The 60s, 70s and 80s are often described as the Golden Age of Indian cinema and Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu had a large number of cinemas devoted to showing films made in Bombay.
Culture is at the centre of the quest to resolve identity issues in Kenya’s arts scene. Artists and experts continue to dialogue on whether we have a truly Kenyan beat.
Zindzi Mandela’s childhood was difficult and tumultuous. However, even with a father in jail and a mother constantly harassed by the authorities, she chose to embrace little pleasures amidst the turmoil.
Afrobeats musicians and music audiences around the world are immensely indebted to Fela Kuti for the enormous sacrifices he made to lay the solid foundations on which the genre stands.
The locals called them Ninjas, for if they were not, how then could these children survive their hard lives? How could they endure their pain without breaking?
In Kenya, rising water levels in lakes along the Great Rift Valley have forced thousands of people from their homes, submerging huge areas of farmland. Schools, hospitals, roads and water pipes have been destroyed. Crucially, there is a real fear that Lake Baringo and Lake Bogoria, one fresh and the other saline, will contaminate each other. Ferdinand Omondi writes about this threat of an ecological disaster.
Kenyans are reportedly “being taken by storm” by Parler, a newish right-wing social media platform. But do they really know how toxic the storm sweeping over them is? The platform is racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, white supremacist – and that’s only for starters.
City dwellers in Kenya are rushing to their rural homes in droves because of economic and social disruptions caused by coronavirus lockdowns and curfews. Many may never return to the city.
One encounters three streams of consciousness in America: unquestioned belonging of whiteness; uncertain discomfort of in-betweens; and the dangerous branding of blackness. Kamala Harris belongs to the in-between identities that have lately kept shifting and disturbing a nation that demands neat extremes.
There is no evidence of the existence of pre-colonial prisons in Kenya. Prisons were among the first buildings the British built whenever they went into a future colony. They were an extension of the colonisation project, a punitive device to ensure compliance with the racist colonial order.
The advent of the circumcision season has presented an impossible choice between tradition and civil obedience to contain the spread of COVID-19.
The closure of places of worship in Kenya has had a profound impact on the Church, which is struggling to retain followers and survive under harsh economic conditions. What will a post-coronavirus Church look like?
