The literary world has lost yet another icon. Another healer of wounds is no longer with us. But Morrison’s language and words will always comfort us, especially in these trying times when extremism, hate and paranoia are fragmenting societies and spreading fear.
Uhuru Park is more than a public green space in Nairobi. It is a space with a glorious history of contestation, a symbolic national shrine and an embodiment of the essence of freedom.
Ken Okoth was a visionary and inspirational leader whose death has left a nation in mourning and reflection.
Museums are the curators of consciousness, interpreting history, our worldview and our place in it. On one hand, they can be great cultural and educational institutions and on the other centres of propaganda and cultural appropriation.
Mboya’s ghost is that of a repressed collective identity submerged into the nation’s unconsciousness. The repression shields the country from confronting its problems of marginalization of minorities, ethnic domination by a few, and state capture by powerful economic interests.
What can one do with the anguish of these truths? With the knowledge that one cannot escape one’s body, no matter how hard one tries? That the past will always find you, in fact it is never past – the present is, in fact, the past in present-time? With the knowledge that if you are caught on the underside of power, your body will become a site of the accumulation of various strikes, until the last chapter of any successful genocide, where the oppressor can remove their hands and say, “My god – what are these people doing to themselves?...
Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ochol faced numerous rejections from publishers before the collection was eventually published in 1966. The collection of ‘songs’ was a resounding artistic and commercial success. Yet, over 50 years since Okot’s encounter, poetry still appears at the bottom of the publishers' priority list.
The perpetual colonial project has miseducated us that conservation is about wildlife, while it is actually about our land, our heritage, our culture, our languages, our beliefs…it is about US.
Harambee Stars has not qualified for Africa’s premier footballing competition since 2004, when a Jacob ‘Ghost’ Mulee coached side was drawn in a tough group with Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso. Now, fifteen years later, what are Kenya’s chances of making the knockout stages of the 2019 African Cup of Nations.
To some, Museveni is a visionary strategist who helped topple three brutal dictators, revived Uganda’s economy, fought the AIDS epidemic and played a steady-handed diplomatic role in a volatile region. But for others, Museveni is himself a brutal dictator, who deliberately provokes conflicts within Uganda and in neighboring countries, brutalizes Uganda’s political opposition and feasts on money stolen from Ugandan taxpayers, all the while beguiling naïve Western journalists and diplomats with his signature charm.
