Living In Kenya — Where I Can’t Get Paid for Writing on Medium!
I live in Nairobi, Kenya — A prime city in a country that has a literacy rate of 82%. We are a country of well-read, intelligent minds with an opinion about everything under the sun. Nairobians, especially, are people with an intrinsic curiosity about everything which leads us to all sorts of information awareness — and nosiness, too.
There’s nothing we don’t know about politics — Because it’s discussed everywhere: in Java, in the matris, in hallowed university halls and even when queuing for public bathrooms. Apart from politics, we also know what the neighbors shout about, what a porpoise is, who Steve Irwin was, why Barrack Obama should visit again, what Oprah is reading and why the economy is about to collapse (or so most Kenyans think).
With so many opinions, a new — or somewhat new — talent has come to the fore: Writing to Talk. Now don’t get me wrong, there are many many Kenyan authors who have written some brilliant works — but this new creed of writers is different. And here’s the thing, I’m one of them.
We want to talk about things like women empowerment on the continent. We want to give our opinions on who actually did go to space. We want to write about why our country is a volcano waiting to erupt. We wish to discuss scalability in our tech sector. We wish to try to empower our readers to think beyond what they already know to the beauty of everything that they don’t.
We want to say what we think, and we want people to hear us. We want to curate our content so we can have a global voice. We want to be separate entities from our politicians, greedy or straight.
And we wish to be seen not as the hungry, starving people who are always portrayed thus in the global media, but as a group of individual citizens who have what it takes to play an important role on the global stage. Oh yes, and we want to do it all the Kanairo style. Which means we want to do it — and be paid for it.
Because here’s what Kenyans love the most: Money. Whether you’re a Mkikuyu, Mluo, Mwindi or any of the other seventy plus tribes living in Kenya, you know it and you love yourself for wanting it: Money. I have yet to find any Kenyan who either:
- Doesn’t have some sort of side-hustle going on, or
- Doesn’t talk about wanting or having or earning in at least one new conversation with a stranger, or
- Doesn’t daydream about being rich just to show off to their neighbors how rich they are at least once a day.
If you’re a Kenyan and you deny any of these, well then, you’re just lying to yourself. :)
So what happens when writers like us take it to Medium , where hundreds of thousands get paid for the same sort of stories we write? Where, in fact, people from ‘approved countries’ tell our stories of what’s happening in our diaspora? Well, it’s obvious, ain’t it: We take our productivity and use it where it matters: In content mills.
In a bid to make money, writing Kenyans turn to Upwork and the like to make some dough. So rather than have your articles with your voice on a platform that’s global and should be able to pay everyone (Kenyans can withdraw cash from Paypal, you know?), we settle for earning peanuts on content mills.
So here’s my beef today: Why, when Medium is a global platform that should be able to take care of all its writers’ needs, do we Kenyan writers shut down our voices? Along with Kenyans, other countries with prolific writers such as the Philippines, Indonesia,India and South Korea suffer the same fate. As a global platform, all voices must be equal — but on Medium, some are more equal than others — only because they get paid for it.
Worth starting a petition for? Let’s discuss it in the comments section. :)
