When Achieng met Ellen
Ellen DeGeneres wanted an African story. Achieng Agutu obliged. Don’t hate the player, though, hate the game.
Kenya
The marginalization of African runners
The international body governing track and field announced that the longest distance race to be held will be the 3000 meters. We know who will benefit least from this change.
Others made of kindness
Ed Pavlic's new novel follows two lovers trading Chicago for Mombasa.
Will Kenya’s courts let gay people live?
Director Wanuri Kahiu went to look for hopeful African love stories and made a lesbian love story, amid court sanctioned homophobia.
Voltamos a Africa
Is emigrating to Africa an option for Black Brazilians in the time of Jair Bolsonaro's toxic, racist, rightwing regime?
Looking for my religion
The power of having a god who resembles us.
The disastrous road of private prisons
Kenya's prisons are in serious need of reform. Opening the door to private interests is not the solution.
The film about nowhere
Invisible City [Kakuma], a film about Kenya's largest refugee camps, seems keen on making a point but is anchored on unsteady ground (with some shitty translation).
Collective guilt
The disfunction with American voluntourism and Christian outreach in Africa, that in some cases have led to abuse.
Public funds for private gain
The planned global Education Outcomes Fund—the UN seems onboard—would create markets for “non-state” providers while guaranteeing profits for private investors that purchase “impact bonds.”
The Story of Priya Ramrakha
Priya Ramrakha was one of the most prolific photographers of Africa’s independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s. This highlights his impact.
No Country for Yes Men
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: colonial and neocolonial rule cannot survive without the work that prisons perform.
It’s only business
How private education companies ruin education in Kenya: Private education companies have sought to cash in on the development game.
Unthinking refugee studies
What use are academic categories when they reinforce conservative concepts scholars seek to challenge?
The tale of two presidents
When rain falls on a leopard, it does not wash off his spots. The same can’t be said of Kenya’s media and the opposition after Uhuru Kenyatta’s crackdown.
To think through and beyond the nation-state
A conversation on books, borders, and belonging with Somali-American writer, Abdul Adan.
Nobel Prizes and Politics in Kenya
The Nobel Prize for Literature buzz around Ngugi’s wa Tiong'o's points to both his seminal contributions to African literature but also his work to kept the memory of Kenya’s divisive past alive.
Is Kati Kati a metaphor for the present crisis in Kenya?
What characterizes daily life in Kenya: a seemingly simultaneous flagrant zest for life and hesitant fascination with death.
Kenya’s return to despotism
Daniel arap Moi perfected rigging and state violence as politics. Uhuru Kenyatta campaigned with them and will extend and complete them in his second term.
The dark and white side of conservation
How easily white landowners in Kenya can utilize the trope of "the maddened land invader" to conjure global support for an unequal land system.