Kevin Okoth

Ihad been back​ in Nairobi for a few days when I heard that Raila Odinga, the towering opposition figure who played a crucial role in Kenya’s return to multi-party democracy, had died at a clinic in India, aged eighty. Odinga, affectionately known as Baba (Swahili for ‘father’) by his supporters and political rivals alike, was a fixture of Kenyan politics. While he never...

Achille Mbembe’s​ On the Postcolony, first published in French in 2000, changed the direction of postcolonial studies. Since then, he has gained a loyal readership across the political spectrum (his admirers include Emmanuel Macron and Judith Butler), and his concepts – the postcolony, necropolitics, Afropolitanism and more – crop up everywhere from the Venice Biennale to...

Kenya’s​ government is in crisis. In May, President William Ruto introduced a controversial new finance bill, which proposed higher duties on basic goods such as bread, vegetable oil and sugar, as well as an ‘eco-levy’ that would drive up the cost of sanitary towels and other items. Ruto said the taxes would raise a much needed additional £2 billion in government...

The Hutu authorities​ in Rwanda, Scholastique Mukasonga writes in The Barefoot Woman, portrayed the Tutsi as ‘inyenzi, cockroaches, insects it was only right to persecute and eventually exterminate’. The term inyenzi evoked images of an enemy that could survive anywhere, no matter the conditions, a pervasive force which had undermined Hutu civilisation. Mukasonga’s...

Textbook histories​ used to claim that independence in Africa was more or less complete by the mid-1960s. Decolonisation had lifted the white man’s burden and allowed African activists to strike out on their own – with a ceremonial nod to their European benefactors. But if this characterisation was absurd, so was the notion that colonial rule in Africa was an anomaly by the...