So there I was at the writing boot camp on the grassy calm and tranquil foothills of the majestic Mount Kenya - the second highest mountain in Africa. This is the country of Kenya! And I was invited to have a "conversational workshop with the young East African writers".
Though I am a South African by birth but I have spent considerable times in East Africa, in particular the countries of Tanzania and Kenya. In one of those times in 2006, August to be precise, I met and personally conversed with President Barack Obama. He was in Kenya to deliver a lecture on Effective Global Leadership - Moving the World Forward. That was one of those visits President Barack Obama made to Kenya. The first of these visits was back in 1986 while he was a young innovative community organizer in the South Side of Chicago.
At the boot camp my purpose was to centrally focus my "conversational workshop" on biography and memoir writing. After all I was invited to the boot camp because I recently wrote a book on the story of President Barack Obama. So I thought it will be worthwhile and beneficial to the delegates to pitch the workshop at the practical level giving practical insights and personal perspectives of the process I followed myself when writing the book for the whole period of 4 years.
I discussed and engaged the boot camp participants about a lot of things covering a wider field. But there were two key central practical lessons that I made sure that the participants take from the boot camp into their consciousness.
The first key practical lesson was to expound on the difference between a biography and a memoir. The two are related but distinct. To be sure and to use my own common sense and discrimination I expounded that a biography is the essentials about a person - the distilled virtues of a person and how can others learn from it. Like the book I recently wrote about President Barack Obama Moving Forward: The President Making a Better America and the World the main purpose of the book is to provide a concise comprehensive constructive account of President Barack Obama's diverse and wide ranging life story that effectively condenses into his Moving Forward Vision for America and the World. In the book many things have been omitted, compressed and telescoped. No book can be all-inclusive. This was a particular special story on President Barack Obama that I chose to tell. My presuppositions and my sympathies colored my choice and text.
Generally speaking, reading a biography the reader should aim off for the breeze: take what he or she wants, leave or adjust the rest. The reader must not accept, but must be critical and question. The biography writer is not the person who knows but a professional who conduct research, focus and interpret the facts. And all interpretations are a matter of discrimination and prejudice colored by the biographer's outlook.
A biography differs from a memoir because a memoir is the most intimate and private of the two. It is a mere presentation. It is full of innermost personal thoughts and feelings, raw as they are - without going into labor for perspectives and context as the biographer might seek to do.
The second key practical lesson I wanted the boot camp participants to get was that people - or readers, their senses are naturally wired to the present times. People's feelings are attuned on present time, not the past or the future. During the writing process even though the writing might be historical or futuristic it must also be contextualized into the present times.
The present times must find itself in the history or the future the author is writing about. Writing history or biography or writing about the future is not a sum but a synthesis, one that goes on changing and accruing even while observed. The past, writes the French historian Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch, is by definition a fact that nothing can modify, but the knowledge of the past is a thing in process which changes and progresses as people progresses.
Chris Kanyane is the author of Moving Forward!
My personality and perspectives is inspired by the 18th century French Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was Rousseau who provided Europe with slogans for return to nature during the times of the industrial revolution when everybody was excited about machines and the power of them.
Rousseau argued for a shift from reliance on the head, (that is reason) to a shift to the heart and pure nature and the simple life.
Rousseau called for the human beings that are genuine in a genuine world. He advocated and kindled a novel appreciation of natural beauty, wild life, forests, landscapes, mountains and valleys. Natural life, argued Rousseau, is spiritually fulfilling, enchanting and cultivating people.
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