Friday, November 25, 2011

TEDxDAR 2011: One Last Thing...

Here's what we've been waiting for: the Speaker line-up for TEDxDAR 2011. It is a very exciting gathering of individuals and I am very much looking forward to the presentations. But I do want to point out one speaker in particular whose presence has got me all knotted up with excitement. Bi Kidude is the stuff of legend.

At the moment I am meandering my way through Shaaban Robert's 'Wasifu wa Binti Saad' or Binti Saad's Biography, about the Taarab musician Binti Saad who mentored Bi Kidude. These women's life stories are incredible, and you can imagine that to see/experience the continuity between a literary work that is part of Kiswahili canon and the real life people who ARE the story is all kinds of mind blowing. How often is history, and literature, quite literally alive for you?

Bi Kidude is also a bit of a feminist/libertarian heroine to me, though I doubt that she would use those terms to describe herself. If I had just one quarter of the je-ne-sais-quoi this woman has, the world would be my cocktail.

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