Kenya Imagine

  • Identity and Violence (with apologies to Amartya Sen)

    Posted: April 2, 2008, 9:51 am
    In Kenya, violence abounds, as do analyses of its causes and consequences. An efficient way of dividing opinion on the matter is to ask four questions: Was the violence planned? Was it 'ethnic'? Was there ethnic cleansing? Was it 'political'?

    We aren't short of people who will answer no to all save the last for boring political reasons; we needn't worry about them. But others, for presumably non-political reasons, will do likewise. 'Unless names are invidiously named', as Timothy Williamson once said, 'sermons like this... tend to cause less offence than they should, because everyone imagines that they are aimed at other people'. Maina Kiai, Tavia Nyong'o, here's looking at you.

    Read more from Daniel Waweru here.

  • Corruption kills a dream: A tribute to Joshua Orina

    Posted: April 2, 2008, 9:49 am
    Throughout my life in the United States, news of a death of a family member or a friend has never ceased. In the last 13 years I have lost a father, two grandparents, an aunt, four uncles, and five cousins.

    Then there is the countless number of friends I grew up with who are no longer alive. One committed suicide because an accident had left him blind, another killed himself because his parents could not approve a girl he was courting, and the third one hanged himself for undisclosed reasons. On two different occasions, two of my friends were killed by speeding cars. A childhood buddy drank himself to death, while several others have fallen victim to that villain whose name my kinfolk are still too ashamed to utter, AIDS.

    Read more from Ombuya E. Okong'o here.

  • Tibet, China, and the west: empires of the mind

    Posted: April 2, 2008, 6:20 am
    The sudden escalation of protest by Tibetans in Lhasa and elsewhere in March 2008 has been accompanied by vigorous rhetoric from the Chinese state reaffirming its sovereignty over Tibet and strong counter-arguments from Tibetans claiming the right to self-determination.

    Read more from Dibyesh Anand here.

  • Plot 10

    Posted: April 2, 2008, 6:19 am
    I lived in a two-roomed 'flat' that my mother had secured from a friend who was leaving the country for a while. The two rooms were connected by a single door and were part of a row of rooms collectively called a Plot as the whole building is built on a piece of land 1/8 of an acre.

    Read more from Juliet Maruru here.

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Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

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

The end of the fish cakes

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