Kenya National Archives

The swept floors are tiled neatly, so long ago. The high walls rise like ghouls that can eat your heart. Inside silence, high end louvers that can’t keep the hum away.

The throb of people outside trying to breach the pristine walls of history. There are no crowds here, just wait till you step out. And the throngs of human bundled up together in multicolor second hand clothes like a market merchandise. Thumping into each other calling each other to board old rusty busses, smearing sweat on each other, wiping lip balm on cheeks in feigned curtsies, gnawing flossed teeth with pieces of potato fries stuck uncomfortably in them. Anxious, worried unhappy sad.

Inside is history, vanished wood rails on the staircase gleaming. Tall windows like warriors of light. Dust on iron weapons, glass over bleaching newspapers about Joseph Murumbi.

Host of people who used proclaim cups from Phoenician ships, dead sweat of old skin that slept on salvaged mats from Persia the patterns, hand sewn.

Washed away bloods that must have been on the Turkana spear, or the rough texture of the palms that wielded the Luhya shield.

The last works of West Africa bronze smiths, Gods masques with slit mouths that remain open like sores, raffia that mimics synthetic hair, chopped nipped sand scrubbed crowns sitting on a pantheon of Kingship hierarchy.

Iron work that was done in kilns whose fires were not lit by matchboxes, beadwork that is half submerged into the stool of an ancient chief for the comfort of his arse, a headrest with dead moth eggs when it was still with its Maasai owner. A Somali knife slipped forgotten into its belt sheath.

Wangari Maathai recently dead, on pictures under glass display smiling. Tom Mboya dead long ago on this very street where the box building stands.

And paintings.

The painting.

The first flight of stairs to your left when you enter. Past the mosaic of Dedan Kimathi, and the attempt at the nooses and crevices of Kenyatta in pencil.

The gleaming staircases solid. The polished stair case rails. Deep brown like good mahogany. Simple lines for patterns.

And at the landing. An orange painting. An outcrop in the middle of a dusty desert. Stones about it scattered at the discretion of the painter. Insipid blue skyline, empty and probably hot. But loneliness, deep sad insignificant loneliness. Standing alone in the middle of nowhere the huge sore rock ,dusty in the desert, a shadow here and there a promise of relief from its locked lack of meaning. A painting like no other, sand orange, blue and rocks.

   

Visit the Kenya National Archives. Know your history.

AU Security summit

African Union Peace and Security summit meeting in Nairobi came to a stark realization on the threat of terrorism posed by inter-border loopholes, but is it too late?

While the meeting toyed with the idea of setting up a fund with Kenya’s President Kenyatta admitting that ‘no single state can tackle this threat alone and it is particularly worrying in Africa today that terrorist organizations have grown both in terms of number and capability’.

Even Spy chiefs and the police who met last week are thinking of crafting a regional approach that might craft cross border partnerships and legislations, it begs to understand whether this counter move is not only anticipated by the terrorists and impractical in the dynamics that are changing by the day.

Why I think both are the case are two incidents that preceded this meeting but were never put in context at the summit.

One is the declaration of a Caliphate on all territories under the Boko Haram by Abbubakr Shekau. While it might be seen as an imitation of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdai’s Islamic State Caliph, the creation of the state even if hysterical at most is a sure effort at blurring borders of the current countries as we know them.

It is not unimaginable especially for the ‘horn of Africa’ where Al Sahab operate across a border of ethnic Somali to declare make a similar move. Disenfranchised and already branded terrorist by virtue of their identity and religion it is also unsurprising that such a move to create a state will be appealing to Al Shabab sympathizers.

If such states pop up than it will be hard to see how a regional force will effectively battle the insurgents without legitimizing the states and the operational dynamics on territorial integrity plus a mish mash of military ranks will facilitate such a franchise.

Another problem is the discovery of a Laptop in a village in the Syrian province of Idlib from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which have since rebranded themselves as the Islamic State during an attack in January.

The Laptop believed to be of a Tunisian Named Muhamed S. a chemist student, contained 19 page document in Arabic on how to develop biological weapons including Ebola and weaponize bubonic plague from infected animal.

While the discovery of a dusty laptop in a remote village in Syria is not a doomsday indicator since even experts believe weaponizing the Ebola virus is too complex and unlikely even in sophisticated laboratories, the issue should not be let out of context.

This even as the Philippines defense department confirmed that it will pull out more than 100 troops from a UN peace-keeping mission Liberia amid concerns over the Ebola virus. What this might result in is a withdrawal of troops in a domino effect that will effectively counter any intergovernmental military action as long as the virus exists.

If and whether to keep populations safe from the virus that has already claimed 1,400 lives with a further 2,600 suspected or confirmed cases, countries seal of area around these Caliphs then they can only morph and gain legitimacy and in effect counter any international help thanks to the Philippines.

The terrorist know little come out of gatherings like this Summits than statements of intent and if any action a bureaucracy that will see it take time. And they will be ready by the time any sound action is actually taken.

It has taken long enough to realize that we need cross border warfare, and even then military procedure still dictated that Cameroonian soldiers disarm the hapless Nigerian outfit that was fleeing Shekau only recently.

#WARAGIPHILOSOPHY: Why Live?

Between a calloused looked spinning a storm on a tall glass with a chipped pattern bottom, the ones you buy as wedding gifts for lack of imagination, a thought escaped me.

I asked a friend hoping his intoxication would have filed off his reservations and numbed his calculations for sounding intelligent. (He thinks too much)

What do you want out of life?

A simple question that I wanted an answer myself. Was it a constant thing a pristine goal that one is born to pursue, per-determined even.

Was it lots, a fatalism or chances that when we go into that evening drenched in dick-purple blood of dusk to an eternity/reincarnation/ or just lights out, we would have fit into purposes like gloves designed for us?

Or was it a morphing thing changing in its manifestation like a salty nipple to a child to a stick finger nipple to a man. changing with growing or diminishing need and attitudes.

Maybe it was with the people, left to tell if you got what they want in life. An outside thing determined by other peoples perceptions, ability or inability to see themselves in your shoes, empathize or worse still judge.

Did anyone ever get what they wanted out of life?

"Confidence"

It came out wistful, unlikely as I first thought. I'd expected better bigger. at least from him. A domineering pantheon I could add to a character in my book, a strong lurid but thoughtful character. But all he wanted was so achievable so within his reach that he had set his 'high-jump' beneath his heels.

I was wrong.

What he wanted tells a lot, its a statement of intent. A unique desire to compensate. It is history, his, or lack of. It is how he wants to fashion his life but is incapable of. His life is a dreary film  he has watched, inspiring but just for the brevity of it. His life, our life demands that confidence a monumental courage to accept the vanities we hold but do not acknowledge.

I still had four fingers around my glass of brown brandy. Fiery for its ability to make us do the wrong things and pass blame to 'Oh the spirit of wine, let me call thee devil.' My one free finger pointed at another friend.

What about you.

"Happiness"

I swung the brandy up my throat my head bent backwards repulsed, hoping, maybe the drink would jut out through the sole of my brain like spewing retch.
Simpleton, I concluded, Jolly monkey African too content with the moment to notice the clock of time winding off those tiny wheels and cogs in de ja vu. I thought of him too crass to base such a mournful span of time to a simple single emotion that was at best unachievable if not feigned. An emotion that was fleeting in its folly and tempered by its antithesis at all times. Reggae-like calling for Peace when we know how awfully conflicting the world is even in its theoretic formation as an explosive star.

But I realized it was in itself not just a childish dream for grownups but an essence that escapes those who think they are climbing the lofty clouds of self awareness. The missing piece after Zarathrustra conquers knowledge. A dark moment even after we have discovered the light bulb in all colours. We remain base animals that need more often than not to be just that. Not tombstones but rotting corpses beneath swallowed by our insignificance. We remain prisoners of the soft human desires of perfections gladly imbuing the admiration and vanity of shared stupefaction. We need to be happy the irony is we will not and thus makes it a purpose a goal worth pursuing.

My friends turned and asked me with their eyes. I had sourced writing material from them, at least I should offer something in return.

"What? Living beyond my bones"

Reincarnation, I thought, wisdom something lofty to tell humans eons from now that there once lived a fool so full of himself. Something important enough to get people to awe at the gaudy brilliance I exuded while I lived, the most intelligent man in the room, the self importance, itself the greatest vanity.

But maybe I longed for an intrinsic biological logic. Desire to see my genes re-written in another being. Engineering something entirely non existent and dependent on my action. A child not only to bear my name but my race, my essence. Siring a human being.

What if am impotent?

What do you want out of life?

Prescriptive philanthropy

Listening to a radio appeal about contributions to a drive to raise money for congenital heart problems if felt moved to act.

Maybe it’s was the way they said it, the way you talk about someone’s misfortune that triggers apathy and vulnerability at the same instance.

Maybe being a victim myself of insistent bouts of asthma and sinuses at an early age I could relate.

Or maybe just maybe am a victim of selective or prescribed philanthropy.

I have never been able to justify why I walk past beggars my whole life. My reasons have varied, from the futility of my effort to the need to instill hard work among beggars.

I have doubted the honesty of their plight especially in Nairobi where I have been informed that beggars are richer than those actually giving them alms, facts I have not been able to substantiate in actuality.

I have held that since they are so many my ten shillings would make no difference in their lives, in fact the next day they will be there the next day begging more fervently than before.

I have also peculiarly held them as junkies. I have my own alcohol issues that gobble up my scanty finances yet I still imbibe with abandon. Knowing they are pre-disposed abusers of some substance to survive their plight I feel that financing their drug habit is not so philanthropic. So I don’t give beggars money.

Then I hate it when my maker is used to extort me. Whenever a beggar appeals to my sense of guilt or fear of hell I switch off. Keep my God out of it.

But generally I do not have a definite reason why my philanthropy does not extend to those crawling beggars with tin cups or babies spread to appeal to the little humanity townsfolk are left with.

This moment has however made me rethink my presupposition. Why is it better for a company to do Corporate Social Responsibility in a cancer clinic and not the homeless?

What would could justify the millions of shillings in targets for formal interventions that are usually surpassed yet we barely give a beggar a dime.

Has the capital franchise found a subtle way to exhaust a universal humane feeling by channeling our philanthropy through formal undefined causes while alienating us from the direct individuals seeking help.

Would it not better to help those we are most disposed to share their gratitude because helping is just a  base vanity of sharing gratitude.

On migrants

What Kenya is doing to its migrant community should worry every rational human being that has not lost a sense of history.

The deliberate global perception towards migrants is not in its entirety new. What is happening is a creation of a dangerous mine field that will dictate the future of our civilization around the globe. We must fight against the fear of migrants being created in us and the fear in migrants against their hosts.

Migrants in recent years are slowly building the biggest world population in a single category outside race and religion and they provide the next frontier for the recurring of inhuman expression of violence since slavery.

If one understands slavery and how it was instituted in the society one cannot fail to draw parralles. It is without a doubt that most of those who organized and effected the trade did so with clarity of thought and an absence of guilt .

Besides the financiers including the big banks of Europe that still run the world through their multinationals that need labour just like then the foot soldier, the crew in slave ships the buying slaver, the African who captured his fellow kin were all pre-meditatively conditioned to see slaves as lesser being humans who did not deserve any dignity.

Slaves on their part were depraved souls who had gone through perhaps the most haranguing experience you can afford to man. Pounced upon while fetching firewood and shackled to band with wrought rusty metal that cut into their skins. Banded together with a corpse which they dragged with the shackles that would cut through their skin. Humiliated naked at the cost examined like beasts and branded. Shipped in spaces not bigger than a coffin in grime feaces and urine for months next to rotting corpses. 1 third of the whole population of a continent turned into docile humans to condition them to their situation.

Now take a migrant. Take yourself a Kenyan in 2007 if the world had not come to your rescue. If this country would have fallen you would be a migrant like the Somali, Syrian or Iraqi or Afghan. And if you believe that the migrant question is Islamic then think Nigeria, Central African Republic, Congo, South Sudan, Ukraine, Venezuela.

Globally social strife is tearing stable countries apart creating a global movement of migrants. Migrants who have been starved by their regimes that they have lost the fiber of nation statism. Migrants who have been so brutalized by their regimes when the table turns like in Bangui its genocide. Migrants who have walked the desert sands of South Sudan over rotting black bodies to cross over borders with barely bones holding their stature.

Migrants who enter their neighbouring countries in millions only to be huddled in concentration camps like slaves and creating a whole generation of people disrupted from their social economic and religious way of life they would sell their own mothers for a morsel of food.

Migrants who due to disrupted schooling are engineered to be on the last wrung of unskilled labourers. Who like in the South Africa mines are the easiest targets for multinational exploitation and xenophobia. Like in Europe are the basis for re-election (right-wing ideologists get rid of migrant syndrome that has gripped europe)

Men to whose host nations treat like scum and have no one but their own to turn to. Who understand the plight of each other only in their seclusion. Whose host population is conditioned to hate them and host security apparatus has perfected the art of Askaris in the cotton field of America.

It is the migrant population in this century that we will be guilty of committing atrocities unlike those done to our own forefathers who fought human oppression.

But it is this same migrant population that we are most vulnerable to becoming. Remember that all failing Nation states had at one time, like you, thought they were stable just before they failed.

On Race in Africa- nah

I just completed reading Chimammanda Adichies novel and I beg to react while the knots of exciting story are still fresh as smoking feaces in ashen dewy grass.

This amazing book about race to me lied when she stated that in Africa she had never been black. That here race doesn’t implode on your face until you meet those niggers and their former slavers in America.

Personally being home grown I have no first hand opinion on America and frankly its books like these that inform my opinions.

On race and Africa I would say that it does exist. who wasn’t a loose toddler running after a white man who has happened to your dark corner of the continent shouting 'Mzungu how are you' The way we did it in our days, was incredulous in our ability to get the grinning old white people with spindly hair and reddening necks to give us sweets.

The lessons do not stop because soon after cutting a cypress tree to make Christmas tree and sprinkling its spiked incensed edges with soft white wool, after putting up Christmas cards with white Jesus Mary and Joseph or Santa and snow, we go to school and read our history as it was written for us.

We see photos of black naked men carrying white missionaries as they discovered us. We are taught more of when the Portuguese made their conquests than the Mau Mau (mentioned in passing as we rush to finish the syllabus just before exams. I can’t believe had to cram all those bloody years)

It is not lost to us that we are a race of people apart and subservient to another. A race who defines what we consider progress, development, future.

It was not lost to me one day when I arrived at Busia catholic church late and was standing in the warm tropical sun all the pews occupied when a white couple, we call them odiero here in Kenya or mzungu. What I witnessed made me stop going to church.

The usher an old illiterate was suddenly struck with panic, the odieros couldn’t possibly stand through the whole mass. That must have seemed so scandalous to her, to imagine the exporters of this religion would be made to endure standing at the expense of the recipient was un-African. So she not only shooed away some Africans but also stripped her greying hair of its wrapper and polished the pew for the white folks who actually thanked her for being so kind.

That was not so bad until the priest who was conducting a Kiswahili service chipped in a few Anglo cues for the benefit of the white folks.

So race is not lost to us it is acknowledged here but not in a militant way; in a submissive way but with a belief that a good white man is only a dead one.

No, white folks do not fret. Meaning a good white folk is one you could fleece. Here you walk down the street with a white woman and brothers slyly smile at you and congratulate you in mother tongue for making it in life. Brothers go to the gym because they see niggers in magazines with chiseled bodies and they reckon it increases their chances on duping a white woman. Other tribes don Maasai regalia and learn how to jump to nail a white woman which is automatic cash cow!

Here relations are more of beach-boy-old-white lady or young girls vulturing for old white men with money. And they help they white guys friends land their sisters in a gold rush kind of way Here interracial is economical just like there where its for immigration papers
Here white folks who have read the travel advisory that garishly paints it as an Al shabab terrorist outpost with criminal gangs running rife. Who have been told not to talk to starngers by their governments and smile wryly at the rushing deluge of blackness and browness only talk to friends they have made at the NGOs they work in.
Race is real not just against us.

A chapter in my life I would give up for a dollar

Last night they cut my power

Just one fast forward dusk like all the power outages Kenyans are accustomed to but this time it was only my one roomed flat. The rest of the single rooms in the opposite tenement flickered like fireflies now that I was plunged in darkness. My thoughts fraught enough to compliment between the words in the novel I was reading and the reality that had just struck.

I only had train fare left, you know. So the first reaction was acclimatising to the fact that this blackout would really last for long. Two, that this writing under a yellow candle flame with a blue arse like monkeys would become household. Three, that maybe I will finally break. It is the third thought that scared me most.

I had tried not to notice things, you know. The fact that I lived in a crappy one room who sewage pipes were burst and collected in foul pool that bred vicious mosquitoes. The fact that I lived next to neighbours who thought I was a teacher because I read so thick novels. Neighbours who drunk cheap alcohol illicit alcohol or smoked bhang in constant intervals just to avoid noticing the squalor. Neighbours who managed to fit in these one rooms with four to six children, one bed (How did they even make love in that crowd?) I had feigned indifference maybe because I hope soon enough I would leave these derelicts behind. But every waking day was serving a reminder that my desire to leave would not be quenched soon.

At least the caretaker was holding me in higher esteem smiling or brandishing her yellow teeth a little more whenever I paid rent in full. She had placed a notice on the landing just beneath the stairs warning of eviction if the tenants could not pay by 10^th of each month. After some obscenities were slewed on the piece of handwritten notice someone tore it through the spine obviously irritated by either the notice or obscenities.

But just that silent instant in a square swimming pool of black suffocating air I desired home. Home where we had never had our lights disconnected. Where my father would somehow always manage to pay earlier than expected.

But I quickly fought that lethargic thought. I would not fail in my quest to cut out a life for myself. I would not fail in this town of unequal opportunity. Yes unequal opportunity because while I was going to a children’s home in Karen yesterday staring at humongous real estates and knowing my idea of making it in this city would never win me one of those. This naivety to work hard would only land me in mid-life crisis. Here I needed either pure luck ingenious deceit a corrupt patron or mooting voodoo.

And this restlessness made me start seeing and coming to terms with my reality instead of fleeting to the desired future I had painted in my mind like canvas murals. I now noticed the ragged men who used the trains that made me feel out of place when I took the train home yesterday evening. Heir ripped up collars and browning clothes who would squeeze up into you in the crammed up spaces. Where men’s limp members were pressed against your thighs and women’s warm breasts on your shoulder blades. Where fat women selling groundnuts would wedge through the crowded boogie and one would feel his wallet moving out of the pocket. Where peoples breath with mint or menthol from chewing PK would merge with haughty pronouncement of hunger stale alcohol and fading perfume would merge and float like low clouds on mountain tops. I had effectively ignored the hoarse rheumatic breathing and minions of dashing spittle making rainbow kaleidoscopes whenever they sneezed. All I did was keep my head high to avoid drowning in my hypersensitivity that no one else could afford to notice.

But that afternoon at the children’s home I jumped at the offer of a free meal. In my calculations I had saved a lot of money, sixty shillings to be precise. I was pleased with myself shrewd. A pale white lady who was seating at my table decided it was her business to keep the conversation going. She decide everyone should say what they did. How was I supposed to tell her I they had sent an intern to cover the event. I told her I was a correspondent, a get paid a retainer and a commission for every story. And that self-deceiving instant I realized I was no longer comfortable in my skin. That freckled woman whose pork white skin was speckled with browns spots and her freckled white hair was tidy behind her head in perfect streaks made my castle in the wind crumble. All the time that I introduced myself to my friends answering that I worked in a big media company without giving the details of the nature of my position no longer stood. I was an intern; I had been so for some time. I was paid a stipend and that was all that there was. So when the white old lady who had been in Kenya long enough to make deductions of local dailies who could tell my tribe by my name (Otiato, you are Lou? She said in a knowing Kenyan way) made me face my reality I stated seeing things for what they were and felt pitiable.

I realized from then on it would be difficult to pretend not to see the thick coalesced fat of unhealthy muturas (stuffed goat or cow intestines) that I sometimes ate for supper. Or the sickening rush of acidic cheap liquor, Meakins vodka to be precise, that I drink in Nairobi backstreets. In those dingy unlit bars with urinals that could scald eyes with urea as if pissing was peeling onions. I realized I could no longer use those who were below me as reference point and see myself as just a little haughtier than them and the thin veil of self-absorption that comparison availed me. I had opened up eyes my alter ego thought was long overdue. A restless soul like mine needed heavier blankets of self-deceit to live the life I was living. But the fear of failing was the greatest conviction that would not allow me to throw in the towel. I had to cultivate a belief that some good will come of it. It was like an atheists belief in God.

So today evening with barely anything left for the rest of this disdainful period I will go to Québec wines and spirits. I will buy a half a bottle of Meakins vodka. While standing with a bunch of casual labourers and small time business men I will hope it will deliver a quick blackout to  face the harrowing darkness that awaits me like the uncertainties in my life. And in the carefree nature that only my college buddies could relate to, I will whisper after cringing my face to allow saliva to calcine the woeful taste of cheap vodka, ‘Money Commeth’

Free Eskinder Nega

Everyone has A Right to expression unless they shout fire fire in a theatre full of people.

Eskinder warned that Ethiopia was staring into the abyss of the Arab Spring and for a nation that is systematic in its subjugation of human expression, they made a law to suit agitators for social change.

What in effect is their interpretation of this exception of the tenet of freedom of speech is that we should jail the manufacturers of fire extinguishers at theater door because they have written (expressed) fire fire.

We should also imprison the administration maintaining the theatre for setting up fire assembly points because they have the same effect as someone who shouts fire fire,  in a theater!

Now if the Ethiopian government deludes itself that it could stop the unraveling human history that is towards democracy and its tenets then it should look around for examples in History.

When the biggest state mechanism that is still operating on throttling civil voice, aka china took in Ai wei  wei, they made him in fact a voice of democracy. Tianamen square embodies this spirit to date and the effect of open revolutionary contempt for the Chinese government simmers to date.

What the Ethiopian government has successfully done is turn Eskinder Neta into the beacon of an African voice for the call of democracy and free speech.

It is a call that every blogger and journalist who has staked up his voice in the open space of the internet should fight for.

It’s a battle that if we lose to despots who are relishing on the precedent by Ethiopia to instigate similar bridle across the continent. Like in Kenya where CCK or whatever it is called wants to license and register bloggers and give them passes in order to converse in the internet.

This is a battle of epic proportions a battle that should allow Satta to be called a sweet potato if he is really one symbolically and behaves like one literally by locking Bwalya for 5 years.

As the Nation Of Africa we solemnly call on Ethiopia to Free Eskinder Nega

Joshua Kisemei: Let Eskinda Go: Let Democaracy Prevail 
Zakes Mda: Africans Must Speak Up for Journalist Jailed in Ethiopia
Call For Justice: Sign Petition Now!