Pwani Si Kenya
Despite years of development promises from Kenya’s central government, the Coast remains a diverse and contested space where the modernising aims of the nation state translate as a hybrid of postcolonial predicaments and targets of resentment and resistance. Ngala Chome traces the fraying threads of her own family dynamics, suggesting that the Coastals are not […]
The Last King of Africa
Brother Leader, global agitator, anti-imperialist revolutionary, megalomaniacal renegade. The former Libyan leader has been tagged with all these attributes, and then some. Olivier Vallée* walks us through the web of political and economic strategies that drove Muammar Qaddhafi’s vision for the African continent, and probably contributed to the unravelling of the model and the man. […]
Secret Countries
This map features in the new Chronic, an edition in which we ask: what if maps were made by Africans for their own use, to understand and make visible their own realities or imaginaries? How does it shift the perception we have of ourselves and how we make life on this continent? To view […]
How to Eat a Forest
Billy Kahora recounts a journey into Kenya’s Mau Forest, where he confronts the interface between the ideal and the real, the disputed and the disparaged. It is a schizophrenic geography as mapped, as inhabited, and as marketed by the dispossessed, the landless, the landowner and the broker. 1. How to eat a forest Almost everywhere, […]
Imagined Waters
Through the poetry of its mariners – the singers of its rivers and seas – Yvonne A. Owuor explores the geography of the vast ocean of Africa. She finds that the horizons of sky, land and water are blurred and that the shape of the past and the future is a matter of perspective, one […]