Skip to main content

Featured

The struggle with many a rigid Logooli cultural practices

  The Logooli community is one of the deeply cultured societies – with near everything supposed to have been done as per custom – to allow another custom to follow. One example is that for a mature man (with a child or more) to be buried, there must be a house structure at home. Another is that a boy must be circumcised and nursed in father land. If maternal family decides to, the boy will have a hard time reconnecting with father people - a dent on his masculinity. There were two children who got burnt to death in a house in Nairobi. The single mother had left for night work. Elders were told that one of the children was Logooli. The other, the woman had sired with someone else. The Logooli family wanted to burry their little one and long discussed the do’s and don’ts. Of a man who died childless and the grave was placed as if he had died as a man with children. It should have been dug on the sides, the grave. A real thorn should have been thrust in his buttocks, his name go...

...POOR DANDORA


Will there be a time when Dandora will look like….?
Or better?
Or never?

Have you ever passed by Juja Road and straight across Outer Ring Road?
Mathare slums pleases none, does it?
The sleeping urchins along the road
And the dust on the foot paths
Doesn’t make you sneer, does it?
All this is on our way to Dandora.

If your phone is not snatched at the roundabout,
The bone oduor will kill your smell sense
The rusty vibandas will redefine beauty
Your long afro hair is dyed brown-red-grey

The bottoms creek as the front tires immerse
The engines fail and get restarted
A minibus opts for the pedestrian side
For the road is a neglected rocky farm.

Noise, dust, sun, robbery and hunger
Mud, sewer, breakage and tribalism.

But still people live there
It may be my narrow thinking
For there are people
Who love D!


This picture I took in Kawangware. The situation is not different from Dandora. 

Comments