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Eid.

Today, the 14 th day of May, Muslims the world over mark with immense celebration the end of the Holy Month of Ramadan. It’s the first time I get to experience the nearly palpable emotion around this day because, in the main, of all the towns I’ve been to, Mombasa stands out as far as Muslim population goes (I bet they make slightly over 40 percent of the total population) and two, this is the first Eid I spend outdoors. There is remarkable joy on the face of every Muslim I encounter. They are easily identifiable today, more than any other day. Women are dressed in colorful boubous and hijabs, their hands adorned with golden jewelry and henna decorations and exchanging spirited “Eid Mubarak!” and “Salaam Aleikum!” greetings unlike in the past 30 days where at this time of the day, they would sound so weak, as though the voices were being forced from deep underneath layers of empty intestines and not from the neck which is where the voice box is located. I wish the latter was a unive...
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  Linda rose lazily from the bed to adjust the louvers and increased the fan speed to its maximum. It swirled angrily, ruffling a sheaf of papers on a table that sat at the center of the single-roomed house. She reached for them, put them together, and placed a padlock on top to keep them in place. Then she went back to bed. As always, it was a searing hot day. One never really got accustomed to such crazy temperatures, she thought to herself. It was a quarter to noon. She still wore her light blue lace nightie. Her friend Mercy was by the sink, nearly four meters away. She had a floral lesso wrapped under her arms and knotted behind her neck making it look like a bare-back dress. She was doing the previous night’s dishes which had started to smell. They had just woken up. They had gone partying the previous night and had arrived at 2:00 am, inebriated. Mercy was feeling nauseous as she always did every time she had one too many. The last time she had thrown up so bad that she had ...
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An Open Letter to Motireniik

Good day elders!  I am reliably informed that thanks to the changes in the school calendar, our boys are going for initiation around this time. For a deep lover of culture, and especially  those aspects of culture that are performed, I must admit that circumcision ceremonies  are one of my  most favorite cultural functions. From the delightful coming together to the passionate hailing of our boys as they prepare to transition to manhood( not to mention the richness of language) to the boisterous and thoroughly  entertaining traditional songs and dances to the refreshing and revitalizing traditional brew among other things. I however have a few concerns. First, it goes without saying that ours is a partriachal culture. We are naturally conditioned to hold our men in high regard. It is time we questioned the premise of that reverence, especially because, for a woman to attain such a status she must have something first,  say, a well paying job. As if to sugge...
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Scarred

  On the morning of her 25th birthday, Rita was in exceptionally high spirits. Apart from it being her birthday, and her 25th birthday for that matter, she had just been finished with her period without having experienced a single seizure throughout the five days. She hated that time of the month. Since she started her menses at teenage, there had never been a greater source of depressive anxiety in her life. Rita had also uploaded her attempt at Adelle’s “Hello” to YouTube twenty-four hours earlier and as she would learn that morning, it had fetched the most views and comments. It was the third cover she had done, the first two being Juliana Kanyamozi’s “Woman” and Nyota Ndogo’s “Rafiki Yangu”. It was 9:00am. The air outside was crisp. Rita sat on the couch in their living room as she scrolled through the comments on her YouTube channel, liking some and responding to some while smiling. She was blown away by the unprecedented kind reception. Of course there were those who asserted...
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New Normal

Cherop nudged the male passenger in front of her and signalled him to open the car window. It was a torrid afternoon. The air outside was dry and still. She had sat in the car for twenty minutes and sweat beads had begun forming on her face. She kept adjusting and readjusting her face mask, pulling it forward sometimes as though to create room for air circulation. She let loose her braids that she had secured with a band at the back of her head, pulled out a flimsy scarf from her handbag and fanned herself with it. There were only three of them in the car, waiting for one more passenger to arrive before the van would leave for the SGR terminus located in Mombasa’s Miritini area. And soon, she arrived. A short, plump and fair skinned woman. Visible parts of her face shimmered from foundation. She who wore a long bulky blonde weave that fell on her back.  Cherop could not help wondering how Mombasa women managed to comfortably wear weaves in such hot weather, considering she had more...
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What Is the Future of African Languages?

  When one month ago Prof. Ngugi made his acceptance speech in Gikuyu after being the 31st recipient of the Catalonia International Prize for his distinguished and courageous literary work and his defense of African Languages based on the notion of language as culture and collective memory", people talked. People talked as they were wont to do. People talked because the good professor was not addressing a council of elders somewhere in Limuru but was addressing the government of Catalonia in Gikuyu. While a few people hailed him, many more others scoffed at him. And in the latter's disapproval was an almost amusingly repressed disdain that had me thinking that there had never been a more illuminating moment about how little we regard our African Languages today. And it occurred to me that the Catalonian government knows something that we do not. That to allow people to express themselves in their own language is to give them dignity. Because really there is not a language that...
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