Passing the Dutchie in Lukenya Hills
Stanley Gazemba
It is a Friday afternoon and we are parking our bags on the roof rack of a tour bus outside The Heron Hotel in Milimani,
It is a Friday afternoon and we are parking our bags on the roof rack of a tour bus outside The Heron Hotel in Milimani,
We had been booked in Lamu for the entire Christmas period, after which we would be flown back to Nairobi. But what the Kwani? guys forgot was that they were dealing with a Luhyia man, who gets an irrepressible urge to travel back to his tribal land to be with his people at Christmas time, to eat ugali and chicken cooked in a pot the traditional way, and thereafter pay a visit to the drinking dens in Shichiko village in Eregi to catch up with his kinsmen over a pot of traditional busaa beer after a year of being away in what my people call iruguru (literally, abroad).
From the small crowd of writers and literary-types present, we selected ourselves by the eyes without talking, and one by one we slinked off and assembled in the hotel lobby downstairs.
In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Pete Larson (of the Dr. Pete Larson and his Cytotoxic Nyatiti Band), an epidemiologist, nyatiti player, and founder of Dagoretti Records, approached the late Grandmaster Masese (real name Dennis Dancan Mosiere) about doing a project on the Obokano music of the Kisii people from the Nyanza region of Western Kenya. Masese was a master of the Obokano, a traditional eight-stringed lyre similar to the Nyatiti of the Luo and the Litungu of the Luhyia. The project, which Masese had started working on by conducting several interviews in his home village in Nyamira, was hampered by a lack of funding, and soon after, his unexpected death.
The recently concluded World Rally Championship (WRC) Safari Rally has yet again lived up to its billing as one of the toughest rallies on earth.
Left in my own private world, temporarily relieved of my everyday encumbrances…naked, frightening, thrilling.
“Wanawake saa hizi hata kushuka hatushuki . . . Hatuna muda hata wa kuenjoy na kina baba nyumbani, kwa ajili kila siku unawaza watoto watakula
It was the fifth year in a row that Jimmy Rugami, Nairobi’s famous record man, was hosting vinyl buffs at his store at Kenyatta Market.
In Ngummo’s Kenyatta Market, near the nyama choma stalls, James ‘Jimmy’ Rugami curates his sonic treasure trove.
Gakunju Kaigwa is a Kenyan sculptor with a Master’s degree in Public Art from the University of Dundee in Scotland. Although he began his career
