Food is power
The World Food Program says COVID-19 will bring about a famine of biblical proportions, so it is a good time to revisit why food has never just been about the simple act of eating. Food is history. Food is identity.
The World Food Program says COVID-19 will bring about a famine of biblical proportions, so it is a good time to revisit why food has never just been about the simple act of eating. Food is history. Food is identity.
Kenyans are split about the legacy of president Daniel Arap Moi, who served from 1978 to 2002 and died on 4 February 2020: Vile and reprehensible vs a benign Baba, history suggests the latter.
Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, African governments should stop seeing non-governmental actors as a threat to their own legitimacy.
The painter talks about how the distance between Nairobi and London allows him to take on topics at the heart of Kenya’s body politic.
This crisis has further emphasized the neglect of Kenya’s poor by the government, and is therefore “a wake up call that we are on our own.”
A new documentary film tells a tale of everyday class, religious, and educational contestations around land in Kenya.
The precariousness of life for women gig workers—in services like cleaning, driving, gardening, beauty supply, and catering—in Kenya.
Colonial land grievances and the politics of redistribution in contemporary Kenya.
Mukoma wa Ngugi's opening remarks at the launch (today) of the 2020 Writers Unlimited International Literature Festival in The Hague.
Prevailing thoughts on slums stress their transitory character, but the complexity of everyday life in slums, including how people manage survival, is lost in the way they are understood from the outside.
For immigrants—especially African and black immigrants to Western countries—the question of home is complex.
Philanthropy and celebrities are not enough to remedy the inequalities that persist in Kenya.
Mobile-phone-based, person-to-person payment and money transfer systems are innovative—but are they really good for poverty reduction and development?
While many African Christians can only imagine a white Jesus, others have actively promoted a vision of a brown or black Jesus, both in art and in ideology.
Poor Nairobi residents pay close to four times more for water that is much less clean, adequate or consistent.
Boris Johnson is in the running for UK Prime Ministers. The UK Conservative Party is particularly fond of Britian's colonial past, but Johnson usually outdoes himself in this regard.
Turn any homophobic corner in Africa and you're guaranteed to run into a delirious celebration of "African culture," but there's nothing African about homophobia.
The future of Kenya's matatus (commuter buses) and their inherent place in the capital Nairobi's culture and society, is all but absent in the government's neoliberal vision for urban planning.
Binyavanga's fashion sensibility as well as his choices in his memoir, and his essays, will have a lasting impact after he is gone.
Binyavanga Wainaina was a writer who not only produced seminal work, but also contributed to and shaped the African literary tradition into what it is today.