Latest Article
Race and class feature prominently as Kenyan President issues directive that spawns confusion, xenophobic attacks
What happens when a government tests how easily economic frustration can be redirected towards an identifiable group? What happens when people who should be asking why their economy is failing instead begin asking why another African is allowed to sell goods on the same street? What happens when a population is so economically exhausted that all it needs is a target?
Filter
We take a comprehensive approach to publishing by editing or re-editing manuscripts, creating fresh and consistent designs for both print and digital editions, recording audiobooks in our award-winning in-house studio, digitizing ebooks, and adapting content into accessible formats such as braille and sign languages.
There is also something deliciously ironic about this happening while Kenya is being encouraged to look towards Singapore as the benchmark for development. Ruto's Singapore is supposed to represent efficiency, prosperity and modernity. At Books in Africa, however, Singapore currently represents something much simpler: Someone over there is reading us and the real question is why.
The answer cannot be found only in courtrooms. It is also found in what happens when an ordinary Kenyan challenges an administrative decision, demands information from a public institution, encounters the police, seeks a government service or insists that the state treat them according to the rights guaranteed to them.
Perhaps the Luo voter doesn't need another political messiah. We already had that in Baba. The tragedy is that after his death, the Luo voter has not yet learnt that losing a shepherd does not mean losing their ability to find their own way.
We spend a great deal of time talking about how, when and why women should get married. We talk about dating, beauty, femininity, fertility, compromise, being a “good woman” and finding a man who is ready to settle down. We rarely spend the same amount of time asking what a woman is expected to surrender once she has acquired the title she was encouraged to desire.
Many African marriages today are being negotiated by people who inhabit two different worlds simultaneously. Many of the women in that room were solid professionals. They earned incomes, managed households, raised children and contributed financially to their families. They participate in public life in ways that were unavailable to many of their mothers and grandmothers. Yet the moral framework presented to them still assumed that authority naturally rested with their husbands, that female submission is virtuous and questioning that arrangement is evidence of rebellion rather than reflection.
