Melville House Books

Morning Mobylivers! For once, this post is not written under bleak London skies but in the steaming heat of Kibaha, a small town on the Tanzanian coast. Although this may just seem like an opportunity to gloat (yay me!) I thought you might be interested in the local literary scene…

An inflight magazine is usually an exercise in futility, designed to numb passengers’ brains to minimise requests and complaints to the flight attendants. Not so with Kenya Airways. Msafiri, their offering, is the most interesting and varied example of this type of literature I have read. In place of the spurious “in depth” city studies and breathless mall reports offered by the likes of Easyjet and American Airlines, the articles ranged from the inevitable homage to Obama (well, he is half Kenyan) through the preparations for the 2010 South African World Cup, and the effects they are having on the population, to a short essay on the likely impact of the global economic crisis on Africans.

The closest it gets to celeb spotting is a very short piece on the “New Face of Africa”, Kate Mewson. I also learned about solar cookers – did you know that Africa receives 51% of all the concentrated sunlight that reaches Earth? And do you know how odd it feels to say that I learned something on a plane? — and three emerging Kenyan artists and sculptors. The photography throughout was quirky and beautiful. Best of all, there was a short story by Henrietta Rose Innes. “Poison” won the 2008-09 Caine Prize for African Writing. It’s the tale of the aftermath of a chemical explosion in Cape Town. Amid the falling debris, one woman resists the exodus, standing alone in the middle of a highway littered with deserted cars. How the writer manages to make it lyrical, I have no idea, but she does and it’s wonderful. You can read the entire issue yourself here.

Msafiri raises the stakes, not just among the airlines but in the magazine world as a whole. East Africans clearly care about their publications – the wide variety of newspapers puts Britain to shame, and that’s just the English ones!