But if faith is the oxygen of a young state, faith in a viable future, there is very little oxygen in Kenya right now. What these suits mask is an escalating free for all, as people use the fronts of respectability and institutional credibility to collect what they can before Armageddon.

You have heard that in some places this sort of skill, built upon from the local pasts of people, from skills from other places, is taught in schools and community centres. Because it is a human thing to do.

In the year 2000 I landed home, for my mother’s funeral, and found myself in the small steamy office of some security official at Mombasa airport. I did not have a yellow fever certificate. A group of red-eyed bureaucrats had cornered me as I picked up my luggage. I tried to plead, using my mother’s [...]

THIS thing called Kenya is a strange animal. In the 1960s, the bright young nationalists who took over the country when we got independence from the British believed that their first job was to eradicate “tribalism.” What they really meant, in a way, was that they wanted to eradicate the nations that made up Kenya. [...]

The media often treat Africa’s 53 countries as a vast, hopeless mass. That hurts, writes one of Kenya’s young literary stars, who has a deeply individual tale of his country’s stunning political change and the emergence of “the Equity Generation.”
Original Published in Vanity Fair July 2007. Click here to read the full article.