Kelele, the birth of an African Bloggers’ Conference

According to Hash at WhiteAfrican, Kelele was born out of connections made at TED Global in Tanzania last year, when 25+ bloggers from around Africa were brought face-to-face for the first time. The announcement for the official launch was made a day after BarCampAfrica.

What is Kelele?

Kelele will be an annual African bloggers’ conference held in a different African city each year and run by an organising committee in that city. Kelele will be held for the first time in August 2009 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Why Kelele?

Kelele is the Kiswahili word for “noise”. The conference will be gathering African bloggers in the tradition of historical African societies where everyone has a voice, where society has room for debate and discussion.

With too many voices marginalised or simply ignored in Africa society today for a variety of reasons, it is believed that technology in general and grassroots media tools such as blogs in particular represent the most powerful way in which to give Africans back their voice. Hence, KELELE will make a powerful, positive, inspirational noise that will be heard across the continent and beyond.

The theme of Kelele ’09 Nairobi is “Beat Your Drum”, which was chosen in order to connect the traditional Africa method of getting messages across vast distances – the talking drums – to the 21st century and the tools we use today to get our messages across via blogs and the Internet.

When will Kelele ’09 Nairobi take place?

The organisers have tentatively booked the 13th – 16th August 2009.

Here is a summary of the proposed programme:
Day 1 August 13: Arrival in Nairobi and official opening
Day 2 August 14: Conference Day
Day 3 August 15: Skills/Training Day and Outreach Day. Official closing
Day 4 August 16: Sight seeing / departure

The conference would seed the next generation of bloggers and advocates of open dialogue in Africa – which is why one day will be focused on having the top 100 bloggers around Africa training new bloggers in whichever host country it’s in.

Also, The African Bloggers’ Awards will be launched – which aims to recognise the top blogger from each African country. The winner from each country will be invited and sponsored to attend Kelele ’09 Nairobi. The conference is hoped to be called “Kelele” wherever it is held.

My Opinion

Since the idea is to bring African bloggers together and give everyone a voice (too many voices are marginalised or simply ignored in Africa), I’ll suggest that the African Bloggers’ Conference should promote the voice of the country where it is being held. So for a bloggers’ conference in Lagos, Nigeria, for instance, it might be called ARIWO – the yoruba word for “noise”.

This would connect the people in the host African country together, since the conference is tagged with their traditional name for the word “noise”, and would also contribute to spreading the African traditions and cultures across the continent and beyond. Besides, people would be proud when their native language is used as the tag of the annual African Bloggers’ Conference.

You can follow Kelele on Twitter here. http://twitter.com/kelele

Popularity: 22% [?]