Pigia Dada continued - by Kingwa Kamencu

Another excerpt, following on the one posted last week, from Kingwa’s elections dispatch:

The voting day dawns bright and sunny. Very few matatus are in operation in the town centre, they come in to the city in ones and twos. All shops are locked, even major supermarkets, restaurants and shops. From a sign on the window at Steers Muindi Mbingu Street, they apologize that they are closed, “To give our staff time to vote.” Town centre is empty. Read more

Amnesty, and Acceptable Loss - by Al Kags

There are two trains of thought on the awarding of blanket amnesty to
the many Kenyans who are suspected and stand accused of reckless riot
without regard for life and property.

One train of thought, as ably expressed by Martha Karua (the only PNU voice I
have heard consistently on the subject), is that the law is blind to
temporary political situations; since at the time the perpetrators of
murder and reckless destruction of property rent Kenyan nights with true
horror, the law did not understand their cause, or more accurately, their
style of protest. Therefore, this argument continues, the law must not be spared
in prosecuting them and amnesty shall be considered as per mitigation
based on a guilty plea - that is, on a case by case basis. Read more

A Letter From Samuel Kivuitu

Kenyan poet extraordinaire, Shailja Patel, has elicited a response to a letter she slipped to ECK comissioner, Samuel Kivuitu, during a talk he gave in Nairobi on May 14. In her own words…:

At the beginning of this year, I wrote an Open Letter to Samuel Kivuitu, Chair of the Electoral Commission of Kenya. It was picked up by a number of sources, online and off, within and outside Kenya, and widely distributed, forwarded, and republished.
http://shailja.com/news/newsletterblog/2008/01/open-letter-to-samuel-kivuitu.html

On May 14th, Samuel Kivuitu spoke, for the first time since “The Crisis”, at a forum on Post-Election Violence in Nairobi. I arrived early at the venue, and slipped a paper copy of my Open Letter under the blotter where he was going to sit. I’d abridged and updated the letter to reflect our current Kenyan reality. It ends with a plea: Read more

Africa, le pauvre

On 26 July, 2007, at the university of Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, Nicolas Sarkozy delivered his first speech to Africa as the President of France. Inadvertently crossing the line between empathy and condescension, his words provoked a pointed response by Cameroonian historian and writer Achille Mbembe. Both are reproduced below: the translation of Sarkozy’s speech is taken from the blogsite Dionysus Stoned; Mbembe’s reply first appeared in the Cameroon journal Le Messager, and was later translated to English by Melissa Thackway. Read more

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