No Roses from My Mouth, Stella Nyanzi’s collection of poetry that was written in prison, and which has won awards, is a deliberately provocative – and apt – response to a dictatorial regime that fails to see the folly of imprisoning writers.
As Democratic Party candidates hurl insults at each other, and fail to inspire voters, the Trump machinery is gearing up to prepare for another victory in the 2020 election. What future can liberals in Trump’s America expect, especially in an environment where rational debate has been replaced by idiocy?
The main objective of Kenya’s largest women’s organisation has been to subdue women’s voices and to control the constituency of women, a purpose that was both necessary and effective in an undemocratic state. That it is being revived may indicate the type of politics the elite envision for Kenya’s women.
An assessment of South Nyanza’s politics suggests that President Moi owed his long rule partly to the Luo elite’s internal divisions and rivalries. The Moi era is also a study on how authoritarian leaders sustained their grip on power during the Cold War.
The Goldenberg scandal did not just negatively impact the Kenyan economy, it also left in its wake damaged and destroyed lives. Central Bank of Kenya employees who raised queries about the massive fraud were quickly sacrificed. These individuals and their families have hauntingly traumatic memories of Moi and his government.
The backward looking accounts, the-good-Moi-bad-Moi debate being waged on social media, and the yaliyopita ni ndwele nostalgia of television talk shows are peripheral to the new challenges of the reorganisation phase. Kenya’s reorganization is at an early stage. It will subsume a new set of challenges and opportunities that will require not only updated political skills, but also a sophisticated understanding awareness of the forces in play.
Much has been written about Daniel arap Moi, and his death has uncorked a litany of previously hidden details and insights into the Shakespearian drama he presided over while in office. But how do we evaluate the legacy of Moi’s agency during his time in office?
DAUTI KAHURA recalls what it was like living in the Moi era.
In the cemetery that is the collective Kenyan memory, the tended graves and monuments are reserved for the powerful, the corrupt and the wicked. Now Kenya’s elite are using President Daniel arap Moi’s death to whitewash history.
With the colonial ideology of order, but without a tribal elite to implement it, Daniel arap Moi maintained the exploitative state by crushing alternative spaces of imagination in the same way his predecessors had done, but with more cruelty. As the saying goes, every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.
