Latest Article
Ben, you don’t have to fight to be a Maa warrior
Central to this ethical inquiry is Ben’s father, a Maasai warrior, who died protecting a film crew during a lion attack. Clay avoids mythologising him. His bravery is acknowledged, but so is its cost. He exists in the narrative as both presence and absence: a figure of pride, but also of unresolved expectation. In one of the novel’s most affecting moments, Ben studies a photograph of his father in traditional Maasai dress, framed in olive wood from his village. The image becomes a powerful symbol of inherited masculinity and imagined strength. For Ben, this photograph is both an anchor and a burden. It represents an ideal he feels unable to live up to—a warriorhood defined by physical courage and sacrifice. Clay excels here in illustrating how children internalise narratives long before they understand them. Ben’s fear of returning to Kenya is not framed as weakness, but as grief: a fear of exposure, of being measured against an identity he never chose yet feels bound to honour.
Filter
Bringing someone into your home as a househelp is a major decision. This is a person who will share your space, care for your children, and interact with your family daily. A careful hiring and onboarding process ensures that you choose the right person and establish a healthy working relationship from the very beginning.
A more fitting legacy would be to immortalize Raila Odinga's thoughts and ideas in books, libraries, documentaries and films.
The Macharia family had every reason to hate Kenyatta. Their appeal for restoration of their land had failed, only to boost the success of Chief Waruingi’s family. They could not forgive the Kenyatta’s government for not pardoning Macharia but instead letting him die after years of detention. They had nursed the hope, in collaboration with the disgruntled freedom fighters, that the new government of President Daniel arap Moi would help them find justice.
The youthful generation is yearning for information, as times have shown that everyone needs to be updated to avoid making the mistakes that our forefathers made when they were colonised and made to think that they couldn’t think on their own or make sane decisions.
This first instalment of David Maillu’s upcoming novel 'The Haves and the Have-Nots' opens our new book serialisation series. The novel dissects the dynamics of social relationships in Kenya’s immediate post-independence period, during which the divisions arising from the freedom struggle continued to have a profound effect on the young nation.
This year, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, and as the announcement makes its global rounds, the question lingers: why does Africa still look to Stockholm for validation? What would it take to build a prize and a reading culture that recognises our brilliance without waiting for the world’s permission? But perhaps, it’s time we asked: why do we still crave that stamp? What would it take for Africa to build its own literary validation, one rooted in its people, its readership, and its histories?
