My sister and I paid a visit to the elephant orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya. I guess it’s technically the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, but most people generally just call it the “elephant orphanage.” I had been to the nearby Nairobi Safari Walk before, which also has an orphanage, but this is a whole new ball game. Baby elephants are the cutest!
We set out from Nairobi on December 22nd at a breakneck pace — our sights are on Malawi, and we have two weeks to get there and back. By bus! It’s really far, but we’ve been to most of the cities in between before, so it doesn’t matter if we blow right through them.
Other than the first leg (Nairobi to Arusha) we weren’t quite sure on the route to take to get to southern Tanzania. Most of the reviews and blogs we read said to steer clear of Dodoma (capital of Tanzania) route due to crappy roads, so we figured it’d be a good bet to head directly to Moshi then ask around there. We learned pretty quickly that, from Morogoro, “barabara ni lami mpaka South Africa” (the road is tarmac all the way to South Africa). Haya, twende Morogoro basi (alright, let’s go to Morogoro then).
Yesterday I happened to speak with some representatives from the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) at an event promoting local music in Kenya. I was shocked to learn that, in Kenya, music works are granted copyright protection for 50 years after the death of the composer. I’m neither a musician nor a lawyer (so maybe I don’t “get it”), but it certainly seems like there is something wrong with that legislation.
For example, let’s say I’m twenty-five years old and I publish a song in the year 1900. If I die in 1960, at the age of eighty five, my copyright would have just expired this year (2010). Exactly whose interests is the copyright protecting fifty years after my death? Keep in mind, the song would have been published 110 years ago! Do you know what people were doing in Kenya ~100 years ago?
