“Ethnic cleansing in Luoland,”

“Ethnic cleansing in Luoland”, The Economist, 9 February 2008.  

 

Peace talks get nowhere as western Kenya becomes ungovernable

AS THE road approaches Kisumu, Kenya’s third-biggest city and capital of the Luos, the country’s third-biggest but angriest ethnic group, it becomes littered with rubble and burnt vehicles. A man beats at a smouldering ambulance’s number-plate with his machete. “See,” he explains, “this belongs to the government of Kenya.” Mobs cry out for their fellow Luo, Raila Odinga, to be made president of Kenya. They plead for guns. An earnest man pushes to the front of one mob. “What we are saying is give violence a second chance.”

Gikandi, “Let Moderate Voices be Heard in this Din of Hate”

Simon Gikandi, “Let moderate voices be heard in this din of hate,” Business Daily Africa, 4 January, 2008.  

 

January 04, 2007: In regard to the current crisis in Kenya, let us start by disposing off the blame game. There is too much of that to go around: A government that has failed in its obligations to uphold democratic practices and the rule of law.

An opposition for whom nothing, except the smell of power, has appeal or makes sense. A media, whose interests are closely bound with those of the political and economic elite and, in some cases, have become willing chaperones of violence and destruction.

GOV240 Sizwe paper due Mar. 5th

GOV 240 service and politics abroad

Spring 2010

paper on Sizwe’s Test

GOV240 Service and Politics Abroad

This course has three parts.

GOV240 Kenya: Beatrice (January 2007)

 

Beatrice is basically a social worker. She goes to check up on outpatients and to deliver bags of fortified porridge mix.  She both feet out of the slum, but is as close to it as is possible to be.  She is positive, but her kids are not.  They live in a “house” that would be unremarkable as a Manhattan-sized kitchen.  She is 24, and her kids are 7 and 4.  We have become pretty close.

GOV240 Kenya: Nyeri (January 2007)

Nyeri, first journal entry ‘07

Three students and I went to a hospital here in Nyeri to visit AIDS patients.  I can’t describe it, other than to say there were two people per bed, and many flies on  the patients–including the babies. It was filthy and the stench was unimaginable. Several patients were deafened and blinded by the disease.  Many looked like they were dying.  The children’s ward was very, very difficult.