Applied history: as an engaged public intellectual, I am committed to the scholar-activism model of knowledge production. This kind of public scholarship that encompasses individual agency through activism, must, of necessity, involve not only academic research, but also advocacy for policy change, raising awareness and public education.

I am dedicated to making attempts at social commentaries on various issues through blogs and opinion pieces published on this website and elsewhere on the World Wide Web to these noble and worthy ends.

How to Play “Father”: Raila’s Lost Moment?

Raila-Odinga

Admire and love him or disparage and hate him, Raila Amolo Odinga is the most seasoned prominent politician still active on the national scene. The man has a career spanning over thirty years something that is unrivalled by any of his contemporaries. It is, therefore, little wonder that Kenyans are wont to bestow him with the endearing reference, “baba.” Only President Moi (Rtd.) and, especially, the founding President Jomo Kenyatta, were referred to using this fond title that once evoked ... Read more...

VOTES THAT BIND: ETHNIC POLITICS AND THE TYRANNY OF NUMBERS

Uhuru-Odinga

The Kenyan elections at the beginning of March 2013 were saluted as historic but they weren’t. They were only “historic” in as far as the elections were undertaken under the new constitutional dispensation. The most distinctive element of the latter is devolved power and deconcentration of governmental functions from Nairobi closer to the grassroots. As such, the elections were historic because, as provided by Kenya’s 2010 constitution, new elective positions such as county governors, ... Read more...

Heal the World: A Personal Reflection on the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting

US-SCHOOL-SHOOTING

It was with numbing shock and great grief that, with my nine-month-old daughter clasped in my arms, I learned of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14th. I followed the story with mute keenness and baffled interest for the next three days. The tragedy visited upon the small town of Newtown, CT, was unspeakable and the pain untold. As more information streamed in on the news, I just clutched my baby girl closer, transfixed in horror.

Fast rewind ... Read more...

EU Nobel Prize: A call for a greater structural peace

eu-nobel-prize

I welcome and congratulate the European Union for winning the 2012 Nobel Peace prize. However, as a historian, I cannot say that this award is timely albeit it is a great gesture for the need for the world to strive for a greater peace: a structural peace. There are two ways of looking at this recognition. One is seeing it as having come sixty-seven years too soon. The other, is celebrating the end, in the continent, of an era of mechanized or industrial warfare that had its early beginnings in ... Read more...

From the outside looking in – An unconventional review for an eccentric book

PEELING-BACK-THE-MASK2

Miguna succeeds in peeling back the mask of his former boss Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga and several other high-ranking actors in the national political drama. But Miguna also hides his own failings behind the mask of many words.

‘Peeling Back the Mask’, written by Miguna Miguna, a former adviser to Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Amolo Odinga, is an explosive book that contains, depending on one’s political sympathies, either revelations, allegations ... Read more...

Kenya: Postcolonial imperial hangover – A note of caution to the Mombasa Republican Council

MRC

I distinctly remember watching on television with concern how young men from the Coast province of Kenya were ambushed and rounded up by security forces who busted them in the midst of military training with homemade wooden rifles a few years ago. Given the ragtag nature of this wannabe “army,” my initial reaction was to dismiss them as a bunch of loonies. But a few months to roughly a year later, I again saw in the news this time a group of well-clad young men being frog-marched by police ... Read more...