owaahh Author

A man, a pen, a keyboard I mean, bananas, and mugs of coffee. This is a labour of love.

The First Computers in East Africa –and what became of them

One of them ended up at the bottom of the ocean, because of a snake, a gun, and bureaucracy. Another ended up in China, somehow.

The Nairobi Incident

Where Imenti House stands today, bounded by Kenyatta and Moi Avenues, and Tom Mboya and Cabral Streets, once stood the courthouses of the Protectorate. It is outside that building, on a cold March 15th morning in 1907 that the following events take place.

Game of Thrones in the Chimp Sanctuary

Ol Pejeta is Westeros, and there is a Game of Thrones going on in it’s Chimpanzee Sanctuary.

There had been an Africa: A Letter to Future Africans

Africa had seemed like a dream come true, at least wherever one lived. That was the Africa we lived in. 

Nairobi was Never Meant to be a City

The first men and women who landed in Nairobi considered the brackish swamp land perfect. The area was picturesque, with hills in the horizon and rivers crisscrossing the plains. The land was not suitable for farming, and certainly not for settlement, but it was perfect for grazing.

The Beatification of Sister Irene Stefani

In late 1911, a 20-year old woman joined the Consolata Missionaries in Turin, Italy. She took her final vows two years later and boarded a ship for Mombasa, Kenya, in 1914.

Former US President Teddy Roosevelt’s Drunken Rampage in Nairobi

Number 26, Teddy Roosevelt, holds two crowns. He was the youngest person to assume the US presidency, and the most badass of them all. He did many things to earn that second title, but none of them featured a drunken spree in Nairobi that nearly caused a diplomatic mess in 1909.

SIX HOURS ON FIGHT NIGHT: Makmende vs Wikipedia

Makmende had returned, and he was here to stay. Not that he reads books and Wikipedia anyway. He just beats them up to get the information he wants.

Kenyatta’s Six Minutes as an Actor, and why he never talked About It

In the trivia section of the IMDb profile of the film Sanders of the River (1935) lies this nugget “Jomo Kenyatta, who was President of Kenya from 1963 to 1978, had a bit part in this movie as a tribal chief.” It was a 6-minute role he never talked about, and with good reason.