Every writer knows his place in the food chain. If Mutuma Mathiu walked into a room, I would stand up and offer him my chair.  And not just because he’s a big kahuna at NMG but also because I love his style of writing. His prose is like lime on fish fillet. I will also give my chair to Onyango Obbo, Kipkoech Tanui and Tony Mochama of The Standard. In short, I will give my chair to any colour writer. I’m a sucker for colour writing. Colour writers, dear IT and accountants, are writers who have bristling prose, writers who paint vivid pictures with words. Stories that get up and stroll out of pages.

Enter stage left; Oyunga Pala. Before we delve into Oyunga, allow me to educate the guys from central and north-eastern. Now, Pala, in Luo, means knife. Something that cuts deep, something that draws blood. But Oyunga is no XXX, Oyunga cuts with words.  In campus, back in Uganda, Saturday Nation would arrive at the library at around 2pm. I would linger about school, waiting to read what Oyunga had written that week. What storm he was brewing. His style was fresh, his wordplay was unsurpassed and he was fearless. I stalked his work.  Then ADAM magazine came about and I got a call to join them, to work under him, to be edited by him. Of course I was honoured. It was an opportunity to learn at the feet of the master.

Thing with meeting your favourite writers is that they will disappoint you; they will not be those guys you imagined them to be in your head. Oyunga ...... Read the entire article

You don’t know Dennis Asiimwe from Adam. As of last week, I didn’t either. I ran into him on Facebook. In April he had left a message on Bikozulu Facebook Group asking if I could host him as a guest writer. I only saw the message last week and the reason he piqued my interest was because he started his message by saying, “ …I know this is going to sound pokey nosey but I had a look at your blog and….” Then he went on and said he would like to be hosted on High School to see if Kenyans would find his work “readable”. Surely, any grown ass man who has the temerity to use the phrase “pokey nosey” deserves a shot because that’s brevity, gang. It takes stones to use certain words.

So I shot him an inbox message and asked for a brief bio. Which he sent:

Dennis lives and works in Kampala as a communications consultant. He’s single (“dating is a bit tedious back here,” he says). He owns a marketing communications firm that develop radio, TV, and print ads as well as uses other media tools and has an event management section. He also writes for the New Vision as a music critic and is also a social critic with several magazines.

He owns a jazz outfit called ...... Read the entire article

We hold court here because we are enslaved by words. We come here because, in words, we find purpose, respite, glee and sometimes comfort. We also come here for the company, to push time and, quite often, to seek validation. We sometimes come here to show off what we know even though we might end up exposing our prejudices, or worse, ignorance. And it’s all good.

This blog is many things, but it’s not a riff raff corner. We don’t suffer layabouts and bums. We frown at loutish behaviour. Nobody comes here to offend or vex. You don’t nip in here with a toothpick sticking out of your mouth hoping to start something. You come in, you read and perhaps offer your two cents in form of a comment. Or, you come in stealthily, read and then ease out of the door quietly, like you were never here, because you don’t want to leave a carbon footprint.

I like to invite folk here to guest write, not because they have something very momentous to say (neither do I, who has anymore?) or because they are brilliant writers (who is, anyway? We all strive ). I invite them because they are budding writers and they are just trying to make something of it. They are facing the pen.

They might fumble with their prose, they might struggle with their composition but they are doing something that is much less worse than not doing something; they are trying.

But they can’t get better – nobody can – if you don’t tell them what they need to do to get better. So ...... Read the entire article

Saturdays are like riding choppy seas; you never know where the waves will take you. You never know which shores you will be washed to, which island you will wake up in; drenched, drunk and bleary eyed.

I, together with three friends, was washed up to a house party in Dam estate, Langata. A house which to get to, we climbed a short flight of stairs, past numerous potted plants that led us to a door which had –outside it – about 20,000 shoes, which kind of reminded me of visiting a mosque, seeing all those shoes. And you can tell what kind of a party it is going to be when you look at the shoes outside a door. Anyway, there we removed our shoes – as only courtesy dictated – and the hostess received us; a bubbly lady called Cate. Then – together with a horde of other guests – we broke bread and cracked open some bottles and we drunk.

You can tell a lousy house party by the first few minutes. Most house parties in Nairobi are marked by certain phoniness where people sit in these clusters defined by how nice you dress is, or whether you have an accent (that is before the booze kicks in and the “r”s and “l’s” are forever entangled in a dance of mirth) or how close you are with the host/ess. And from these clusters they eye each other from across the room, as if willing the other group not to dare mix with their group because they might just end up diluting their assemblage with their less pedigree.

Fortunately, ...... Read the entire article