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
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.
Inhabiting the shapes and sounds and patterns of other people
May 21 marks the anniversary of the writer and commentator Binyavanga Wainaina’s untimely death in 2019. He was 48.
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.
An election about nothing
The leading political formations in Kenya's 2022 elections are born of each other, the result of many profound compromises, and this in part explains the blankness.
The young ones
Voter apathy among young people in Kenya reveals fundamental flaws in Kenya’s democratic politics.
The ideological vacuum in Kenyan politics
The Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network wants to challenge the vague manner elites there deal with the past and take on the challenges of the present.
Worshipping other people’s gods
Kenyan filmmaker Jim Chuchu explores the struggle between indigenous cultural practice and Pentecostal Christianity.