owaahh Author

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

Why Britain Opposed Ethiopia’s Entrance into the League of Nations

101 years ago this week, Ethiopia formally joined the League of Nations, the precursor to the modern-day United Nations. Ethiopia is famously the only country in Africa that was never colonised. It defeated Italy’s first excursions in 1896, and was occupied during World War II because regaining Italy’s standing as a colonial power was important …

Features • Quick Reads|

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‘If Gays Didn’t Exist’ Part II

II Read Part I here. In November of 2019, the world descended on Nairobi for an important but highly controversial UN conference. By then, the United Nations had become a major arena for religious and social groups opposed to comprehensive sex education, and everything that fell within the “family values” container. In many UN gatherings, …

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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.

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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.

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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.

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7 Unsolved Murders of Young Women in Kenya

On the morning of Valentines Day 2012, Careen Chepchumba's brother accessed her apartment at Santonia Court, off Kirichwa Road. She had been incommunicado since February 12th. In the bedroom, he saw her in bed, tidily covered with a bed sheet. There was music playing from a laptop placed on the bedside table. Nothing looked amiss. Except that Careen had been dead for 18 hours.

Listicles • Morbid|

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7 More Brutal African Serial Killers (Who were Caught)

Read about some of Africa's worst and darkest serial killers, and how they were caught.

Listicles|

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The Sack of Baltimore

Sometime in mid-1631, a pirate flotilla left Algiers, one of the main ports on the Barbary Coast. The main ship was a Dutch-built 300-ton man-of-war, armed with about 24 pieces of ordinance. It was crewed by 200 men. The smaller ship was half that size in both weight and crew. The flotilla was commanded by Captain …

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The Politics of the Miniskirt (and hippies) in Africa

This article was first published on Medium. Read the edited version on Mail and Guardian Africa.  The recent #MyDressMyChoice protests in Kenya have rekindled a debate that has plagued Africa since independence in the 1960s. Most African countries gained independence at about the same time two trends were catching on in the West.

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