Mary Okello is one of Kenya’s trailblazers. In 1977, she became the first Kenyan woman bank manager. She did not sit on her laurels, instead she decided to push for more women to access the formal banking sector as a founder member of the Kenya Women Finance Trust, the only micro-finance institution which lives up […]
Early last year, some members of Kenya’s Asian community visited a Nairobi branch of the Jubilee Party and demanded that Kenyan Asians – the vast majority of whom are of Indian descent – be officially recognised as a Kenyan tribe. Led by a human rights activist called Farah Mannzoor, the group stated that Kenyan Asians […]
Thus colonialism imposed its own version of order, superimposed its idea of tribes bounded within district boundaries on this ethnic patchwork, and even created an entirely new “traditional” administrative structure in the form of tribal chiefs who were actually state employees.
The Inspector General (IG) Joseph Boinnet’s recent pronouncement that the police had formed a special squad to deal with the Jubilee government’s critics confirmed what many believe to be a plot by the government to clamp down on opposition politics and what it considers to be individual “dissidents” and provocateurs. The police’s daring move of […]
In February 2015, residents of Gilgil, a small town halfway between Naivasha and Nakuru in Kenya’s scenic Rift Valley – which was once known for its “Happy Valley” set – were stunned to learn that Simon Harris, a respected middle-aged British charity worker who had been living in the town since the 1990s, had been […]
No one at MSJC is insensitive to the risks of organising against the police in such a visible way. It speaks to their dedication that all the staff members are volunteers even while Nairobi’s cost of living soars.
January 30th 2018 enters Kenya’s history books alongside September 1st 2017, the day when, for the first time, an election in the country was nullified. Many dismissed the opposition coalition NASA’s threat to swear in the principals Raila Odinga and his deputy Kalonzo Musyoka as a PR gimmick. Yet, as the new year rolled in, […]