Issue #1 of Kwani?, the journal of contemporary African literature.

Several of my previous blog posts have mentioned Kwani?, the Nairobi literary journal/publishing network dedicated to building contemporary African literature. My interest in the publication was first aroused by the contrasting literary scenes in Uganda and Kenya. While FEMRITE, based in Kampala, Uganda, is a strong local writers’ organization, I never found a literary magazine like Kwani? in Eastern Africa, which offered everything the local and foreign reader could want: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, illustrations—all dealing with the world that is Kenya from a hundred different perspectives.

So, when I was first introduced to Kwani?, I could not let go. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about the role of literature in the development of a national psyche, particularly in post-conflict situations. Words have a way of immortalizing moments that are otherwise easily swept under the rug forever. In this sense, we are indebted to the artists that immortalize these events and ensure their recognition in the long-term, whether political, economic or social. As Kahora says, “writers are society’s conscience.”

In Kenya, this has been particularly important. The post-election crisis could have become just that: another post-election crisis. Previous elections have been bloody. Previous elections have been rigged. Previous elections were built on empty promises and on bought votes. But through literature like Kwani?, perhaps there is an acute awareness among the public that this is not just another post-election crisis. This was the final straw.

The last two issues of Kwani? focused on the post-election crisis, making an indelible impression on readers. The goal was to record in pictures, cartoons, poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction what happened in the first 100 days of 2008. As Kahora says, “One of the big problems we’ve always had is a problem in recording momentous events in this country which leads to a widespread amnesia; such a record, makes sure there is no excuse, at least from a literary community’s viewpoint, for the kind of behaviour [during the post-election crisis].”

Consequently, Kwani? also wants to focus on the younger generation of Kenyans and their aspirations for the country as ‘leaders of tomorrow.’ Kahora says that the next issue of Kwani? will focus on “youth expressions—as a way of going deeper into the 46-year-old malaise [Kenya] is suffering…re-evaluating who we are and what directions we are heading in.” Closer to the 2012 elections, Kahora says Kwani? will use the magazine “as [a] way of making people remember.”

Among youth, the coming generation of Kenyan leaders and doers, Kahora says that Kwani? represents “a younger un-texted space that falls outside of official narratives, that can be written into being.” Kenya is a country saturated with stale political narratives that never seem to change, published day to day in the big local newspaper, The Daily Nation. Kwani?, though perhaps only drop in the bucket in the long-run, offers youth, and other Kenyans, a means of looking beyond the mainstream and writing out a new idea of Kenya. Perhaps, through this process, some of these aspirations will become reality.

And now that I’m on staff, it is more clear to me than ever why I’m doing what I’m doing. But every day I come to work, check the trap for mice and adjust the tarp that prevents the rain from falling on my desk, I hope that our volunteers, interns and poorly paid writers realize that no one is living large off the money we are not paying them.

Which is why I have so much trouble understanding how so many of Canada’s big-money magazines can justify asking students and new graduates to work for free.

I hope you’ll be inspired to take action against such magazines after reading the inaugural column of our media columnist, Arthur Johnson. As editor of Canadian Business in the 1990s, Johnson created the magazine’s celebrated internship program, which, despite its modest wage, remains one of the country’s highest-paid magazine internships.

The sad fact is that This Magazine cannot afford to pay even modest wages. Our writers make one-tenth the standard industry rate and our summer students make minimum-wage. The money you spend to buy the magazine goes a tremendous way to allow us to pay even that.

But think for a minute what might happen if the money Canadians spent each year to buy big-money magazines that rely on sweatshop labour—we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars—instead went to support independent titles like This Magazine, which desperately want to pay a living wage, but can’t.

If that happened, small magazines like This might not be so small anymore. We’d be able to invest in our writers, editors and artists, to pay all our interns, rather than just the summer students, who are the only ones to qualify for federal wage subsidies.

Until that happens, though, we will continue to rely largely on volunteer labour, on those writers and artists who contribute to our pages or behind the scenes issue after issue because they love the magazine, believe in the cause or just plain like our company.

We truly wouldn’t exist if it were not for them, which is more than those big-money magazines can say.

When Canadians read or heard disclosures about how Nike footwear was being produced in Vietnamese sweatshops by people who work for next to nothing in appalling conditions and at an inhuman pace, we were outraged enough to join an international clamour to force the company to deal only with responsible and ethical contractors.

And when news reports reached Canada about how Wal-Mart sourced much of its cheap merchandise from China, where it is often produced under even worse conditions than Nike footwear used to be in Vietnam, we also demanded that the world’s largest retailer be more scrupulous in choosing suppliers.

But go to any newsstand in Canada and choose a Canadian magazine at random, and chances are excellent that you will have fresh evidence of a cynical, widespread scheme to apply the methods of the sweatshop to young, vulnerable people who are so desperate to join the ranks of the employed that they will actually compete with one another for the opportunity to work for free.

What’s especially repugnant about this to me, a journalist, is that magazines, which should be exposing such ugly, shoddy practices, are gleefully embracing unpaid internships to cut costs and increase profits, and are proud of it.

Lynn Cunningham, a professor of journalism at Ryerson University who has tracked the spread of unpaid internships since the early 1990s, says that most magazines across Canada have such programs, and that not paying people to work has spread to broadcasting and to some community newspapers which do not have labour unions and collective agreements.

These unpaid arrangements began in magazines in the United States during the last recession and, like a plague (think of it as “Cash Cow Disease”), soon spread to Canada. In no time, some of the most successful magazines in Canada, including Toronto Life, Saturday Night, Flare, Vancouver and many others were generously offering to let young, unemployed would-be journalists hang out, fetch coffee, check facts, suck up to editors and, if they were very, very lucky, maybe even write a story or two which would be published under their byline.

(Many small magazines, like this one, offer unpaid internships not to generate large profits, but because they genuinely have no money. Such magazines are often a labour of love, and many have no paid staff at all.)

It’s probably not surprising that other magazine departments have been inspired to emulate some of Canada’s most celebrated editors. Cunningham observes that at some places, it’s now possible for the truly gullible or desperate to serve as unpaid “circulation interns.”

I think we condone the sleazy practices of large magazines in the mistaken belief that they are, at worst, akin to being victimless crimes (hey, it’s kids from affluent families who are willingly working for free, after all).

But that, of course, means that less affluent kids are more at risk than ever of being squeezed entirely out of a vast and important segment of our mass media.

Cunningham also notes that by embracing unpaid internships, editors are training publishers “to believe that editorial people will work for free.” It’s a notion that many publishers are all too willing to believe, and to act upon.

I don’t think you, the reader, should have to put up with this. Magazines, remember, are extraordinarily sensitive and vulnerable to pressure, properly applied.

Let me suggest that you make inquiries immediately about whether magazines you read employ unpaid interns. If they do, make note of advertisers in these magazines and inform the advertisers that you intend to boycott their products if they insist on doing business with publishers who engage in practices that would not be condoned, even in most parts of the Third World.

And find out whether your favourite magazines are receiving money from the federal slush fund supposedly set up to help publishers weather the onslaught of competition from the south, which never happened. Write to the feds, and demand that they withdraw such support from any magazines that don’t pay their people.

Finally, get in touch with the editors and publishers themselves. I doubt that it would make a damn bit of difference, but it’s the right thing to do.