Issue 001
A magazine of non-fiction and reportage from Eastern Africa publishing rare, deeply reported stories about the past, the present and the future and how the three relate to each other and especially to now.
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Contributors
Kiprop Kimutai, Paul Goldsmith, Paula Ihozo Akugizibwe, Dalle Abraham, Wanja Michuki, Asha Ahmed Mwilu, A. K. Kaiza, Clifton Gachagua, Hadassah Saya and Diana Chepkemoi
Inside the issue
In 2003, my dear friend and brother the late Kenyan writer and satirist Kenneth Binyavanga Wainaina, to whom I owe a lot, made an audacious statement which I have found myself returning to. Writing the editorial in the inaugural edition of Kwani?, the literary journal he and a bunch of formidable dreamers founded (in that same editorial, he lists the names of as many of these individuals as he seems to remember, specifically singling out Wanjiru Kinyanjui thus “whose idea this was”), Binyavanga posited, “To me this says we are finally becoming a country...”
I was reading James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on The Mountain on my phone in a ‘Double M’ bus, stuck in Nairobi traffic when I received the news.
The bull elephant emerging from the thicket swooped up Hassan before his daughter’s cries of warning left her mouth. He hoisted the man high in his coiled trunk, then dashed him to the ground.
On a sunny Cape Town morning in early 2008, I am enjoying my daily ten-minute stroll to work. I cross the street outside my apartment building and enter the Company’s Gardens
In 1995, my young parents moved our family from a village linked by a labyrinth of dusty footpaths, ineffectual Euphorbia fencing, a few grass-thatched roofs, loud neighbours, goat pens, paraffin
“Now, with my parents gone, I was drowning in the pain of loss, suffering sharp stings, and there was no one to jump into the water to save me.”
“Now, with my parents gone, I was drowning in the pain of loss, suffering sharp stings, and there was no one to jump into the water to save me.”
The first time I watched Nairobi Half Life I promised myself to never suffer the same fate as Mwas,the film’s main protagonist.Driven by the urge to seek greener pastures in Nairobi
The last time I tried to kill myself I was twenty-five years old. I stood on a ledge nine floors from the ground, staring into the abyss that was my life.
I grew up with the Bible and the Quran, as I’m sure many people have, the former because I was raised Catholic and the later because my brother, busy at the time with madrassa.
Even under a bright noon sky, the darkness at the confluence of Nsalo Road, Sir Apollo Kagwa Road and Boundary Road persists like an ineradicable, congenital condition.
I was a scrawny eight-year-old with a coily afro when I first heard a Bob Marley song. It was 1996, and I was visiting my father and his new family.
Reviews
“There’s a meaty offering in Debunk Quarterly by Ugandan writer and journalist A.K. Kaiza (aka David Kaiza). If he had been born in 16th-century Europe, Kaiza would have been an enlightened explorer….”
~ Charles Onyango-Obb0 for the Daily Monitor