Guest Post by Patrick Gathara At the end of my first term in high school, I watched a screening of Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, the tale of an ordinary family unknowingly living in a house built over a graveyard without the bother of moving the bodies. Of course, this does not go down well with the […]
Kenya had its first ever televised presidential debate on Monday night. Like many others I was watching the livestream online and Tweeting while at it. I have included some of my real time tweets in this post (see below). A number of things stood out during the debate. The incumbent Prime Minister Raila Odinga—referred to […]
It interesting that the title of this video–shot recently by filmmaker Cary Fukunaga and commissioned by fashion brand Maiyet*–is “Sleepwalking in the Rift.” Not just alluding to dreaming, but also, because we are in the realm of genre here, to the film “I Dreamed of Africa.” The genre has its conventions. This reel, as with others in […]
Levi-Strauss writes of a Native American people for whom every dream has a hidden sexual meaning, except explicitly sexual dreams, for which it is imperative that non-sexual interpretations be found. I am reaching for an Oscar Wilde aphorism here. Everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power. The Freudian in me demurs against […]
We know journalists will soon begin to obsess over what is the legacy of Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s 3rd President since Independence. Kibaki has to stand down next March (when elections are scheduled in Kenya) after two terms in charge (including a disputed December 2007 re-election). It’s hard to make sense of the politics around Kibaki’s […]
Last week, on “The Tonight Show,” US President Barack Obama joked that his combative relationship with rightwing businessman Donald Trump (who claims Obama wasn’t born in the United States) goes back to their time playing football together in Kenya. In what is not a joke: A play on Trump’s brand of reality show is now heading […]
Blogger Kweli of Bring me the African Guy writes for us on the relationship of Kenyan politicians Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto. “Although they are facing charges at the International Criminal Court (ICC), the two have been busy convening prayer-cum-political rallies across the country in their campaign for the presidency. At almost every rally Uhuru and Ruto have knelt on the dais, been anointed with oil and prayed for, and they’ve delivered campaign speeches that double as sermons about their persecution and martyrdom at the hands of the ICC.”
The first thing that comes to mind is our unquestioning admiration and obsession with wealthy people. Our newspapers and magazines are chock-full of personal interviews of rich people. In these interviews, people born with silver spoons in their mouths often offer the average Kenyan advice on how to work hard and make it to the […]
