Month: May 2020

A Girl. A Picture. A Story

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546

Sometimes the moon is low over Turkana and the night an impregnable shade of black. Other nights the same sky is littered by a million blinking stars. Those nights Ibei sits outside this little hut, one of the only …

The Griot’s Daughter

  143    
586

It’s finally dawn and cowardice curls at my feet like a serpent. We are shadows with the night. Before we all start lifting our weaponized hands, we are still sons of women, not animals. We have been loved and …

Six Daughters

  147    
632

In 1959, four thousand bob could afford you a plane ticket to New York. For those annoying people who like to equate everything with bags of cement, that’s five bags of cement now. [Happy?] In the 1950s, folks in …

Njoro

  251    
743

Here is how I first met him. Let’s call him Njoro. Research on a mental health piece I was writing led me to a Dr Kigamwa, Consultant Psychiatrist at Nairobi Hospital, who – perhaps based on how distracted I …