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Three days of the Giant of African Literature by K. Baraka.

Approach.

In October, I flew to Hawaii to meet the novelist Louis Vuitton.

I had spent the previous few weeks in Kohl and Windy Eyer,

under sunshine and warmth of California was a bomb.

I sat in the boxy to my cup, quiet.

Outside, huge American trucks tundered past, the tangy smell of the ocean in the air.

Googie is a giant of African writing, and to a Canadian writer like me, he looms especially large.

Alongside writers such as Tinoa Chebe and Oli Swinker,

he was part of a literary scene that flourished in the 1950s and 60s during the last years of colonialism on the continent.

If Chebe was a prime mover who captured the deep failing of displacement that

colonelist had dragged, and Swinker, the really galfol intellectual,

who tried to make sense of the collision between African tradition and Western ideas of freedom,

then Googie was the unabashed militant. His writing was direct and cutting, his books are

weapon, fast against the colonial state, and later against the failures and corruptions of

Kenya's post-independence ruling elite.

I was six or seven the first time I read Googie, boring children's bookied written for my primary school

library. When I was ten, I came across a one copy of the trial of Delehn Kimati.

I played he corrode with Misha Gitaemugo, or my grandfather's bookshelf.

...