When Kenya’s founding father Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978, Daniel arap Moi took over and what followed were dark days for Kenyan politics. This affected not just academia but also the creative arts, especially the written word.

Kenyan publishing was reduced to school texts and reprints of literature books, earmarked as high school examination set books. Popular literature was dead and there were no new literary works.

Popular magazines such as Viva, Playboy, Drum, Joe Magazine and True Love, that offered interesting urban writing that related to the socio-economic realities of the day, shut down for reasons ranging from political to commercial.

Outside Kenya and the region, the world was turning on its head, and the issue of commitment to “proper” literature perished with the introduction of perestroika in the mid 1980s in what was then the USSR.

By the late 1980s, there was political agitation in Eastern Europe that eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990. The world would never be the same again.

Fast forward to the year 2000, and Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan who had dropped out of the School of Business at the Transkei University in South Africa, wrote a winning essay that launched him into creative journalism. He went on to win the Caine Prize for African Literature in 2000 and launched the literary journal Kwani? in 2003.

Binyavanga’s quest before he landed the idea for Kwani? was self-discovery and the creation of a career for himself as a writer. Outside the accepted literary traditions, which cherished only a handful of texts for scrutiny in English classes, Binyavanga started a literary fire in which university departments of literature are engulfed.

Kwani? later spawned Kwani Trust, dedicated to nurturing and developing Kenya’s and Africa’s intellectual, creative imagination through strategic literary interventions.

The writers in the Kwani? tradition read and enjoyed the likes of Joe Magazine despite being children of the same people who wrote and published the magazine and who belonged to an older generation.

In Binyavanga’s words, “Joe Magazine mixed high and low and had tight versatile writing.”

In marking the 10th anniversary of its existence this month, Kwani Trust will launch Dust, a new novel by Yvonne Odhiambo Owuor, the winner of the 2003 Caine Prize for Literature with “Weight of Whispers.”

I know many readers in East Africa who are waiting for the critics’ reviews to decide whether the book would come to mean to Kenyans, what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun means to Nigerians.

Kwani Trust, albeit belatedly, joined other institutions, agencies and organs all over the continent that promoted books and provided platforms for writers.

Back to Kwani?, many lovers of the written word on the continent admire and read the journal, which has been published in Nairobi since 2003. They note that the journal was not started by towering literary and intellectual giants like professors Bethwell Allan Ogot or Ali A Mazrui.

According to his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place (2012), Binyavanga Wainana, was surrounded by entrepreneurs in architecture, the hospitality and music industries, and this inspired him.

Whereas mainstream journals looked for academic standards and liberating ideologies, Kwani? was satisfied with capturing the readers of Playboy, Drum, True Love, and mass-produced magazines that depended on the advertising industry provided the exemplary framework.

Thousands of copies of new journalism, fiction, experimental writing, poetry, cartoons, photographs, ideas, literary travel writing and creative non-fiction were produced and they met a ready and willing clientele.

The English-speaking West Africans though, eschew colonialism and neo-colonialism, and have not thrown away standards against which they judge literature, drama and the arts. Their tastes and standards are very much universal but at the same time they have profound respect for their indigenous cultures.

The idea behind Kwani? then was to counter pressures of economic realities that face young writers and editors who drop out of school and universities to survive by writing.

The battle-hardened literary critics who condemn the quality of writing in the journal forget the innovative spirit of the literary upstarts who, because of their resilience, have grown up to become world class writers.

Wainaina and another unconventional Kenyan writer Tony Mochama are not graduates of English and literature departments; they were not exposed to a proper literary education nor mastered Western standards of literary criticism and creative writing. They do not show a depth of knowledge of African culture either beyond names of members of their family trees.

They have to tinker with it and, oftentimes, copy and paste the West and jigsaw Western culture to ours. They have, however, forged ahead with something they can call theirs and succeeded in pushing Kenyan literature to new levels of productivity.

They have worked so hard that they have developed a sense of impatience with the canonical and pioneering writers like Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Wole Soyinka. They argue that African literature needed the fresh air the young writers breathed into it.

It needs to be written in better English and capture the realism of the life around us: “The elephant in the room is the novel,” says Billy Kahora, the managing editor of Kwani?

“These writers look untutored to an unaccustomed eye; they operate on their own, without the help of university lecturers and teachers of English and literature by using unorthodox methods, but succeed in capturing the interest of readers and successfully sell their literary products to a market that cannot be reached by time-honoured creatives.

The majority of these cultural entrepreneurs find a welcoming market in Kenya’s towns and they compete for it with their allies in architecture, the music industry, fine arts and sculpture. But most of them are eager to write off older writers and critics who are mostly based in public and private universities.”

In the 50 years of Africa’s Independence there have been journals like Black Orpheus (Nigeria), East Africa Journal (Kenya), Transition (Uganda), Ghala (Kenya) and Zuka (Kenya).

Universities have had their own journals and literary magazines: Penpoint (Makerere University), Umma (University of Dar es Salaam), Nexus (University of Nairobi), which re-baptised itself as Busara. These journals lacked proper promotion and fell by the wayside.

Black Orpheus, East Africa Journal, Ghala and Zuka may have stood out as launching pads of careers for writers like Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Jonathan Kariara and Grace Emily Akinyi Ogot, Rebeka Njau, Lydia Nguya, and Margaret Ogola.

But most of them are so awfully disadvantaged by inadequate funding, that although they are much better edited and have excellent content and are contributed to by writers who show commitment and dedication to the liberation of our continent, they find no ready buyers. This is where Kwani? beat them all at their own game.

As much as Kwani? has catapulted writers like Yvonne Odhiambo Owuor, Uwan Akpan, author of the best-selling short story collection Say You Have One of Them, and resonates with writers all over the world, the journal targets low-brow readers.

The older generation of writers in Kenya were encouraged by the works of Ulli Beier and Gerald Moore and Eskia Mphahlele, to exploit the words and images around them.

Although their experiments did not bring a lot of commercial gain, they provided the foundation on which the new writers have built their writing.

The writers in the Kwani? tradition celebrate each other without asking questions, much like Communists, while we in the universities have critical standards through which we help them to produce better products.

But for how long can Kwani? writers remain hostile to university-based literary critics? One may argue that since 2012 Kwani? has involved scholars in their manuscript project, but this is only as far as the literary competition is concerned.

This is the one-off prize for unpublished works from African writers on the continent and the diaspora.

The Kwani Trust in Nairobi is as good as the Chinua Achebe Centre where Binyavanga worked. The former is not a centre for “old writing.” Binyavanga says that Kwani Trust seeks to promote global African arts for the new generation just as the Chinua Achebe Centre and for that matter the contributions of literature departments cannot be underestimated.

Chris Wanjala is a professor of literature at the University of Nairobi.