On March 9, 2018, at around 1.00 pm, Kenya’s tepid political weather experienced a sudden and powerful jolt when President Uhuru Kenyatta, the country’s elected president, and his political opponent, Raila Odinga, the so-called “People’s President”, were shown walking together and shaking hands on the stairs of Harambee House. The fiercest protagonists of the recent […]
In December 2010, my mother was admitted to an established private hospital in Nairobi for what we considered a routine surgery. This surgical procedure was the culmination of a series of medical tests that begun in July that year in Kisumu where she lived and ended up in a referral to a sister hospital in […]
In my country Kenya, being a ‘youth’ officially ends on attaining 35 years. Once one gets to this age, you are no longer eligible to benefit from the ‘affirmative action’ policies and laws put in place to ‘uplift’ young people as a disadvantaged demographic. Mid this year (2018), I shall be officially departing from this […]
We cope with the oppressive system of Capitalism by eating our children’s futures before eating them alive. Grace Ogot captures us in her 1968 classic Tekayo, literally a story of cannibalism, metaphorically one of abuse of trust by a man in a position of authority. Authority of kinship where girls now live in fear of […]
The little girl, knees buckling, made it to the grass verge and set down her twenty-litre jerrycan. The year is 2016. Nothing says “Third World” louder than a yellow plastic 20-litre jerrycan. The jerrycan has become a symbol of underdevelopment. The girl tells me where she got the water and where she is taking it. […]
The current social and political engineering in South Sudan is an exact replay of the political processes that plunged the Sudan into the first civil war in 1955.
Mea maxima culpa. I have not engaged with the idea of the post-colonial before. Not overtly. I didn’t notice it, you see. And that is the politest way of putting it. But I have heard about it in dribs and drabs, as one hears about people from a distant and fascinating culture that point at […]
The 2017 elections remain one of the most contested, memorable and divisive elections in the history of Kenya. The second elections under the 2010 constitution, it witnessed staggering 15,082 aspirants for just 1,882 elective positions. These were just the ones who actually barely survived the revolving knives of the shambolic party primaries. From the very […]