The True Story of David Munyakei

The True Story of David Munyakei PDF Author: Billy Kahora
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9966700897
Category : Political corruption
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
In April 1992, David Sadera Munyakei, a newly employed clerk at the Central Bank of Kenya started noticing irregularities in the export compensation claims he was processing. On July 31st 2006, Kenya's biggest whistleblower passed away in rural obscurity, 14 years after exposing the Goldenberg scandal, Kenya's biggest economic scandal to date, estimated at over USD 1 billion. Billy Kahora recounts his story.

War Crimes

War Crimes PDF Author: Rasna Warah
Publisher: Author House
ISBN: 1496982819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
In War Crimes Kenyan journalist Rasna Warah exposes how foreign governments and humanitarian agencies conspired to keep Somalia in a permanent state of under-development and conflict and how Somali politicians, warlords, clan-based fiefdoms and terrorists benefited from the ensuing chaos and anarchy. The book is about the many war crimes that have taken place in Somalia in the name of peace, development, religion and reconciliation. It reveals who gained from the spoils of war and who paid the price. War Crimes is an insightful examination of why a failed state colluded in its own destruction and why the international community did little to stop it.

Kwani?

Kwani? PDF Author: Binyavanga Wainaina
Publisher: Kwani Archive Online
ISBN: 9789966983664
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Following and keeping close to the great tradition set by its three predecessors, Kwani? 4 presents a wail of new voices in literary concert with the not so new. The now established talents- Binyavanga Wainaina, Muthoni Garland, Doreen Baingana- share these pages with the fast risers: Billy Kahora, Mukoma wa Ngugi and Shalini Gidoomal. And Kwani? 4 has delved deeper into the all those spaces where the Kenyan story lives: the street corners, the neighbourhood pubs, the in-between semi rural places where the clash of cultures- the traditional versus the modern- continues to redefine the social roles of the individual, dismantle patriarchal constructs and still retain the pithy wit and the devices of ancient orature that time and the ritual of the communal fireside have honed. Still, as though in ridicule of such notions of Africa as being the continent on the lee side of the Digital Divide, Kwani? 4 reaches into the burgeoning realms of the Kenyan blogosphere to bring such politically aware, borderline intellectual and only-two-degrees-shy-of-rebellious voices bringing a fresh look at the old themes of politics, slices of life and religion and placing them alongside such taboo subjects as sex beyond the hetero-normative ideal. Kwani? 4 is established in Africa as the space for cutting-edge new fiction, mind provoking non fiction and photo-essays and witty graphic narratives.

Red Soil and Roasted Maize

Red Soil and Roasted Maize PDF Author: Rasna Warah
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1456777254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Red Soil and Roasted Maize is a selection of Kenyan writer Rasna Warahs most poignant, introspective and satirical articles, columns and essays that provide snapshots and analyses of events that have shaped Kenyans lives and dreams in the last decade, from the turbulent transition to democracy in 2002 to a flawed election in 2007 that had a deep impact on Kenyas political, economic and social landscape. She candidly deciphers and describes the perils of growing ethnic chauvinism and corruption in an increasingly polarised nation and examines her own life as a writer in one of Africas most diverse and unequal societies.

African Literature in the Digital Age

African Literature in the Digital Age PDF Author: Shola Adenekan
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847012388
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The digital space provides a new avenue to move literature beyond the restrictions of book publishing on the continent. Arguing that writers are putting their work on cyberspace because communities are emerging from this space, and because increasing numbers of Africans use the internet as part of their day-to-day engagement with their societies and the world, Shola Adenekan explores this transformative development in Nigeria and Kenya, both significant countries in African literature and two of the continent's largest digital technology hubs. Queer Kenyans and Nigerians find new avenues for their work online where print publishers are refusing to publish short stories and poems on same-sex desire. Binyavanga Wainaina's rise to critical acclaim arguably started on the literary blog Generator 21. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary celebrity partly relies on her prolific use of social media to tell thestory of powerful Nigerian women. With further examples from the development of literature across the continent, this innovative book sheds new light on narratives about digital Africa. It will also be the first major work to provide a trajectory of class consciousness in Kenyan and Nigerian writing. Through this analysis, the book articulates the difference in attitudes towards queerness, sexuality, and hetero-normativity among successive generations of writers. SHOLA ADENEKAN is an Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and also the publisher of Thenewblackmagazine.com. He was previously a Researcher and Tutor in African Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bremen, Germany, and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.

Unsilenced

Unsilenced PDF Author: Aicha Elbasri
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1504999932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 91

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Book Description
In a world experiencing increasing conflicts, terrorism and displacement, many people are wondering what the United Nations the organization established in 1945 to save future generations from the scourge of war should or could have done to prevent these disasters from escalating. UNsilenced shows that, in fact, the UN has remained a bystander in many of these conflicts and that peace-building efforts have not only been undermined by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, but also by the UNs many agencies and programmes. The book exposes how, under the guise of development, stability and the war on terror, the UN fails to prevent conflicts in many parts of the world, and in some cases, misleads the public about the scale of a problem. The book also reveals the web of lies, cover-ups, corruption and impunity within the United Nations that has allowed wrongdoing to continue unabated. Many of these acts of wrongdoing occur or continue because the UN fails to protect whistleblowers; on the contrary, most UN whistleblowers experience severe retaliation. UNsilenced describes how whistleblowers have been denied justice within the UN system and how the immunity accorded to UN officials and the conflict of interest inherent in the UNs internal justice system allow the perpetrators of criminal or unethical activities to go unpunished. The book is an urgent call for a serious reform of this bureaucratic, arcane and increasingly politicized organization because not doing so constitutes a betrayal of the trust invested in it by the people and countries that depend on it.

The Life of Mzee Ondego

The Life of Mzee Ondego PDF Author: Ondego (Mzee, Enock)
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9966718206
Category : Biography
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
Mzee Ondego, Kenya's greatest choirmaster and Kenyatta confidante tells the story of his relationship with Kenya's founding father. Unknown as the man behind one of Kenya's most influential songs - the haunting dirge that played on during those fateful days after the death of Kenya's first president, Mzee Ondego remembers a time that has become part of Kenya's living memory.

African Literatures as World Literature

African Literatures as World Literature PDF Author: Alexander Fyfe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501379976
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The enormous success of writers such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that African literatures are now an international phenomenon. But the apparent global legibility of a small number of (mostly Anglophone) writers in the diaspora raises the question of how literary producers from the continent, both past and present, have situated their work in relation to the world and the kinds of material networks to which this corresponds. This collection shows how literatures from across the African continent engage with conceptualizations of 'the world' in relation to local social and political issues. Focusing on a wide variety of geographic, historical and linguistic contexts, the essays in this volume seek answers to the following questions: What are the topographies of 'the world' in different literary texts and traditions? What are that world's limits, boundaries and possibilities? How do literary modes and forms such as realism, narrative poetry or the political essay affect the presentation of worldliness? What are the material networks of circulation that allow African literatures to become world literature? African literatures, it emerges, do important theoretical work that speaks to the very core of world literary studies today.

Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture

Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture PDF Author: Grace A Musila
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000588343
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
This handbook brings together an international team of scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries – in the sense of cultural productions, contexts, consumers, producers, platforms, and the material, affective and discursive resources they circulate – are influential in shaping African realities. Collectively, the chapters assembled in this handbook index the genres, methods, mediums, questions and encounters that preoccupy producers, consumers and scholars of African popular cultural forms across a range of geohistorical and temporal contexts. Drawing on forms such as newspaper columns, televised English Premier League football, speculative arts, romance fiction, comedy, cinema, music and digital genres, the contributors explore the possibilities and ambiguities unleashed by the production, circulation, consumption, remediation and critique of these forms. Among the questions explored across these essays are the freedoms and constraints of popular genres; the forms of self-making, pleasure and harm that these imaginaries enable; the negotiations of multiple moral regimes in everyday life; and, inevitably, the fecund terrain of contradictions definitive of many popular forms, which variously enable and undermine world-making. An authoritative scholarly resource on popular culture in Africa, this handbook is an essential read for students and scholars of African culture, society and media.

Tales of Two Planets

Tales of Two Planets PDF Author: John Freeman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525505717
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Building from his acclaimed anthology Tales of Two Americas, beloved writer and editor John Freeman draws together a group of our greatest writers from around the world to help us see how the environmental crisis is hitting some of the most vulnerable communities where they live. In the past five years, John Freeman, previously editor of Granta, has launched a celebrated international literary magazine, Freeman's, and compiled two acclaimed anthologies that deal with income inequality as it is experienced. In the course of this work, one major theme came up repeatedly: Climate change is making already dire inequalities much worse, devastating further the already devastated. But the problems of climate change are not restricted to those from the less developed world. Galvanized by his conversations with writers and activists around the world, Freeman engaged with some of today's most eloquent storytellers, many of whom hail from the places under the most acute stress--from the capital of Burundi to Bangkok, Thailand. The response has been extraordinary. Margaret Atwood conjures with a dys¬topian future in a remarkable poem. Lauren Groff whisks us to Florida; Edwidge Danticat to Haiti; Tahmima Anam to Bangladesh; Yasmine El Rashidi to Egypt, while Eka Kurniawan brings us to Indonesia, Chinelo Okparanta to Nigeria, and Anuradha Roy to the Himalayas in the wake of floods, dam building, and drought. This is a literary all-points bulletin of fiction, essays, poems, and reportage about the most important crisis of our times.