African Bullets and Honey | Martin Kimani’s Blog

Two thousand years ago, Hermann a chieftain of the Cherusci tribe led his troops in the massacre of three Roman legions. This act is dated as the birth of the German nation and is being quietly celebrated after a century in which it was the rallying cry of the Hitlerite…(more)

Here is a clip of the fascinating and timely California Newsreel hour-long documentary on Melville J. Herskovits, the pioneering anthropologist of African and African-American studies.

Simon Johnson, a former economist at the International Monetary Fund, argues that Wall Street holds the Western and particularly American political class captive. If this were in the so called Third World, the IMF would know exactly how to break up this cozy relationship. In other words, how would an American structural adjustment [...]

Steven Hahn reviews Eric Foner’s Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. At the heart of American freedoms is the history of Black America during the First Reconstruction. Eric Foner revises revisionism.
What if the history from which you draw ’self esteem’ were forged? Pride and mistaken identity.
John Updike tiptoes around Ngugi [...]

Congratulations on your acceptance letter my friend. You must now tap into the deep rivers of American survival craft that I, with the help of the wise ones, have fashioned for the better part of a dozen years. You have struggled mightily to gain that visa, found just the right angle to pitch [...]

Is my cucu’s cucu guilty of benefiting from the slave trade? Do I carry the guilt of those that did? I just read a great post by Keguro and may have forever annoyed him by writing such a long comment that I have made it into a post here.
I am confused about how to [...]

Of course you’ve been kissing and in so many ways too if you think of it for a moment. You have shared kisses of veneration; of peace; perhaps conferred them on religious images, relics or idols; and maybe been ‘lucky’ enough to kiss the Pope’s foot or bestowed one by your superior. It [...]

I have just watched a BBC program called ‘Days That Shook the World’ which today explored the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. Whenever I have encountered MLK in the media, I have always come away newly struck by his power and the hope that he faced the world with. I was [...]