The one thing coursework in International Terrorism can do is make you despise simplistic good vs evil storylines. So can the study of History, the reading of other people’s literatures, and the willingness to know what you don’t want to know. Be warned that your capacity to suffer fools gladly quickly wanes too. In this…
Kajiwe Since 1963, all Kenya’s presidents have raised the Christian bible to take oath of office, and all of them have broken that oath with shocking impunity and audacious impenitence. Suppose they were required to drink the blood of something, chant some terrifying vows in the name of their ancestors, acknowledge that insanity and pestilence…
In Christian mythology, labor is a curse. A punishment to humans for disobedience. Deity curses the land so that men shall forever toil in futility until the day they die. It’s a rather grim outlook on labor. “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the…
When a generation of youth is blind to the sacrifices of the shoulders they stand on, they become a boot on others’ shoulders and start a new cycle of oppression. Back in 2015, I had many personal conversations with the youth of Kenya that left me numb. The collected layers of calloused tragedies from insecurity,…
Willpower is overrated. I’ve heard about people going cold turkey on bad habits – too much smoking, cracking knuckles, alcohol, gnashing teeth, biting your lip, etc. “Yeah! I woke up one morning and decided enough! And from that day on I never touched another cigarette!” I don’t know about that. I just don’t believe in…
Fattening and Sickening “During the mission period, 3 out of 4 of the coastal Indians perished. They’d lived well free, but as soon as we introduced them to a Christian and community life, they fattened, sickened and died” – a Christian missionary during the Christianization of the Native American peoples, The West (Burns). My mind…
Something happened on August 7th, 1998. There were two terrorist bomb attacks in Kenya and Tanzania by Al-Shabaab against the United States. 213 Kenyans and 11 Tanzanians died over a war that had nothing to do with either country. It was a foreign war brought to African soil. Kenyans had no inkling on the rising…
The disappearance of intellectual wealth in African communities is directly linked to imperial missionary work that killed professions such as storytelling, rainmaking and divination, all of which had seasoned experts, trade secrets and years’ worth of researched knowledge often dressed up in ritual for the consumer. Born-again African Christians stopped telling tall tales about ogres…
Some 20 years ago, I was in the cast of Samuel Beckett’s one-acts, directed by a visiting French company, Theatre du Shaman. The thing is, we struggled to see the humor the director insisted was in Beckett. We just couldn’t see it. How on earth could the doom-and-gloom of Beckett’s absurd theatre be funny? We…
