{"id":17964,"date":"2021-09-26T07:44:15","date_gmt":"2021-09-26T07:44:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barazalab.com\/?p=17964"},"modified":"2023-09-04T05:40:30","modified_gmt":"2023-09-04T05:40:30","slug":"monkey-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tuwele.com\/baraza_update\/monkey-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Monkey Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greetings, friends:<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking about\u00a0<\/span>that monkey<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that shut down the Kenya Power grid a few years ago. It\u2019s strange, the way the mind can wander and then fixate on something as random as that. The vervet monkey apparently jumped over the electric fence at Gitaru Power Station and landed on a transformer, tripping it. That set off a cascade of events that resulted in shutting down the entire national grid, and the country losing power for three hours.\u00a0<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>We have so many random stories like this in Kenya\u2019s history that I think deserve a deeper treatment, more exploration, even expansion into comics, animation or even a podcast. Imagine an animated film exploring the fictional backstory of this intrepid monkey — what\u2019s her backstory? Who were her influences? What was she running from as she risked her life to jump over this fence? Or was it something more malevolent, a revenge mission perhaps?<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>I asked these questions\u00a0<\/span>on my Twitter account<\/span><\/a>\u00a0last week, and I was surprised by the response and engagement it generated. I took that as confirmation that as a country we have so many \u201cunfinished\u201d stories that are just crying out to be told. It is said that Kenyans have short memories, but perhaps this is less a sign of apathy and more the result of carrying around so many unfinished story threads. Because so many story fragments remain incomplete, the best we can do is set them aside, not because the story is over but because the story is in limbo.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>As storytellers, we must always work to our stories having some measure of completeness, which is to say even if we may not know everything there is to know about a story, we have actually put in everything that we know, for now. This doesn\u2019t mean that everything has to be longform; even a short story can be complete. But you can\u2019t get around this. Audiences can tell when we\u2019ve given it our all, and when we\u2019re just breezing through and skimming the surface, for whatever reason. Otherwise, the unravelling of various and disparate stories will inevitably threaten to unravel us too<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

As usual, here\u2019s:<\/span><\/p>\n