African traditions and cultures have always held an awareness of the life cycle, from birth to death and the afterlife. The life cycle made us aware of the transitions from birth, through initiations, to child-bearing and rearing, to old age, to death, and thereafter to the journeys to the spiritual worlds of the ancestors and […]
I was born in March of 1989, just two years before the term millennial was coined by William Strauss and Neil Howe in 1991, three years before Bill Clinton, the neoliberal icon, took over the most powerful presidency on earth and right on the throes of agitation for a multiparty democracy in Kenya. I was shipped […]
Two decades is a very short period, particularly in the wake of war and conflict, to institutionalise the norms of a full-fledged democracy. In that time, Somaliland has indeed made strides that can be built upon to strengthen its political infrastructure and, for the sake of future generations, move away from being a clan-based polity.
“Kweli itashinda kesho, kama leo haitoshi.” ~ Shaaban Roberts Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, you have left us, but you will be immortalised forever in history as one the greatest leaders of the 20th and early 21st Centuries. Courageous, revolutionary, intelligent, loyal, beautiful, loving and dignified is how you are now epitomised. You defied all stereotypes through a sharp […]
The Elephant in conversation with lawyer Apollo Mboya
It is not unusual that when a liberation struggle hero dies, many voices come to the fore, to bear witness, to lament, to remind, to narrate. It is unusual that there is a particularly gendered vitriolic account the kind of which has accompanied the passing of Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela Mandela. In the cacophony of patriarchy-anchored, […]
“Not until you have discovered what is worth dying for is life really worth living.” Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela-Mandela Reminiscent of Freire’s analogy of liberation as a painful childbirth and while the evocation of ‘Mother’ can be suspect as witnessed in disempowering narratives of women who must carry the weight of the world on their […]
Speech delivered on 14th April 2018 by Julius Malema at Winnie Mandela's funeral.
And so, the inevitable has happened. After five years of Jubilee’s astonishing debt-fuelled binge, Kenya is now officially in an IMF bailout programme. As the government struggles to raise Ksh 284 billion for debt repayments this year alone, the austerity knife will make deep, long cuts into jobs and budgets. With private sector investment on its knees, Jubilee’s spending jamboree has already eaten Uhuru Kenyatta’s ‘Big Four Agenda’ children. DAVID NDII gives a sobering prognosis.
The labyrinthine character of the self-preserving and self-perpetuating incestuous commercial and political relationships that characterise the Kenyan elite is playing out like a choreographed Kabukiesque theatre composed of handshakes of and photo-ops in short scenes. This series of normalised taboos flawed Kenya’s last election has entered into a new Act of deal-making and compromises that at once leave the Kenyan audience aghast and mesmerised write MUTHONI WANYEKI