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The Khanga is Present
Memories of my grandmother come to me in many forms. One that stands out is a ritual of inheritance that follows her death in 1994. Days after her burial, my cousins and I are standing in line...
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The City as a Photograph
A city adopts a certain shape, an arrangement that can be seen even in its absence. Somewhere in my childhood, there is an image of Nairobi, one that I saw whenever I closed my eyes and imagined the...
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Stones and Memory
We forget to remember the names of those we killed on our way here. —Keguro Macharia They shall build up the ancient ruins; they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined...
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This Image of Bi Kidude
I have never seen a woman ride a drum before, like a goddess rides a tiger…I have never seen an artist / male or female / anywhere across the world / own her instrument / like it grew out of her...
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A Memory on the Wall
“Walls are a marvel; don’t you think? I’ve always paid a great deal of attention to what happens on the walls… {…]. And how many times have I been tempted to pause in front of a nice wall and carve...
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The Other Image
Osborne Macharia uses these words to describe one of his recent photography series, Macicio, where he fictionalizes a special unit of five opticians within Kenya’s freedom fighters, Mau Mau. This is...
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The Portraits of Men
In the short story The Man by E.B Dongala, “the man” breaks into the president’s palace and kills him. It is not clear how he manages to pass through the impregnable security system “contrived by an...
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The Image of Life and Death
I met my paternal great-grandfather for the first time in a photograph taken during his funeral. My father, then a teenager, all his siblings, and everyone else who mattered, who was family, were...
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The Writing on the Wall
Something can be said about encounters with strangers in public bathrooms, specifically women bathrooms. There is the horror and discomfort of being with a stranger in a space requiring privacy, but...
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