A student once shared an interesting anecdote about his travel to Rwanda where he noted that the word “genocide” existed only in French translation and none in Kinyarwanda. By this, he surmised that genocide was not an African concept. Once again, here’s a fallacy of assuming that just because something has no definitive word in…
I’m parked out at Aldi about to go in and buy lemon-pepper. I open the door but I’m arrested by the story on NPR. About a man in India trying to save his father whose dry cough suddenly turned into to a fever. He rushed him to hospital after hospital – says the storyteller –…
We got there and weren’t sure which of the two houses was the “last on your left” as per instructions we got from our host. They both occupied that same curved stretch of bay at Cape St. Claire. We decided we weren’t going to come out of the car until we were absolutely sure of…
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 I was 11-and-a-half I fancied a boy. I remember exactly why. He was the only one with a book bag that had graffiti on it. I did not know then that I was attracted to things creative, but there it was, Boy X and his green canvas backpack. On it were huge blocks of…
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,…
In one of the high schools I went to – those were the days one graduated from 4 years of secondary school to a 2 years of high school – we were not allowed to speak Swahili. Only English. This school was at the Coast, the land of Swahili peoples. They speak, think, dream, project,…
Irrational Belonging is a theory that overturns Balance of Power and destroys ideas of dominance & superiority. It views the world through identity constructs.
Power: They were only 16, give or take a year. But so powerful were they their mere appearance caused dread in girls no matter what we were doing. You could be sitting quietly during study hour and see a maroon sweater pass by from the corner of your eyes and your blood pressure suddenly rises….
One day, my mother pulled me out of school. Just for a day. I was 17. It had occurred to her that I needed to be given a rite of passage. That rite turned out to be an Anglican one. The Church of England had erased our cultural rites and bequeathed us theirs. Ok, so…
