11 min read. Kisumu is not alone in using street names as a form of resistance, as a way of refusing to forget. The naming of streets in Kenya can be used as a form of symbolic resistance and as a locus for collective memory expressing group identity.
14 min read. A story of an unlikely friendship, a chronicle of the final years of the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga’s life, from the perspective of a former student activist discovered on the brink of despair and mentored into a writer.
11 min read. Award-winning American jazz singer/song-writer of East African ancestry, Somi, was in Lagos to work on her seventh studio album which will be released in the summer of 2020. Nigerian doctor, poet and music critic, Dami Ajayi caught up with Somi for Sunday brunch.
11 min read. The best efforts to find a successor to the hugely successful African Writers Series have so far failed to bear fruit while the indigenisation of the book trade has seen the neglect of the African writer of fiction, with local publishers preferring the financial safety of educational publishing. The only alternative for a writer wishing to see their work in print is to seek to publish abroad, a road fraught with a myriad challenges where talent alone does not guarantee success.
9 min read. An in-depth look at Bongo Flava’s most well-known artist, and the talents and business acumen that led to the astronomical success of his record company.
11 min read. Taarab is one of the oldest music forms in the East African region and amongst the earliest to be recorded commercially and exported. From its cradle at the East African coast arose new genres of music and a cast of iconic musicians whose influential contribution to world music continues to receive scant attention in popular literature.
11 min read. Billy Kahora is a writer of the impact of an age in Kenyan history. In his writings, you piece together the etymology and see that at soul, the stories begin in the first decade of Kenya’s independence.
10 min read. Critics of the Kaduna Book and Arts Festival-KABAFEST- claim that it is a public relations gimmick for a controversial State Governor but as Isaac Otidi Amuke argues collaborations between politicians and artists raises various counter-arguments.
10 min read. Some pointed to his turbocharged shoes; others came up with culturally reductive theories about why he ran a marathon distance in under two hours. However, Eliud Kipchoge has shown the world that only discipline and endurance can create champions.
8 min read. The Machakos People’s Park is more than a public green space, it is a symbol of re-imagination and negotiation from a time when proximity to the Capital City Nairobi determined who or what mattered writes Lutivini Majanja.
