NO LAUGHING MATTER
by Judi Kibinge

Once upon a time, three university pals in their early twenties formed a comedic trio at the height of President Daniel arap Moi's dictatorial reign. Moi ruled supreme, to the extent that to imagine his demise was declared a crime punishable by death. Political enemies disappeared, or were arrested in the middle of the night and taken to torture chambers. No one voiced their real feelings in public. You never knew who might be listening. Phones were bugged and conspicuous informants sat in on university lectures, trying to blend in. Even after the first democratic elections in 1997, Moi still ruled over a cowed nation. (Click here to read all...)

Another sleepless night since December 30th, 2007. The horrifying denouement of Kenya’s national elections. Woken by blurred figures howling in colourful dreams of unrest. The rain and thunder of remembered speeches pounds my thumping heart.

It is three a.m. A ginger tomcat jumps on my bed, strutting with feral grace. He sits on my chest and purrs. He oozes calm. I hold him tight; I imagine the rhythmic sound of his breathing will bring peace. Animals sense fear; some, like these, try to appease it. (Click here to read all...)

On December 27, 2007, citizen-voters camped outside polling stations with gleaming eyes, set faces and a determination to choose. The euphoria was tangible; a feeling that one's choice meant something for the greater good of the country. That one could choose how one's country could be governed, its dreams managed, its hopes accounted for.

News of the world blaring out of TV speakers. We are the three minute sound bites that niftily side-step the socio-cultural complexities that are the backdrop for the rage, squashed into mythological boxes: traditional African atavism perpetuated by two petty African tribal warlords. The foreign news merchants are almost forgiven. How else can strangers make sense of the seething howls overcoming this country? (Click here to read all...)

“Mao,” I remember asking my mom two years ago, and though I was hitting twenty-five, I couldn’t stop calling her the child’s equivalent of mommy in KiTaita, her ethnic tongue. “Mao, when we used to live in Zimmerman, there was a day you came and took me and Rozi (my sister) out of our double-decker bed and stacked it with UHT milk and packets of Unga maize flour as if it was a shelf. And for three weeks we never got out of the house.” (Click here to read all...)

I come from a quaint little country where, because illiteracy rates are high, we vote with marbles. The candidates' faces are plastered on the sides of the ballot boxes, and a special tube, a mini marble run really, winds its way in, allowing each marble to drop in with a solid ‘thunk’ as it joins the nest of others within. This marble trick means our spoilt vote rates are exceedingly low. But I guess it also means that vote-rigging with marbles is a lot easier than trying to do so with sheets of paper. (Click here to read all...)

One of the most irritating things about the violence that rocked Kenya recently, as many middle- and upper-class Nairobians will tell you, was the fact that their maids, guards and nannies did not show up for work. This was not because they were protesting their inhuman working conditions or low salaries; it was because many of their shacks had been gutted in the violence that followed the announcement of the election results and some were actually living as refugees in various government facilities within the city. Others lived in notoriously dangerous slum areas that had been cordoned off by militia or police. (Click here to read all...)

When the Nakumatts close, you know there is trouble. Yesterday, I was sitting in a Java, sipping some curiously-named drink and doing a melanin-graded assessment of everybody else in the Java. There we all were, in my nice safe middle-class Nairobi, sitting under maroon umbrellas and admiring our own urban chic: black and sinuous (really, she was the most fantastically beautiful woman, she looked like an advertisement for blackness), to creamy white and elegant – this one was wearing more beads than the average Maasai, and I wanted her shoes, badly. It was good to lust for shoes, instead of retribution, instead of dreaming up new circles of Dante’s hell for the people who have cost us our hopes, who are going to keep the gravediggers busy. As an act of charity, hospitals are allowing grieving people to pick up the dead bodies of their loved ones for free. Free death, and free storage of bodies. (Click here to read all...)

Three days ago I “exercised my democratic right” and cast my vote. A vote is a voice, a choice to speak.
And then it was New Year 2008.
Morning Mass at Consolata Church, Westlands:
The thing that has invaded the land, this, layered and ineffable grief wafts even through this hallowed acre. Inside, the pale brown pews are half empty, the celebrant’s steps down the aisle are laboured, his head lowered as are those of his yellow-robed acolytes. The chorister inadvertently starts the entrance hymn in D Minor; a note that sets the theme for the world’s best requiems. New Year’s mass in this church usually stresses its concrete seams with chattering congregants, many of whom turn up to hover at a church door only on the first day of a new year. Last year they formed guilty but cheerful gossiping clumps in the car park, interspersed with gleeful Happy New Year! And Shhh! (Click here to read all...)

My friend Yvonne once told me that it was only when she lived in my country's capital that she understood which city Nairobi was going to be when it grew up. Harare in the 1990s was funky and groovy and uncluttered and happening. There was a flow of tourist money, there were film festivals and arts festivals; there were Manchurian restaurants and people speaking of all the things they planned. There were more than twenty-four foreign airlines bringing the world to us. (Click here to read all...)

Watching television news the other day, I was struck by how many of the pictures of the rioting youth showed them apparently in good cheer.

There is a lot of anger in the country about the presidential election results, at the lack of economic opportunities and at the violence being meted out by both rioters and the security forces.

Yet when the cameras roll, the atmosphere they capture among the perpetrators of violence is one of euphoria and carnival, despite the suffering and destruction that the country has experienced in the past month. (Click here to read all...)

Kenya’s opposition must challenge disputed election results in the courts if it wants to strengthen democracy, weaken autocracy and defuse violence. Even in Zimbabwe this has shown our citizens and the world that there is still hope for that very foundation of freedom, the rule of law. (Click here to read all...)

Growing up in Kenya in the eighties, there were certain things we children took for granted. Kenya, for instance. Unlike our parents who were born into the British Empire and who watched the uncertain birth of the country, and for whom the country was a continuous experiment with the ever-present possibility of failure, a fragile thing that had only just come into being and might very well go out of being – we children knew Kenya as a fait accompli, immense, indestructible, unchangeable, a fact of life. We had been born into it and it was all we knew. For us, it had always been there, and there was no reason to imagine otherwise. (Click here to read all...)

Things are calmer in much of Kenya after a week of national hell. In Kibera, Kangemi, Dandora and all the burning slums, people are trying to get back to work and to find food. The roads in and out of Eldoret are now open although it is there, and in other parts of the Rift Valley, where things remain volatile. (Click here to read all...)

Poverty is the worst form of violence. At its worst, it is a form of slow genocide. For example, take the fact that the vast majority of the Native Americans “rubbed out” in the American genocide died (and still die) not from settler bullets, but from poor diets, disease, poor-on-poor crime, stress-related illnesses caused by predatory moneylending rates and the like. In short, they are killed by the condition of being poor. (Click here to read all...)

“Here, Malika, I have a good one for you.” We were driving towards Nanyuki. We had been on the road for almost two hours. The land had changed from the green, heavily cultivated hills of Nyeri to flat plains that stretched on for miles. Occasionally, the flatness was broken by a collection of trees. To the east Mount Kenya sat, heavy and solid, far removed from the shimmering mirages that were sometimes visible from my husband’s office in Nairobi. (Click here to read all...)

There is this cheeky lad on television. He is at the front of a small crowd of men and two women. You notice him because he is in a black t-shirt, he wears a cap and he is pulling at his ears, stretching out his tongue at policemen dressed as if they are an alien invasion force. He laughs, we imagine, because we see his teeth gleam. Teasing and weaving. (Click here to read all...)

An armless, toothless, directionless population held captive by politicians, police, thieves, and anyone else willing to display naked power. Our reactions to the deaths, massive population displacement, desecration of democracy, the destruction and looting of our infrastructure is shock, disbelief, wringing of wrists. We are unable to come to terms with the fact that our country is fragile. (Click here to read all...)

My brother frustrates me.
In response to my nagging, frantic, persistent questions, he responds with “Fine, just fine.” I feel as though he's holding back. I want him to tell me how he “really” feels. I want him to translate his feelings into language. To become eloquent about his situation. I want to believe – as smiling TV talk show hosts have taught me – that anything and everything can and should be said. (Click here to read all...)

Like many Ugandans, I have watched recent events unfold in Kenya in shock, but also with vague discomfort because of the familiarity, to us, of the images of violence, especially that unleashed by the police and army on fellow citizens. We Ugandans, unfortunately, are also too familiar with the mockery our leaders make of democratic processes, as with the rigged Kenyan election, and the surreal swearing-in ceremony that followed. (Click here to read all...)

We've never met. It's unlikely we ever will. But, like every other Kenyan, I will remember you for the rest of my life.

You had a mandate, Mr. Kivuitu. To deliver a free, fair and transparent election to the people of Kenya. You and your commission had five years to prepare, with a tremendous pool of resources, skills and technical support to draw on. You had the trust of 37 million Kenyans. (Click here to read all...)

As I sit down to write this piece, it is just over a month since the GSU threw journalists, observers, and anyone else getting in the way, out of Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC) in the first step to quickly reinstate Kibaki as president.

During this period, conservative estimates indicate that nearly 1000 people have died and over half a million are refugees. Kenya, once the symbol of progress in Africa, lies in tatters as a systemic and poisonous polarisation infects the country. (Click here to read all...)

Bound within the pages of a book, the emotive intensity of a suffering child rises one notch. This goes some way to explaining why the bestselling lists have been powerless in the face of an onslaught of “misery-lit” stories of childhoods sacrificed on the altars of domestic abuse. (Famous examples: Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It; Toni Maguire's Don't Tell Mummy: A True Story of the Ultimate Betrayal; Julie Gregory's Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood, and Torey Hayden's Somebody Else's Kids: They Were Problems No One Wanted!) (Click here to read all...)

This is a tribute to the "Man In Black T-Shirt"
His name we may or may not know
But that's how he was referred to by the KTN Television network
The date was Wednesday 16th January 2008 (Click here to read all...)