Une Friendly F-Fire

Stealth hawkeman cometh!
As drone. Deadly ka-cargo.
Pok'th the north, wind. Boom!

Making Nairobi City the Greatest

About a week ago, as my wife and I shopped at The Junction, I heard a radio deejay quite unequivocally call Nairobi the greatest city in Africa. I was somewhat surprised by that unconditional claim. But it forced me to clarify my own thoughts.

Sure, few African cities have Nairobi's charm and laid-back energy -- and none, clearly, has its history and character, such as we have lived that history and shaped that character. However, being occasionally SWOT-oriented, I am only too aware of its Ws and Ts to be lulled by its Ss and Os into so categorical a stance.

Note: This is an old, incomplete draft, just now published as is

Salim Lone and the Last Days of December 2007

Salim Lone's account of the events surrounding Kenya's general elections of December 2007 appeared in the Sunday Standard of September 14th.

Note: This is an old, incomplete draft on my blog, just now revisited, and published as is.

The Kenya We Don't Want

The first "The Kenya We Want" conference was held in 1962, the year before independence. The second one was held in 1980, about two years after President Daniel Arap Moi became Kenya's second President. For reasons we can guess at, his Sudanese hosts were used to calling him Arab Moi. The third "Kenya We Want Conference", convened by the Grand Coalition Government of President Mwai Kibaki an Prime Minister Raila Odinga, started yesterday and is to end tomorrow.

The Kenya ordinary Kenyans want has been known, and has not really changed, since 1962 or thereabouts. The problem is with the leaders: they say they want one thing, exactly what the "average citizen" wants, but their body languange betrays a more sinister self-centredness. They say one thing, and do and explain away another -- when the contradictions are elephant and boil over. The disconnect between word and deed leaves many citizens at once puzzled and cynical. It is not what ordinary Kenyans want that's at issue; it is what the leaders really want -- and mean by their deeds. So much so that the slogan "The Kenya We Want" has met its match in a very public refrain -- "The Kenya We Don't Want!"

Where was the idea of this obviously unnecessary and ill-timed gathering broached? Who came up with this bad and practically obscene idea? Why would anyone imagine that this was "the time"? It was obscene in that it suggested that the very same leaders the public blames for moulding a Kenya we don't want thought, even for a minute, that Kenyans are too dulled by poverty, too blinded ethnic loyalty and and too mesmerized by their self-possessed leaders to know, or to be exercised by the knowledge, that they have been betrayed by these erstwhile champions.

It's amazing how things can change in less than a year. The Grand Coalition government has not even celebrated its first anniversary, but what the public has been treated to is the moral equivalent of five to ten years of Moi-era rapacity and greed. That may sound unfair, but the bar was raised in the hey day of "Yote Yawezekana" -- by the very same leaders whom the public now roundly condemns, one month after another, for grand corruption scandals that seem to have no end.

The greed in high places is palpable. The apparent absence of conscience is troubling. The unbridled nepotism and parochialism that register on our political "Richter Scale" with nearly every major appointment to public office (by both PNU and ODM) smack of delusions of dynasty which, in the broad daylight in which we witness them (though the leaders continue as though they imagine that they operate out of sight and that there's nobody there to unravel the extreme subtlety of their moves, when in fact these moves are puerile and appear uneducated), erode irreversibly the enormous political capital that they had built and that has placed them exactly where they find themselves. But the leaders continue as though they imagine that they operate out of sights of everyone that may have something to say (an objection), and that, moreover, there's nobody there, really, to unravel the presumed subtlety of their moves -- a subtlety that increasingly impresses only them and their diehard gofers, for in fact these moves appear, to more and more observers (even in Kibera), at once clumsy and uneducated.

There are no times more ominous of changes to come -- the change that must come -- than when average citizen discover that they cleverer than the leaders who stand before them!.



Note: This is an old, incomplete draft on my blog, just now revisited, and published as is.

Kenyan Olympians in Beijing

It has been ten centuries since Kenyans -- that is, since people from what is now Kenya -- caused as much stir and buzz in Beijing as they did this August. Eleven centuries, that is, if we forget for a moment the emotionally charged visit to Beijing by that Kenyan girl from the coast a few years ago.

As Philip Ochieng tells us, Kenyans have a long-standing connection with the Olympics. This connection...




Note: This is an old, incomplete draft on my blog, just now revisited, and published as is.

The 140 Characters: Steve Gillmor's Peroration

Gillmor defends Twitters 140 character limit against the attacks of Dave Winer and suchlike, but seems, at the start, to be spoiling for his own turn to attack Twitter. He expresses dismay at Twitter's, so to speak, ... himself


Read More: Gillmor's Peroration



Note: This is an old, incomplete draft on my blog, just now revisited, and published as is.

Yambo Places

There are a number of Yambo place-names that interest and intrigue me; places that make one rethink distinctions and specificities.

Giddens says that Place and Locale, once one, have come apart, in modernity. They are remixing in various ways, though; above all in our minds, of all places, and, more and more (more or less), always.

Here's a map of a place called Yambo, Yembu, Yembo, on another continent altogether. What you do with it is a choice you have to make: Click. What I make of it is, in turn, my own choice.

Yambo

The name Yambo intrigues me -- I, who bears it. It was my father's name: Yambo son of Onyalo; or, as became the habit among men of his age, Yambo sio Onyalo. In Kiswahili, that could be construed to mean: Yambo's not Onyalo, one inference being that Yambo was precisely Yambo, and not his father. Fair enough. My father named me after his own father, Onyalo, as was typically the case. The son, then, is father to the man.

But then colonialism anglicized certain namings, and, no longer grandfather, son became his own father. I acquired my father's first name as my own surname and was thus Yambo. Which is how I am known in the places, the little patches of the planet, that I am mostly known today -- and as I, myself, primarily know and label myself. Yet there are still people I meet, out of the blue, from high school days who will on seeing me "instinctively" call out, just as dramatically out of the blue: "Onyalo." Onyalo is, of course, always happy to see them and to ask how they have been, knowing that many we remember have died over the years. My more numerous acquaintances of more recent decades will, however, experience both a puzzlement and a bemusement -- seeing, all of a sudden, that the brand they had all figured out kumbe has another label. It's like discovering that Coke goes by another, unexpected, call-to-order, smell-just-as-sweet name elsewhere.

There's a place, as you drive from Kisumu City on the Kisian-Bondo, just before Holo market centre, that's called Yambo. The people of Kisumo, where my mother was born, have been known occasionally to shout "Seme Yambo!" as their eyes, tracking the sunset over Lake Victoria in the distance, sort of fly over that very same "place Yambo", which is indeed where the Seme territory begins. You drive through Seme all the way from 'place Yambo' (and Holo) till just before Akala market centre, which is in Gem.  

What does that name, Yambo, mean? I have always wondered about its origins. When we were growing up, there was no other Yambo that we knew of. Later, the first surprise was to read about Yambo Ouologuem, writer and citizen of distant Mali. Then I think I heard, perhaps via the TV, of a Yambo somewhere in Namibia. For a long time, the port of Yenbo in Saudi Arabia was simply Yenbo, nobody used the Yambo variation in its spelling, such as we see nowadays. And all of this was in the age before the Internet and search engines, and, in particular, before the Wide World Web and Google.

In 1992, when a group of us visited Denmark, I saw a shop with the name Yambo Coffee one evening as we drove by. By then, I was of course already aware that there was a place at the south-western tip of the Sudan called Yambo, at the border with Cameroun and DRC. A few years ago, I came across a question on the Internet asking someone, anyone, to please explain what the name Yambo meant. I couldn't help, but I was among the puzzled. On April 24, 2013, I posted this tweet:

The #Yambo #Meme: In Copenhagen once, we drove by a Yambo Coffee shop. What, America has mo of (the) me me! http://www.census-gov.us/list/YAMBO/           9:16 PM - 24 Apr 2013

Here's one plausible explanation for the meaning of Yambo: click here. Yambo is shown as one of several alternative names for a language spoken in both the Sudanese and the riverain Gambela Region of southwestern Ethiopia, and better known (as I have myself always "abstractly" known it) as Anuak, the language of Anuak people. As of 1998,

A decade or so ago, the Anuak, Yambo language was spoken by a total of only 97,646 people on this planet. A smaller number (some 52,000 people) were to be found in the Sudan. The other names by which Anuak is known in the Sudan are: Anyuak, Anywa, Anywak, Dho Anywaa, Jambo and Nuro. Its alternative names in Ethiopia are, besides Yambo: Anyuak, Anywa, Anywak, Bar, Burjin, Jambo, Miroy, Moojanga, Nuro and Yembo. Ethiopian dialects associated with Anuak are Adoyo, Coro, Lul and Opëno.

READ: Leoma G. Gilley (2004) "The Lwoian Family" (pp. 165-174) in Occasional Papers in the Study of Sudanese Languages. No. 9, 2004

The Anuak,Yambo people are cascadingly classified as Nilo-Saharan, Eastern, Sudanic, Nilotic, Western, Luo, Northern, Anuak. They are said to be closer to the Acholi and Luo (to the south) than the Shilluk (to the north). For a further sketch of the taxonomy of the Luo cluster of languages, click here.

Note: This is work in progress. You and I should like to know where in Africa our various ethnicities were 1000 years ago. Then 1,500. Then 2,000. Then 3,000, 4,000. 10,000 and then"beyond" as far as the discerning eye can see. We know too little about our heritage. We cannot know too much.

Further Updates:
1. August 27, 2015

Beyond Measure

Here's what matters:

Knowing nothing does, but that

Which will keep us wise.

[Haiku]

Farewell to Michael Jackson

The world bade farewell to Michael Jackson on July 7th, 2009. He had died on Thursday, June 25th.








1. Click here for some memorable moments from yesterday's memorial service


Note: This is an old, incomplete draft on my blog, just now revisited, and published as is.

Bodiseye: Haiku

Eye. Very same storm.
Sea! How I enter myself.
How -- I undo tins.



I thought had published this haiku already, but I've just found it on my blog as an unpublished draft. Let's do it 'again' for whatever reason, then! Likes it.