African Bullets and Honey | Martin Kimani’s Blog

can Kenya get Moi’s? The Swiss Federal Council has prolonged the freezing of Mobutu’s assets “until the supervisory authority has ruled on the complaint it has received but at the latest until 30 October 2009″. But strangely, it is a Swiss professor apparently leading the charge to keep the money away from Mobutu’s [...]

Freedom is an unstoppable force. It may be delayed or diverted, blocked or shunted down dark alleyways but it emerges always to strike down tyranny. This, I think, is worth remembering because I forget it too often. Striking down tyranny is no guarantee of final victory: there is always the need for [...]

With all respect to the Kofi Annan mediation effort, perhaps it is time that the region’s leaders visited Nairobi as a group and insisted on some movement toward a political settlement. In the same way that the Lusaka and Arusha peace agreements, aimed at Congo and Burundi respectively, were crafted from tough negotiations led [...]

For those of you who understand Swedish and want to hear some Kenyan ranting on Sveriges Radio, please go to the Konflikt page and tell me what it is being said other than the parts in English. Same applies to this much shorter interview also in Swedish.

This opinion originally run in the East Africa on January 28, 2008 under the title,
‘The problem with Kenya’s politics is the old guard‘
The next revolution in Kenya will not be a violent one, contrary to the bloodletting presently underway. Rather it will be the rejection of the generation of men from whom the leaders of [...]

A country created by grand theft, ruled by a clique
(Originally printed in the East African on January 14, 2008)
Robbery has thrived in Kenya for many decades now. The very creation of Kenya a century ago was an act of grand theft. Our country won its independence but has never broken free from the idea that [...]

Everyone reading this blog must know that Kenya is aflame. We have burnt churches with dozens trapped in them, we have seen a peaceful election with the highest turnout in our history end as farce and the number of displaced citizens has risen to more than 100,000. I wrote a piece last [...]

I grew up being told that Luos were clever but addicted to showboating; Kambas were clean but stupid; the Maasai brutal and backward; people from the Coast were lazy; while we Gikuyus were ambitious and a tad dishonest. In a Kenya where the president’s marital wars impact national politics more than his economic policy, it [...]

Dear Baba,
This is an odd and public and rhetorical letter, on a subject that recent tradition has asked us to sweep under the carpet. I find myself, at 35, at odds with the tone and nature and political space that is Gikuyu. For the first time in my life, in the Kibaki government, my identity [...]

Parselelo Kantai on the contested territory in writing and acting on history in Kenya, and the recent spate of books by white, western intellectuals decrying the oppressions suffered by Kenyans of various stripes under British colonialism.  One of them, Caroline Elkins (author of Britain’s Gulag) reviews Adam Robert’s The Wonga Coup, [...]

I am in Nairobi for a few days from London and just came from a ride to Athi River with my mother who is purchasing some land there. We were accompanied by my uncle, the cliche family rogue, who knows every single trick Nairobi has to part you from your money by means fair [...]

Qatari citizen Saif Saaeed Shaheen (formerly known as Stephen Cherono) reacts to smashing the world record and winning the 3000m steeplechase at the 2005 World Championships. I do not care if he is a citizen of the moon or Qatar, there is nothing better than seeing a Kenyan on top of the world.
President Kibaki [...]

Read on for more on the ‘brain drain’ and the peerless mama mbugua…and then go to this link for another story on her.
Nursing a problem
Salil Tripathi
Tuesday August 9, 2005
Guardian Unlimited
Charity Kirigo Kimani worked long hours as a nurse at the national hospital in Kenya, finding it extremely difficult to make ends meet.
A mother of three, [...]

There is much I could say about modern-day slavery in Mauritania, Niger and Sudan. But let me instead turn to the dirty little secret that so many of us Kenyans know but maintain a studied silence about. Yes, I am talking about the lot of the ‘mboch’, the housie, the maid, in good [...]

While the headlines are dominated by London’s terrorist attacks, Kenyans have been grappling with the massacre of over 80 people in Marsabit in north-east Kenya. Local press coverage has been extensive reflecting the empathy that I believe most Kenyans feel for the victims and survivors of these attacks. However, little has been said [...]

Why OGs and mababi, two generations of the African elite, are under attack
When I attended primary school in Pumwani in the early 1980s, babi was a teasing term for a softie: a spoiled kid who couldn’t hang. In the intervening decades, a babi has become a detested and shunned individual who cannot participate in most [...]

I was just about to comment on the upcoming G8 Summit and the hypocrisy of Bob Geldof who has been filling the air waves with his inane pleas for more aid to Africa. Then I came across the op-ed below, by Simon Jenkins, which says exactly what I had been hoping to express about [...]

Jonana Mungai of the Kings African Rifles, writing home. Burma,
January 1945.
 

I just received a text message from a friend in Nairobi who let me know that the authorities are bulldozing all the temporary structures built to house small businesses: kiosks, hawkers and mitumba dealers. All this is being done to supposedly get ‘rid of thugs’. I have been saying it for a while now, [...]

I just read these comments on the Confessions of a Middle Class Kenyan post and thought that they were so passionate, they needed to be better displayed.
Anonymous: I stopped being guilty and apologetic for being a middle class Kenyan along time ago. Human beings are about interests and interests first. The difference between an action [...]

Just thought I would put up one of my favourite images. This is one of the the oldest structure on my grandmother’s farm: the boy’s hut. It is where I would stay whenever I went to visit her during the holidays. The walls on the inside are covered with old newspapers and [...]

Kenya is many things and many peoples, a dizzying blend of communities and individuals; not a single entity with a common understanding of itself. A friend of mine recently asked: How does Kenya arrive in your village, at your doorstep? As a friend or a foe? In the case of the Pokot, or the [...]

The British Council in Nairobi on April 8th hosted a public debate on Kenya, Britain and the Mau Mau. On hand was David Anderson, writer of the critically acclaimed ‘Histories of the Hanged - Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire’, one of two recent books that have re-written the history of [...]

The Essence of Nairobi: Effort, Entrepeneurship, Patience.

The Two Towers in Khartoum and London
Millbank Tower, the London offices of the UNHCR and the British Labour Party, lies halfway between the headquarters of the British secret service and Parliament. Between truth and deception. Millbank Tower: glass and cement, sharp angles and silver lettering – modernity. Liberté, égalité…
One evening in Autumn 2004, a small [...]