The debts our parents left us
The language of fiscal consolidation is meant to sound inevitable. But for Kenya's informal workers, the human cost is anything but abstract.
Kenya
The human cost of Kenya’s expanding lakes
As Kenya’s Rift Valley lakes expand, swallowing homes, farms, and infrastructure, what appears as a climate anomaly reveals a reckoning with ecological limits, failed planning, and the illusion that water would stay where it was put.
Cooking up the city
A new history of Mombasa shows how street food, colonial labor migration, and urban capitalism reshaped what—and how—Kenya eats.
Where do the borders really lie?
In Nairobi, migrants face not just national frontiers but invisible barriers in policing, housing, and work.
Whose story gets to be heard?
A new film investigates the long-standing land disputes between Kenyans, the government, and multinational corporations, whose expansive plantations are the site of much of the Kikuyu people’s hardship.
Visiting Ngara
A redevelopment project in Nairobi’s Ngara district promises revival—but raises deeper questions about capital, memory, and who has the right to shape the city.
Gen Z’s electoral dilemma
Long dismissed as apathetic, Kenya’s youth forced a rupture in 2024. As the 2027 election approaches, their challenge is turning digital rebellion and street protest into political power.
Who gets to tell the history of Mau Mau?
David Elstein’s attack on David Olusoga’s docuseries on the legacy of the British empire reveals less about historical error than about the enduring impulse to rehabilitate British colonial rule.
Wrestling power from political dinosaurs
The passing of Raila Odinga has unsettled Kenya’s political equilibrium, exposing a crowded field of veterans, opportunists, and activists, alongside a growing generational demand to reclaim power from an aging elite.
Pints and powerpoints
From IMF history to astrophysics, Nairobi’s Drunken Lectures turn casual drinkers into an engaged public.
The mirror and becoming
In Najaax Harun’s paintings, the self confronts its own reflection—haunted, tender, and unafraid to transform.
Global Africa for whom?
Nairobi’s cultural moment reflects both the promise of continental imagination and the anxiety of performing arrival for the world’s gaze.
Raila Odinga’s Kenya
The death of Kenya’s most enduring opposition leader invites a reckoning—not only with his contradictions, but with what his long struggle reveals about the unfinished work of liberation.
We must learn to sit in the dark together
At our first workshop from our festival in Nairobi, The Elephant’s Joe Kobuthi, reflected on a year since #EndFinanceBill.
The poetics of protest
From rooftop beginnings to open mics that echo on the streets, Kenya’s newest literary collective shows how art can archive struggle and energize dissent.
After the uprising
Following two years of mass protest, Kenya stands at a crossroads. A new generation of organizers is confronting an old question: how do you turn revolt into lasting change? Sungu Oyoo joins the AIAC podcast to discuss the vision of Kenya's radical left.
The anticolonial roots of Kenya’s student strikes
From the colonial classroom to today’s exam halls, student strikes in Kenya are less outbursts than acts of political imagination—insisting that schools live up to their promise of justice and transformation.
Gen Z and the spirit of Mau Mau
Kenya’s largest-ever protests have drawn striking comparisons to the Mau Mau uprising. But for today’s movement to endure, it must move beyond the streets and invest in political education.
All pull together
The 2025 Kenyan protests once again declared themselves “tribeless, leaderless, partyless.” But what does the idiom of unity hide?
Kenya’s femicide problem
A lack of reliable statistics and coherent strategy to address femicide in Kenya, has left a culture of everyday insecurity for women in the country.