Six years after COVID-19, the world is facing another pandemic. It is a little-known disease but very destructive: rhetorical exoticism – mentioning the woes or wonders of some remote place to make a ...

On 15 December 2025, the cabinet approved two funds proposed in President William Ruto’s 2025 State of the Nation address: the National Infrastructure Fund and the Sovereign Wealth Fund. Together, ...

Kenya is in an argument between its past and its future. Some might say that this argument has been brewing for a long time, and they’d be right. Every day that Kenya has spent as “Kenya” has been a ...

The American and Israeli assault on Iran is not an isolated eruption but the latest expression of a long imperial pattern in which Western power is asserted through opportunistic war, racialized ...

The call came in at around 4 p.m. “Kobuthi, it’s Brian from primo.” “Oh, sema Brayo, long time, man.” “I’m good, bro.” After the usual pleasantries, there was a long pause. A deep sigh in Brian’s ...

I was born at 6 a.m. Not metaphorically. Literally. I have no memory of it, but I try to picture it: Nairobi not yet loud, Parklands hanging between darkness and noise, the kind of light that doesn’t ...

Sometime in 2014, then in my late 20s, I attended a birthday party in a middle-class Nairobi suburb. The host was a young Nairobi millionaire, a wheeler-dealer. The birthday boy was destined to become ...

During the first term of the Uhuru presidency, when the Kenya government was preoccupied with swaying public opinion as opposed to being political, it was not unusual for citizen criticism of the ...

In the coastal, Indian state of Goa with no end of charismatic churches, the Mae de Deus Church in Saligao, Bardez, is an arresting sight. The neo-gothic, quaintly ribbed, avant-garde design is more ...

At the break of dawn in Bushiangala, Ikolomani, rural Kakamega, Mercelina Injete’s day begins with a ritual known to her and other artisanal miners in the gold trade. Her “office” is a patch of earth ...

This morning at breakfast, I sat with a renowned historian from the University of Ghana. We were both attending the 5th Vice-Chancellor’s Management Retreat, held at a lovely resort on the banks of ...