Posts Tagged ‘kenya’
Outing corruption in Kenya, and African authors you want to meet
Last year, I wrote about a new book on a Kenyan whistleblower, written by a British journalist. A reader pointed me to Kenyan writer Billy Kahora, who’d also just published a book, locally, about a Kenyan whistleblower — in fact, the man who, as Kahora tells it, exposed Kenya’s biggest-ever corruption scandal. It’s also one [...]
Farm aid from space
This is the title of my newest Christian Science Monitor article, which is actually about weather-indexed insurance programs in sub-Saharan Africa. All kinds of cool science-and-tech stuff has come together in the last five years to allow big insurance companies to offer super-small insurance policies — low-premiums, comparatively low-payout, to the usually poor, always vulnerable [...]
And in Kenya, an alternative to the Gospel of Greed
African journalist extraordinaire Michaela Wrong just released her new book, “It’s Our Turn to Eat,” about anti-corruption crusader John Githongo. He spent his life documenting sleaziness under several Kenyan leaders, then fled the country in fear of his life. He landed at Wrong’s apartment, and she turned his work into a book. It’s a hot [...]
On hearing what you want to hear
I have been keeping track, for no explicable reason, of the number of places outside of the States where I hear a song that my fellow West Virginians and I can only consider an anthem, possibly one more emotionally significant than anything Francis Scott Key ever hummed. Never mind that John Denver only traveled through [...]
Murphy’s law meets Occum’s razor
For whatever reason, the cultural differences in dating practices have been coming up in many of my conversations recently. Today, it was Kenya. “So what’s dating like in Kenya?” I asked a new friend. “What’s it like?” she said, taking an incredulous puff of her cigarette. “The men cheat. The women cry.”
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [