T for Turere: All He do is Win...Now matter what! #TEDTalentSearch

Sometimes to err is human, and to human is to exaggerate. I've been guilty of many exaggerations in my posts, and a lot more take-my-head-off-and-smash-it-onto-a-drum melodrama. This, however, is no exaggeration.

Do you have an 11-year old in your homestead? Does he skate like Evan Doherty and drive you crazy like a Kenyan matatu with his occasional falls off his prodigious pedestal? Maybe your kid even says the times table to the nth power? Impressive, aye? Well meet Richard Turere and get a bit depressingly impressed.

At the age of 11, I had made out with - and told on - about 11 girls since kindergarten and gotten over them. At 11, Turere had faced LIONS; conquered, gotten over them and all!!!.  I kid you not, Samson. And no, ladies and lions do not have any similarities. Save for the retractable claws. 

Here's how the cradle of brilliantkind did it. Without any knowledge of electronics or advanced art in science, Richard faced the possibility of losing his responsibility and livelihood as a cattle-herder in the plains of Kenya to the Man Eaters of Kitengela. Impossible odds, no? How about learning that he actually cared about the lions almost as much as he did his cattle, and did not see them as expendable creatures? Impossibler odds?

Well if anyone embodies possibility, this idea worth spreading is the young Turere. He came up with a system of dancing lights using a car battery and bike indicators, strategically lined along his homestead's fence. All this from the observation that lions did not like [read 'scampered off like little kitties'] at the sight of a flickering torchlight. And in this simple innovative way, complicated as Kenyan politics for a kid who shoulda been doing his tortuously impractical 8-4-4 homework, Turere avoided this:

Lion project - The face of predation

by using these:

                          and has now, at 13, graced Brookehouse Schools with his presence here:

Photos of Turere and the Lion Light from @PaulaKahumbu's post, WidlifeDirect

Food for thought, that, Mr List-all-the-problems-Kenya-has-NEVER-the-solution. Mrs Oh-My-Nailpolish-spilled-over Oooh-that'll-make-a-cool-tweet! 

Ati the T in T-Pain stands for Teddy? Natsing! Turere patented #Winning long before we had the hashtag! He now also joins FabLab. Inspired yet? I'll hazard a guess it's either that or utter standing ovation while inwardly green as a pea pod.

With great Responsibility comes great Power: Thoughts from @paulakahumbu's #TEDTalentSearch

Be honest...you smugly clicked on the link to correct the error in my heading. No? Ok...then you must have known that I was trying to pull some wool over your eyeballs. That not it either? One last shot at it then...third time charm and all - you just knew that with such a title the post would HAVE TO be interesting. No?

Well in whichever case you'd be disappointed. Because it's not an error. I'm not in the fabric business, so no wool here either. Maybe just a hint of fabrication. And of course I'm not here to tell you anything you don't know. So how could it be interesting?

She needed - and still needs - no introduction. Yet like the TED@Nairobi MC, I feel the need to introduce her. She shouldn't have had to - and still doesn't have to - care so much for the world YOU live in, yet she makes me want to share the sentiment. Every single one of the four times I have spoken to Paula Kahumbu this past month.

Her calmly clenched fist punched the air at Braeburn, cool lull of nature filled the silence in the hall as she projected her passion for the ecosystem to a captured audience. All that was missing in the picture was a broom, preferably a Nimbus of Firebolt, perhaps an invisibility cloak and headless Nick or two red-haired troublemakers, et voila. 

Paula's brilliance imbued the #TEDTalentSearch wavelength with such ferocity that I could bet you no-one dropped a gram of litter all day the next day. Her plea for a balance between mankind and wild-kind was so infectiously affectionate that I for one felt sorry for the lions killed in Maasailand. Much in spite - and malice - of the fact that they encroached on the morans's homesteads and got what was coming their way. Spears...and one man's poison.

"Lions are a National Symbol for Kenya." Paula, during a talk at Pop!Tech - Camden, 2009. 

I am certain she intended to complicate our understanding so - the understanding that there are two sides to encroachment on nature. That much as the lions were in the wrong place at the sharp pointedly wrong time, that land was once theirs to roam freely in. 

My freshman year communication skills lecturer said, in 2007, that we as listeners should not be swayed by our perceptions of anyone as they give a talk. I have never begged to, but I feel the need to differ with her today, all of 5 years later. Because with Paula, it's impossible not to flow with perception when you lend her a stage. 

Chief Nyamweya's work as captured by @afromusing, TED@Nairobi

Because with Paula, it's not a matter of power coming with responsibility. She takes responsibility everyday...and everyday, her power to change the world rises to greater heights. She on many occasions calls former President Moi's burning of ivory in the eighties "a massive global political statement."

She is wrong.

How? Here's how. Paula Kahumbu is THE "massive global political statement". Even without trying to be. Because she does not try to be.

Inspiring Kenyan Youth: @AWellToldStory - Thoughts from #TEDTalentSearch

A "text-savvy" continent. A superhero. The man; behind a mask of routine as a reporter, wielding superhuman ability to reach and change lives; telescopic vision, carrying the world around him on his shoulders. And...wait for it; he's not Clark Kent. This isn't Kansas, Smallville. He's African. This is Kenya, to be precise.

He got on stage with one goal in mind. To change the future with one story. That story. The same story relished by 62% of school kids in Kenya. A story of taking responsibility...of taking action, not tossing around blame. A story of courage. A story called courage.

As Rob Burnett got off the stage, it was hard not to think man this guy's good. Not just the fact that he totally demolished the stage with a crisp, timely, innovatively designed presentation full of well-balanced graphics. It was more the fact that he spoke about an idea already spreading more than the darkness seems to at Kenya Power. 

From Well Told Story: A good comic makes you laugh or cry and it opens up your heart and your mind to new ideas. 

Shujaaz. The Swahili version of a pre-antisemitic post-Mad Max Bravehearts. Maybe with a little less gore and tragedy; at least in the man-kill-man-in-senseless-close-quarters-rusty-jembe-acting-as-a-blade-combat sense. 


Shujaaz is the story of a young Kenyan comic book character turned live action figure cum DJ. DJBoi, sorta like some Kenyan bloggers and tweeps I like to call Mass Anone (anonymous), airs his own progressive mindset change agenda from the comforts of his makeshift radio station. Where he beats many slacktivist citizen journos is in his viral self leadership initiative. Influencing the people physically around him to change for the better.


This reminds me of  post I just read, from one of my students at True North Leadership College:

Excerpt from Nixon's post at Student's Thoughts

This despite all the trauma and hardship he faces, like many of his fellow students, living in the Nairobi slum. Like the creative team at Shujaaz fm, he has not let the world dictate his ambition; he defines his own purpose in life.  This is a story bloody well worth telling. An idea truly worth spreading. 

And a bright young man rearing to have a go at the world. 

Semantix: Doreen Baingana's Stories Out Of #TEDTalentSearch

When it comes to storytelling, Doreen Baingana is paralleled by few in the region, and admired by the rest.

Doreen is the author of Tropical Fish, an acclaimed collection of 'introspective and personal' short stories intertwined artfully into one historically accurate blend of life. The book won an array of accolades in 2006, including but not limited to the AWP Short Fiction Award and a Commonwealth Prize.

Her talk was on the power of words and language, and storytelling as a way to shift perceptions. It was a stroke of brilliance on TED's part, whether conspired or incidental, that she followed Dayo's inspiring talk on lighting up the dark continent. It was a case of 'repeat mindblows':

It may be arguable, but perhaps no one speaker on Saturday would better have been suited to talk about the power of words than a respected author whose every sentence leaves you powerless when she means to evoke the sentiment, and powerfully inspired whenever her paragraphs snip at the frays of your reason. 

"Doreen Baingana has set a goal as a writer to “complicate the negative narrative of Africa.”

                                                                                     10x10act.org 

And complicate it she certainly does, forcing you to walk in her character's shoes; and enjoy the experience. Listening to her, I went back to my final year at Varsity.

In my fourth year of Publishing and Media Studies at the Moi University, my lecturer introduced a concept I found quite intriguing. Metropolitan Language Centres, where young Kenyans can learn to speak their own languages, and understand their own cultures. He proposed that this sort of education could then be transferred all through the nation, by mandating that at a stage in their development, children go on a 'National Student Exchange' program. Brilliant!

Doreen Baingana Reads from Her Book Tropical Fish

The Power of Language as a tool for personal development is even better illustrated in Neuro Linguistic Programming; this approach to communication, personal development and psychotherapy, created in the 70s, has often been misused. The documented connection between thought, language and behavioral change leaves practitioners fully-equipped to bend the wills of their subjects by manipulating words. While this may yield desired results, for instance in rehabilitation centres, the same knowledge has been used to cause destruction.

A @madayo Africa: Thoughts from #TEDTalentSearch

She was eloquent...coherent...an evident display of talent, if not the Scout Motto, Allzeit bereit - Always Prepared. 

Dayo Olopade's opening talk was a credit not only to her own principle and overall philosophy as a journalist and author, but to TED's insight and knack for spot-on pragmatism. She was, on stage, as she is in person, the very essence of  an idea worth spreading. 

Having met her at Baba Dogo last year - where we both volunteered during the Kuweni Serious 125/100 project - it seemed only fitting that her presentation on lighting the dark continent had the onus of opening the forum. She did not disappoint. 

Projected behind her was the picture of a row of children, bare-foot, in blazers and shorts. Their torsos appeared headless, the picture having been cropped to their shoulders; an illustration, Dayo commented, of the story the world seems to want to tell about Africa. It brought back a quick flash of the #SomeoneTellCNN debacle, where meanings and messages seem to deliberately get lost in translation.

Dayo's Twitter Profile:
Happy Belated Bday

Her presentation reminded me of a conversation I had recently at a Rotary meeting with a young medical doctor. She criticized my venture at the time, the Kenyaspirants.com initiative, saying that we can peddle hope and change as much as we want to, and go as far as offering free newspapers nationwide geared at educating the Kenyan electorate; but in so far as their own livelihoods do not dictate choice, and they have no food, no access to proper sanitation...then the result would be the same. Fruitlessness.

Shifting mindsets is the only way forward, not only away from the victim mentality, but also from the copycat ideology that innovation seems to take in Africa, where we focus less on our own problems, and more on innovative ideas from the West:

'The African focus should shift [from formal systems] to informal systems [such as] JuaKali...'

This is the story we should be telling. One of advancement for all, and positive ethnicity; of fair, smart politics, oxymoronic as that may sound.

 TED Fellow in the making, this Dayo...and that's only the beginning.

An array of Responses to Dayo's Talk

Ideas Worth Spreading: Thoughts from #TEDTalentSearch

Borrowed from Tom and Jerry Free Games

I pride myself in being one of the most randomnest Kenyans in the world. So when Ida Ng'ang'a from XpertUs gave us - me and legion of thought - a random call on Friday afternoon, inviting us to the TED Talent Search, we jumped at the opportunity like Tom on Jerry. 






In case you have no idea what TED's all about, here's a brief eye-opener from the gods of all things knowledge. 

Wikipedia: TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading."

Google Search result: (www.ted.com) TED | Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world. 

The talent search, on Saturday 5th May, promptly began at 5:00pm at the Braeburn High School, Lavington Suburb. Only 4 days earlier, Kenyan blogger Brenda Wambui had monologued on her twitter timeline, talking about Nairobi as the Silicon Savannah:

This right here is an idea damn well worth sharing. For free, at least for the blogger's perspective. How much it's gonna be worth for you to implement, however, is for you and your legion of thought.

The event clashed with an array of other worthwhile initiatives, including, but not limited to: the Bloggers' Association of Kenya Awards at the Serena Hotel, the reloaded Night of a Thousand Laughs, and as one tweep noted, social conversations with fellow drivers stuck in traffic that rainy evening.

Kicking off the ideas was one of the TED talent search guys  [whose name I did not quite get; the brilliant @Ngendow would, however]. He talked about how TED started based on Technology, Entertainment and Design, but has now grown into the undisputed best source of ideas worth not only spreading, but brilliantly executed in implementation. My words; he was too modest to actually say what he no doubt already knows.

In line with all the inspiration that night drudged up for me and many of my friends present, I'm doing 24 short posts this week; thoughts on the ideas generated from one action-parked night at Ted@Nairobi, that began here:

checked in here:

and ended thus: