When economists shut off your water
Access to water in Nairobi is horribly unequal. The World Bank, Nairobi Water Company, and development economists exploited this unjust context to treat poor Kenyans like guinea pigs.
Kenya
Imagining the future through running
The successes of elite Kenyan athletes should not distract from the ways ordinary Kenyans are using it to make meaning for themselves.
We shall overcome
One cannot fully appreciate Kenya’s normative Christianity and its particular obsession with public piety without appreciating the legacy of the East African revival.
Ruto’s climate contradictions
Kenyan president William Ruto has reinvented himself as Africa's climate champion. But, his policy contradictions reveal that this is just his latest hustle
Taking care of each other
How a new underground club in Nairobi offers Kenyans respite from the harshness of everyday life.
The venality of the Kenyan MP
In Kenya, elected office does not represent a duty to represent ordinary citizens, but an opportunity for personal enrichment.
Who is hustling who?
In Kenya, political elites across the spectrum are trying to sell off the country for themselves—capitulation is inevitable.
Inventing our own fictions
For Binyavanga Wainaina, writing about Africa means to to write honestly, benching any attempts to categorize our lived experiences in language that could never accommodate them.
The politics of maandamano
Kenya’s cost of living demonstrations have as much to do with popular discontent as they do with the opposition capitalizing on frustrations.
Kenya’s stalemate
A fundamental contest between two orders is taking place in Kenya. Will its progressives seize the moment to catalyze a vision for social, economic, and political change?
Defund the police
Policing in postcolonial Kenya is at an impasse. What is needed is disinvestment from this system of repression and reinvestment in communities.
William Ruto and the evangelicals
Which theology we will use to make sense of the relationship between church and state in Kenya?
A generation of seeds
While it is clear that food insecurity threatens the life of millions of Kenyans, lifting the ban on GMOs is not the solution.
How to write like Binyavanga Wainana
This week on the AIAC podcast, we discuss a new posthumous collection of writing from Binyavanga Wainana.
Without much sorrow
Queen Elizabeth’s failure to even acknowledge or issue an apology for Britain's colonial legacy, explains why many Kenyans did not mourn her death.
Binyavanga Wainaina: The early years
On the occasion of the release of 'How to Write About Africa,' a collection of early essays and short fiction by Binyavanga Wainaina, Achal Prabhala remembers his friend’s earlier beginnings and literary breakthroughs.
Child of Mau Mau
Ethnicity did not simply disappear in Kenya’s 2022 elections. Instead, it was a crucible where both sides mobilized historical claims and ideas to win supporters, in ways that could, at times, elude the eye.
No amount of foreign currency can justify this
The dire, often fatal, conditions that African, and in this case specifically Kenyan, domestic workers are facing in the Middle East.
Bookends: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
The author of 'The House of Rust' tells us all the little things (from foods to films) that get her imagination going.
What is it about the Kenyan postcolonial state?
The lesson from political economist Rok Ajulu’s academic work and activism: it’s not enough to change the “tenants,” but fight to change both the “state” and all of its houses.