I. Went to get them flowers from the same shop I first went to at age 20. It was closed. Where flowers once bloomed a new seed has taken root; green and red and metallic. Across the way were buckets, withered roses and too much plastic set against a gate. This was my third visit […]
Coherent Ramblings
Fundi Not Frank
Sandra Cisneros writes in The House on Mango Street: “Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a […]
More than Just A Book
Ever since Just A Band released Hey! 7 years ago, I’ve felt a strong kinship with these guys. I loved them (and Hey!) so much I once designed for Boflo (the puppet in Hey!) a cousin called Shokolokobangoshe, a foul-mouthed diva. I’ve written about them a few times in my journalism career with the latest […]
Ake 2015: Engaging the Fringe and Other Stories
I’ve always enjoyed solving problems and festivals flare up with so many little editorial and production fires that for some reason I really like putting out. I’ve been worked in and around literary festivals for the last eight years. With Storymoja alone I’ve happily bobbed around as a volunteer handing out programmes, worked as a […]
A Case for Better Discourse Around Sex
I’ve admired the political blog, Brainstorm ever since it was launched in 2013 by Kenyan writers and feminists Brenda Wambui and Michael Onsando. With the tagline, “Intelligent. Kenyan.” the site was launched to address the need for critical thought on the Kenyan experience. The goal was to “look at Kenya from the inside” and they […]
Open Letter to Dr. Nyairo on “An elegy on the death of Kenyan fiction”
Dear Dr. Nyairo, Thank you for expressing your honest thoughts here about the state of Kenyan fiction but I take issue with several points in your article. The biggest one being that you would publish a piece titled, “An elegy on the death of Kenyan fiction” when Yvonne Adhiambo Owour’s searing debut novel, Dust was […]