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.
The backlash against the women’s movement has seen a rise in the hypersexualisation and infantilisation of women, especially in music videos, says RASNA WARAH. This has had a negative impact on how women view their own bodies.
Ali Zaidi and I parachuted into Kenya when it was easier to form relationships and friendships based on shared interests and common humanity. We arrived as outsiders and Kenya became the reality wreck that forced us to co-evolve.
CHRISTINE MUNGAI travelled to western Kenya to meet farmers who had only good things to say about One Acre Fund’s activities in their communities, as the organization fills a gap created by the abandonment of smallholder farmers by government authorities. But more questions arise on how exactly the organization is able to circumvent the cartels that have gripped the sector, and on the structural inequalities that the company exploits and even exacerbates.
Food has never been about the simple act of eating; food is history, and identity. Hence, colonialism, as a violent process, fundamentally altered the way of life of a people, including their culinary habits.
Peoples are what they eat and the dietary consumption and what we choose to imbibe, or not consume based on habits, health, religion, or taboos symbolically reflect this dynamic.
Ali Zaidi was that éminence grise that all newspapers must have – that one in-house intellectual and grammarian commanding a battery of section editors. He was also an incredibly warm and genuine person who was happiest when surrounded by large groups of people.
Attitudes about death and bodies have evolved over time writes PATRICK GATHARA. But the politics of death in today's context has been marred with colonial myths and narratives that influence death and burial rights.
The members of Wildlife Utilization Task Force have attempted to facilitate the blatant colonization of our lands through wildlife management chicanery. Whether their respective roles were a deliberate conspiracy or unwitting, remains to be seen. However, we will never forget their names. We Kenyans deserve better and should never accept this shame they have visited upon us.
DAN ACEDA explores the new wave of contemporary pop music as one marked by urban, ahistorical, and accessible philosophy and idiom, and one that ironically, gospel music may have paved the way for – which is only possible because Kenyan gospel pop was only faintly related to religious or church music proper.
There is familiarity in veminization of marginalised people in cities, in places like Kibra in colonial Kenya and the first Chinatowns in North America that existed around the turn of the 20th century that continue to endure to date.
What if this ratchet music is a pushback against the bleak logics of a society that defiles in so many other ways, a society that ruthlessly forecloses on opportunities for the young and poor in particular? What if the ratchet offers an insurgent possibility of life after social death, of life beyond nihilism?
