As a young girl growing up in Nairobi, I resented having to read Ngugi wa Thiong'o in school. I did not mind reading the books; I minded having to read the books: a distinction all readers will understand. Nationalism and principle are all very well, I thought, but it is a tad wearisome to have to keep contemplating the evil capitalist wabenzi and the endearingly outmatched but heroic Kenyan peasant, constantly, page after dutiful page. These were characters who collectively formed a throng in wa Thiong'o's books – he wrote them by their multitudes. Crowds of them, beautifully presented in one guise or another, spouting suitably impenetrable (because it was literature) yet clearly understandable (because it was propaganda) parables at each other, littering the pages with their sly but worthy demonstrations of the evils of class inequality and the faults in Kenya's post-colonial complacency. Did these characters never stop to smell the flowers, or even step on them? Petals of blood were all very well, but what about the real ones used for romance and guilt-abatement, the ones which lovers lay on? Had these characters no time in their lives for frivolous thoughts, satisfying sex, preferences in hair oil, or even stains in their underwear? Were they all so unremittingly dedicated to ponderous issues that even their noon-day dreaming had social significance?

It is many years later now, in 2008, and all over this country the bloodstain-handed, machete-wielding, matchbox-sporting fruits of the seeds that the evil wabenzi (who loll self-importantly about in the pages of wa Thiong'o's books) have been sowing all these years have finally ripened and are falling to the ground. As they fall, they make loud crackling noises, like the sound of dry twigs burning, or a small child's doll on fire. When they hit the soggy earth beneath them, they burst open and release more of their seeds, which immediately send out new greenly eager shoots and gnarled grasping roots clawing for purchase. They are feeding on blood, these plants. We are having quite a season of harvest, here in Kenya, and we can expect more bumper crops in the future as a result of our relentless gardening: our carefully composed tending, and richly composted tilling, of hatred, ignorance, poverty and fear. I have been a student most of my life: a school of any description is my natural environment. I know all about learning, I thought; I've been engaged in it, one way or another, for over thirty years.

On Thursday the 3rd of January 2008, at exactly 17:17 hours, according to my Toronto-speaking computer clock, my real education finally started. Binyavanga Wainaina wrote to some people what was really quite a confused and chaotic email message, full of imperative demands for pieces for publications based in Europe and in Nairobi, with urgent deadlines and bewildering protocols. There were calls for bios and strictures and timetables for what could go on blogs and what could not: it was as if a forest of strangely aggressive but wordy trees had suddenly sprung up around me. This was the first email I received from the Concerned Kenyan Writers collective, and I will treasure it for the rest of my life. Binyavanga Wainana asked us to write, and I didn't even know half of who “us” was. I still do not; I have never met most of these people, or spoken to them, still.

Binyavanga exhorted us to watch our word count, get our bylines straight, lengthen and then shorten the scope of our texts, mind our grammar (were we not in possession of manuals on style?) And then he, quite without irony, asked us to...'say what was in our hearts.' That is a quote. It seemed to him that we should say what was in our hearts when our hearts were on fire, when our hearts were bubbling and burning with grief and with desolation: he thought that we should nevertheless sit down at our desks and offer our weeping souls to an uncaring muse as a sacrifice, as a bribe to allow our thoughts to take form. So we did. We dragged our pens through the ink of our country's undoing, and wrote, pausing to cry, to feed children, to wander around our homes in a daze, and to listen for police bullets outside, or for the sounds of machetes being sharpened; and then we sat down again to peer into the red mists of our grief and anger and to note down their monstrous forms and their laughing demons. We looked at what our eyes did not want to see nor our minds wish to comprehend, so that we could identify the flavour of its threat and the texture of its destruction; we held the taste of dead babies in our mouths, so that we could describe them, with love.

Kenyan writers did what it is they had been born to do, plundering their own personal losses and looting their families' lives for languages, for images, for characters and for conversations; writing through fury and sadness and madness and fear. Blog posts, editorials, poems, opinion pieces, SMS texts, sub-heads, and even fiction: if a thing exists in short textual form, the Concerned Kenyan Writers have probably produced one of whatever it is by now. The other writers probably thought that they were writing for their country, they probably thought that their words were intended for 'out there'. They did not realise that all their outpouring was teaching me, that I was inhaling it in greedy life-giving gulps and grabs; that I looked at my computer screen every morning before I looked out of the window, because I liked the view better on-screen. I have a wonderful garden here in Nairobi, yet, it is still unable to compete. These fellow Kenyan writers have been feeding me, sustaining me, shaming and humbling me and making me laugh out loud for over a month now: for forty-four days and some change.

Every day, a new lesson, a new reason for respect. Every day, a new insight, a new human connection made. Every day, a sentence of such beauty that it stops me in my tracks; perfectly formed clauses, words which shimmer and dance, metaphors that glitter from within. I have been learning, every day, since the 3rd of January, 2008, that Kenya has produced writers whose voices, in their cacophony, their chorus, and their defiant contradictions, have swelled to a symphony of resistance. From Muthoni Garland's unwavering sense of character and moral authority to Simiyu Barasa's bracing wit, from Stephen Partington's acerbic yet strangely tender poems to Yvonne Owuor's soaring prose, from Andia Kisia's trenchant intelligence to Jackie Lebo's practical sensitivity and Shalini Gidoomal's beautifully calibrated sense of both language and justice: over 30 Kenyan writers have produced almost one hundred pieces of excellent, technically masterful, emotionally breathtaking work. After Daudi Were finished gathering us into a google group and sorting out all our computer problems, he then wrote one of the best pieces himself.

Some of this work is featured in this issue of Farafina. These Kenyan writers have given, freely, to the world as well as to Kenya, another sort of bounty, another sort of harvest, another sort of lush and flowering gift, grown in Kenyan soil. These writers, also, are the fruits of Kenya's forty-five years of becoming, of our sowing and weeding, of our tending and our shaping and our care. In these fields, though, we reap while rejoicing: we pluck and we pick with gladness and with thanksgiving. There are many kinds of gardens in Kenya now, many kinds of planting and pruning, many plants with beautiful seeds, and with strange and wondrous blooms.

The pen is mightier than the sword, but a computer is much better. We write, so that the Kenyan soul may live.