I cherish two distinct memories of veteran Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The first memory goes back to the early 2000s (I was 11 years old) when I stumbled on a copy of A Grain of Wheat, Ngũgĩ’s ...

In recent years, Nairobi has become one vast construction site, and residents of Kenya’s capital appear destined to endure the relentless noise of building works for years to come. Across the city, ...

A Kofi Annan Foundation and UpSight’s Electoral Vulnerability Index (EVI) for Kenya, an evidence-based tool designed to identify elections that may face elevated risks of violence, political ...

I want to tell you about a book that made me deeply uncomfortable, not because it was difficult to read, but because it was easy. I kept expecting the analysis to feel dated, to hit a page where I ...

When Baba died, I became numb. He died of a heart attack at eighty years of age. He collapsed in a modest clinic in Kerala India one morning after his routine walk. They said his body guard and ...

From Sudan and Sierra Leone to Eritrea, Angola, Congo, Botswana, and postwar Tigray, the struggle over gold and minerals reveals a recurring lesson: resources do not determine political outcomes, but ...

On March 3, 2025, a short video went viral on TikTok, captioned “Get ready with me to go for stranger removal.” The two-minute clip amassed more than 90k+ views, likes, comments, and shares. The video ...

Elections ordinarily serve two main purposes. One, they facilitate the peaceful change of leaders or the renewal of the mandate of incumbents, which is necessary for their legitimacy regardless of the ...

Establishing home both in the legal, communal, and social sense is always an ongoing conversation under the shadow of the state and of history. Dr. Mshai Mwangola talks to Dr. J. K. S. Makokha.

Kenya’s baronial class—a tight-knit elite of political dynasties, business moguls, and landed gentry—has entrenched itself since independence, perpetuating backwardness through systemic plunder. The ...

In this blog post, Lebohang Liepollo Pheko introduces a recently published, open access special issue in The BMJ on reparations and global health. In it, she argues that if the 19th century was the ...

In 1950s apartheid South Africa, visibility was never neutral. To appear publicly as Black, urban, fashionable, and modern carried political meaning in a society built on racial segregation and ...