot be underestimated. Stress is, requesting a band to play their song and not know what key the song is in!” he said pointing out the most common problems that musicians face.

However even with tons of talent – being a successful musician does not come easy.

One time as Eric came across an old school friend while in a traffic jam said, “Oh Eric its 8.30 in the morning what are you doing up this early. I thought that artists wake up at 1 or 2 o’clock?”

He couldn’t have been more wrong. The process of composing, arranging, recording a song is a daunting task and it many times involves working hours on end to attain near perfection. Also, Eric learnt very early the importance of surrounding himself with people who are better than him – according to him its one of the best ways to learn.

Eric’s efforts have paid off though since he has received countless accolades for music.

So far he has garnered the coveted MNET (South Africa) award for favourite male vocalist in February 2001 and Best East African Artist at the pan-African 7th Annual KORA All Africa Music Awards on 2nd November 2002. He had been nominated for another KORA Award in 2003, and in 2005 he received his third Kora nomination, this time for the prestigious Artist of the Decade award. At the 2007 Kisima Music Awards Wainaina won three categories: Afro-fusion, best song and best video from Kenya.

His most memorable classes at Berklee was when a guest speaker came in and said to them, “The world owes you nothing! Don’t think that the world owes you something just because you’re a good song writer, the world doesn’t care! I mean you could die today and the music industry would progress on along like it always has. Don’t think that you’ll write this song and everyone will rush out to you!”

Music is a great way to articulate ourselves; Eric tells us how when a school bus was once stopped by a police officer asking for a bribe the school kids began singing out his song … “nchi ya kitu kidogo …” (Land of small things – bribes) this is increasingly having a snow ball effect on civic empowerment in Kenya.

Regarding the recent post electoral violence Eric felt the need for Kenyans to embrace openness.

“We as Kenyans need to talk more openly to each other. The key sensitive issues like land need to be addressed as a matter of urgency. We need to change the way we view leadership and choose the right kind of leaders because if we are eloquent on what is wrong with Kenya then we should ask ourselves why we have the same people going into power and making the same mistakes? The same injustices remain unaddressed over time and so I think it’s a high time we de-link politics and emotion allowing us to make decisions on a clear basis.”

But how can we cultivate music talent amongst the young Kenyans?

“The school curriculum needs to take music and art more seriously especially in Kenya where graduation from primary school does not guarantee you a placing in secondary, graduation from secondary does not assure you a place in university and graduation in university does not guarantee one a job. This means that a large group of Kenyans would have look for alternative ways to make ends meet. Therefore schools ought to open the minds of the young from the onset. For instance, reliance on art and creativity is really underestimated. The first thing one does after waking up is turning on the radio to listen to some music – we need to learn how to capitalize this.”

“Kids in school need to be taught more on how to live with others and problem solving. Right now the focus is squarely on learning by rote and regurgitating the answers during exams but the educational systems need to teach young Kenyans socialization. It would be probably the most useful knowledge we could impart as it teaches them how to live with other people.”

What are your views on the rampart piracy in Kenya?

“Piracy laws are valid and have been enacted but are hardly effected. People just walk into a cyber store and 50 bob later have a CD with burnt music. Musicians are not looking to stop these distribution channels which are viable but instead ensure that the buyers support the musicians by paying for the music – someone worked hard to get that song and it’s the least one can do to acknowledge talent.”

Parting words?

GenerationKenya will lift our national psyche. The venture will change the way we feel about ourselves. It’s transcends beyond all difference we have and instead highlights what we have in common – being Kenyan!

And … Kenyans have remarkable accounts of achievement; GenerationKenya is looking to showcase this by simply reflecting on our stories, our selves …

Today Anselm holds up a rod of glass and moves it from side to side, looking at the play of refraction and radiance. “Look,” he says. “It’s light standing still. Frozen fire.” He can not see that his blue eyes too glow with pulsing luminosity, that they are alive with the glittering dreaming light common to prophets, visionaries and madmen. His fascination with making glass stems from its alchemical production: the magical fusion of science, art, engineering and form, of heat and light, water and fantasy. “Bush Glass,” he calls it.

Anselm speaks with fierce pride of the “Kenyan Jua Kali ethos,” and its force is strong within him. He likes “making things from stuff around”; he gets his inspiration for his art from more “stuff around”— planetary bodies and motions, and molecules, and mountains and hills and flowing landscapes. Indeed, he specifically likes old objects: things that are able to hold their use-value through many lives and many incarnations, things with history and innovation embedded into them. His recycled and heartbreakingly beautiful glass is like that: redolent with other lives, other contexts, past forms and future uses.

Anselm is planning no less than a revolution: an African hot-glass movement in which handcrafted glass from every region across the continent, complete with regional specializations and signature colours, will present itself to the world as another indicator of Africa’s global-level creativity, another way in which African cultural production continues to innovate, re-imagining and renewing itself.

The way to the workshop is over rutted roads with more craters than the moon and through wafting billows of dust. That certain features of the landscape are not geological formations takes a while to notice. The visitor’s eye wanders over the seductively wide horizons of the Kitengela plains and then zooms back to a strange mound in the middle of the openness. This large, deep-red brick dome surrounded by hardy scrubland and herds of incurious cattle and cavorting baboons is, improbably, Anselm Croze’s workshop. Around this mound, which looks like nothing so much as a fantastical out-sized egg mysteriously parked on the savannah, Anselm has created a mythical landscape populated by beguilingly oversized and unexpected forms. His sometimes disturbing artwork is out in the open, harmonizing surprisingly with the grass and rocky outgrowths and trees. His is not the only artwork on display, because he believes in artistic collaboration and engages in many joint projects with other artists. But his is certainly the animating spirit behind the exuberance and the rigour of the art.

There is, for instance, the corpse of a car upended on its bonnet. A few seconds after processing the improbability of an accident (there’s nothing to hit) that would cause a car to stand on its nose like that, the viewer notices a curiously immobile elephant rendered in wire and a fifteen- foot moran gazing imperturbably over the dusty grasslands. There are camels too—real ones, and others done in metal and shards of glass—along with suns and cacti constructed in glittering, glimmering shards of light and ensorcelled stone. Behind the cluster of buildings that houses the glassworks, astonished visitors will discover the Necklace Bridge—an absurdly fragile-looking contraption of wire and beads swaying precariously over the muddy brown waters at the bottom of a very deep gorge. The idea that this intensely beautiful weaving of beaded metal strands is sturdy enough to support a person’s weight above all of that deep nothingness is alarming.

Inside the dome, groups of men in protective overalls with old socks on their hands toil and sweat surrounded by roaring furnaces and bubbling glass. The men wield curious long-handled metal pipes with dexterity and controlled haste. These they sometimes plunge, twisting, into the hearts of the fires roaring around them before sitting to twirl and pad the glass into shape ,or dunking them in the buckets of cold water next to their workstations. The workshop sounds like a living thing, with water hissing, fires crackling, and the footsteps of the glassworkers syncopating as they wield their long pipes, tipped with glowing bulbs of molten glass, like fiery dreams waiting to be imagined into life. Work proceeds like a strange and dangerous ballet: The fires are very hot, the space is not very big, and the glass must be shaped before it cools—which happens very quickly with recycled glass. The men move with an eerie awareness of each other—their metal rods swinging through the dark interior like fireflies bobbing in the evening light. Anselm Croze weaves through this space uttering sharp “Now!” directives, stooping to take up a tool and correct a shape himself, murmuring, encouraging, experimenting, and innovating along with his skilled team. Every now and then, they break into resigned laughter when a technique goes horribly wrong. And then they try it again. And again, until they get it right and effortless, until they are almost dancing through their work.

Anselm Croze was born in Cumbria in northern England. He came to Kenya with his father, Harvey Croze, an environmental zoologist who worked in the Serengeti. Anselm remembers home-schooling in a tent in Tanzania; later, he was the one little mzungu kid amongst many black urchins in a small, one-room rural school, running around, getting into dirt and trouble. Later still, he drove a taxi around Ann Arbor, Michigan, because he had run out of money to pay his university fees in the U.S.A. He understands hardship quite well, and he understands the value of practical methods of showing solidarity. Kitengela Glassworks supports the Bosco Boys Home (where Anselm recruits many of his glassmaking trainees), as well as the local high school, with material and financial support. More importantly, Anselm Croze is intent on passing on his skills and his love of glass and making beauty to as many Kenyans as possible; given the abundant evidence in his Kitengela Hot Glass retail outlets, this is a skill that is economically beneficial as well as soul satisfying. For his environmental passion and his rigorous and joyful aesthetic production, for his capacity to make dreams tangible and touchable (and useful), for his relentless creativity and innovation in found objects and Kenyan material culture, GenerationKenya is proud to claim Anselm Croze amongst our panel of jurors.

Anselm Croze: glassmaster, dreamweaver and GenerationKenya juror.

He is the Chairman of the Chandaria Group of Companies, a family concern that is also a huge empire operating in over 43 countries worldwide. He is also the Chairman of The Chandaria Foundation started in 1952 by his family which focuses on helping the less fortunate in the community.

His early years were spent at his father’s provisional store along Nairobi’s famous Biashara Street, he lived briefly in Mombasa and then in a one-roomed house in Ngara during pre-independence Kenya. In those days Muthaiga, an affluent Nairobi suburb, was still an exclusively European affair flagged by a huge forbidding signpost that read “Trespassers will be Prosecuted.” Lolling around on the beaches of Nyali was also reserved for the Europeans only. If Asians or Africans wanted to take a dip they had to take a boat into the sea and get off at the reef and swim in the open seas of the Indian Ocean. Therefore, it was ironic sitting in his lounge in his home in the Muthaiga suburb where less than half a century ago none of us would have been allowed into the area at all, or worse still allowed to fraternize.

The Muthaiga sign came down after 1955 when he had already married his wife Aruna Chandaria mother of his three children and his best friend. This is by far one of the most obvious fruits of independence that Kenya reaped, our ability to thrive on diversity.

But what is Dr. Chandaria’s key to success?

“At an early age I realized I would never be great at sports, so I made up for it in my studies,” he said.

His father had moved to Kenya in 1916 as a merchant with a provisions store along Biashara Street. They also delved into the manufacturing business by buying into an aluminium plant called KaluWorks. His parents made a lot of sacrifices to educate them well and Dr Manu, with some of his family members took over the running of Kalu Works once they finished their education. At first they were overwhelmed at the level of work required to run a successful business enterprise. However, they also felt a strong sense of responsibility and recognized the struggles that had to be endured first by their parents to acquire the plant and then by the children to make it a success.

Strapped with this determination, they woke early everyday and opened the doors for the plant workers by 7.30am. As management, they put in 16 to18-hour days and within 5 years the business grew from 40 employees to over 800 employees. In time they amassed a collection of other plants around the world; and by 1980 the business expanded to almost all continents.

Even today, nearly 30 years later, Manu still puts in 16-hour days at work.

He attributes much of their success to the exposure that he acquired while studying abroad which opened his mind to new ideas. He is also influenced by his strong religious upbringing in the Jain doctrines that are principled on a pious and moderate lifestyle. He has never had the need for ostentation or excesses.

Another side of Dr. Chandaria is his work in the community. He has always seen the need to give opportunity to Kenyan youth so that they can have the chance to live to their full potential. He is involved with several charity organizations and works with them to raise the quality of life; a feat that he feels all Kenyans with means should be involved in. Dr. Chandaria was on Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s honour list in 2003 and in 2006 he was granted Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition for his work in the community and his promotion of Kenyan – British economic interest in Kenya.

He also feels that the corporate world has a duty for giving back to the community.

“We need to realize, as the private sector, that we have the responsibility to accept making money and looking after ourselves but in addition we need to also care for the community and our country Kenya at large.”

With this in mind, it is not surprisingly to see him busy involved with projects ranging from rehabilitation of street families, to educational trusts that expand opportunities for the less fortunate in Kenya.

“The real key to success for the youth in Kenya is to open their minds to good ideas that can have a multiplier effect,” he explains

“Zero multiplied by zero will always be zero. You can’t get something out of nothing. We need to expand our ideas – two multiplied by two is four and four multiplied by four is sixteen and so on. That is the true secret to success!” says Dr. Chandaria.

According to him, the government, the corporate world and individuals need to learn to harness the potential of the youth in Kenya by equipping them with skills that will help build them as strong capable citizens, and allowing them to use these tools to help secure the future of our beloved nation.

His message to the youth of Kenya is to learn to set themselves free from the web of dependency. Grants or aid is only provided to sow the seed of our ambitions then we need to begin to think of ways to attain financial independence with hard work and winning ideas.

And his vision for Kenya?

“Among all our neighbours in East and Central Africa, Kenya is still a notch higher even without any real natural wealth. Our main asset is human resources, intelligence and goodness of heart. We Kenyans are the true source of wealth in this region. We just need to realize this and then we can make it.”

Mugo Kibati has always been the smartest guy in the room ever since he was about six, and finally went to a school that ranked its students. It was easier to ask him to remember the times when he was not #1 in his class. The first time he ever got a class ranking at all, he came in at number two, and mostly because he had just joined a new school where the classes were in English, and not Kiswahili, the language he knew. Before that, he had only ever spoken English in the half-hour English class at his previous school. He didn’t know anybody who actually spoke it all day, every day. Then, years later, he went off as a Form One Newbie to Alliance High School, and came in at number five that first term. He’d just finished coming first in his province in the national exams the year before, so that was a rude shock. His mother, chuckling at his puzzlement, said to his father ‘the young man may finally be challenged, after all.’

Challenged he was; it was after all, Alliance High School, where the incoming class is full of people who were first in their primary schools, or in their provinces, or in the country. The shock of adjusting to this level of meta-excellence and the pride in having been able to ratchet up his performance to meet this new expectation explain a lot about Mugo Kibati’s relationship to his former, and formative, high school. Alliance High School is one of the three most significant forces in his life: the other two are his parents and his wife. From his father, he learned about the fundamental injustice of arbitrary social hierarchies. It was at a family gathering when Mugo was still a tiny tot, but wanted to give his opinion about something the grown-ups were discussing. An uncle was about to dismiss his participation on the grounds of Mugo being a small child and thus preferably both invisible and inaudible. His father stopped that burgeoning form of oppression in the very bud. He said that his son, Mugo, had the right to speak his mind in his own home, and anywhere else for that matter—and that what was important was the quality of the statement and not the age or position of the speaker. Mugo Kibati never forgot that.

Mugo Kibati wins awards with “Young” as the first word of their titles quite frequently. He is accustomed, in addition to being the best, also to being the youngest of whatever peer group he is excelling amongst, and all of Kenya knows by now that he is the gold medallist equivalent of corporate stewardship, as well as being the youngest of the corporate heavy-hitters. I asked him for an instance of his failure. He told me of the time he did not get into the Imperial College of London (the MIT of the UK) but later got into MIT itself, where he again excelled.

He met his wife Laila in the United States, where she impressed him by contradicting him often and fighting hard to win her intellectual points against him. Laila, another over-accomplished Kenyan, has a strong sense of social justice and had turned down the lucrative possibilities of private law practice in the U.S. to work with legal aid organisations. She argued passionately with Mugo, and won, so, of course, he fell in love with her and married her as soon as he could convince her that it was a good idea. That was a few arguments later. Few Kenyan men could ever sound so happy about losing major points—to a woman. Few Kenyan men of that level of accomplishment listen to other people’s points, on anything at all. Laila’s mind is a very big deal to Mugo Kibati, and he talks about her often: his intense large eyes open wider when he does.

Mugo was School Captain of Alliance when he was a student there, and now he chairs the Alumni Association and sits on the Board of Governors for his old high school. He is the youngest Board of Governors member they have ever had, of course. I ask him what this high-flying trajectory is in aid of—what drives the effort behind his own excellence? When he went to university he was the student chair of his faculty (his first election win), in the U.S. he worked as a Congressional Intern (for a Republican Senator); he is the youngest person ever appointed to the position he now holds and he has just won the Young Global Leader 2008 award. Why is Mugo Kibati running this high-performing high-stakes excellence race, seemingly mostly against time and against himself?

His answer is the reason that he is a GenerationKenya Juror. Mugo Kibati wants to build a society based entirely on merit—a meritocracy, now, in his lifetime and preferably next week. He has a burning passion to make ours a society in which the best rise, no matter their background, or gender, or economic conditions, or creed, or colour, or anything else. Mugo Kibati wants a society in which excellence is the only measure by which we allow ourselves to discriminate amongst ourselves. It is not so surprising, considering his own life, but what often goes unsaid in listing his many achievements is how strongly he feels about the need to inculcate moral courage and positive, active social engagement in our citizens. Knowledge, or intelligence, is not merely a passive process of taking in what swirls around you—for Mugo, it is an energetic, active process of perpetual finding-out, aggressive seeking of new skills, new understanding, new perspectives, new possibilities, new futures. He is a man in a hurry, to excel, and to find and to promote excellence in all he does. He is GenerationKenya to the core—he will know how to identify other Kenyans with his type of mind.

Mugo Kibati, GenerationKenya Juror. Forward Into Excellence

Editors note: Mugo Kibati resigned as group CEO of East African Cables in June 2008.

In 1981 she told Nairobi’s Sunday Standard that fashion was a form of artistic self-expression and creativity to which all Kenyan women had a right; and that women, no matter how beautiful and model-worthy, needed to pursue their educational goals as far as they could. It is now 2008, and her core belief in this imperative for Kenyan women’s self-sufficiency, creativity, self-determination and dignity has not changed.

In fact she has expanded this creed into her work life. Mildred Awiti now trains Kenyans who, in a variety of capacities, represent Kenya in the international arena. Her job is to make sure that they know how to present themselves as appropriate emissaries of the Kenyan people.

“It’s the little things,” Mildred says of her training sessions, “that can make the difference. Anybody representing Kenya on the global stage, from boardrooms to classrooms to the performance stage and the track and field event, must know that for many people, he or she is their first encounter with Kenya. It is important how we behave in these contexts—the national reputation rests on it.” Ms. Awiti’s challenge is to ensure that this Kenyan reputation is protected and preserved. She trains executives, civil servants, athletes, journalists, models, diplomats, and any others likely to be seen by global eyes as “the image of Kenya.” She shows them how to carry and conduct themselves in ways consistent with global standards of courtesy, etiquette and interaction, and Kenyan inflections of hospitality, multiculturalism and our hard-working ethos. In one way or another, Mildred Awiti is still making Kenyans look good. The only difference is that now she has moved, from looking good by herself, to helping all the rest of us look good as well.

Even though her own talent as a model was discovered young, and she was already working as a professional model while still a teenager in the 1970s, Mildred Awiti not only completed her course of study at the Kenya High School, but also went on to study at Nairobi University, emerging with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Literature. She has further credentials from Cornell University, LINTAS International, Tack International and Development Dimensions International. In the years since her modelling days, she has worked as an executive in diverse corporate fields, from Human Resources to Marketing and Communications.

The moral authority she has acquired over her years as an unofficial global good-will ambassador for Kenya sits lightly on her shoulders, especially when she is at ease in the Nairobi home she shares with her two adopted children and one natural son, an exuberantly friendly dog, and the continuously shifting assortments of friends, neighbour’s children, relatives and acquaintances milling amongst the colourful flowers of her garden. She is so eager to promote others that she forgets to talk about herself, instead speaking excitedly of a woman who has started an HIV-orphans home, another who has emerged as a grassroots leader in an impoverished urban area, yet another who has started her own modelling agency, another who has devised Kenya’s most innovative software technology services, and most compellingly, of her own mother. The sentiment is clearly returned: Mildred Awiti’s mother has saved every photograph, every cover, every publicity shot that her beautiful daughter has ever been in, and yet Mildred’s looks were never the most important thing about her to her mother, and therefore were never the most important thing to Mildred herself.

On her appointment as a GenerationKenya Juror, Ms. Awiti is characteristically self-effacing. “It is a great honour to be associated with an initiative that promotes positive Kenyan values,” she says. “I look forward to participating in this process, and to learning from my fellow jurors. But they are all very distinguished and famous Kenyans—it is very intimidating!” She does not look in the least intimidated as she maps out her strategy to move Kenya to greater tolerance, understanding, mutual respect and civility—at home as well as abroad. Kenya-Fabulous.

Mildred Awiti: GenerationKenya Juror.