KENYA STORIES

The travelling library of Kenya

Culture moves by camel

27-08-2015 by Freddie del Curatolo

It 's true, as he wrote Ryszard Kapuscinski, one of the most precise thinkers and evocative of Africa, the story, the Black Continent, is transmitted orally and legend becomes myth, but the culture, prose and literature need of paper, of pages, of written words.
In one word, of books.
In Kenya the poorest and desolate, there are dozens and dozens of kilometers without a library, with makeshift schools under acacias and baobabs, or in temporary huts.
Are the northeastern regions of Wajir and Garissa, where the dust of the harsher savannah is deposited on the skin and penetrates into the veins, mingling with the blood that is often paid for disputes on the few farmlands or on cattle passages.
The Kenya Association Library Service donated a few years ago to Rashid Mohamed Farah, a nomadic Wajir moving from village to village with a herd of camels, a real traveling library.
The "Camel Mobile Library" moves like the shepherds of those regions, camel. They are heavy boxes that bring dreams, fantasy and imagination.
Books suitable especially children, who have the opportunity to make two loans for a time and then return them to the next step of cammellabile library, the month after.
"Many of the settlements that reach - said Rashid at the BBC - are formed by nomadic shepherds, impossible to create for them fixed locations to find something to read, here the culture you have to move like them, by camel."