‘The Life & Times of Richard Onyango’ by Richard Onyango

‘The Life & Times of Richard Onyango’ by Richard Onyango

This Kwani-ni? edition tells a street-to-canvas bildunsroman of one of Kenya’s most successful artists, inspired by a great love of his life. Richard Onyango tells his coming of age story; from his beginnings as a musical apprentice at the Coast, to lover of Drossie, to his emergence as a force in the international art world.
Read Frank Whalley’s review of the Kwani-ni? in The East African.

‘The Life of Mzee Ondego’ by Enock Ondego

Mzee Ondego, Kenya’s greatest choirmaster and Kenyatta confidante tells the story of his relationship with Kenya’s founding father. Unknown as the man behind one of Kenya’s most influential songs – the haunting dirge that played on during those fateful days after the death of Kenya’s first president, Mzee Ondego remembers a time that has become part of our living memory

‘The True Story of David Munyakei; Goldenberg Whistleblower’ by Billy Kahora

In April 1992, David Sadera Munyakei, a newly employed clerk at the Central Bank of Kenya started noticing irregularities in the export compensation claims he was processing. On July 31st 2006, Kenya’s biggest whistleblower passed away in rural obscurity, 14 years after exposing the Goldenberg scandal, Kenya’s biggest economic scandal to date, estimated at over USD 1 billion. Billy Kahora recounts his story.

Kwani? 05 Part 2: ‘Revelations & Conversations’, An Anthology

Kwani 5 Part 2 ‘Revelation and Conversation : Part 2 of Kwani? 5, the second 400 pages of a twin edition, further examines Kenya in the context and violent aftermath of its 2007 elections. Here, writers, photographers, poets, cartoonists provide further collective narratives on what we were before, and what we became, during the epochal first 100 days of 2008. The issue also features a extended travel piece based in Uganda that comparatively explores the concept of ethnicity, and the history of a peoples in a space other than our own.

Kwani? 05 Part 2 Editorial

The Fire Next Time

OR

A Half-Made Place: Between Tetra Paks and Plastic Bags

In Kenya, democracy is the growth in popularity of bad manners. Anonymous

About six months ago, I wrote an editorial to appear in the twin issues of Kwani 05, Part 1 and 2 (this issue). However, that editorial only ran in Part 1; I yanked it from this issue- Part 2, because what I had to say back then today feels jaded, naïve and foolish as is any attempt to capture public life in this country beyond the span of a few weeks. The certainties, ideas and chest-thumping of August 2008 are dust motes and vapours. I wake up to the Kenyan morning and look around, and the new day seems to forgive the recent past, mostly because the public life is one of amnesiac collusion, a physical fact without regret or hope. So I start again.

The two parts of Kwani? 05 are dedicated to our ‘troubles’. And it is exactly 11 months since the two principals of these ‘troubles’, PNU and ODM, signed a peace accord through President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga and ‘decided to work together’. Read the full editorial.

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