The Elephant

Establishing home both in the legal, communal, and social sense is always an ongoing conversation under the shadow of the state and of history. Dr. Mshai Mwangola talks to Dr. J. K. S. Makokha.

Before there was a Commission, there were generations who died too young – not because of bad genes, but because of stolen land, unpaid labour, and a minority world that extracted everything it could and called it progress. This is a question of political economy: who owns what, who decides, and who is forced to pay the price in bodies.

I want to tell you about a book that made me deeply uncomfortable, not because it was difficult to read, but because it was easy. I kept expecting the analysis to feel dated, to hit a page where I could say well, things have changed since then. That page never came. The book is L’Économie de l’Ouest Africain, written by Osendé Afana, an economist and militant who finished it in 1966, the same year the Cameroonian army shot him dead in the forest at age 36.

In 1950s apartheid South Africa, visibility was never neutral. To appear publicly as Black, urban, fashionable, and modern carried political meaning in a society built on racial segregation and control. It was within this environment that Drum magazine emerged as one of the most influential publications for Black readers across the country. Founded in Johannesburg in 1951, the magazine documented township life, jazz culture, fashion, sport, politics, and everyday urban experiences.

Kenya’s post-independence history is marked by numerous instances of high-ranking politicians and politically connected individuals exploiting state power to illegally acquire public land – what land sector practitioners and the public call land grabbing. In the decades before the 2010 Constitution, public land allocation was heavily centralized in the executive.

In a Uganda long accustomed to provocative social media flurry from Army Chief General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, two recent developments shocked even the most cynical observers. On the night of 27 June, the general ordered the closure of two leading independent outlets: the Daily Monitor and NTV Uganda, both owned by Kenya’s Nation Media Group.

From politics to law, environment, to social life, Kenyans have had quite a fruitful half-year. What should we keep an eye on? What should we measure? What should we leverage? The Elephant talks to writer and researcher Darius Okolla.

I have been transnational all my life, born in Zimbabwe, raised in Malawi, received graduate education in Britain and Canada, and worked at eleven universities in Jamaica, Kenya, Canada, and the United States. So, I have not only experienced what it means to be a foreigner on national and racial grounds, some of it inflected and infected with various forms of xenophobia, but I have also learned how to navigate it, even overcome it.

Patrick “Panye” Mukabi, painter, tutor, imaginer, always stood tall, ready to lend a hand, an eye, a piece of advice, a gentle nudge, always in the service of others. He, with his patient, unassuming demeanour, taught those who came after him to look closer, not just at the canvas, but at the space between the canvas and the wall – the world the painting carried with it.

There is a cross-cutting sense of dysfunction that defines the public life in ways that drain the public imagination and sap the national spirit. What does it take to dream of better outcomes and the courage to follow through and actualize them? The Elephant in conversation with Gleh the Poet, an award-winning poet, teacher, and spoken-word activist.