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.
From The Elephant
Gen Z and the spirit of Mau Mau
Kenya’s largest-ever protests have drawn striking comparisons to the Mau Mau uprising. But for today’s movement to endure, it must move beyond the streets and invest in political education.
A TikTok revolution?
Kenyan youth are leading popular protests against regressive tax reforms that will worsen the country’s worsening cost of living crisis.
What is the United Nations for?
Israel’s assault on Gaza has shown, once again, that the UN Security Council is ineffective when it comes to preventing wars and protecting the human rights of all people.
Sudan’s counter-revolution
Since 2019’s revolution, the Sudanese elite and its international backers suppressed popular democratic energies. Although military in-fighting rages on, the accumulated experiences over the past three years has ensured that the resistance cannot be easily broken.
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?
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.
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.
The ground has shifted
Western conservation NGOs condemn violence against Maasai, but also don't want herders or subsistence hunters on land they want to control and profit from.
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.
The political economy of “decolonization”
Decolonization in Kenya may be permitted in its universities if the Kenyan government receives a grant to promote it, or if foreign donor will sponsor it.
A man of few words
Late Kenyan President, Mwai Kibaki, could be a political heartbreaker and a great disappointment when he moved smoothly on from a cause.
Sanitizing the Kenyattas
Why are Kenya's ruling family trying to reinvent themselves as friends of Mau Mau so many years later?
Nairobi’s incendiary displacements
Urban displacements greatly diminish the living conditions of already desperate populations living on the brink of poverty in Kenya's capital.
The young ones
Voter apathy among young people in Kenya reveals fundamental flaws in Kenya’s democratic politics.
There was no Green Revolution
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa was presented as a game-changer to address hunger. The consensus 15 years later: It failed.
The humanization of public monsters
Charles Njonjo's legacy is as member of a powerful group of Kikuyu chauvinists who surrounded Jomo Kenyatta and corrupted the state.
Mo Ibrahim does not have all the answers
The Mo Ibrahim Prize rewards African presidents for promoting democracy. But there's no proof the prize has had any effect or that it is needed.
Simply filming people’s lived experiences
How the film, 'I am Samuel' about a gay Kenyan couple was banned by the Kenya Film Classification Board.
Kenya is Europe’s dumpsite
On the back of a failed COP26 climate conference: how e-waste dumping by European countries in Africa contribute significantly to climate change.