Greetings, friends:
This week’s newsletter is continuing the tradition of inviting members of our community to write From The Curator’s Desk, and for this edition, I’m happy to hand it over to our Board Chair, Daniel Kalinaki. This reflection was first published by the Daily Monitor on Thursday, February 27th.
Please send your guest writing pitches for this section to chris@barazalab.com if you’re interested in being our guest curator on the newsletter, and you have something of interest to share to our community — a trend you’ve noticed or something you’d like us to think about.
~ Christine
I am a keeper. It is not that I collect things; it is that I haven’t learned the art of throwing away those that have outlived their usefulness.
So, you can imagine the kind of stuff I have lying around the house: a first-generation iPad that hasn’t been powered on in a decade; enough discarded charging cables to stretch across the River Nile; a lovely Van Heusen shirt acquired dowing grad school two decades ago that I have worn fewer than five times; even the hand-written newsletters I produced in secondary school in the early nineties.
This habit of hanging onto things doesn’t make me impervious to change, but it creates a constant power struggle between being loyal to the status quo and fitting in the new.
For instance, I do not recall when I last wrote out a cheque, but I still maintain a post-office box and like to open it and find a dividend cheque mailed to me. Yes, I know I can get paid through the bank or mobile money and, yes, I like inward transfer notifications on the phone, but nothing beats receiving a cheque in the mail.
I subscribe to The Economist and The New Yorker and read them mostly online, but I love to receive the hard copy in the mail every week even if I, increasingly, lack the time to read the paper version.
I have accepted these peculiarities as embodiments of some undiagnosed childhood trauma of growing up in a poor and violent country. Sometimes I even wear these peccadillos with a badge of pride; nothing says eff-off to the constant wash-rinse-recycle of the fashion industry like wearing a 20-year-old shirt whose style has suddenly come back into vogue.
(Do you see what I just did there? Do you? Do you?)
Anyway, this conservatism means that I prefer to read printed newspapers and books to digital versions. I consume lots of the latter, but I can’t think of more gratifying things than, for instance, sitting down to a full English breakfast with a copy of The Times, or lying by a pool on a hot afternoon with a good paperback.
The sound of impending doom within the media industry – the soundtrack to our lives over the past two decades, really – fills a dinosaur like your columnist with an even deeper sense of loss.
How are we supposed to have our morning coffees without a newspaper and a clever crossword puzzle? Are we supposed to doze off in hammocks in the hot and humid afternoons scrolling through iPads instead of books?
It was on one such warm afternoon off a beautiful Mediterranean island not too long ago that I read a book, Necessary Endings, by Henry Cloud. It’s been around a bit – the book, but not as long as the island – but it was in a big pile of my unreads (some of which I have kept for 30 years; you get the drift).
Dr Cloud’s argument is simple but profound; old things have to die for new ones to be born.
I was reminded of it at the Africa Media Festival in Nairobi as I watched a mostly young and enthusiastic lineup of content types speak to the content they are creating and the narratives they are challenging.
None of them spoke about the newspaper columns they are writing or intend to write. Some looked like they wouldn’t recognise a newspaper if you smacked them in the face with one.
As terrible as it is for us dinosaurs, the death of traditional media platforms is perhaps inevitable – some would even argue, cruelly, necessary – for new forms of storytelling and new players to emerge.
Just don’t touch my VCR player or my CD collection. I might need them someday!