We cannot wholly use ethnic borders to define economic contact between our counties because colonial boundaries are based on myths.

The most obvious inaccuracy is the myth that leadership failure occurs only when presidents from other communities are in power.

Scholars should tell the truth and help Kenyan singers rise above negative ethnicity

Leaders who divide their people never understand what peace means to the ordinary Nandi or Luo. It means everything.

Something is going on at Kenyatta University’s Literature Department. Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino, which celebrated its 50th anniversary with a grand celebration at Makerere University early this year, is being translated into Sheng.

Kibigori Railway Station is a lonely place. No train passes through it as it used to.

My genuine fear is that nothing short of government intervention will end the painful injustice going on in Kenya’s publishing industry. Including music, but that’s a story for another day.

In his research on the journal ‘Transition and Black Orpheus (1986)’, Peter Benson reports how the late Ali Mazrui suggested that Kenyans rally behind the Mau Mau to cement a sense of nationhood.

He bears a striking resemblance to the late Prof Ali Mazrui. Indeed, when Mazrui died, the literature scholar says his children received condolence messages

Where were you in the early 1980s? If you were a young adult in the village, you must have attended the village ‘tea party,’ then haunted by young adults, where the record player, and its child, the vinyl, was king.

It’s true that certain historical circumstances made it possible for colonial powers to establish university colleges in West Africa – such as Fourah Bay, Achimota, and Ibadan – much earlier than they did in East Africa.

The question has often been asked: Between culture and biology, what precedes what? Most scholars agree that culture does.

The Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) will soon pick new literature set books for secondary schools.

The gradual opening up between agents in the literary trade might yield a proper harvest for Kenyan Literature sometime in the distant future (I certainly do not include in it the current thinking which equates literature to a certain nocturnal – well, even diurnal – activity where the publisher and the editor are considered a pair of wonder-drug pills).

This is factual: I was in Class Eight at a rural primary school called Oneno-Nam in 1992. This was in Muhoroni Constituency, Kisumu County.

There are things about which we must not think twice before we decide under this bright sun burning above our heads here in East Africa

I do not know if you are aware that the Kenyan state has succeeded in teaching a massive chunk of its population to be snail-shy with their views, but Kenyans must soon learn that some people still do not care one bit about such sterile injunctions.

Does the song Dunia Mbaya ring a bell? Recall Kenya of the late 1990s when a monster-disease called ‘ayaki’ was sorrowfully harvesting human beings on the shores of Lake Victoria

This is a joke: If you yesterday met a man from Western Kenya whistling his favourite tune after winning a certain midday battle (end of joke), then probably the song was ‘Tindikiti’ (Mulongo) by David Barasa, or ‘Mukangala’ by the late Jacob Luseno. But the former is a circumcision song, so its fame is restrictive.

Lack of a structured, centralised body to regulate the production, sale and consumption of music is ruining the industry in the country.

"World music is as complex and diverse as the human body," says Abdul Karim, the 1962-born proprietor who is following his late father's footsteps.

Barring the fact that Christmas is a secular ritual traceable to the Roman Empire, does Jesus Christ usually smile from ear to ear each time a Christmas carol is sung to celebrate his birth?

When we arrived to interview her, we found Rispah Achieng Andega planting potato vines on her small plot. From the way she held the hoe and sank each potato stem into the mounds of earth, you would be forgiven for thinking that she had eyes.

Does God exist? That is a question we are not very sure about. Christian preachers never help us much here in Kenya, because their pins and potassium permanganate are often the best evidence that God was probably never there right from the start.

I have recently read that the population of the Kenyan middle-class has hit the 6.8 million mark, and that because of it, ethnic thinking is likely to reduce. I grant our political scientists their freedom to project, but they too should give me my freedom to doubt.

If you stand near the tallest tree in Ogwedhi centre and look east, there is a wide space of uninhabited land before you see lush fields and rolling hills of Maasailand in the distance. And if you were that tree, then you would be the keeper of many historical secrets between the Maasai of Narok County and the Luo of Migori County, some violent, some even comical, others cordial. The empty space of unoccupied land between the two villages of Kikaat (Kilgoris constituency) and Ogwedhi (Suna-East constituency) represents the cautious handshake which the two communities offer to each other through inter-ethnic marriages.

Curtain fall: Phares Oluoch Kanindo helped many musicians from Nyanza hit national stardom.

When Prof Agnes Wanjiku Kabira looks at you, her face betrays no emotion. She fits the Luo saying: ‘Jochame joyue dhogi joling’ ka matuo’ (literally: ‘those who ate it wiped their mouth and became calm and innocent like patients’). And yet she did something drastic sometime in 1979.

A Kenyan scientist-novelist who lives and works in the US, Prof Alila weaves a gripping tale about two sub-clans with an unresolved curse running for three hundred years.

Purely on account of prejudice, there are books I cannot touch, even if you gave them to me free of charge. I form my opinion of a person’s literary capabilities after reading a few of their works, short or long.

The last surviving spiritual leader of the Talai Clan died in 1979 and his descendants now say they have been left destitute and scattered over the land

There was a time when walking past the stones at Kopere Centre along the Chemelil-Nandi road in the evening was unthinkable.

According to the Luo folktale of Nyamgondho, a man must never mistreat his wives or play favourites among them lest ill fortune befalls them

According to literature enthusiast ABENEA NDAGO, even if you don’t believe in mythology, head to Kilgoris, Narok County and visit Naisugaiye, the place that swallowed everything

I have been reading some Kenyan autobiographies of late, and I’m still of the opinion that we need to tell a bit more. No, this does not mean you become like Nelson Mandela (God rest his soul) and surprise us with the humbling news that you once stole pigs (in Long Walk to Freedom).

An embarrassing fact about African music is that nations that are more successful than the others are typically found in regions known for a culture of philosophical thought.

“Do you know that during my Kenyatta University days, the late Professor could not touch the wheel of a car because of forgetfulness?”

Despite tourism being at the nerve centre of the country’s economy, the Government lacks proper documentation of the country’s attraction sites.

Even though she has grown quieter than she used to be, Asenath Bole Odaga’s place in Kenya’s Oral Literature is not easy to erase.

Many westerners have written books about Africa’s conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Only two years ago, the Belgian Theodore Trefore’s The Congo Masquerade (2011) attempted a historical analysis of the same conflict.