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@Owaahh
One Story is good, till Another is told.
Oct 5, 2018 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Now this thread is for the people who, as part of their human experience, went to national schools and groups of schools. First, you are not brighter than us. You are not our betters. We can call out your abuse or any abuse by anyone you identify with. I am not attacking you when I say this. But over and over again when I make a point about how your schools have harmed the Kenyan experience, the same conversation happens. I am not attacking your experiences, or your humanity.
Sep 28, 2018 • 48 tweets • 23 min read
If you feel the need to talk to me, to be angry with me, or just to insult to me, my email address is at the end or this tweet. I will post screenshots of your email here, without your name or address. Let's talk. Let's unpack this feeling. This foreboding. >>

m@owaahh.com They subject for this one was "I truly lack a subject."
Sep 27, 2018 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
The Man Who Sold a Country owaahh.com/the-man-who-so… In Lieu of a King: "The raids on the public coffers have become the national soap opera, each new twist being fed as tantalizing fodder to a tabloid generation." owaahh.com/in-lieu-of-a-k…
Sep 21, 2018 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
On this day, five years ago, Westgate was just waking up the way malls do. What begun just a few hours from now could have been prevented, could have been stopped before it escalated, could have been solved fast, could have been investigated so we never go through it again... The clusterfuckery that's the other side of this social contract we call Kenya failed in every instance. It ignored warnings, reacted like a drunk sloth, brought tanks to a gun fight, frustrated international investigators, and blew up a pile of explosive mattresses.
Sep 20, 2018 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Also, freedom of expression? That one that has been under threat for a while, there's a new wave coming with the Copyright Amendment Bill (2017), now in heading to its 3rd Reading.

Everything on this page is a real threat to the stories you want to read.
Let me tell you a story. Two years ago, after I did the Tatu City series (owaahh.com/war-tatu-city/), several things happened. One of them was that someone in Lagos sent a takedown request to my host. I didn't know until I had all of 12 hours to respond to it.
Sep 20, 2018 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
Are we angry yet?

Are we angry enough yet?

What will finally break us? Because not only can the center not hold, it has been mortgaged for generations. It seems there are only ways to experience this country today, as a subservient, overly optimistic (even with a gun to the head), voting citizen who stays quiet and prays for Ushuru and Bill the Teary.

Or as an anarchist. Because this can't be how this story ends.
Aug 31, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
― Frederick Douglass “The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.”
― Gore Vidal
Aug 14, 2018 • 29 tweets • 5 min read
A few more stories, in the "Gospel of Peter" (discovered in 1886), Jesus doesn't just rise from the dead. Two angels first appear, then after he rises, the angels heads "reached to heaven", and Jesus head "overpassed the heavens". Also, a cross is following them (and it speaks). In the Book of Enoch, the explanation for the great flood is that fallen angels had sex with humans, who gave birth to giants "whose height was three hundred ells." The giants then eat the humans, then ate "birds, and beasts and reptiles and fish" before eating each other.
Aug 11, 2018 • 10 tweets • 7 min read
Baobox is such a cool place.

Also, I am happy to report that the water cutting on #NairobaeIGTour 4.0 has begun. My crown is at stake today (or rather tomorrow morning). ...and then we won! (although by we here I mean @Atetwee and @theMagunga). The game was Kenya 50/50.
#NairobaeIGTour
Aug 11, 2018 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
The oldest written customer complaint dates back to ancient Mesopotamia.

In the cuneiform tablet, a customer claims he was sold inferior copper ingots (and that his seller had treated his emissaries rudely "in enemy territory" and refused to refund the money). In 1974, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis published a paper titled "The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of 'Writer’s Block.'" It contained zero words.

It has been cited more than 60 times.
Aug 7, 2018 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Observing a moment of silence at the 20th anniversary of the August 7 '98 bombings.
#Aug7at20 "Al Qaeda had three main goals
1. To kill and destroy
2. To divide us
3. To undermine the values we hold dear.
...Although we have suffered, we are not beaten."

-@BobGodec

#Aug7at20
Aug 7, 2018 • 5 tweets • 5 min read
The only aerial photo of the August 7th 1998 blast taken in real time by a construction worker at Times Towers.

#Aug7at20
#iSurvived98 August 7th was the end of a normal week in KE. Bankers' strike (hence reduced casualties at Coop), teachers' strike, petty politics...a time like now, just an hour to the blast, this is the headline you would have been reading.
#Aug7at20
#iSurvived98
#Kenyanhistory
Aug 6, 2018 • 18 tweets • 8 min read
On a day like tomorrow, 20 years ago, a Friday, all hell broke loose just after 10 a.m. Two singular, coordinated terror attacks in KE and TZ cost hundreds of lives and injured many more. It was like the world was broken in two, but we survived. And thrived.
#iSurvived98 Before August 7th 1998, the worst terror attack in KE was the 1980 Norfolk bombing which killed 20 people and injured tens of others. It was retaliation for KE allowing Israel to refuel during Operation Entebbe (there were other 'reasons' as well)
#iSurvived98
Jul 14, 2018 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Thefts like this fascinate me. Biggest things ever stolen: a beach, a Boeing 727, a fully loaded oil tanker (and two more after that), a bridge, a church (Don't joke with Russians), a five-story mill (Kenya's entry), a tank, a WWII fighter jet, two luxury yachts... ...and once, a decade ago, @NYDailyNews temporarily stole the Empire State Building. In just 90 minutes. It was a stunt to show just how easy it was, and their fake company was called "Nelots" which, is "Stolen" spelled backwards. 😂😂😂
Jul 14, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
One of the most iconic buildings in Nairobi, now 101 years old. At least its foundation stone; the rest was done in parts over the next 4 decades.

Host to protesters in the '90s. Incl. once in 1997 when the police lodged teargas into the church and beat protesters to a pulp. It had played host to the fearless mothers of freedom corner, who were hidden inside the church in 1992.

In the 1997 protest, Kibaki was stashed in the vestry while police clobbered protesters inside the church. The pews were left broken and covered in blood.
Feb 8, 2018 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
In trying to repair what's wrong with KE, there are many conversations we need to have. The exiling (not deportation) of Miguna was wrong. It was, however, the actualization of an internal war ODM made against him about 9 years ago.

A thread. In "Peeling Back the Mask", Miguna talks about that time in January 2010 when PMU came after him on the issue of citizenship. The argument then was pretty much the same as it was the week. First page.
Feb 6, 2018 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
The law Miguna Miguna has been charged under was passed to fight, not surprisingly, the peasant irredentism known as the Mau Mau.

It was passed in 1955 but other laws had already been used to charge people with 'administering an illegal oath' in the years before.

A thread. To understand just how far back into the colonial model we have sunk, check the dates on the sections on oaths GOK is using. They were all passed after 1950, and seem to have been modified as our colonizers learnt more about the oathing process.
ilo.org/dyn/natlex/doc…
Nov 23, 2017 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
Have you ever heard of "Kamau Maithori" the secret group that emerged around independence, complete with oathing and such, to demand settlement for displaced Kikuyus in Central Province, or permanent settlement in R. Valley? Also, anyone have or know where I can get a copy of "A Love Affair with the Sun: A Memoir of Seventy Years in Kenya" by Michael Blundell?

I am willing to buy a second hand copy.
Oct 16, 2017 • 50 tweets • 6 min read
So @RookieKE asked me to try and give a historical perspective of this Luo-Kikuyu animosity that has held KE hostage for 50+years. The Q was triggered by what Dr. @marvinsrm went through at work today. Start here , then come back to this thread.