Dr David Wachira is a financial specialist at the World Bank who has recently made a number of interesting appearances on the Kenyan media scene. He happens to be Mukurino, belonging to a Christian community in Kenya historically unique for fusing Kikuyu traditions with the Christian faith. Indeed, he is known as the American Mukurino. Boasting 100 years of existence, the Akorino community is known for its distinctive sartorial style which, depending on one's gender, includes a turban or head cl

Arriving on the East African coast to shoot his 1999 PBS documentary series Wonders of the African World, Harvard University Africana scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. interviewed Sheikh Badawi, “one of Lamu’s most venerable Islamic scholars,” asking him whether Lamu, the oldest Swahili town in Kenya, is an Arab or African civilization. It has been an Arab civilization for more than a thousand years, Sheikh Badawi replies, and when Gates asks him whether he—a black African—carries African ancestry,

In the West, rulers used notions of race to subjugate black people. In Africa, they used ethnicity.

Standing in line at a Nairobi polling station to cast my ballot in Kenya’s 2017 presidential election, I struck up a conversation with fellow voters in the queue. The result was a foregone conclusion, said one of the gentlemen proudly. We had the numbers and our candidate was going to win. Everyone else agreed.

No one needed to ask which candidate we would be voting for. That was another foregon

A petition to decriminalize sexual acts between people of the same sex was recently rejected by the Kenyan High Court. The litigation process was once again characterized by frequent references to “African culture.” One of the interested parties attached to the case was Irungu Kangata, the senator of Murang’a County whose interest in the petition was “to secure the diversity of Kenyan culture in their common rejection of homosexuality.” Kangata argued before the court that “none of the Kenyan co

That constitution also abolished the provincial administration, the ruthless system of arbitrary rule the British had relied on to maintain control in Kenya. But Jomo Kenyatta enjoyed virtual carte blanche to amend those rules, and in taking the extremely retrogressive acts of getting rid of devolution, clamping down on parliamentary powers and reinstating the provincial administration, the founding president was technically operating wholly within the law.

Neither was Moi breaking any laws whe

June 13 marked the ninth time a Finance Cabinet secretary delivered the budget speech before the National Assembly since we adopted the 2010 Constitution.

By now, it should have occurred to someone in government that there is something deeply anachronistic about this exercise. The new Constitution adopted a presidential system of government: It fully separated the Executive from the Legislature and transferred ultimate authority on the budget to the Legislature.

It boggles the mind why we stil