During a rehearsal for “Puma” in Nairobi, I struggled to get the scene in this photo to work technically. In my writer-director’s mind, the oath-taking President figure (Gilbert Lukalia) was supposed to slide smoothly across the stage, ghost-like, follow-spot on him as oaths from the 4 presidents in Kenya’s history fill the auditorium. A moving…
Just before he dies, the former South African president who led a white supremacist regime tries to clean up his act and hope history’s brush will paint his life with soft strokes. He records it all for public release in a last-minute mea culpa titled “FW de Klerk’s message from beyond the grave”. I think…
Copyright 2009 Mkawasi Mcharo “I am a child of God, a child of God, a child of God…” he chanted, keeping an absent mind on the familiar route that took him every morning from his Eastlands home through the city and across to Nairobi West. He repositioned his hands around the steering wheel so the…
It’s the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and reporters from the western world seem terribly incompetent. Their journalism and intellectual idiocy that’s carelessly flying about is a thing of wonder. Turn on to any media and you hear – “spark a possible World War in Europe”, “a World War is underway”, “we are in…
Analytical works published in regional and global magazines.
*Featured art: “Hope” by Mcharo Mwakio, 2022. Oil on Canvas Art is a people’s conscience. When put on canvas or any medium, that conscience becomes a tangible treasure. With time, it can become priceless, a national treasure displayed only in museums under tight security. You see it and it hits you with a sense of…
The singular voice of the crowd and the voice of the individual in that crowd
Presidential hopeful, Elizabeth Warren, exited stage-left. The audience that cheered her on muttered disappointment about how it will be a long while before this country ever gets a woman president. It’s still a relatively new thing for the European culture to accept women in powerful positions. That was never the case in the African cultures….
Churches never disappoint in wartime. That the Orthodox Russian church is supporting the killing of innocent humans an imaginary border across is quite unsurprising. The US came from a 4-year era of a powerful Evangelical church supporting a dangerous liar whose regime culminated in a violent insurrection. Without the pact between political barons and the…
The US imposes a travel ban on 8 African countries over Omicron. Other countries with the same virus detected but not banned include Belgium, Israel, Hong Kong, UK and Germany. This calls for a lesson on transmogrification (the Western gaze that views the African/Black human as a dangerous creature). Its opposite is humanization. Stay with…