Features

18 Rare Photos of Tom Mboya’s Wedding to Pamela Odede

In April 1962, Ebony Magazine published a lead feature on the January 1962 wedding of Tom Mboya and Pamela Odede.

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Here’s Why We Need to Rewrite Our History

A brisk reading of K. Ingham’s 1953 book ‘Europe and Africa’ shows little difference in how we tell the African story.

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12 Stunning High Quality Photos of Kenyan History

By Nathan Tama It is rare to bump onto high quality images of colonial and precolonial images such as these. 

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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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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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The Savage Mutilation of Piah Njoki, and her Incredible Spirit

At daybreak on November 4th, 1983, a scream cut through the serenity of Kiaga Village in Kirinyaga. The single scream quickly became cries for help, then wailing of what now sounded like a large group of people. What sounded like the cries of pain of a dying woman would lead residents of the small village …

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