Nairobi — You have heard of Binyavanga Wainaina, the Caine Prize winner in 2002. You have also heard of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Caine Prize winner 2003. It is true Kenyans are reading. And more, they are writing.

They are even researching on reading habits. In the just concluded Nairobi International Book Fair it was noted that not less than six Kenyans have been nominated by the prestigious UK-based Caine Prize. Two have brought the prize home. And Kenyans are amazing storytellers, just as much as they are runners or talkers.

A recent research, led by award winning writers, Binyavanga Wainaina and Yvonne Owuor, sent out a list of questions to determine the reading habits of Kenyans. According to Muthoni Garland, who co-ordinated the research, one of the questions yielded a kind of summary response for the frantic question: Why Read?

The list goes: It improves the intellect for inspiration; for entertainment ; it helps to build language skills; builds mental alertness; it's a means of a lifelong education process; for personal well-being and lastly - to pass exams.

Their survey revealed that many people read because it is a cheap, affordable thrill, it breaks an awkward silence when conversation fails. While some people read to "cram" quotations and authors, which they use to impress guests and visitors.

One bemused respondent said reading increases sex appeal, and that, in his own words, "it is cool for chiles to see you holding a kabook like War and Peace and quoting some Shakespeare, like the quality of mercy is not strained."

A patriotic one said reading accelerates economic development of a country. He went on to say, "those entrusted with economic development should at least be able to read the reports they write." The question is no longer whether people read or not.

With such a long list of tangible benefits of reading, it is becoming redundant to ask: "why read?" It has been asked before, why should a nation of people quite often exhausted by the challenges of daily living, of making sense of the confusion of things, bother to read?

Why read beyond the exam syllabus when there are elections to be won, children to be born, and property to buy? "Our Vision 2030, strategy papers and even political manifestos, who reads them?

Why can't they be simplified and turned into stories our children can identify with? Our administrators are busy planting flowers and watering gardens instead of expanding libraries and supporting our struggling publishers.

We want a beautiful city, but we are creating a nation without thinkers," says Dr Kisa Amateshe, who teaches literature at Kenyatta University. Amateshe continues: "There is still nothing to make your average Kenyan race to the nearest bookshop or library and start carting lorry loads of books away.

Look at where the 6.2 per cent economic growth is going. Not to authors and publishers, but to the supermarkets and political thugs."

He throws his arms despairingly at a passing shopper whose trolley is bulging with everything else, but a book.

But for the likes of 2003 Caine Prize winner Yvonne Owuor, reading is first and foremost a culture thing. Her entire family are book lovers. "I had no choice but to learn to read by age four," she says. "It was the way I could communicate with my parents.

I would ask for food by citing the insights of Dr Spock, for example. Weekend visitors to our home quickly learned not to panic and call the police after they had banged the gate, shoved in the bell and scaled the walls and still heard nothing but the sound of silence, interspersed with the shifting-shuffling of rustling leaf like sounds.

By deduction, experience and time, our visitors soon understood that all this time the whole Owuor family were in residence, reading assorted books. We were not ignoring the visitors," she adds.

"Our house was already full of characters and ideas that would enter our family life, just as if they were new family members. It was a culture thing, rather eccentric. But this should not be the case." The study reveals that there is a connection between reading and development that society tends to ignore. Muthoni says it is this lack of reading that makes us, both leaders and subjects, "sycophants, tribalists and partyless people."

She notes that during the 2005 referendum debate, it was obvious that many people condemned or accepted the contentious Constitutions without as much as looking at any of them. "One leader is quoted as saying that if the party leader had read it and condemned it, it was no use reading it.

And those who read either of them did not bother to explain the differences for us to internalise. So what the hullabaloo was it all about?" she quips.

Reading feeds the imagination. Wide reading cultivates mature reasoning, cautions against blind, thoughtless action, it also instills a sense of independence and freedom. It teaches us to respect the views of others, to know and shun selfishness, to accommodate others, but not necessarily to go with them.

Binyavanga Wainaina continues the debate: "The leadership crisis in Africa is that we have closed our books and gone to the streets to scream and scavenge.

We have limited our thinking and reasoning, because we are not reading enough. And those who are unable to imagine for themselves are imagined for by others. So we have no vision worth talking about.

"We may shriek against colonialism. We may wail against tyranny, we may mock SAPS and decry Afro-pessimism. But that is all we shall do, if there is no one to imagine a transcending paradigm," he adds. None of our leaders have something close to a grand-scale imagination for this country.

Show me one whose story of Kenya will make you weep, sing and dance with inspired energy. What does it take to tell that story? Certainly more than reading. The absence of a sense of the power of the imagination embedded inside words is obvious in all leaders.

Can one talk of a cultural renaissance, at least in African writing? I asked Al Kags, who runs an online poetry journal.

"African writing is experiencing an international renaissance. A new generation of African authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ismael Beah, Laila Lalami, Doreen Baingana, and Uzodinma Iweala are raking millions in foreign exchange as the rightful fruit of their writing labours.

We can write just as well. Kenyans are amazing storytellers. But somehow this talent is not being published or promoted at home. Those with talent are writing, but mainly for foreign masters. This denies Kenya the quality of local writing that is easily available elsewhere.

"We must all promote high quality writing, nurture a writing and reading culture locally, while also attracting international audiences."

Writers have urged the government, publishers and other stakeholders to adapt more aggressive policies in promoting reading and writing. It is no longer enough for them to keep drumming the message that Kenyans "should" read.

"To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting."- Edmund Burke.

"Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body." - Joseph Addison.

"When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before." - Clifton Fadiman.

"No matter how busy you think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance." - Atwood H Townsend.

"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere." - Hazel Rochman.

"A library is a hospital for the mind." - Unknown.

"When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading just as I did when I was young." - Maya Angelou.

"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors." - Henry Ward Beecher.

"Reading furnishes the mind only with the materials of knowledge; it is thinking that "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." - Mohandas Gandhi.

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all." - Abraham Lincoln.