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.