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…
Hello there! Thank you for coming by. Mkawasi.Com is a place of familiar confessions and self-discovery. I hope it stirs you up sufficiently, entertains you profoundly, and surprises you with new knowing. Share it freely as you journey on. About Me I am a storyteller, a teacher, writer, thinker, agitator. These are my chosen life assignments –…
Just over 5 years ago, I needed a black doll for my play that was to show at the Kenya National Theatre. I thought I could walk into any toy store and find one. I was in Africa after all. The Motherland with over 1 billion black humans. Let me tell you! I walk the…
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,…