“We have a rich oral tradition and it’s important that we document what is happening in history poetry-wise,” she explains. “Africa has a history of a lack of documentation and we really didn’t want this to happen to our poets.”
Kaoma, 29, is part of the team behind the Badilisha Poetry X-Change, the largest online archive of African poetry, accessible via mobile phone, in the world.
The Badilisha project was originally conceived as an annual poetry festival overseen by the Africa Centre, a pan-African organization based in Cape Town in 2008. Over the following years it grew to become a powerful mouthpiece for showcasing African wordsmiths. And by 2012, the institution decided to move online in an effort to break down geographical borders and open up their diverse anthology to a wider audience in Africa.
Poetry in your phone
Following an overhaul of the site last year, Badilisha relaunched in September, making its immersive archive accessible to a broader international following through a “mobile-first” site.
It’s a shrewd move on a continent where mobile phones have revolutionized critical sectors such as education, healthcare and agriculture. Adoption of mobile phone use has been prolific in Africa with mobile data services going from strength to strength. Seven out of 10 mobile users in sub-Saharan Africa use their phones to browse the web, according to a recent report from Ericsson. Elsewhere, a study by analyst firm Ovum predicted in November that “mobile broadband connections in Africa are set to rise from 96 million in 2013 to 950 million to cover 77.3% of all mobile subscriptions in the continent by the end of 2019.”
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It’s a sentiment project manager Koama says many poets share about their inclusion in Badilisha.
“When we first started there was obviously a bit of resistance. People not understanding how being online works. Now as a society, we are more accustomed to being online, a lot of our activities are based online — we shop online — so as society becomes more comfortable with the idea of the web, so do poets,” explains the curator.
“Poets are very open to it and they appreciate having such a space there they can engage with one another.”
Badilisha is principally funded by Spier, a South African wine estate, with additional financing from applications to the government and other private institutions. And in a time when traditional publishers are shying away from printing poetry due to lack of sales, the project offers poets a new outlet for presenting their work in a digital age. But Kaoma is quick to clarify Badilisha’s position as an alternative literary publisher.
“A lot of publishers right now aren’t publishing a lot of poetry, (and) we don’t want that to be what stops us as poets from having thriving careers. I think we can exist online and maybe when people see how popular poetry really is, they can start increasing the number of books being published. I think we can coexist and work with one another.”
Tom Page contributed to this story.
