Frazer Hay in conversation with Kimani Njogu, as part of 10 Stories for 10 Years.
I met Kimani Njogu online, speaking to him from Scotland while he sat in his office in Nairobi. He had been introduced to me as Professor Kimani Njogu, but almost immediately, he asked me to call him simply Kimani. Titles, he said, create distance. They are uncomfortable for him.
It was a small moment, but a revealing one. Over the course of our conversation, I came to understand that distance is something Kimani has spent much of his life trying to reduce: between knowledge and communities, between language and policy, between marginalised cultures and national recognition, between past and future.
Kimani is the founding CEO of Twaweza Communications, a Nairobi-based civil society organisation working across public policy, media, culture and sustainable development. Twaweza, he explained, means ‘we can’ in Swahili. The phrase could not be more fitting. It carries the confidence, practicality and collective spirit that seem to run through his life and work.
With support from the British Council’s Cultural Protection Fund, Kimani led the Bajuni Cultural Heritage Project, Safeguarding the cultural heritage of the Bajuni dialect of Swahili, oral traditions and poetry. The project worked to protect the language, poetry, oral traditions and cultural practices of the Bajuni community in Lamu County, whose heritage has been threatened by climate change, violent conflict, migration and marginalisation.
It was a remarkable project. Through Twaweza Communications, local partners, teachers and community members, Bajuni language learning materials were created for the first time. Textbooks for Grades 1 to 3 and teachers’ guides were approved by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development, allowing Bajuni to be taught in schools for the first time in the community’s history. More than 140 pieces of oral heritage, including proverbs, poetry and traditional practices, were recorded and made available online. Community members were trained in digital documentation. Poets found new audiences. A language that had been pushed toward the margins began to re-enter public life with dignity.
For Kimani, this is not only about saving words. It is about safeguarding knowledge, identity and possibility.
‘Language transmits culture,’ he told me. ‘It is the vehicle. It is a way of entering into histories, entering into knowledge systems, entering into dynamics of social relationships.’
That belief began early.
Kimani was born in Kenya’s Rift Valley, in Kericho County, on a settler’s farm owned by an Irishman, Mr Stuart Hamilton. Kenya was, of course, still shaped by the long afterlife of British colonialism. His father had moved there to work on the farm. Years later, Kimani managed to trace Mr Hamilton, then in his nineties, in Ireland. He found his phone number, sent a message, introduced himself, and the two exchanged memories by text. The exchange gave Kimani real happiness. It was another act of connection: a child of a farm worker reaching across time to the former farm owner, not to erase history, but to remember it with clarity and humanity.
When Kimani was nine, his family moved from the farm to Kipkelion, then known as Lumbwa, a small township with shops, a railway station and a multilingual, multi-ethnic population. His father, Geoffrey Njogu, became a businessman. His mother, Martha Njeri, raised eight children with warmth, intelligence and quiet discipline.
The household was full of structure and purpose. Every Friday at 7.30 pm, the family held a meeting. Everyone gathered to discuss the future of the family. Decisions were collective. The children learned early that individual ambition was tied to shared responsibility.
‘Decision-making was a collective process in our family,’ Kimani said.
That lesson stayed with him.
Education was central to the family’s life, though money was limited. His parents sacrificed to ensure that all their children had the chance to learn. Kimani was a gifted and restless student, hungry for books, questions and challenge. He read anything he could find: fiction, adventure, novels, stories that opened other worlds.
‘Books were really something I relished immensely,’ he remembered.
After primary school, he attended Taita Secondary School, a small day school close to home. It was a poor community school, built through local contributions, a place where families with limited means could send their children. There, one teacher changed the course of his life. His head teacher, Herbert Aura, understood him. He saw the restlessness, the need to read more, to do more, to be challenged beyond the pace of the classroom. Before his exams, Kimani asked if he could study alone. Herbert agreed. He gave him a small room near his office, on the condition that Kimani still attended morning parade and physical education.
For three months, Kimani studied by himself. He became the school’s best student.
‘I will never forget that opportunity,’ he said. ‘If he had denied me that opportunity, I would not be the person I am now.’
There is another story from this period that feels almost emblematic. Kimani’s mother would sometimes padlock him inside his room from the outside, so that friends passing by would see the lock and assume he was not there. Inside, Kimani could read undisturbed. When he was ready to go out, she would return and let him out. It is a wonderful image: a mother conspiring with her son to protect his hunger for knowledge.
His favourite place to read was a hill near the township. They called it Blue Hill, though Kimani remembers it as green, covered in grass, with a few trees and space to think. When he had a good novel or play, he would go there to read and rest.
That image stayed with me: the young Kimani on a green hill called Blue Hill, reading in the open air, already living between place, language and imagination.
Yet his path was never only about personal achievement. After secondary school, he could have continued his own education immediately. Instead, he made a promise to his father. He would train as a teacher, begin earning, and help support his siblings through school. Later, even when he had the opportunity to continue to a bachelor’s degree, he delayed again to honour that promise. It was an act of sacrifice, but also of continuity. His education would not be his alone. It would help make space for others.
Eventually, while working as a teacher, he studied privately for his A-levels, passed, and entered university on a scholarship. At Kenyatta University College, then linked to the University of Nairobi, he studied literature, Swahili and language. He excelled, completing his degree, then a master’s, before winning a scholarship to Yale University, where he completed a PhD in linguistics.
The journey is astonishing: from a community day school near Kipkelion to one of the most prestigious universities in the world. But Kimani tells it without self-importance. He speaks instead of teachers, classmates, family, friends, mentors and obligations.
At Yale, another important connection formed. Before leaving for the United States, Kimani had met Professor Anne Biersteker, who encouraged him to apply. Around the same time, while travelling by boat to Lamu to teach Swahili to American students, he sat beside a young man called Athman Lali Omar. They began talking. Athman was from Lamu and was also on his way to Yale to study African Studies and anthropology.
The coincidence is almost novelistic. One was from Lamu, the other from inland Kenya. One Muslim, one not. One is an archaeologist, one a linguist. They became roommates in the United States.
Through Athman, Kimani learned more about the poetry of the Lamu region, particularly Vave, a form of farmers’ poetry. They talked about poetry, language and community, comparing traditions and histories. Years later, when the Cultural Protection Fund application round was announced, Kimani remembered those conversations. He remembered that Athman had said the poetry was disappearing.
That memory became a responsibility.
Kimani returned to Lamu to explore whether he could help record and revive the poetry. But once there, the work expanded. It was not only the poetry that was at risk; the Bajuni language itself was endangered. The community had experienced marginalisation and exclusion. Its oral traditions, practices and knowledge systems were under pressure. Safeguarding the language meant safeguarding much more than grammar or vocabulary. It meant protecting a way of knowing the world.
The Bajuni Cultural Heritage Project emerged from that realisation.
For Kimani, the Cultural Protection Fund was crucial because it understood the importance of community-led heritage work. He speaks of the partnership with warmth and respect. CPF, he said, offered structure but also trust. It allowed Twaweza Communications and its local partners, including the Shungwaya Welfare Association and the Swahili Resource Centre, to respond to local realities.
‘It has really been a pleasure working with the Cultural Protection Fund,’ he told me. ‘It has been one of the most powerful projects I’ve ever undertaken.’
What mattered most to him was the Fund’s respect for communities.
‘I have felt the CPF’s immense consideration and respect for communities,’ he said. ‘Whatever we do, we must listen to communities and what their priorities are.’
That approach allowed the project to grow in several directions at once. It documented oral traditions through audio-visual recording. It created an online archive. It trained community members in digital documentation. It worked with teachers to write and teach in Bajuni. It supported poetry, public performance and advocacy. It brought the language into the curriculum. The result was both practical and symbolic. For the first time, children could hold Bajuni textbooks in their hands. For the first time, the language could be taught formally in schools. For the first time, the community saw its own language recognised within the educational system.
Kimani described seeing children holding those books as a moment of deep fulfilment.
‘I don’t think I would have wanted anything more than that for the Bajuni community,’ he said.
This is cultural protection in one of its clearest forms: not simply recording what may disappear, but creating the conditions for transmission. A language enters a classroom. A child reads in a language that carries home. Teachers learn how to write and teach it. Poets perform again. A community begins to see itself differently.
One participant described the project as invigorating the community and shifting perceptions of Bajuni cultural identity. That seems exactly right. Recognition is not a decorative act. It changes what people believe is possible.
Kimani’s wider life has been shaped by this same commitment to possibility. After Yale, he was offered opportunities to stay and teach in the United States, including at Yale and New York University. He considered them seriously, but chose to return to Kenya. He believed he could have a greater impact from home. If he stayed in the United States, he reflected, he might succeed as an individual. But from Kenya, he could contribute to communities, mentor others, influence policy and help build institutions. It was the same logic that had shaped his promise to his father: achievement mattered most when it opened doors for others.
‘I see myself really as a social justice worker,’ he said. ‘An individual committed to fairness, to equity, to a better world.’
That vision eventually led him to leave formal university employment and establish Twaweza Communications. He did not leave knowledge behind; he widened its field. He continued to work with universities, supervise students and publish, but also moved into civil society, media, public policy, culture and community-based work.
‘I belong to a school of thought that understands the potential of knowledge being developed beyond the university corridors,’ he said.
This idea of the public intellectual is central to Kimani’s life. He writes, teaches, mentors, convenes and serves on boards. He contributes to organisations working on health, human rights, indigenous culture and social change. He coordinates the Creative Economy Working Group, a network of more than thirty organisations in Kenya. Again and again, he returns to the importance of enabling others to speak, act and create.
His earlier work in radio drama reveals the same instinct. While still studying, he wrote some of Kenya’s most popular and award-winning radio soap operas. Later, he trained writers in countries including Saint Lucia, India, Madagascar, Pakistan, Namibia and Tanzania. These were not dramas for entertainment alone. They explored behaviour, social values, gender, health, inclusion and change. Storytelling, for Kimani, is not separate from development. It is one of the ways societies think about themselves.
Perhaps that is why the Bajuni project feels so connected to his life. It brings together language, story, education, community, policy and justice. It protects heritage not as a museum object, but as a living system of memory and meaning.
At one point, Kimani said something that felt close to the heart of the Cultural Protection Fund’s work:
‘We are protecting the present, but also the future.’
That is what the Bajuni Cultural Heritage Project has done. It has created resources for children now, but also for those who may come decades from now searching for a language, a poem, a proverb, a way of understanding the world that might otherwise have vanished.
The project has also sparked a new ambition within the community: the dream of a Bajuni Resource Centre. That dream feels significant. Cultural protection, at its best, does not end when a project closes. It leaves behind confidence, relationships, tools and new forms of collective imagination.
By the end of our conversation, I understood why Twaweza means ‘we can.’ It is not a slogan of easy optimism. It is a philosophy formed by a life of collective effort: parents who sacrificed for education; siblings whose futures were linked; teachers who recognised potential; friends who opened doors; communities whose languages deserve recognition; partners who work through trust rather than transaction.
Kimani told me that for him, relationships are never only professional. They are personal. If people connect at that level, they can work together with respect.
‘It is not just implementing a project,’ he said. ‘It is about the connections that I make with people.’
This is what gives his work its particular force. His commitment to language is also a commitment to people. His commitment to cultural heritage is also a commitment to justice. His work with CPF has not only safeguarded a dialect, poetry and oral tradition; it has helped a community see that what it carries is valuable, teachable and worthy of the future.
And perhaps that is the quiet power of Kimani’s story: from the green hill called Blue Hill, where a young boy read novels in the grass, to classrooms in Lamu where children now open Bajuni textbooks for the first time, the same belief persists.
Knowledge belongs with people.
Language carries culture.
And when communities are trusted to protect what is theirs, something remarkable can happen.
We can.
