- Some Africa.News.com readers might have seen a baffling essay by Julius Sigei and Solomon Waliaula in the Kenyan newspaper Saturday Nation of May 1 (“East Africa is a literary dwarf because of poor teaching”). The piece was a response to an April 16 essay by Evan Mwangi in the same newspaper, titled, “Why East Africa still remains a literary dwarf." East Africa fared poorly in the Africa portion of the 2010 Commonwealth Literature Prize pageant and the trio smell a crisis. Mwangi's hurried piece made little impression, but Sigei and Waliaula's essay set my teeth on edge, for several reasons. First, speaking as a former English teacher, I reject the wr…