Muthoni Thangwa

Category: Life in the Side Mirror

  • The Evolution of Global Beauty Standards: Privilege, Power, Pageants and clarity of thought.

    The Miss Universe competition! In an era where women have made significant strides across science, politics, business, and culture, it remains surprising that a global pageant continues to frame female achievement through physical display.

    The contestants are asked to articulate their views and demonstrate intellect; however, the underlying structure still relies on spectacle, and women are primarily presented, judged, and ranked through their appearance.

    While global perceptions of beauty have undeniably broadened, moving beyond the narrow, porcelain-doll ideal to embrace deeply melaninated and diverse forms of beauty, long-standing stereotypes continue to exert a powerful gravitational pull. They draw women back into a pageant format still rooted in historical notions of worth, visibility, and external validation.

    In 2025, the controversy deepened when reports emerged of an incident involving the pageant’s organiser and Miss Mexico, during which he allegedly directed verbal abuse at the contestant. According to multiple accounts, the exchange prompted Miss Mexico to withdraw from the competition, a decision that drew widespread public attention and raised serious questions about the culture within the pageant’s leadership.

    The incident also revived long-standing allegations and rumours surrounding the organiser, including claims related to trafficking that have circulated in the media and public discourse over the years. Complicating the narrative further were public interpretations that Miss Mexico’s stance reflected a certain advantage: the mental acuity, access to information, and the courage required to speak the truth.

    While such readings remain interpretive rather than verifiable, they raise an important point: a woman’s capacity to dissent within highly regulated global platforms is shaped less by status and more by clarity of thought, awareness, and moral resolve.

    Seen in context, the incident involving Miss Mexico is not an isolated failure of individual conduct, but a reflection of the deeper architecture of beauty pageants themselves. The Miss Universe competition was founded in 1952, a time when business and media profited by exploiting women as visual entertainment. Femininity was marketed, packaged and sold in advertising and for male approval.

    At its inception, the pageant positioned women as representatives of national pride while subjecting them psychologically to private systems of control, contractual obedience, and hierarchical judgment.

    The system reminds me of the unmistakable imprint of inherited bigotry. Groups that were once subjected to discrimination and forced labour as commoners in Europe carried those same hierarchical logics into other continents, recreating serf-like systems in Africa, Australia, and the Americas. In this context, invoking white privilege as a conscious justification for bigotry reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the term itself, which was intended to describe unconscious, structural advantage, very similar to the setting up of pageants.

    Though the competition has since incorporated the language of empowerment, advocacy, and intellect, its foundational logic remains largely intact; women are still curated, disciplined, and evaluated within a framework that privileges appearance and compliance. Like colonisation and slavery, a great deal has changed in words, but the fundamental systems remain the same.

    Many contestants enter with clear intentions: visibility, scholarships, career access, or a platform for causes they care deeply about. In a world that continues to reward women’s bodies more readily than their labour, pageants can appear as pragmatic, if imperfect, avenues to opportunity. Yet individual agency operates within structural limits. When advancement is tethered to appearance, obedience, and silence in the face of misconduct, choice becomes constrained.

    Controversy did not end there. During one of the live segments, another contestant; Ms. Jamaica, Dr. Gabrielle Henry, suffered a visible fall while walking on stage. The moment, captured and circulated widely online, raised concerns about stage safety, production standards, and the pressures placed on contestants to perform flawlessly under physically demanding conditions. This served as a stark reminder of the risks embedded in a spectacle that prioritises visual perfection and pace over the well-being of the women participating in it.

    The question, then, is not simply why women still participate in pageants, but under what conditions that participation occurs. Agency and coercion are not opposites; they often coexist. Many contestants enter willingly, fully aware of the compromises involved, because the alternatives offered to women, particularly those from less-resourced backgrounds, are limited. Visibility, mobility, and access remain unevenly distributed, and pageants continue to promise a shortcut through those barriers. When a system rewards compliance, aesthetic conformity, and silence while penalising dissent, participation can no longer be read as pure choice. It is a negotiation shaped by power, scarcity, and the enduring expectation that women must adapt themselves to flawed institutions to be seen.

    The question, then, facing pageants like Miss Universe is no longer how they can be restructured, but whether they remain relevant at all. A world that has learned to value women’s leadership, creativity, labour, and intellect does not need a staged hierarchy of bodies to validate female worth.

    Platforms for visibility now exist, which do not require women to submit to spectacle or silence in exchange for opportunity. When an institution must repeatedly rebrand itself to mask its original logic, perhaps the most honest response is to acknowledge that beauty pageants, as they are currently structured, have reached the end of their cultural usefulness.

  • Who Owns the City Centre?: Restoring Safety in the Heart of Nairobi

    Reclaiming security for the city

    There was a time when I recall Nairobi’s city centre feeling truly safe. Kenyans went about their business with the usual wariness that comes with any big city. The public operated relatively freely, accepting minor risks as part of the urban vibe and drill of life.

    That uneasy balance has now been dramatically altered by reports of gangs of youth and street families taking over the streets, even in broad daylight. In just the past week, several Kenyans have shared disturbing accounts of robberies in the Nairobi Central Business District, some brazenly carried out in broad daylight, particularly over the weekends. Knife-wielding goons and teenage gangs carrying human waste are now threatening the peace of commuters, shoppers, and visitors alike.

    What was once background noise in the city’s rhythm has become a loud warning alarm. A secure city is measured by how well it protects its people. Nairobi is rapidly losing its standard, and it is doing so quickly. Building security and freedom for city users takes a long time, but that confidence can be eroded in a few incidents.

    One of the biggest disadvantages of insecurity in the city for me is the constant fear it creates every time one has an errand to run. Walking around clutching your bag, often having to empty it to a bare minimum, is a stress-filled experience. A standard woman’s bag has many things that may never be used, but on the day one leaves them behind is the day we need them.

    The consequences are wide-reaching. Residents live with constant anxiety and they restrict their movement. Businesses lose customers as people avoid certain streets or those businesses close early for safety. Tourists and investors, already cautious, will start to see Nairobi as high-risk, damaging both the economy and the city’s reputation and image.

    One of the hallmarks of a great city is its ability to protect people; when that is lost, everything else, commerce, culture, and community, begins to crumble. Sadly, Nairobi is sliding down this path, losing ground on safety faster than many had expected. Fear is once again shaping how people use the city.

    The big question now is, does urban safety always have to be a balance between human protection and public order? In the last few years, Nairobi’s streets have been overflowing with hawkers and their merchandise, leaving pedestrians with little space to navigate their activities including walking. The streets were markets for fruits and vegetables, cloths and even electronics, that often blocked entrances to city building or made their access quite troublesome.

    These street markets made movement difficult and inconvenienced motorists as pedestrians traffic spill into city roads as shoppers tried to negotiate their way on the busy pavements. Thought the subtle danger of pickpockets lingered, the human population formed a protective shield against any real danger.

    City authorities have eventually pushed the hawkers back into designated city back streets, restoring order and flow of human traffic and motorists in the central business district. But now, in the absence of hawkers, criminal gangs are moving in to fill the vacuum. The question is stark: must Nairobi choose between disorderly but relatively harmless hawkers or gangs that openly threaten the safety of everyone who passes through the city center?

    Nairobi cannot afford to gamble with the safety of its people. A city that fails to protect its residents and visitors loses more than its reputation; it risks losing the very things that make it a living, functioning city: its people, its businesses, its culture, and its energy.

    The warning signs are already clear on our streets. Unless decisive action is taken to reclaim the city centre, insecurity will continue to spread, eroding public trust and driving both business and visitors away. The choice is simple: restore security now, or watch Nairobi’s heart collapse under the weight of fear.

    Reclaiming Nairobi’s security will require more than public outcry, it demands action. The city must increase visible policing, dismantle criminal gangs, and invest in better lighting and surveillance. At the same time, authorities need to work with each other, the policy and the county government, businesses and even hawkers to restore order while pushing the criminals into the shadows where crime thrives. Unless Nairobi confronts both the criminals on its streets and the weaknesses within its policing, the city centre will remain a place of fear rather than a hub of commerce and community.

  • She Spoke German without History

    She thought there are Africans who look upon colonisation with nostalgia!

    I thought I had heard it all—until, in 2024! We were in Germany as part of the MuseumLab programme, a curated platform that brings together African and European heritage practitioners for dialogue, collaboration, and critique on museums and the heritage sector in both continents. 

    During one session, a young African woman spoke proudly of her German heritage. That made me physically wince. However, what followed cut even deeper: she stated that some people in Cameroon recall the German colonial period with nostalgia. The room stiffened with various reactions. Some looked at the floor; others started searching in their bags, as if for lost treasure, while a number stood and headed for the coffee table. The discomfort was palpable. Her words bruised my spirit, as if I had lived through that colonial experience myself. I looked at her for the first time – looked at her.

    Many wild thoughts were running through my mind, scrambling around like restless feet on a tin roof. But one kept rising above the noise: I wanted to lock this African somewhere, to isolate her, but to give her light, sunshine, until she could think again. It wasn’t disdain. It was heartbreak. Because what she had just said was not an opinion, it was evidence of brainwashing. Evidence of historical amnesia, of how colonisation not only stole land and bodies but rewrote memory itself.

    It was a painful reminder of how deeply manufactured memoryhas burrowed into our consciousness, convincing some among us that the oppressor brought order, when in fact he brought rupture. Romanticizing colonization is not just a travesty, a betrayal of historyandancestors, it is also forgetting oneself, in the quest to be like ‘those others’. It speaks to the danger of a people who no longer recognise the chains that still shackle Africa culturally, economically and socially. Such people have trained their minds to call the chains bracelets.

    The speaker came to Germany as a child. It was clear that the country doesn’t teach any African history. Fair enough – until recently, the history that was taught in Kenyan schools was often stripped of its messiness and violence. Children were told of explorers who ‘discovered’ mountains and rivers that Kenyan communities had interacted with for millennia.  But here, the silence felt heavier.

    I wondered what takes root in a historical vacuum? How do people, like that speaker, Africans raised in Europe, without the tools to interrogate or process historical facts presented through the lens of someone else?. People who speak with certainty, but from a place of omission. Her nostalgia for German colonization didn’t seem rooted in malice. It sounded almost pitiful, like it came from an emptiness, an absence where something vital should have been.

    As she spoke, I watched the room. No one said a word. Not the Germans, not the Africans. There was no applause, no challenge, only a silence so heavy it felt complicit. This was the saddest part. Because silence, in moments like this, is not neutrality – it is endorsement. The presenter, who had spoken of cassettes as if they were some prehistoric discovery, may have walked away thinking she had delivered a successful talk. She may have believed she had represented the African voice with clarity. But the truth was quieter, and more haunting: the Africans in the room decided not to engage. She had gone too far, too far from truth, too far from self, for any meaningful recourse. And we, out of weariness or protection, chose not to waste precious hours trying to bring her back.

    We were visiting African heritage practitioners; she was going to remain in Germany. We could not save her, and we knew it. Her mind had already been claimed by another story, one we could not rewrite in a single afternoon. So we chose to save ourselves. The irony is that even the Germans remained silent. The organisers had probably anticipated a spirited resistance, at least some reaction. As for the Germans, I’m still not sure what was expected of them. And I’ve always wondered what, if anything, was said among them once the event ended. If silence held any discomfort. Or if it, too, was just routine.

    Colonialism does not simply vanish over time – it mutates, hides in school curricula, reappears in street names, and sometimes, finds voice in those it once oppressed. What happened in that room was not a debate about historical nuance; it was the echo of a violent erasure. And when we fail to teach African children their own histories, whether in Europe or in Africa, we raise generations fluent in the language of their colonisers, but illiterate in the truths of their nations and people.

  • Brilliant Girls – Broken Systems.

    The Alliance Girls case is not isolated—it exposes a culture of grooming that stretches from high school dormitories to PhD scholarships.

    We have read with horror about the sexual grooming of students at Alliance Girls’ High School. For many, the news is shocking. For others—especially women who passed through similar institutions—it is tragically familiar.

    What few are willing to admit is this: this is not an isolated incident. It is the inevitable outcome of a system that has, for decades, neglected to protect the very girls it claims to empower. Behind the polished school gates and gleaming academic trophies lies a darker truth—predators have not just infiltrated the education system; they have been enabled by it.

    In schools like Alliance—elite, high-performing, tightly controlled—the grooming isn’t just of girls. The institution grooms the public too: to trust, to praise, to deny. Reputations are managed. Whispers are silenced. Victims are disbelieved or blamed. And so the cycle continues.

    The Anatomy of Grooming: Power, Silence, Betrayal

    Sexual grooming is not about sex. It’s about power—slowly applied, carefully masked. A teacher begins with kindness. Offers mentorship. Shows concern. Sends late-night messages. Touches too long. Tests the boundaries. And by the time the girl realises what’s happening, she’s isolated, ashamed, and afraid to speak.

    Worse still, in many cases, she doesn’t even realise it was abuse—until years later.

    This is the horror: abusers hide in plain sight. They are not strangers. They are the ones given staff housing. They lead chapel. They coach debate. And in the name of discipline, of tradition, of “moulding future leaders,” they are left unchallenged.

    The System Protects Itself

    Why does this happen in top schools like Alliance Girls? Because reputation is currency. And girls—no matter how brilliant, how ambitious, how hurt—are expendable when that currency is threatened.

    The school will call it “an unfortunate incident.” The ministry will promise “a full investigation.” A sacrificial lamb might even be offered—a teacher quietly transferred. But the truth is that the system is designed to forget, not to protect.

    There are no safe reporting structures. There is no trauma support. There is no accountability for silence. There is only a message: Don’t embarrass the school.

    Let’s Tell the Truth

    This is not just about Alliance Girls. This is about how deeply broken our societal response to sexual abuse is—how quickly we turn away, how instinctively we defend the institution over the individual.

    It’s about how we, the public, collude in the cover-up every time we shrug and say,

    “At least they passed their exams.”
    “Why are they remembering now?”
    “Isn’t that an isolated case?”
    “So many girls went through that school and turned out fine.”

    But what is the perfect time to remember a trauma you were never allowed to name?
    What is the perfect age to unearth the shame that was handed to you as a teenager and has sat like a stone on your chest ever since?

    We do not ask the same questions of survivors of war, or accident, or illness. Only girls who were groomed, silenced, and violated are told to remember on schedule—or not at all.

    This culture of disbelief is what keeps predators safe and victims invisible. It’s what trains a generation of girls to quietly fold their pain under their uniforms and smile for prize-giving day.

    Grooming Doesn’t Stop in High School

    This idea of grooming—the slow corrosion of boundaries under the guise of opportunity—does not end at the dormitory gates of girls’ schools. It has crept, fully clothed in academic prestige, all the way up to PhD scholarships, fellowships, and international research programs.

    At that level, it is more subtle but just as lethal.
    A white professor, as old as Methuselah, shares a hotel room with a bright, young African female student—because, without his “help,” she can’t afford to attend the conference. Or a powerful male academic dangles access, authorship, or visas in front of a female student with a knowing smile.

    It is never a male student sharing a room with Methuselah.
    It is rarely a female academic hosting a young man under similar terms.

    Because grooming, at its core, is not just about sex. It is about the manipulation of need, ambition, and silence. And in academia, where hierarchies are steep and opportunities rare, the predator’s power is often wrapped in letters of recommendation.

    What makes it more insidious is that the victims are adults—or so we assume. But age does not immunize one from imbalance. When your academic future depends on one signature, consent becomes currency, and silence becomes survival.

    The Gatekeepers Are Not Innocent

    Universities and funding bodies are not bystanders in this. They are often active enablers—turning a blind eye to inappropriate mentorships, brushing off complaints as “misunderstandings,” or quietly sidelining victims who speak up. Conferences are sponsored, research is published, fellowships awarded, and yet no one asks how certain students got access, or why the same professors are named in hushed tones year after year.

    There are no clear reporting mechanisms, no meaningful protection for whistleblowers, and certainly no appetite for scandal. The institution protects its own, not its students. And the result? A silent, global network of abuse dressed up as academic excellence.

    The Silence Ends Here

    We must stop pretending that grooming is rare, or isolated, or “handled.” It is embedded in our education systems, from the first prize-giving ceremony to the final thesis defense. We need to listen differently, act quicker, and stop sacrificing young lives at the altar of institutional prestige.

    Because if our brightest girls and women cannot find safety in the places meant to shape their futures, then what exactly are we building?

    I hope the case of Alliance Girls does not become just another moment of hashtags and fleeting reflection. I hope it becomes a reckoning. A line in the sand. Because we must now find the courage to ask: What would justice look like for the girls and women who endured grooming—silently, fearfully, and alone? What can we do, as a society, about this collective hypocrisy of forgetting?

    Because when girls or women excel academically, they should be safe—not sacrificed at the altar of prestige.

  • Larry—This Is Not Your Battle Alone: Language, Power, and the African Voice!

    Mocking an African Presidents fluency in English is not a joke

    I came across a clip on social media of Kenyan journalist Larry Madowo, visibly puzzled that Donald Trump seemed surprised by President Joseph Boakai of Liberia speaking fluent English. Larry’s tone was dismissive—as if the real problem was Trump’s ignorance. But no, Trump doesn’t have a problem, in this linguistic instance. We all should be surprised when an African speaks good English—and nothing more. That surprise is not stupidity. It is a symptom of a world still held together by the logic of empire and linguistic imperialism.

    Let’s talk about Liberia for context. A country on the West African coast, often ranked among the poorest in the world by UN metrics. But these rankings—like speaking English, or writing in English, or being praised for fluency in the languages of any of the former colonisers—are scaffolds of neo-colonialism. They uphold a global order that rewards proximity to whiteness while erasing the trauma and knowledge systems of those whose ancestors lie at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

    Ironically, Liberia is often described as one of the two African countries that was never colonised. But that’s a half-truth dressed as liberation. Liberia was founded by freed African-American slaves—yes—but their freedom came at the cost of indigenous African land. The settlers, supported by the American Colonization Society, arrived with a mandate that mirrored every colonial project before and after: claim, govern, dominate.

    The result was a deeply fractured society—one where the Americo-Liberians attempted to rule over the indigenous people with the same racialised hierarchies they had escaped in the United States. Years of civil war followed, as if history itself refused to remain buried. The juxtaposition is uncomfortable but necessary: a people returned “home” only to recreate a system of exclusion. It is not unlike the founding of Israel—where memory, displacement, and land ownership collided violently. The cost of this “return” was paid, once again, by those who never left – those who were ‘lucky’ enough not to be captured by the slaver traders.

    The deeper question, perhaps, is this: Was Larry surprised that President Trump was surprised that an African American descendant could still speak English? or that they couldn’t speak anything else? If the enslaved lost their ancestral languages in the hold of slave ships, isn’t it remarkable that their descendants—those who returned to rule Liberia— did not lose their English prowess on the returned ship and instead continue to excel in the language of the captor? That surprises me too! Is English then, the language of eternity?

    And here Liberia’s identity crisis deepens, much like the linguistic and cultural trauma many colonized nations inherited and have refused to address. You cannot build a lasting peace on cultural vessels that are fundamentally in conflict. A nation that speaks the language of its trauma but has forgotten the language of its healing cannot be whole. The wounds are not just political or economic—they are linguistic, spiritual, and ancestral. Liberia’s unrest may not only be about war, poverty, or corruption. It may also be about what happens when a people cannot remember who they were before the world renamed them.

    President Boakai may feel offended and trampled on. But Presidents Trump’s condescension is not new—it’s a signature trait. He has routinely belittled leaders from countries he deems weak or chaotic. His treatment of Liberia’s President is not unlike his earlier treatment of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. The difference lies in what he chooses to attack. With Zelensky, it was his clothing—Trump mocked his lack of a suit, reducing a wartime leader to a fashion critique. But with Boakai, the target was far more insidious: language.

    Mocking an African president’s fluency in English is not a joke—it’s cultural assault. It reinforces the idea that African legitimacy must be earned through mimicry of the coloniser’s tongue. It’s a form of violence wrapped in surprise. It says: “You can only be taken seriously if you speak our language.” That is not just ignorance—it is the empire rearing its ugly head.

    So let me take a step back and speak directly to Larry. I understand the impulse—to defend, to correct, to be outraged on behalf of a fellow African leader. But we must be careful where we place our grief. I try, in my work and in my life, to draw an unsentimental line between language, memory, and identity—and the deep dissonance that arises when those threads are severed or replaced. Because weeh! this is a trigger for many Africans, especially those of us who have moved through international cultural spaces and felt the quiet violence of exclusion.

    I am associated with the International Council of Museums (ICOM), an organisation that claims to be global. Yet its official languages are English, French, and Spanish—European, all of them. Every attempt to introduce a language from outside that small colonial circle is met with the same excuse: budgets. The subtext is clearer than they admit—African and Asian linguistic blocs don’t pay enough in membership fees to matter. Never mind that French-speaking countries don’t have the numbers to contribute much either; the organisation is hosted in France, and so the language remains sacred.

    Meanwhile, the United Nations is hosted in Nairobi, yet Swahili is not required—or even respected—as a working language. The irony burns. Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and yes, Swahili are among the most widely spoken languages in the world today. But it is only Africans who must show up dressed in borrowed tongues, with accents to match. Other cultures speak boldly in their own languages—what you understand is your business. Africans have made little attempt to use their own languages – with few exceptions – thank you Ngugi  – linguistic interference is frowned upon, often ridiculed, as if our native tongues are a threat to international decorum. Now it turns out even fluency is ridiculed. And with that, the final nail is driven into the coffin of cultural liberty.

    Larry, I feel your frustration. But I wonder if your grief is really about that single awkward moment between two presidents—men you do not know, and who have little bearing on your life. Or is it something deeper, shaped by your own long dance with linguistic performance in elite Western spaces like CNN?

    Maybe what we are witnessing is a mirror! A mirror of the uncomfortable truth many of us carry in global spaces. The weight of exclusion, the nuances of discrimination that do not scream, but which persists. And the impossible decision—to step away entirely, or remain in the room, bruised, limping, but still showing up! It’s tough Larry – but then again so is survival!

  • Saba saba!

    Kamukunji Grounds at peace!

    Today is Saba Saba.

    Funny how it only stirs something when you say it in Swahili. Say “the seventh of July,” and most people will blink and move on. But say Saba Saba—and something activates. The air stiffens. Memory stirs. Passions rise. It’s not just a date. It’s a scar. A story. A mirror.

    But this year feels… different.

    No placards. No sirens. No leaders bellowing into aging microphones.

    Just Kamukunji Grounds, wide and waiting under the Nairobi sun. And four strangers—young, unarmed, unbothered—walking in from the far corners of the country, like an accidental compass pointing to something new.

    Amina, a tech innovator from Garissa, is here to install an open-source WiFi node for schoolchildren—just one part of a dream she calls ShujaaHub.

    Kimani, grandson of a Mau Mau general, comes every year to this ground to remember. This time, he’s brought a drum.

    Chebet, a spoken word artist from Kericho, carries only her voice. She’s debuting a piece called We Are Not the Lines Drawn On a Map.

    And Odhiambo? A culinary artist from Kisumu. He’s lugged a pot of mbuta stew and enough ugali to feed whoever comes hungry—physically or otherwise.

    None of them were invited. None needed to be.

    The Convergence

    They meet at the old fig tree. The one elders say heard the first whispers of resistance. There’s no programme. No emcee. Just offerings.

    Amina sets up the WiFi and waves a small device at a group of kids chasing a flat ball across the dust. “Free Internet!” she calls out. They abandon the match without a second thought. Soon they’re gathered around her, learning how to upload stories to ShujaaHub.

    Kimani sits cross-legged, eyes closed, and begins to beat the drum. Not in protest—but in memory. In rhythm. His feet trace slow movements from long ago—the kind the resistance once danced in caves and forests. A few children try to mimic him, limbs flailing in joy. The sound carries.

    When he stops, Chebet rises. Tall. Graceful. Her voice slices through the air like truth:

    “We came from the Rift and the Coast and the Mountain and the Lake
    But what bound us was not land—it was longing.”

    Silence falls. Not out of reverence—out of recognition.

    Then Odhiambo ladles out stew, chatting up a boda boda rider from Kathonzweni who chuckles, “Aki, if I’d known this was happening, I’d have brought mangoes. Historic occasion, bana!”

    People begin to gather. Not for a march. Not for a spectacle. But because it feels right. A girl types out her grandmother’s story—about how she survived the Emergency—then uploads it to ShujaaHub.

    A teenage boy records Kimani’s drumbeat and makes it his ringtone. Then he airdrops it to anyone within Bluetooth range.

    A city council cleaner joins Chebet’s chorus with an old hymn. Two uniformed police officers stop—not to disperse—but to listen. No slogans. No t-shirts. No hierarchy.

    Just people. Just Kenyans.

    Memory. Possibility. Stew.

    On this day at Kamukunji, the ground remembered.

    And maybe—just maybe—so does the country.

    That the future of Kenya will not be shouted into existence.

    It won’t be forced through manifestos or fists.

    It will be made—quietly, defiantly, and together.

    But that is vision 2030 – what happened to that blueprint by the way? On this saba saba day, we are on the edge of hope. Hoping that the memories from today will part of the poems in 2030 and beyond.

    For now, I’m gobsmacked by Kenyans—and how much we mirror our politicians. We defy order like it’s a national sport. Last Friday, I was at the bank, ticket number in hand like a passport to the pearly gates, waiting my turn like a decent human being. Then in waddles a certain Kenyan—of notable presence—straight to the cheque counter. No ticket. No line. No shame.

    I wasn’t going to let that fly.

    I marched up to the counter and said, “Excuse me, I have a number. I’m in line.” Then I waved my hand across the banking hall like a prophet with a shepherd’s staff and declared, “All of us are waiting. One of us does not get to skip the wilderness.”

    The woman looked at me calmly and said, “I’m only here to check my balance.”

    “And I’m only here to shepherd my flock,” I replied. “But I’m ahead of you.”

    She opened her mouth for a retort, but the people nearest the counter burst out laughing. I hadn’t meant to be funny—only to make a point. About ethics. About respect. About manners. About the kind of order that doesn’t need a uniform to enforce it.

    Because weeh! This madness isn’t just at the top. It starts in the queues.

  • The Truth About Caregiving: Love, Loss, and the Strength to Stay

    The strange kind of love – Reflections on caregiving

    Last week I posted something on social media about caregiving.

    They don’t tell you that caregiving is a strange kind of love. You watch your loved one fade like the setting sun — while you are supposed to shine like sunrise. It is also love in the purest form.  

    I didn’t expect the wave that followed. Now I feel that the moment is ripe to deepen the conversation with clarity and hopefully some grace, for I clearly touched a nerve in many different ways.

    Many replied with quiet tears: “Me too.”
    Others, with concern: “But what about your own life, are you ok?’’
    And a few, with sharp practicality: “It’s a waste of time, energy, money.”

    Those who are living it

    For those who are living it. You don’t need me to explain this kind of love. You’re living it. You’ve learned that time bends — that a single hour can feel like a year when the person you care for no longer knows your name, or repeats the same question twelve times before breakfast.

    You’ve felt that pang — the one where love is still strong, but recognition is gone. And yet, you carry on. You show up. You hold the line between memory and forgetting.

    I see you. And more importantly — you are not invisible to your loved one and others who give care.

    My mum no longer remembers my name — she calls me Mummy, the same way I’ve always called her. It’s her strange, beautiful gift to me.
    If she ever calls me by name, especially at night, we know something’s wrong. My name has become a signal — not of recognition, but of pain. A quiet plea for help.

    For those who fear it

    Some asked: “What about your dreams?”
    “Isn’t this a kind of death sentence?”

    I understand where that comes from. It can be hard to watch someone devote their life to a role that demands so much and gives back so little in tangible terms.

    And yes — it’s hard. It can feel like a slow erasure of the self. But that doesn’t mean it’s a dead end.

    Caregiving didn’t kill my dreams.
    If anything, it lit a fire under them. Gave them purpose. Clarity.
    It stripped away the noise — all the distractions, the vanity goals, the borrowed ambitions I once mistook for my own.

    In caring for someone else so completely, I finally saw what I was meant to fight for. This wasn’t an excuse to give up — it was my liberty card. Not the kind we wave when we want out, but the kind we earn when we finally understand what matters.

    For some of us, caregiving isn’t the death of our lives — it’s the rediscovery of what matters. It’s a different kind of becoming. A quieter kind. A harder kind. But not lesser.

    For those who call it a waste of time, I guess money and emotions too!

    I won’t argue. I simply offer this: Not all value is transactional. Not all time has to earn. And not all love must be proven with profit.

    Some things are sacred — not because they are easy, but because they strip us down to our essence and ask us: Who are you, when no one claps?

    That’s what caregiving does.
    It’s not just about caring for someone else — it strips you bare and shows you who you really are. It reveals the self.

    And to put it in terms that might land better: adulthood is a scam.
    Maybe love won’t scam you — not the real kind — but life will.
    You will be scammed. By duty, by capitalism, by expectations dressed up as dreams.

    I’ve simply chosen my scam.
    Caregiving is the one I picked with my eyes open.
    You get to choose yours too.

    For those of us who will stay.

    I don’t romanticise caregiving. I know the toll. The isolation. The fury. The bone-deep fatigue. But I also know the quiet, searing beauty of being someone’s anchor when they are lost to themselves.

    Caregiving isn’t for everyone. It shouldn’t have to be. But for those of us who walk this path — by choice or by circumstance — let it be known:

    This is not a waste.
    This is not weakness.
    This is love — strange, costly, inconvenient, and transformative.

    Last word.

    If you’re caregiving, or considering it, or afraid of what it might make of you — welcome. There’s room here for your story. Your fear. Your grit. Your grief. Your uneven strength.
    We don’t have to agree on everything.
    But we can choose to hold space — for each other, and for the versions of ourselves we’re still becoming.

    Because in the end, that’s what caregiving teaches us:
    How to hold.
    Even when it hurts.
    Even when it fades.
    Even when it’s never returned.

    And maybe, in this fractured world, that’s the most radical thing left to do.

    If you’re walking this caregiving path too — or just want to connect — I’d love to hear from you.
    You can leave a comment below or reach me via the contact page.

  • Decolonizing, but in English – Sorry Ngugi wa Thiongo

    One of Kenya’s greatest literary minds, transitioned to the realm of an ancestors on 28th May 2025. His passing marks the end of an era but, his words remain, sharp, urgent and uncompromising.

    A fierce intellectual and cultural worrier, Ngugi’s life was a long rebellion against the violence of colonialism and the subtle tyranny of mental enslavement. He chronicled the fractures of Kenyan society with the precision of a surgeon, form Weep not child to Wizard of the crow.

    In the 70’s Ngugi made a radical and irreversible turn, he rejected English as the primary medium for his fiction and turned fully to Gĩkũyũ his mother tongue, as the vessel of his fiction. It was a bold and reckless move in a world still dazzled by the queens English. I was first introduced to Ngugi by my father who handed me, like one might hand down a sacred guard – Caitani Mũtharabainĩ. I was about fifteen and should have been lost in the romance of a Mills and boons. But wapi? Here was the devil, no subtitles, no glossary. It was a real cross carry. I had to read with my brow furrowed and my pride bruised. I did not understand much in that book – but I began to hear the music of my own people in literature. Not in translation. Not in apology. But in their full thunderous voice. That was my fathers failed attempt to decolonize my mind.

    The next Ngugi book I read was the River Between – my all-time favorite. I still see that river in my minds eye, winding, patient, ancient. It curved more than just valleys, it carved questions in me. As a teenager, read it like a political allegory, which it is. But it wasn’t until much later as an adult, that I realized, it was also a love story. A quiet aching one. Ngugi had hidden tenderness in the fold of rebellion and I hadn’t known how to see it yet. The book that truly shifted my perception, the one that completed the decolonizing work my father had unknowingly began was Decolonizing the Mind. This book speaks to me, it had confronted me. It laid bare the subtle ways colonialism had infiltrated, our speech, our education, even our silence.

    As a professional in the heritage sector, decolonizing is a current buzz word, sprinkled generously in conference titles, panel discussion and funding proposals. But often we are merely regurgitating ideas Ngugi gave us, clear and uncompromising in the 70’s. He had mapped the terrain, language is the carrier of culture. But how many of us are willing to carry through? To write, speak and even dream in the mother tongues we were taught to abandon – so that we can seek validation in foreign languages. Ngugi’s choices were not without cost. Imprisoned without trial in 1977 for his play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), exiled for decades, and blacklisted at home, he paid the price of telling the truth. And yet, he never wavered. His later works—written in Gĩkũyũ then self-translated into English—demonstrate the full flowering of an imagination liberated from colonial scaffolding.

    Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a giant—even in death. In the days following his passing, Kenya has been abuzz with his name. Social media timelines, radio talk shows, barbershops, and university corridors alike have all lit up with tributes, memories, and debates. As is typical of how we mourn our legends, opinion has split. Some question his wish to be cremated—calling it unafrican. Others lament that he spent most of his life in the West and has denied us the chance to celebrate him with the full-blown, trumpet-blaring African funeral party he surely deserved.

    But we forget—selectively, as humans often do—that Ngũgĩ did not choose exile the way one might choose a travel destination. He fled. He left Kenya not for luxury but for survival. His words had unsettled the powerful, and the price for speaking truth here was prison, censorship, and danger. The West gave him safety, not necessarily home.

    Ngũgĩ’s life was full of contradictions: a village boy from Limuru who became a global scholar; a man who fiercely denounced empire while teaching in its most elite institutions; a writer whose boldest act of nationalism was to write in a language many of his own countrymen could no longer read. And more recently, his son, Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ, unearthed painful truths from the vault of childhood—portraying him not just as a literary giant, but as a complicated, and at times violent, man. That too is part of the legacy. Greatness is rarely neat. In the end, Ngũgĩ remains what he always was: deeply human, deeply African, and utterly unignorable.

    And this commentary, ladies and gentlemen, has been written by a Muthoni—in English. My own decolonizing work, it seems, remains beautifully untidy. But perhaps that, too, is the point: it was never meant to be clean, or complete. Just courageous.