AFROPTIC

I didn’t want to write about her in the heat of the celebrations not because she doesn’t deserve the festivities. No. In fact she deserves all the attention worth of any heroine. I purposely delayed her tribute so that when I finally publish, it gets good attention. I didn’t want her tribute to be swallowed and absorbed into the old, repetitive and boring hypocritical tributes paid by our insincere political leaders to our independence heroes whose families are still languishing in abject poverty due to betrayed dreams. You see, she didn’t attend the Whiteman's classes. People said she didn’t read others said she didn’t go to school while others used more derogatory labels such as “ illiterate " to describe her. These didn’t bother me at all. To me she was simply the best in world. I cannot find any other woman comparable to her. I will never find one. And I am also not looking for any. Writing about this kind of a woman is such an uphill task. The problem is that you do...

As the world continues to be a small global village thanks to modern communication technology, countries are more aggressively embracing multilateral cooperation. Regional integration today is much stronger than ever before with some regions yearning for confederation. Africa is not left behind in this regard with some leaders floating the idea of the United States of Africa.  Traditional regional integration efforts on the continent have largely been championed through regional trade blocs. Key among such blocs include the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC),  Communauté Économique des États de l'Afrique Centrale (CEEAC), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU). All of these bodies have been driven by common objective: to promote free movement of people and goods across their borders. Although the above-named bodies have h...

General Dedan Kimathi appeared to me in a dream last night. He was furious. He held a giant bow in his left hand and a steel arrow in his right. A dozen other arrows where in a buffalo leather sheath that was strapped on his back using a crocodile leather strap. He positioned the arrow in the bow as he angrily questioned why I had ignored his instructions. That was not the first time he had appeared to me. It was the 7th time in a month.I had ignored them as sheer dreams. I am not a very superstitious man but last night's dream was too vivid to be just a dream. In each of the instances he appeared to me, he ordered me to sweep the streets of Nairobi. But I did not know what he meant until he appeared with the weapons. So after failing to answer his question, he aimed the arrow at my upper between the thighs. I froze. I desperately pictured how the Bukusus would bury me. I must have been a disgrace to the community for having failed to produce enough publications to carry my name....

I told you people. This thing happens a lot in Nairobi's Ronald Ngala Street and Haile Selassie Avenue towards Muthurwa. Just three days after a failed attempt to snatch my old Huawei cell phone, I witnessed another robbery in the Green City in the Sun. I was seated in my homebound bus; the green Mwi Sacco PSV taxi commonly known as matatu. Commuters have nicknamed this particular Sacco Mwizi Sacco because of the theft that goes on in there. If the street thugs are not robbing you of your mobile phone, the bus crew rob you without robbing you. A distance of Ksh 50 they charge you Ksh 100! And if you give them Ksh 500, be rest assured they will “forget” to give you your change! They always forget and your chances of forgetting are equally as high as mine. I can bet. Now back to the Nairobbery incident. This seemingly gracious lady was a few seats ahead of me but on the same outer side on the bus. She must have been busy on her phone giving written instructions to her house ...

It is very notorious in Nairobi, especially along Ronald Ngala Street and Haile Selassie Avenue. This uncouth street behavior makes the great Pan-Africans who are named after them turn in their graves. It is disgusting and irritating. Very immoral! Sadly it happens and Nairobians largely seem unperturbed. Rumor has has it that the culprits enjoy the fruits of their labor with the supposed law enforcers. Sad! They have unsuccessfully attempted it on me several times. But last Saturday's attempt was quite memorable. I was seated in the inner row of the green MWI Sacco bus going back to my landlady's house after a very long day of hard work. Building this nation is not a joke! That day I had not had time to do Shadrach's standing assignment. So I decided I should do it on my way to the house. I was seated on the second seat from the window. I thought I was safe enough. But I was wrong. Very wrong. My plea to have the pseudo-slay queen seated on my left, next to the window,...

One day these careless and irresponsible politicians are going to burn all of us. But of course they burn us without burning us. They will simply give us fuel and a single matchstick then we will ignorantly and foolishly set ourselves on fire. It has happened before where for instance Tutsis and Hutus in the country of a thousand hills called Rwanda decided to kill each other without any good reason. Political historians tell us that about 800,000 innocent Tutsis and "moderate" Hutus were killed within 100 days in 1994.  Burundi has suffered the same, Kenya tasted it in the 2007/08 political violence that assumed an ugly ethnic face. In South Africa we have a madness called Xenophobia where "amakwerekwere," the foreigners are hunted and lynched just for being foreigners in that rainbow nation. Since we never learn from our past political mistakes, the pogrom that awaits us is unfathomable. The signs are already on the wall. Today in a remote Chepturo village of ...

A lot of things in Africa do not make very good sense to me. One of them is unnecessary security checks at some places considered "important." Woe unto you if you do not subject yourself to these, sometimes very annoying, security rituals. But do they really make sense?  Does a slight bending of these rules threaten national security? I work in a big organization that treats security of its members "very seriously." However, I find some of their security practices very ridiculous, annoying and/or irrational. They do not make sense at all. But you should see the zeal, enthusiasm and seriousness with which their custodians enforce them. The other day I was entering some building of the organization. Its entrance is designed in such a away that strangers and certain employees have to pass through some walk-through metal detector to "detect" if they are carrying an atomic bomb. At such entrances, all your metallic possessions are supposed to pass through...

It used to happen to me mostly when I was a teenager. It did not happen once, not twice but several times. Even in my early adulthood I experienced it I think once. Demons could visit me, strangle me and choke me. I could not shout, I could not move my mouth. My feeble hands could not move. My eyes could not open to see the evil spirit strangling me. That feeling is awful. You die without dying while seeing it! I actually died several times. If not for my name "Kuloba" I would have actually died dying. See, "Kuloba" is not a very romantic name to the Slay-tongue. In fact, its connotation relates to some huge, ugly soil. It is a kind of name that is given to infants after a special ceremony is performed to confuse evil spirits and scare them away from consuming the baby. It is actually a miracle name. Now back to the battle with the evil spirits. I am sure you have also battled it. You may be wondering how? Remember those early mornings you tried to wake up but y...

Elevators were developed to make life easy in terms of vertical access to our modern city buildings. If not for such an incredible product of the creative human mind, life would have been extremely hard in the cities' skyscrapers. However, Africans have peculiar and sometimes very annoying ways with elevators. Here are a number of them: Hostage holding - I have observed in a number of African cities that there are some individuals who are so selfish and insensitive to the needs of others. These are people who hold the elevators from proceeding with the journey because they have important matters to discuss with their friends out of the elevator . An elevator will be held hostage for a whole two minutes for these Africans to finalize their last minute chatting; it is very unethical! Unnecessary use - Ideally the elevator was invented to aid in climbing high floors. It is surprising that a good number of Africans use these facilities to access Mezzanine 1, 2 and first floors. T...

I naturally love learning new languages; any language that I come into contact with I always try to learn. I started with my immediate surrounding languages. I mean the countless dialects of Luhya. Wait a minute! There is no language called Luhya but what we have are the various individual languages (not dialects but full languages) of the various communities that historical anthropologists lumped together as Luhyas. So my immediate foreign language to learn as a small boy was Oluwanga ; the language of the Abawanga people of Kakamega County. Then I leaned some Ateso during my short stint among these amazing people in Kocholya village, Busia County. When I went back home after only nine months, my Babukusu people were amazed at how fast I had Tesonized myself.  So as expected everybody wanted to know how I did it! However, these are not the only languages I have learned. The most amazing language that I leaned to perfection is Lingala....Yes! This beautiful language of Rhumba m...

It is surprising how life changes thanks to technological changes. They say change is as good as rest. Although some changes are good, a coin always has two sides to it. Today let us discuss the flip side of the mobile phone. This hand-held gadget, a product of modern telecommunication technology, revolutionized the way we communicate. Its arrival in the early 2000s spelt doom for at least two major sectors; the landline and the Posta. However as the mobile technology continues to improve, another sector is almost becoming redundant and this is the Cyber Café industry. Nowadays, we are able to communicate instantly at the press of a few buttons on the mobile phone. We are able to send and receive messages instantly through conventional short text messages or via social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Twitter etc. We are equally able to make video calls on WhatsApp, do mobile teleconference, send and receive multimedia messages and even read books in ...

AFRICA is the only continent on the earth where its problems are defined and discussed in foreign languages and perhaps this explains why the slogan " African solutions to African Problems " has remained out of reach. How can you solve an African problem in an unAfrican language?  One of the reasons given by imperialists for their colonization of Africa was based on Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution . That human beings evolved from apes and since Africans were still evolving, Europeans came to quicken the process of evolution and in this madly murderous political enterprise, the colonial masters deemed it fit to dismantle African cultural identity. The entry point was to introduce a new language to the black man of Africa. Each colonial power forcefully pushed its mighty language down the throats of powerless Africans. So the British enforced their English, the French, and the Portuguese equally implanted theirs. The naive African man embraced it "wholesale...

The team that was crafted by President Uhuru Kenyatta and his political arch-rival former Prime Minister Raila Odinga to ease political tensions in the country is expected to hand in its report any time this month.  Dubbed the "Building Bridges Initiative" or simply "the BBI," this team was crafted after a political truce between Uhuru and Raila following the hotly contested 2017 presidential election to look into ways of averting perennial post-election crisis in the country.  Building Bridges Initiative Chairman Yusuf Haji makes a point during one of the taskforces' sittings at Maasai Mara University in Narok County in February.  [Robert Kiplagat, Standard] Even though the contents of the BBI report are not yet public, rumor has it that the team is proposing sweeping constitutional changes aimed at promoting inclusivity in government. Among issues being fronted is the creation of the position of a powerful Prime Minister and two deputies. Such changes w...