From colonial storage to open access
For a century, African musical heritage was recorded, boxed, and shipped to museums abroad. In Nairobi, a new generation of archives is bringing cultural memory home — and putting it online.
Kenya
The ungovernable Gen-Z
The Kenyan government’s reaction to the present moment of necessary generational disobedience resembles the way colonial regimes used to respond to the question of the “detribalized native.”
Rebranding French imperialism
Although the Africa Forward Summit in Kenya was framed as a partnership, it was actually France desperately looking for a new door into a continent that wants to throw it out.
When the peacemaker clocks out
Kenya’s shift toward trade-led diplomacy underscores the difficulty of sustaining regional leadership under conditions of fiscal dependence.
Kenya’s goon economy
Across the country’s urban centers, young men are being recruited into political militias that offer quick cash, fleeting power, and little chance of escape.
The game behind the game
The football gambling industry across Africa preys on the risk factors built into the game. The only viable solution is investing in durable, developmental frameworks at the grassroots level.
The debts our parents left us
The language of fiscal consolidation is meant to sound inevitable. But for Kenya's informal workers, the human cost is anything but abstract.
The human cost of Kenya’s expanding lakes
As Kenya’s Rift Valley lakes expand, swallowing homes, farms, and infrastructure, what appears as a climate anomaly reveals a reckoning with ecological limits, failed planning, and the illusion that water would stay where it was put.
Cooking up the city
A new history of Mombasa shows how street food, colonial labor migration, and urban capitalism reshaped what — and how — Kenya eats.
Where do the borders really lie?
In Nairobi, migrants face not just national frontiers but invisible barriers in policing, housing, and work.
Whose story gets to be heard?
A new film investigates the long-standing land disputes between Kenyans, the government, and multinational corporations, whose expansive plantations are the site of much of the Kikuyu people’s hardship.
Visiting Ngara
A redevelopment project in Nairobi’s Ngara district promises revival — but raises deeper questions about capital, memory, and who has the right to shape the city.
Gen Z’s electoral dilemma
Long dismissed as apathetic, Kenya’s youth forced a rupture in 2024. As the 2027 election approaches, their challenge is turning digital rebellion and street protest into political power.
Who gets to tell the history of Mau Mau?
David Elstein’s attack on David Olusoga’s docuseries on the legacy of the British empire reveals less about historical error than about the enduring impulse to rehabilitate British colonial rule.
Wrestling power from political dinosaurs
The passing of Raila Odinga has unsettled Kenya’s political equilibrium, exposing a crowded field of veterans, opportunists, and activists, alongside a growing generational demand to reclaim power from an aging elite.
Pints and powerpoints
From IMF history to astrophysics, Nairobi’s Drunken Lectures turn casual drinkers into an engaged public.
The mirror and becoming
In Najaax Harun’s paintings, the self confronts its own reflection — haunted, tender, and unafraid to transform.
Global Africa for whom?
Nairobi’s cultural moment reflects both the promise of continental imagination and the anxiety of performing arrival for the world’s gaze.
Raila Odinga’s Kenya
The death of Kenya’s most enduring opposition leader invites a reckoning — not only with his contradictions, but with what his long struggle reveals about the unfinished work of liberation.
We must learn to sit in the dark together
At our first workshop from our festival in Nairobi, The Elephant’s Joe Kobuthi, reflected on a year since #EndFinanceBill.