African mother tongue languages are increasingly being abandoned, with sub-Saharan Africa being one of the regions with the most endangered languages. But the solution will not come from simply promulgating policy. The “African society” must hold conversations with itself and overhaul its value system, because language is culture, and culture is empty without its set of values and truths.
Stanley Gazemba sets out to unveil the myths that surround bullfighting, a sport with a huge following among the Kisa, Idakho, Isukha, Banyore and Batsotso sub-tribes of the greater Luhya community, and meets with grizzled veterans of this popular blood sport.
The fears the epidemic has stoked have far outpaced its spread, and discussion of the disease’s politics, for better or worse, often outweighs that of epidemiology. Its ripple effects are familiar to anyone in a diaspora: negotiating how much distance to put between yourself and your origin—“origin” being that which others perceive it to be, and what ills they perceive it to embody.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
