Spoken Word Poetry in Kenya: Evolution from the Physical Stages to Digital Circuits

Mapping Kenya's Spoken Word Poetry

It was a breezy Saturday evening in Nairobi, and the small amphitheater at the Alliance Francaise Gardens was packed. The anticipation from the audience was palpable as the lights dimmed and the microphone crackled. A tall, slender figure stepped onto the stage, adorned in a flowing African-print kimono and a heavily beaded necklace. The figure walked to the center stage and took over the microphone. The voice vibrated across the room and the audience soaked in the unique style of performance that was pushing poetry to new horizons. As the audience snapped their fingers in unison, Kenya's spoken word poetry revealed itself both as a performance and a revolution. The stage was a platform for a powerful and multilayered performance, where a blend of Swahili, English, and Sheng (a very specific dialectal remixing of Swahili, English, and other regional tongues), coexisted with rhythm, gesture, and political critique. It was through such experiences that Kenyan spoken word poetry proved to be a heterogeneous and dynamic cultural form, one that resists singular definition and thrives through multiplicity.¹

This contribution emerges from my sustained scholarly engagement with Kenyan spoken word poetry across several research projects, which trace spoken word poetry as a dynamic cultural form shaped by performance, transnational exchange, and digital mediation. I draw on my broader scholarly trajectory while remaining grounded in lived experience, as an audience member, interviewer, and participant-observer within the spoken word community.

Orature, Performance, and Global Mediascapes

Writing about Kenyan spoken word poetry requires turning to theories of African orature, performance studies, globalization theory, and digital culture scholarship, particularly because in this body of work, meaning is produced through performance, embodiment, audience interaction, and sociopolitical context rather than through fixed textuality alone.

Kenyan spoken word poetry exemplifies Ngugi Wa Thiongo's insight that orature and performance are sites of cultural struggle, especially because, as he argues, African expressive forms must be understood as historically embedded practices, inseparable from questions of language, power, and resistance.² Through linguistic hybridity, code-switching, and performative address, poets contest colonial and postcolonial hierarchies while reasserting African modes of storytelling and critique. Importantly, spoken word poetry in Kenya does not exist as a single, authoritative text; instead, each performance is reshaped by its immediate context, reaffirming Ruth Finnegan's observations on variability and adaptation as defining features of African orature rather than signs of aesthetic instability.³

Spoken word spaces in Nairobi function as public arenas where poets negotiate belonging, articulate dissent, and cultivate collective affect.⁴ These performances do not merely reflect social realities; they actively constitute publics through dialogic engagement, audience response, and ethical address. In this sense, Kenyan spoken word poetry operates as both artistic expression and social practice.

Performance studies further provide an additional critical lens. Diana Taylor's concept of the repertoire, embodied knowledge transmitted through performance, helps explain how spoken word poetry sustains cultural memory beyond the written archive.⁵ Spoken word performances function as repertoires of affect, protest, and belonging, especially in contexts where formal archives have historically excluded subaltern voices.

Arjun Appadurai's concept of global cultural flows and mediascapes helps name the particular contours of connectivity that emerge from Kenyan spoken word poetry. Appadurai's framework explores how Kenyan spoken word poets encounter, reinterpret, and localize global performance forms, from African spoken word and hip-hop to Caribbean dub poetry, through uneven but productive exchanges.⁶ These influences do not displace local traditions; rather, they expand the expressive possibilities of orature, enabling Kenyan poets to participate in global conversations while remaining grounded in local histories.⁷

Digital media theory further strengthens this framework. Henry Jenkins' notion of participatory culture helps explain how spoken word poetry thrives on social media platforms that enable audience interaction, remixing, and co-presence.⁸ Scholars of African digital culture similarly emphasize that online spaces function as extensions of everyday cultural life rather than ruptures from tradition.⁹ Kenyan spoken word poetry's migration to digital platforms, accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, demonstrates the resilience of orature under changing technological conditions.

Recent scholarship on African digital culture has increasingly challenged technologically deterministic accounts of social media by emphasizing the ways local communities appropriate digital infrastructures for their own cultural and political purposes. Yet Kenyan spoken word poetry does more than adapt to digital media: it actively configures digital platforms through the aesthetics, ethics, and performative practices of African orature. YouTube, Facebook Live, and TikTok become not merely sites for the circulation of poetry but new stages on which oral performance is remediated. Localized, and collectively re-imagined. In this sense, digital media does not simply transform African oral traditions; African orature also transforms the cultural possibilities of digital media.¹⁰

Historical Emergence: From the 2000s to the 2020s

Spoken word poetry in Kenya is a form that has grown in the cracks of social, cultural, and political change. The history of spoken word poetry is hybrid, improvised, and layered. Its emergence over the past three decades can be understood as a gradual movement, from scattered, often experimental spaces to a recognizable cultural practice that now commands both local and international attention. This evolution should be understood not as a departure from African orature but as one of its contemporary transformations.

Early Currents, Institutionalization, and Visibility: 2000s to 2010s

Kenyan spoken word poetry is rooted in long-standing traditions of African orature, political performance, and communal storytelling, yet its contemporary manifestation crystallized more visibly from the 1990s through the early 2000s. This period marked a decisive shift from page-bound poetry toward embodied, performance-centered forms staged in urban public spaces. As Finnegan argues, African oral forms are historically adaptive, shaped by changing social, political, and economic conditions.¹¹ Kenyan spoken word poetry emerges within this adaptive continuum.

Spoken word poetry began to crystallize into public cultural practice by the early 2000s. The launch of Kwani? Open Mic nights at Club Sounds in Nairobi created a regular stage for poets, musicians, and storytellers. As spoken word poetry entered Nairobi night life, it attracted young audiences eager for alternative spaces of expression. Kwani? Open Mic, birthed under the umbrella of Kwani? Trust was characterized by literary experimentation and open artistic exchange. It was inclusive and informal, and anyone could walk in and sign up, and perform; it embodied the openness of Nairobi's emerging spoken word culture, privileging expression and dialogue over polish and rivalry. Great Kenyan poets like Tony Mochama and Namwalie Sitawa first tested their voices in this space.

In 2008, the founding of Slam Africa marked a significant turning point. Introducing competitive performances judged by audience response, Slam Africa foregrounded clarity, immediacy, and stage presence. Imani Woomera introduced the concept of the poetry slam to Kenyan audiences by transforming spoken word poetry from a primarily educational and entertainment-based performance practice into a competitive art form in which poets performed before audiences and were evaluated through a structured judging process. A significant milestone in this historical trajectory were the premier Slam Africa competitions in Kenya, which consolidated spoken word poetry as a visible and competitive cultural form. The results of the premier Slam Africa event placed Timothy Mwaura in first position, Dan Oballa in second place, and Dan Mwangi in third place.

Dan Oballa's performance poem, Why Should I Say Goodbye to Mau Mau, posted by Goethe-Institut Subsaharan Africa on October 29, 2013, was framed around Kenya's 50 years of independence (uhuru) and exemplifies the political and aesthetic commitments of this period. Drawing on postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, particularly the notion that post-independence states often reproduce colonial structures of power, Oballa's poem articulates a profound skepticism towards celebratory nationalist narratives. The repeated refrain, "Why should I say goodbye to Mau Mau?", functions as both a historical invocation and a refusal to abandon unfinished liberation struggles. In line with Gayatri Spivak's concept of the subaltern voice that remains unheard within dominant political discourse, Oballa positions the speaker as a witness to systemic failures that continue to marginalize ordinary citizens despite formal independence.¹² The poem further challenges histories of political independence that fail to deliver meaningful social and economic emancipation for ordinary citizens, especially when new national elites reproduce many of the exclusions and the inequalities of colonial rule. Through the repeated refrain, Oballa echoes Fanon's argument that decolonization is not complete when political power merely changes hands; rather, true liberation requires the transformation of the social and economic structures that perpetuate inequality and oppression.¹³ The poem therefore questions whether Kenya's independence fulfilled the aspirations of the anti-colonial struggle or simply replaced colonial rulers with a postcolonial elite.

As the Slam Africa event expanded in the following years, it became more formally organized under the stewardship of a committee of poets led by Ian Gwagi. A pivotal moment in this evolution was the relocation of performances to the Alliance Francaise Gardens, a prominent venue at the heart of Nairobi's cultural life. This spatial shift marked a symbolic and practical elevation of spoken word poetry, from niche underground practice to mainstream cultural fixture. Performing at Alliance Francaise placed spoken word poetry alongside established artistic forms such as theatre, music, and visual art, signaling its legitimacy within the city's broader creative ecosystem.

This institutional consolidation directly enabled the emergence of a new generation of poets, such as Dorphan, Mufasa Poet, Raya Wambui, Teardrops, and Wanjiku Mwaura, all of whom would become synonymous with Kenya's spoken word renaissance. The term "renaissance" is used in this context to refer to the re-emergence of spoken word poetry from the margins of print poetry, underground activism, and informal oral performance into a visible, institutionalized, and culturally central practice. What distinguishes this era is not merely the visibility of spoken word poetry but its formal and stylistic heterogeneity. The poets did not conform to a single aesthetic model; instead, they expanded the performance practice across narrative, musical, and theatrical registers, demonstrating the flexibility Finnegan identifies as intrinsic to African orature.¹⁴

Dorphan's early poem "Mum Aliishia" (loosely translated from Sheng to mean "mum left") illustrates spoken word as narrative-lament. The poet has performed the poem for more than a decade across various platforms; one recorded example is his performance at the Sondeka Awards in 2020, accompanied by Edi Seymour. Performed through the persona of a young child, the poem recounts maternal absence using intimate storytelling anchored in everyday ritual, addressing the mother's absence on the child's birthday, when she would normally sing the "Happy Birthday" song. This simple image then opens up or expands into a layered narrative of pre-marital pregnancy, economic vulnerability, child displacement, and gender-based violence. Through repetition, direct address, and affective storytelling, "Mum Aliishia" transforms private grief into social critique, echoing lament traditions deeply rooted in African oral culture.

A different register appears in Mufasa's "Freedom Is Under Control," performed at Alliance Francaise Gardens in 2016. Introduced by a reggae-gospel rendition of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" by guitarist Ciano Maimba, the performance unfolds over live guitar and drums, situating spoken word within musical ritual. The poem invokes global and African histories: Chicago, Mississippi, Soweto on June 16, Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, and Steve Biko, combining these references with lines about racial violence, memories of apartheid, xenophobia, and contemporary African precarity into a single moral narrative. Through rhythmic repetition ("I heard about . . . I saw . . ."), Mufasa converts historical reference into a lived testimony, culminating in an ethical appeal that rejects militarized security in favor of love, care, and civil responsibility.

Raya Wambui's "You Work for Me" introduces yet another mode: theatrical confrontation. The recording was subsequently posted online by the Centre for Creative Arts. Delivered in a declarative second-person address, the poem indicts political leadership for corruption, misgovernance, and neglect. Through sharp enjambment, embodied gesture, and repetition, Raya reframes the citizen-state relationship, positioning spoken word as a form of participatory accountability.

These performances demonstrate how Kenyan spoken word poetry operates across narrative, musical, and theatrical registers, precisely the kind of multiplicity Finnegan identifies as characteristic of African oral arts shaped by differing social conditions and audiences.¹⁵

Digital Inflection: Amplification, Circulation, and Transnational Reach in the 2010s

If the 2000s established spoken word poetry's legitimacy through live platforms and institutional venues, the 2010s marked a decisive digital inflection, transforming visibility into amplification. This period did not replace live performance but extended it, enabling spoken word poetry to circulate beyond Nairobi's stages into networked publics across Kenya and the African continent. In Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's terms, performance remained historically embedded and socially grounded, yet it now operated within expanded communicative infrastructures that intensified its reach and political resonance.¹⁶

Several platforms that emerged or consolidated during this decade illustrate this shift. Fatuma's Voice, founded by Chris Mukasa under the auspices of the Kenyan Poets' Lounge, was explicitly conceived as a space for nurturing young voices and encouraging poetic self-expression. While grounded in live performance, Fatuma's Voice functioned as a launchpad for poets whose work would later circulate widely through digital media. Many spoken word artists who now constitute the core of Kenya's spoken word community trace their early development to this platform.

Similarly, Poetry After Lunch, hosted by spoken word poet Kennet B. at the Kenya National Theatre, provided a hybrid space that bridged institutional theatre culture and grassroots spoken word practice. By programming emerging and established poets, the platform promoted intergenerational mentorship while situating spoken word within one of Kenya's most symbolically significant performance venues.

The 2010s also witnessed the deepening of transnational collaborations, facilitated by digital visibility and cultural networks. A distinct example during this period is Raya Wambui's participation in the festival Poetry Africa 2014, organized by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. This participation exemplifies what Finnegan describes as the adaptive mobility of African oral forms, modes of expression that remain rooted in local social experience while circulating across shifting performance contexts.¹⁷ In an interview I conducted with Raya Wambui in 2016 in Nairobi as part of my MA research, she reflected on her invitation to the festival and emphasized its significance as her first major Pan-African spoken word platform. She described Poetry Africa as a formative space where she not only encountered poets from across the continent but also presented Kenyan spoken word poetry to diverse African audiences.¹⁸ In Durban, Wambui performed politically charged and socially reflective pieces such as "You Work for Me," "Define and Conquer," and "Stand Up," which foreground themes of leadership accountability, post-election violence, ethnic division, national identity, and civic responsibility.

Wambui's reception in Durban highlights the operation of what Arjun Appadurai terms transnational cultural flows, in which expressive forms travel through festivals, media networks, and diasporic circuits, acquiring new meanings without losing their local specificity.¹⁹ Wambui's performances resonated strongly with audiences because they drew on shared African political experiences while remaining firmly grounded in Kenya's sociopolitical realities. It proves fruitful to return here to Appadurai's concept of mediascapes, where cultural forms travel through uneven but productive global flows, generating dialogue rather than simple imitation.²⁰ As Wambui noted in the interview, performing these poems in Durban revealed striking parallels between Kenyan experiences and those of other African nations,²¹ reinforcing spoken word poetry's capacity to function as a shared continental language of resistance, memory, and affirmation. This dynamic affirms Finnegan's insistence that contemporary performance poetry should be understood as part of an ongoing continuum of African orature, shaped by new publics and platforms rather than as a rapture from tradition.²² Wambui's Durban performances thus position Kenyan spoken word poetry as both locally accountable and continentally legible, functioning as a mobile repertoire of resistance, memory, and ethical critique within a broader Pan-African performance ecology.

As spoken word platforms increasingly intersected with digital media, social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook transformed spoken word poetry from a predominantly live performance practice into one that could be archived, replayed, and circulated indefinitely.²³ Audience engagement, through views, comments, shares, and reposts, has become an integral part of meaning-making, bringing the elements of what Jenkins has described as participatory culture within spoken word poetry even more clearly to the fore: audiences are not passive spectators but active contributors to circulation and interpretation.²⁴

A smoother transition from the live stages to digital performance is evident in works that explicitly integrate music, multilingualism, and visual aesthetics for mediated audiences. Namatsi Lukoye's poem "Queen" provides a compelling example. Performed in collaboration with instrumentalists and musicians such as Val and Raggz, the poem unfolds amid live music, blending spoken word recitation in English with sung Swahili lyrics. In the case of "Queen," the poem is composed both for a physical audience and for the camera: pacing, musical layering, and repetition are calibrated for re-playability and emotional resonance across screens.²⁵

This kind of performance illustrates how digital platforms were more than broadcasting instruments. Instead, they actively reshaped the aesthetics of spoken word poetry. As poets became attentive to framing, duration, sound quality, and visual intimacy, performance itself evolved. Spoken word poetry began to exist simultaneously as event and artifact, as its repertoire expanded to include digitally mediated embodiment without dissolving its affective force.²⁶ The hybridity observed in earlier live performances (narrative, lament, musical sermon, theatrical confrontation), intensified in the digital form, where genre boundaries became even more fluid.²⁷

Digital circulation also democratized access without erasing locality. While it became technically possible for audiences in New York or Johannesburg to encounter Kenyan spoken word poetry, the poems' language, idioms, and political references remained grounded in Kenyan realities. Furthermore, even though the primary empirical focus of this study remains the engagement of Kenyan audiences with Kenyan performances, the potential for global visibility became an important attribute for the scene as it mattered symbolically and materially: Kenyan poets were performing their work with a keen eye to broader imaginaries across geographic borders.²⁸ As a result, Sheng intermingled with English and Kiswahili, gospel rhythms coexisted with hip-hop cadences, and performances could be revisited, shared, and contextualized across time.²⁹

In this sense, the digital inflection of the 2010s did not detach spoken word from its historical roots but extended its reach within overlapping global cultural flows. While becoming increasingly networked, resilient, and transnational, Kenyan spoken word poetry remained a locally grounded, performance-based orature. This convergence of live performance, digital mediation, and participatory audiences set the stage for the genre's adaptive response to the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic, which the next section examines.

Contemporary Era: The 2020s and the Restaging of Spoken Word Poetry

The contemporary phase of Kenyan spoken word poetry is best understood as an intensification of tendencies already embedded within the form, such as mobility, adaptability, and responsiveness to social crisis. The defining feature of the 2020s has been the restaging of spoken word poetry across convergent platforms. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated this process dramatically.³⁰ As physical venues closed and public gatherings became impossible, poets were displaced from the embodied spaces that had long anchored spoken word culture, including cafes, gardens, theatres, and community halls, and were thus compelled to experiment with digital performance. Spoken word has proven resilient because its meaning is generated through adaptable relations among voice, audience, and context.

The digital turn that followed aligns closely with Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's insistence that African expressive forms are historically situated practices shaped by struggle and contingency rather than fixed aesthetic objects.³¹ During the pandemic, platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and later TikTok became new sites of cultural negotiation. Poets like Mufasa and Dorphan hosted virtual performances and livestreamed readings that configured audience interaction through comments, shares, and real-time feedback. These networked performances can once again be understood through Taylor's notion of an expanded repertoire: embodied knowledge and affect transmitted through mediated presence rather than physical copresence.³² Yet, even as the locus of exchange shifted from the stage to the screen, the spoken word poem remained performative and dialogic.

The digital turn in Kenya's spoken word scene extended performance beyond the stage by redefining what it means to belong, to protest, and to connect. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, when public gatherings were banned and art spaces fell silent, the screen became the new stage. Many poets found themselves compelled to adapt to digital platforms both as performance venues as well as social and political spaces.

When Kenya entered a lockdown in March 2020, Mufasa Poet, one of the most recognizable voices in the country's spoken word movement, turned to Facebook Live as his primary stage. In the absence of physical audiences, he began hosting live sessions that attracted hundreds of viewers, transforming the solitude of quarantine into a communal ritual of listening and healing. Scholars of digital performance have described such livestreamed events as forms of "networked liveness," where affect and co-presence are produced through mediated interaction rather than physical proximity.³³ In one of his most viewed Facebook Live performances, titled Mufasa Live In Concert: Raising A Sun (June 7, 2020), Mufasa used poetry to condemn police brutality that accompanied the enforcement of curfew restrictions. He framed his poem as a lament and as an indictment, honoring victims of state violence while demanding accountability from those in power. The live audience responded in real time through comments, emojis, likes, and shares, turning the digital performance into an act of collective witnessing. 

Mufasa's Facebook sessions blurred the lines between art, activism, and therapy. His use of the refrain "We can't breathe even when the air is free" echoed global movements like Black Lives Matter, but he localized the sentiment to speak directly to the Kenyan experience of curfew violence and social neglect. The performance restaged the ethics of orature in the algorithmic space, reasserting the poet's role as the conscience of the nation, even when the nation itself was under lockdown.³⁴ Through these digital rituals, Mufasa reimagined poetry as a civic duty. The intimacy of his voice, transmitted through unstable internet connections, carried the urgency of street protest and the tenderness of prayer. His performances offered Kenyans a space to mourn, to reflect, and to resist together, even while physically apart. 

Whereas Mufasa used Facebook Live as a site of communal empathy and resistance, Dorphan approached the digital stage as an opportunity for technical and artistic evolution. During an interview I conducted with him in 2022 for my PhD research, he reflected on how the pandemic forced him to rethink performance both as a single act on stage, as well as a multi-layered digital experience.³⁵ He began experimenting with YouTube Live, integrating spoken word with background visuals, ambient sound, and audience chat interactions. Such experimentation aligns with Barber's recent arguments that African orature increasingly operates through "intermedial performance," where meaning emerges across sound, image, text, and digital interface rather than a single expressive mode.³⁶ In our interview, Dorphan noted that he wanted to "make poetry feel like music, like film, like something that breathes beyond the mic."³⁷ His live sessions became immersive digital performances that were half poetry and half multimedia art. The comment sections served as a running dialogue between poet and audience, creating a sense of presence despite physical distance. 

The Cases of Mufasa and Dorphan highlight how Kenyan spoken word poetry redefined performance through constraint. The pandemic and its accompanying lockdowns, instead of silencing poets, expanded their stage into new digital and transnational dimensions. Both poets transformed their living rooms into theaters and their laptops into amplifiers of public feelings. Their practices reflect what Achille Mbembe describes as rhizomatic cultural formations: non-linear, decentralized networks through which African expressive cultures circulate in the contemporary moment.³⁸ Their works affirm that digital platforms have not diluted the communal essence of oral performance; they have merely translated it into new forms of interaction.³⁹ In this sense the spoken word poet has evolved into a digital griot, a storyteller who moves through circuits of WI-FI and code yet remains anchored in the ethics of community. Whether through Mufasa's poetic activism or Dorphan's multimedia experimentation, Kenyan poets have demonstrated that orature adapts, survives, and reclaims relevance in every historical moment of evolution.

The contemporary scene exemplifies the hybrid orature that scholars such as Barber and Quayson identify as characteristic of urban African performance cultures.⁴⁰ Spoken word poetry in the 2020s collapses distinctions between oral and written, live and recorded, local and transnational. This collapse takes two linked forms. On the one hand, established performers move into larger, mainstream stages and corporate-sponsored festivals, professionalizing the form and making high quality recordings and broadcasts available to wide audiences; on the other hand, younger and grassroots poets, circulate short-form poems on TikTok and Instagram reels, remixing text, image, music, and user comments into new creative variations. It is primarily the latter practices, the short-form uploads, remixes, comment threads, and collaborative reposting, that instantiate Henry Jenkins's notion of participatory culture. Audiences on these platforms do more than watch. They annotate, duet, sample, translate, add visual edits or new audio, and spread work across networks, thereby shaping circulation, reception and even the evolving form of the work.⁴¹ Established festival performances participate in this ecosystem when they are recorded and released online in ways that invite audience interaction (sharing, adding subtitles, creating response videos), but the defining participatory instances are the platform-native practices in which users actively co-create and recombine poetic content.

Kenyan spoken word poetry has not undergone a linear evolution but a series of overlapping shifts, from the institutional and festival stages of the 2000s to the digital dispersals and networked performances of the 2010s and 2020s. Heterogeneity is the scene's defining feature, and its vitality lies in multiplicity: the coexistence of activism and romance, Sheng and standard English, live embodiment and digital mediation.

Conclusion: The Poem, the Stage, and the Nation Reimagined

From the intimate gatherings at Kwani? Open Mic to the pulsating energy of Slam Africa, and finally to the virtual spaces of Facebook and YouTube Live, Kenyan spoken word poetry has continually reinvented itself in response to shifting social, political, and technological realities. What began as an experimental art form two decades ago has matured into a dynamic cultural movement, shaping how a new generation of Kenyans imagines selfhood, community, and justice. As scholars of African performance have argued, it is precisely this capacity for reinvention, rather than stability, that sustains oral genres across historical raptures.⁴² Kenyan spoken word poetry thrives precisely because of its heterogeneity.⁴³ That is, it draws from the oral traditions of the past, the hip-hop and slam aesthetics of the global diaspora, and the digital improvisations of the present. The poets who animate this space, whether performing on a Nairobi stage or live streaming to an international audience, embody the fluid, multilingual and socially conscious spirit of contemporary Kenya.

Furthermore, the digital migration of performance during the pandemic extended spoken word's circle of orality. The spoken word poet today speaks across screens and borders but still invokes the same ancestral logic of the storyteller: to gather people, to provoke thought, and to heal through rhythm and word. Kenyan spoken word poetry, therefore, stands as both a continuation and a reinvention of the nation's oral heritage. It translates the drum beat of the past into the clicks and echoes of the digital age. It speaks with tongues shaped by multiple worlds—Kiswahili, English, and Sheng—crafting a polyphonic narrative that resists fixed identity. In doing so, it fulfills the enduring function of poetry in Kenyan life: to bear witness, to question power, and to imagine better futures. Kenyan spoken word poetry continues to bear witness, question power, and imagine better futures while demonstrating that African orature endures by continually reinventing itself across new stages, new media, and new publics.

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Beatrice Jane Ekesa, PhD, (@beatricekesa) is a literary scholar, educator, and poet whose work explores performance, identity, and digital culture in contemporary African literature. She teaches English Language Arts at Columbia High School in Richland County School District One, in South Carolina, USA, and serves as part of the district's curriculum writers' team for high school ELA. She is also a member of her school's instructional leadership team. She holds a Bachelor of Education (Arts) in English and Literature from Maseno University (Kenya), a Master of Arts in Literature, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Literature from the University of Nairobi (Kenya). Dr. Ekesa is the author of several studies on Kenyan spoken word poetry, including Heterogeneity and Performance of Spoken Word in Kenya (2016) and Restaging Spoken Word Poetry in New Media (2023). She has also completed certifications in Gifted and Talented Education, Homelessness and Poverty Education, and Bilingual Education from the University of South Carolina, USA, and she is a performing poet and a past participant in the Kistretch Poetry Festival.

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References

1. Beatrice Jane Ekesa, Heterogeneity and Performance of Spoken Word in Kenya (master thesis, University of Nairobi, 2016). Digital Repository. ↩︎
2. Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Heinemann, 1986), 1. ↩︎
3. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 2nd ed (Open Book Publishers, 2012), 48. ↩︎
4. Karin Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 67. ↩︎
5. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), 41. ↩︎
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   ↩︎
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34. Ekesa, Restaging Spoken Word Poetry in New Media. ↩︎
35. Dorphan. Interview with the author, conducted remotely via Powtoon (author in Columbia, South Carolina, USA; Interviewee in Nairobi, Kenya) July 15, 2022. ↩︎
36. Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics, 72. ↩︎
37. Dorphan, Interview. ↩︎
38. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Duke University Press, 2017), 11. ↩︎
39. Ekesa, Restaging Spoken Word Poetry in New Media. ↩︎
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41. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 3. ↩︎
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43. Ekesa, Heterogeneity and Performance of Spoken Word in Kenya. ↩︎