Africa Is a Country

Making sense of the terror attacks in Kenya

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Making sense of the terror attacks in Kenya

By
Africa Is a Country

Follow these sources (a mix from the blogosphere, Twitter and Facebook, including from some mainstream media sources that aren't that bad) to process the Nairobi mall terror attack.

Image: EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid via Flickr CC.

If you, like us, are disturbed by US congressman Peter King’s suggestions to monitor Somali-Americans, the decision by the world’s most visited news site, the Daily Mail, to focus only the fate of North Americans and British victims of the terror attack on a mall in Nairobi, CNN quoting fake Al Shabaab Twitter accounts, or waiting for the inevitable Heart of Darkness-themed piece by some Western journalist or other (though they may surprise us yet), it may be better to follow these sources (a mix from the blogosphere, Twitter and Facebook, including from some mainstream media sources that aren’t that bad):

Blogs

 

Twitter

  • Robert Alai, controversial Kenyan blogger and social media strategist.
  • The BBC’s Southern African correspondent Karen Allen.
  • Charles Onyango-Obbo, Nation Media Group’s digital editor. On Twitter.
  • Oliver Mathenge, a political writer of the Star newspaper in Nairobi.
  • The South African journalist Robyn Kriel, the East African Bureau Chief for a South African 24-hour news channel.
  • Kenyan journalist and news anchor, Larry Madowo.
  • Erik Hersman, co-founder of Ushahidi, who goes by White African.
  • Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Mohamed.
  • Photojournalist and columnist Jonathan Kalan.
  • Abdi Ayente, director of Somali’s first ever think and a former Al Jazeera and BBC journalist.
  • Somali-Kenyan journalist  Abdi Latif Dahir.
  • Tom Odula of the AP’s East Africa Bureau; and
  • Ory Okollah, going by KenyanPundit and co-founder of Ushahidi,

Add your suggestions (and comments) in the comments below. Ht @KenyanPundit, @Jepchumba, @Samar42

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.