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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Kenya’s post-independence history is marked by numerous instances of high-ranking politicians and politically connected individuals exploiting state power to illegally acquire public land – what land ...

In a Uganda long accustomed to provocative social media flurry from Army Chief General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, two recent developments shocked even the most cynical observers. On the night of 27 June, ...

From politics to law, environment, to social life, Kenyans have had quite a fruitful half-year. What should we keep an eye on? What should we measure? What should we leverage? The Elephant talks to ...

Patrick “Panye” Mukabi, painter, tutor, imaginer, always stood tall, ready to lend a hand, an eye, a piece of advice, a gentle nudge, always in the service of others. He, with his patient, unassuming ...

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.

There is a cross-cutting sense of dysfunction that defines the public life in ways that drain the public imagination and sap the national spirit. What does it take to dream of better outcomes and the ...