Reading Culture or Doing Culture?
Sometimes, all it takes for me to spill out paragraphs and paragraphs of emotion is one simple sentence I read. It triggers so many other things. Like right now. I just read a quote that is apparently by Albert Einstein. I say apparently because you know how it is these days. You can think up anything and claim any famous person said it. Anyway, this was the quote: Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Kenyans have always been accused of not reading, not having a reading culture. I disagree with this premise by the way. The street vendors with sackfuls of books and others spread out neatly on the ground with people hunched over them in proof. Also, you are here reading this, you are proof. We could say Kenyans have a short attention span but then again that would be a lie. Kenyans will read long things all day, every day. They just won’t read long boring things. You want proof again? Biko Zulu. 🙂
Most of the popular websites in Kenya are content sites, news sites, gossip sites. That is all reading. Not to mention gutter press right on the streets. Kenyans love reading so much, bloggers are coming up every single day because there are people to read. Kenyans read. They just don’t read boring stuff that has no bearing whatsoever on their lives. My dad will read newspapers and educational magazines and whatever else makes sense to him. My mum will read motivational books. My brother will read some strange engineering manuals I have never even bothered looking at. My other brother will prefer the newspapers’ sports section to catch up on Arsenal, comic books and funny novels that make him laugh out aloud in the night. My baby sister, well, she will grab anything that tells her stories that she has never heard of before, story books with pictures. Of late she cannot seem to put down this particular Children’s Bible that has been handed down generations.
Anyway, in the end you have to do more than read. If all you do is read and do nothing, then you might as well not read. If you are reading to be in the cool crowd, the deep crowd, stop. Just like the quote above suggests, reading is not an end in itself, just like education is not. You have to get out there and do. Just like reading the Bible should not end there. Read on people, just don’t spend all your time reading and doing nothing, clicking links on Facebook and Twitter and reading all the time at the expense of your job. Priorities people. In fact, if you clicked this link and you are supposed to be doing something else, kindly pinch yourself.
Just do it!
(And before we knew it, March was gone.)