Who is this poet who is sweeping everyone in town with his SpokenWord events? Wamathai is his name. An accountant by profession, Wamathai is a gifted poet who started out sometime mid last year posting his poems on a blog. With some clever use of Twitter, he has managed to create a loyal following among poetry enthususasts in town. Did you hear about the #Paragasha event that took place sometime this week? I have read some of his poems on his blog. Simple but powerful is all I can say. Nothing like unfathomable abstractness, incomprehensible stylistic devices or convoluted techniques of language use. It’s simple, plain English. I do sense that their power lies in the rhythm the words create. But all this is subjective. Read them for yourself and make your own judgement. And what about this….

#SwaWed Thing

Actually, it was a day, Wednesday to be precise, that was set aside for #KenyansonTwitta to crack up and start tweeting in fluent Swahili: #SwaWed. Now you get it! Started out some 3 weeks ago but seems to have fizzled out of late. It wasn’t easy tweeting in Swahili. Some tweeps did not get into the flow right away (Hi there @Astar_TheLight and @soulsystah and us too). And there were so many grammatical errors on many of the posts. To give you a little glimpse into the problems we had that day, check out the following update:

@mahasi @rimbui @njesh316 @Ngendo87 Kwani mipango yenu ya jana yalikuwa kukiongea Kiswahili hapa? #mpangowakando 11:30 PM Oct 5th via web [http://twitter.com/KenyaMicroblogs/status/26528714788]

That was us. But in came @rimbui who quickly corrected us:

@KenyaMicroblogs Habari kaka, Kiswahili sanifu ni "Mipango "ilikuwa" sio "yalikuwa" ....LOL #SwaWed11:35 PM Oct 5th via TweetDeck in reply to KenyaMicroblogs  [http://twitter.com/rimbui/status/26528906792]

:-D.