Gukira

• Re-Reading Leo Bersani (From Nairobi)

  Posted: December 14, 2011, 9:07 pm by keguro

  I first read Homos in 2000, when I lived in Seattle. A friend was taking a class in queer theory and because I was starved for intellectual stimulation—trash romance wasn’t doing it for me and I had plowed through my stacks of Marguerite Duras and Jean Rhys—I begged for a copy of the class syllabus [...]

• Dear Kenyan Teenage Boys

  Posted: December 13, 2011, 9:25 am by keguro

  I have been told that you do not read. This Christmas, please ask those who love you and buy you things to get you a copy of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, available in the Penguin edition at Text Book Centre and Bookpoint for the princely sum of Kshs 180. You will thank me. I assure [...]

• “I’m Not Listening”: Kenyan Whiteness

  Posted: December 9, 2011, 2:05 pm by keguro

  Kenyan whiteness is righteous rightness. Hyper-corrective toward non-whites, hyper-aware of its privileged status, hyper-willing to exercise its privilege and whip the natives into place. A blustering white man yelled obscenities at my cab guy. When I subsequently confronted the blusterer—it’s that kind of day—he insisted: “he broke the law,” and repeated several times, “I’m not [...]

• Listening to African Queers

  Posted: December 9, 2011, 8:08 am by keguro

  A few weeks ago, I broke a longstanding personal rule and left a comment on a mainstream, very popular, award-winning U.S. gay blog. A long string of comments by mostly gay men (if web identities count for anything) supported the U.K.’s decision to consider sexual rights in granting aid. Many of the commentators condemned not [...]

• Medical Emergencies

  Posted: December 8, 2011, 7:50 am by keguro

  The Kenyan education system considers medical doctors, including dentists and pharmacists, to be our best and brightest. In our competitive—and elite-making—public education system, medical doctors are the cherry on top, the prize, those who have proved themselves worthy. Medicine is not considered a vocation; I write this understanding how the term “vocation” can be misused [...]

• At War?

  Posted: December 4, 2011, 12:38 pm by keguro

  Despite the guards who routinely search us as we enter Sarit Centre, Yaya, Westgate, but not Junction (curious, that), these being high-end shopping places, and despite nervous titters about bombs and terrorists, Nairobi feels indifferent to the war. Mainstream newspapers barely cover it—a recent article in the DN, treats an excursion into the “Somalia jungle” [...]

• Reading Caroline Nderitu

  Posted: December 3, 2011, 4:29 am by keguro

  Caroline Nderitu is, arguably, Kenya’s most public poet. As the Profile in her collection Caroline Verses notes, since August 1996 her “unique brand of original performance poetry has become a regular feature at government, corporate, educational and charity functions. She has “a poem for every occasion.” I am boggled by Nderitu’s 15-year career as a [...]

• World AIDS Day & Rape

  Posted: December 1, 2011, 7:51 am by keguro

  A friend tells me that 50% of schoolgirls in a local primary school have been raped. That is, girls aged from 6-14. Elsewhere, it’s 70% of the girls. I’ve yet to find numbers on the boys. Of the over 5,000 cases still to be tried from Kenya’s Post-Election Violence in 2007-8, not a single one [...]

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes