#kenya decides

[greggtendwa]

“Let the Kenyan PEOPLE decide”

[I wrote and posted this piece through Facebook on Feb 3, 2013]  

Part of me tells me that Kenya…

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[creativetimereports-blog]

Nairobi-based poet, performer, actress, and musician Ngwatilo Mawiyoo's new Creative Time Reports Feature, 

Kenya Elections:  Whispers of Fear and Hope

Getting to Moyale from Nairobi takes two nights and a day by lorry, nonstop, with one driver intermittently chewing khat along the way. That’s how I go. There is a bus, but I am advised that the lorry will be more comfortable, especially once the tarmac ends. The badness of the road is legend, so everyone who can flies to Moyale instead.

Leaving Nairobi by highway, you learn that Moyale is 488 miles away—north. North into the place the colonialists named the Northern Frontier District. Beyond where the rest of us in the south believe good news can be borne. North into that bush where they ask you for news of Kenya. Past Isiolo and the shiftas(“bandits”) on the loose beyond it. Past the deserts and the oasis at Marsabit. Almost Ethiopia: Moyale.

In the lorry I sit beside a Borana man. I can’t tell that he is Borana, he tells me. I’m wearing a hijab, newly acquired from the Somali and Woria outpost in Nairobi—Eastleigh—because I imagine it will help me blend in, and it does. The old man thinks I look Borana. “Blood calls to blood,” he says in Kiswahili. And my blood calls to him. He blesses me. He says he prays that I will find a rich husband. He tries to speak Borana to me, even though I tell him I do not understand it. He says he does it to test me. I only hear syllables hurriedly beating past my ears, and fading off quickly as if they’d died when they came too close.... [MORE]