Kenyan lawmaker Charles Were shot dead in capital Nairobi: local media
A Kenyan lawmaker was shot dead on Wednesday night in the capital Nairobi by gunmen on motorcycles, local broadcaster Citizen TV reported.
The news was also reported by other Kenyan outlets, including The Nation and The Standard newspapers.
The lawmaker, Charles Were, who represents Kasipul constituency in Kenya's west, was shot dead at around 7.30 pm local time "by two gunmen who were trailing him with a motorbike," Citizen TV reported.
One of the gunmen got off the motorbike and shot Were at close range, Citizen TV reported, adding that his driver had survived the shooting. The MP was pronounced dead at a hospital where he had been rushed for medical care.
Were was a member of the opposition ODM party led by veteran politician Raila Odinga, who lost to William Ruto in the last election in 2022.
Odinga, who rejected the election result, alleging irregularities, has since struck an agreement with Ruto to address issues troubling Kenya.
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TimesLIVE
2 hours ago
- TimesLIVE
Ngugi was simply ordinary — a man of the people
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan playwright, novelist and thinker, who died on May 28, has left a huge intellectual gap in Africa's cultural and political landscape. Instead of mourning him, I have chosen to celebrate the intellectual legacy of this generous and authoritative African sage I was privileged to have encountered during my undergraduate days at Nairobi University and much later as a scholar of Ngugi and African literature. When I arrived in South Africa in 1991, Ngugi was the most widely known African writer in the academy, in spite of apartheid. As early as 1981, the widely respected South African journal, English in Africa, had dedicated a special issue to his works. His most widely referenced text then, was Decolonising the Mind. Indeed, he is the most widely taught African writer in the global north and the global south, alongside Chinua Achebe — the man who published his award winning novel, Weep Not, Child under Heinemann African Writers Series. When the prestigious Cambridge University Press decided to publish worldwide series on 'Leading Writers in Context', again it is Achebe and Ngugi who featured from Africa, and I am deeply privileged to have been asked to serve as the editor of the volume on Ngugi in Context. His works have been widely translated in several languages across the globe: Japanese, German, Chinese and in many parts of Asia. I hope we will soon see his works getting translated into African languages across the continent. During his last days, he had embarked on translating his novels written in English into Gikuyu. It needs no emphasis that Ngugi remains one of the most influential African writers over the past few decades of Africa's independence, not only for his creative works but also for his wide-ranging contributions on Africa's cultural thought and political life. Indeed, the role of the writer in shaping the cultural and political life of his people is an enduring theme in all his works. He was concerned with the role of culture as a source of historical memory and as a weapon against all forms of oppressive regimes. But he was also interested in narrative, specifically imaginative literature, as an agent of history and self-definition, an instrument for taming and naming one's environment. He was concerned with literature's role in the restoration of African communities dislocated by colonialism and the repressive postcolonial states that followed. As early as 1972, Ngugi was already drawing attention to how the tyranny of the past exerts itself on his works. He wrote: 'The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with 'the thing that has been,' a struggle as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, his people's history' (Homecoming, 39). For Ngugi then, the novel was an instrument that wills history into being and therefore, as a writer, he always located himself at the intersection of history and literary imagination. Ngugi always insisted that colonial subjects were detached from their mainstream history and therefore their identity was shaped by forces alien to their local universe Ngugi always insisted that colonial subjects were detached from their mainstream history and therefore their identity was shaped by forces alien to their local universe. For him, the search for Africa's identity therefore lay in a reconstructive project to reassert a radical form of Africa's historiography conceived from below. At the heart of his restorative project was also his call for a return to the source, which would also involve the privileging of African languages in the production and consumption of local cultures. For him, it was only African languages that had the capacity to recover those African cultures repressed by colonialism and to equally carry the weight of a national history and memory. Genuine national literature, Ngugi argued, can only flower in local indigenous languages because literature as a cultural institution works through images and language embodied in the collective experience of a people. Ngugi always positioned himself as a writer in politics. He was hounded at home by one Kenyan political regime after the other and eventually driven into exile in the eighties by the repressive Moi regime in Kenya in the 80s. Little wonder then, that themes of dislocation, abandonment and exile dominates his works, written against the backdrop of authoritarian structures of control and imprisonment. Ngugi's early works are heavily weighted towards fiction, and the later lean towards non-fiction. In the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the publication of four novels, two plays and a collection of short stories, Ngugi produced only one volume of essays, Homecoming. But after his last major work of fiction in English, Petals of Blood (1977), Ngugi wrote a total of five collections of essays as opposed to only three novels, Devil on the Cross (1981), Matigari (1986), and his latest novel, The Wizard of the Crow (Murogi wa Kagogo (2005), written first Gikuyu before translation. But it was the establishment of a community theatre in his home village of Kamiriithu, and the staging of the play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), that really raised the ire of the Kenyan authorities, leading to the banning of the play, his arrest and detention without trial. It also marked a major turning point in Ngugi's life when in prison, he used the language of his incarceration to write his first Gikuyu novel: Caitaani Mutharabaini (Devil on the Cross), on rolls of toilet paper. Subsequently, it is only Ngugi's collection of essays that he would continue to write in English, obviously aimed at the academy, with whom he continued to wrestle with over a range of cultural and political issues. The joy of reading Ngugi's essays is that they serve as a theoretical elaboration of themes and topics akin to his narrative. If Writers in Politics (1981), and Barrel of a Pen (1983) essays seek to question the colonial traditions of English and Englishness inherited at independence, Decolonising the Mind (1986), and Moving the Centre (1993) push the debate to its limits by insisting that the roots to Africa's freedom lay in the articulation of a new idiom of nationalism that would liberate the African identities from the prison house of European languages and cultures. The project should not only involve the privileging of African languages in the making of African cultures, but also the struggle for the realignment of global forces such that societies, which have been confined to the margins will gradually move to the centre, to become not just consumers but producers of global culture. It is the denial of the cultural space by the postcolonial state tyranny and global imperialism that Ngugi elaborates on in Penpoints, Gunpoint, and Dreams. Here the culture of violence and silence that has come to define the postcolonial state; the state's desire to saturate the public space with its propaganda, is counterpoised against a radically redemptive art that seeks to erect a new regime of truth by reclaiming and colonising those spaces through the barrel of the pen. In his most eloquent collection of essays, symbolically entitled Moving the Centre, Ngugi draws attention to the effect of the colonial archive in arrogating what constitutes the real historical subject to the imperial centre. When Ngugi calls for moving of the centre, he is in essence trying to suggest that in terms of history and discursive knowledges, the West has always positioned itself as the true self — the centre — while the empire remains the Other and on the periphery. Indeed, one of the legacies of the colonial encounter is a notion of history as 'the few privileged monuments' of achievement, which serves either to arrogate 'history' wholesale to the imperial centre or to erase it from the colonial archive and produce, especially in the Empire or the so-called New World Cultures, a condition of 'history-lessness', of 'no visible history'. Both notions are part of the imperial myth of history because history is defined by what is central, not what is peripheral and those not central to an assumed teleology or belief system, are without history. It seems to me that even a superficial reading of Ngugi's narrative and his critical essays over the years, point to a conscious project of transforming our inherited notions of history, especially the position of the colonial subjects as inscribed within imperial discursive practices. If the imperial narrative attempted to fix history and to read the empires history as the history of the other, by making reference to its set of signs located in its cultural landscape, Ngugi's position is that the history of Africa need not be contingent upon the imperial allegorising. Allegory here is used to mean a way of representing, of speaking for the 'other', especially in the enterprise of imperialism. Whatever the ideological drifts and shifts in his body of work, Ngugi's fundamental belief is in the restorative agency embedded in all human cultures — the return of the other to the self. This is what he celebrates in his theory of globalectics — a theory that seek seeks to destabilise the privileging Western ways of knowing and instead celebrates those many streams of knowledge, regardless of their origins, as humanities collective experience. The creation of a humanistic wholeness and healing, has been at the core of his poetics over the years. The return to memoirs over the last decade or so was perhaps his last attempt to lay bare his soul and spirit; his life history as fragments of many forces — a rich tapestry into a life crafted around complex and layered forces of family and larger biographical universe. As a person, Ngugi was profoundly warm and down-to-earth, and always carried himself around with a deep sense of humility and ease, not to mention his infectious laughter and humour. He was simply ordinary — a man of the people. May his legacy live on and his soul rest in peace until we meet again in the land our ancestors. James Ogude, Professor of African Literatures and Cultures. Professor and Senior Research Fellow, and author of Ngugi's Novels and African History. Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Daily Maverick
3 days ago
- Daily Maverick
Elegy for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o – Weep not Africa, the devil is on the cross
the passing of the sage needs an elegy weaving his works into memory woven not from sorrow but from the titles he left us each a thread in the long cloth of liberation Weep Not, Child though Njoroge's dreams were drowned in betrayal still he hoped still he studied still he believed that books could set a colonised people free as the Petals of Blood drift down the River Between Kamina's cries echo through the valley where Waiyaki once stood torn between tradition and the hunger for change Devil on the Cross watches from a billboard in Ilmorog where Wariinga, mother, secretary, warrior walks tall past the businessmen who sold her country for a coin and a foreign tongue through the smoke of the Kenyan stage we hear The Trial of Dedan Kimathi his voice unbroken his spine unbowed his name restored to the tongues of children (did I say Kenya? No, belonged to the world) he spent his life trying to Decolonise the Mind not just from foreign flags flying through the occupied territories and the Dias but from self-doubt from the coloniser who lived behind our eyes whispering shame in our own languages he taught us the necessity of Moving the Centre from empire to earth from London to Limuru from ivory towers to village theatres I Will Marry When I Want, said Gicaamba and Wariinga not when the landlord says not when the priest demands but when freedom rings clear as a blacksmith's hammer and for saying so he was Detained left with nothing but a Writer ' s Prison Diary pages scribbled in secret where even silence was written in resistance yet even in exile he nurtured Dreams in a Time of War walking barefoot through his boyhood while bombs fell and books were rare as rain in the House of the Interpreter he listened to the scriptures of the empire read aloud by boys in uniform and asked what if we spoke of our own prophets instead the Birth of a Dream Weaver was not painless it came with betrayal with exile with his passport stolen and his tongue declared dangerous yet he kept Wrestling with the Devil not to destroy but to expose his weapon not violence but parable his armour not hate but laughter the sting in his pen penetrating and shattering tyrants, and masters the humility in his heart warming every freedom fighter in Africa and beyond Barrel of a Pen in hand wa Thiong ' o resisted repression in neo-colonial Kenya noting that the Mau Mau is Coming Back out of myth walked Matigari wrapped in rags and questions seeking truth in a land where justice had gone into hiding on a windy playground Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus took off lifting young minds beyond fences and flags while Njamba Nene's Pistol reminded us that courage can be held even in small hands his Homecoming was never a return but a revelation a replanting a radical remembering that the village has always been enough on every page he spoke with the Language of Languages from Gikuyu to Kiswahili to the silence between drums reminding us that no language is small when it carries a people's soul he dreamed of The Perfect Nine daughters of Mũmbi mothers of a nation their journey carved in myth and marrow walking barefoot into legend from Something Torn and New he stitched a flag that no coloniser could fold his ink forming stars his stories forming skies weep not Africa the devil is on the cross screaming in white houses the walls of the empire shaking from voices Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o son of Kenya father of African letters fellow traveller of Fanon comrade of Sankara brother in resistance to Biko rooted in Makerere's red soil where he stood among a chorus of East African minds Micere Githae Mugo, fierce and unbending Okot p'Bitek, singing Lawino into eternity Ali Mazrui, mapping Africa's global soul John Ruganda, building stages of truth Pio Zirimu, naming orature as power Grace Ogot, weaving ancestral memory into prose Taban lo Liyong, sharp as iron in a blacksmith's fire Shaaban Robert, a Kiswahili visionary the South and North African contingents the Dias, Walter Rodney and so many others teachers and poets farmers and firebrands the women and men of the people who did more than write back to empire they wrote forward with and among their people they imagined futures in the ashes of conquest they held language not as a tool but as a weapon as shelter as seed Ngũgĩ understood this he knew that the word could build a nation he knew the power of stories told in the mother tongue and like all true cultural workers he toiled not for applause but for transformation now he rests but Njoroge still dreams Wariinga still walks Matigari still searches Dedan still speaks Mazrui lives and children still rise on buses made of books he is not gone his story is not over a monument built on language, knowledge, culture, history this elegy is still becoming. DM
eNCA
3 days ago
- eNCA
Tanzania faces call to investigate activists' torture claims
DAR ES SALAAM - The international community must pressure Tanzania to investigate police officers accused of sexually torturing Kenyan and Ugandan activists last month, a rights coalition in Kenya said on Tuesday. Boniface Mwangi and Agather Atuhaire were detained in Tanzania's business capital Dar es Salaam between 19-23 May when they attempted to attend the trial of opposition leader Tundu Lissu, who is charged with treason and faces a potential death penalty. They have both detailed torture and sexual abuse by the police officers who detained them. On Tuesday, the Police Reforms Working Group, a coalition of Kenyan rights organisations, called on "the East African Community and the international community to demand that the government of Tanzania hold accountable the police officers and their commanding officers responsible for the torture, assault, and sexual assault committed against Boniface Mwangi and Agather Atuhaire." The group spoke alongside the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) at a press conference in Nairobi. "Torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment are serious crimes under multiple treaties and international law," they said. "The government of Tanzania must arrest and prosecute all officers suspected of responsibility for the human rights violations against Boniface Mwangi and Agather Atuhaire and bring them to justice in a fair trial." Irungu Houghton, director of Amnesty International Kenya, said Tanzania was engaged in "a brutal campaign against all forms of dissent" ahead of elections in October. President Samia Suluhu Hassan is running for re-election but her government has banned the main opposition party, Chadema, after it insisted on reforms before taking part.
