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Many things have change but the core things stay the same. KenyaUnlimited is still about promoting the Kenyan/African blogosphere, encourage people to start blogging and encouraging bloggers to keep blogging.

The aggregator is still in the same place as are the Help Files.

For a quick overview of the changes to this website – have a look at the About Us section http://www.kenyaunlimited.com/about-us/

The KenyaUnlimited Aggregator displays the latest articles written by members of the Kenyan Blogs Webring. Read the aggregator and visit the blogs to share your thoughts.

Thank you

On June 1st 2007, Kenyans everywhere will be celebrating Madaraka Day. Madaraka Day commemorates the day that Kenya attained internal self-rule following an important milestone on the road to independence. To mark this event, we would like to invite members of the Kenyan Bloggers Webring to blog in unison under the banner ‘Kenyan Bloggers’ Day’.

Why?

This day is opportunity for members of the Kenyan Bloggers Webring to share their thoughts on the topics below. Last year’s Kenyan Bloggers’ Day featured a wide range of inspired posts. The level of support and interaction shown by our members in response was outstanding. Please follow this link to see how members celebrated last year – http://www.kenyaunlimited.com/blogs/admin/2006/05/23/kenyan-bloggers-day/

How to Get Involved

On or on the weekend of June 1st 2007, we are proposing that we all create a post on any or all of the following suggested topics:

* Kenya
* Being Kenyan
* Being a Kenyan blogger
* Being a member of KBW

The post can be a piece of prose – 2 lines, an essay, a poem, a podcast, a photograph, your favourite quote. It is entirely up to you how you chose to celebrate this day. You don’t have to be Kenyan, just a member of KBW.

On this day we wish to use collective blogging as means of celebrating the nation that unites us as bloggers of KBW.

To keep track of who is taking part please leave a comment below or email us at admin [@] kenyaunlimited.com with a link to your blog as we shall maintain a list of participating blogs. We shall also be producing buttons to display on members’ blogs.

On June 1st 2007, Kenyans everywhere will be celebrating Madaraka Day. Madaraka Day commemorates the day that Kenya attained internal self-rule following an important milestone on the road to independence. To mark this event, we would like to invite members of the Kenyan Bloggers Webring to blog in unison under the banner ‘Kenyan Bloggers’ Day’.

Why?

This day is opportunity for members of the Kenyan Bloggers Webring to share their thoughts on the topics below. Last year’s Kenyan Bloggers’ Day featured a wide range of inspired posts. The level of support and interaction shown by our members in response was outstanding. Please follow this link to see how members celebrated last year – http://www.kenyaunlimited.com/blogs/admin/2006/05/23/kenyan-bloggers-day/

How to Get Involved

On or on the weekend of June 1st 2007, we are proposing that we all create a post on any or all of the following suggested topics:

* Kenya
* Being Kenyan
* Being a Kenyan blogger
* Being a member of KBW

The post can be a piece of prose – 2 lines, an essay, a poem, a podcast, a photograph, your favourite quote. It is entirely up to you how you chose to celebrate this day. You don’t have to be Kenyan, just a member of KBW.

On this day we wish to use collective blogging as means of celebrating the nation that unites us as bloggers of KBW.

To keep track of who is taking part please leave a comment below or email us at admin [@] kenyaunlimited.com with a link to your blog as we shall maintain a list of participating blogs. We shall also be producing buttons to display on members’ blogs.

Users outside Kenya seem largely untouched by these problems but we have had some indications that some users in other countries may be experiencing similar problems. Please let us know if you have noticed anything unusual.

We suspect that this is happening because of a DNS issue which hopefully should be resolved by now. We appreciate your concern and patience.

If you have problems accessing the site on http://www.kenyaunlimited.com/ then you can try accessing it via the IP address at http://207.210.111.112/
In the same way if you problems accessing the aggregator at: http://kenyaunlimited.com/feed.php try accessing it via the IP address at: http://207.210.111.112/feed.php

As usual if you have any questions, comments or suggestions please feel free to get in touch with us.

[Thanks to Maitha who helped us troubleshoot this problem].

The page can be found here.

Kindly note that this page is strictly for messages on KQ507. If you would like to comment on any other issue please email the KenyaUnlimited Admin Team on admin [@] kenyaunlimited.com.

Let us stand together, united, to honour those on KQ507. Pamoja.

I’m willing to grant that the question may be irrelevant. After all, does one need to feel free to be truly free? Isn’t it more important to be free than to feel free?

Yet.

Having grown up in the Moi era, I know all too well that political repression is as much psychic as it is material. And an emphasis on material growth and prosperity—look at the burgeoning middle-class, the increasingly wealthy Kenyans, the amazing growth in productivity—too easily effaces the significance of psychic life. As I have claimed over the past 3 years, psychic life is not entirely private. It is social.

I want to lose the nagging sense that democracy in Kenya is fragile and threatened. I especially want to lose the sense that leaders, trained and reared under a repressive regime, will go to any lengths to secure their authority.

Over the past few years, we have seen incidents of political repression: threats from the-then minister of Internal Security, the destruction of media outlets, indifference to citizens when their ideas do not align with politicians.

And now, the police commissioner has told us the president is above political critique. Make no mistake, though Hussein Ali speaks of “demeaning” statements about the president, he targets critique, no matter how it may be articulated. In an election year, the president has become sacred, protected, to be revered, not engaged.

Now, certainly the Smiling Texan’s reign may have made us more than a little skeptical about freedom of speech—which seems to have been reinterpreted as the freedom to ignore freedom of speech. I can’t get rid of the sense that, in America, freedom of speech amounts less to political critique and more to opportunities to appear on TV. And Kibaki’s seeming indifference—witness the referendum debacle—suggests he really does not listen.

So, arguably, freedom of speech might amount to little more than freedom to make noise. Even so, I want it. It’s a right. I am absolutely frustrated by the many columnists and bloggers who, over the past two years especially, have insisted we must “respect” the office of the president, that we should not critique or satirize, and that if we do so, it must be done with all respect. Indeed, I take these calls for “respect” as authorizing, in part, this latest edict.

In “On Patriotism,” I tried to unsettle the notion that an unquestioning relationship to citizenship was desirable. I was especially concerned that the repeated calls to “love” Kenya, without critique, might allow various forms of political abuse—it’s much easier to love Kenya when safely ensconced in the middle class or abroad.

Here, I want to register my support for dissent. Indeed, to insist, as the Left has been in America since the Texan took over, that dissent is democratic. As several politicians have pointed out, we cannot let ourselves slide back into the swamp of repression.

We might begin with the observation that injustices are readily observable—they are “see[n].” Sight, however, this “see[ing]” needs to be read in its literal and symbolic renderings. “To see,” in Ofwona’s text serves, simultaneously, as “to recognize.” One recognizes through familiarity. We learn to recognize. Seeing, by this measure, seems almost involuntary. But I like the word “see” here, if only because it suggests the banality of “injustices.” We don’t simply “recognize” injustice; we “see” it.

To see, of course, presupposes or at least strongly suggests that we are not complicit in “injustices.” We see, as from a distance, an elsewhere that also marks our “integrity.” “Integrity” names an outside from which we recognize the terms of violation, the “injustices,” and differentiate ourselves from those who violate. We, “us” in Ofwona’s rendering, live apart from injustice. In part, we live apart because we can name injustice, that which is recognizable precisely because of “our” distance from it.

Questions disturb me. The first: what might personal integrity have to do with the problem of injustice? Is it possible that personal integrity might so depend on one’s distance from injustice that the only reasonable option might be to seek even more distance? Might the act of speaking out, which somehow shores up personal integrity, not make one complicit, in some way, with injustice, muddying one’s image of oneself? In part, I wonder why personal integrity should be the index by which we measure our responses to injustice. Might there be a version of rendering justice—or participating in justice—that has little-to-nothing to do with self-aggrandizement? Might we think about justice as indifferent to the demands of the ego?

Two, how might a reliance on the visual metaphor of sight, and its reliance on recognition and familiarity, foreclose naming moments of injustice? From my own context, does queer bashing count as a form of injustice? Might discrimination and violence against queers be seen—or recognized—as a form of injustice? How might we think, in other words, about forms of injustice we sanction in the name of “integrity” or “dignity?”

What might we gain in re-thinking injustice not as that which we see and recognize, the familiar, but that which we might always lean toward, always be complicit in? In such a scenario, we might be less concerned with “our integrity” and more aware about the forms of injustice we perpetrate (Here, of course, lurks the perpetual question of class difference as a form of social injustice.)

In questioning the ostensible distance between “us” and “injustices” we might come to a certain vigilance, shall we say, that might be more appropriate to the task not of “see[ing]” injustices and speaking out against them, but acting so as not to create or perpetuate injustice.