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Showing posts from January 20, 2019

Kisumu: A City of Fire, Music, and Enduring Spirit

I was born and raised in Kisumu, that tiny, loud city on the shores of Lake Victoria, where the air hums with the scent of fried fish and the rhythms of Benga music. Ours was a childhood shaped by political fire and cultural pride—a place where opposition politics ran hot in our veins, and where the lake’s breeze carried both the promise of joy and the tension of unrest. A City at the Barricades Kisumu was—and still is—the heartland of Kenyan opposition politics. Growing up here meant knowing the crack of tear gas canisters before you knew multiplication tables. Every year, the "Sabasaba" rallies turned our streets into battlegrounds. Protesters clashed with riot police, who met defiance with a brutality reserved only for our city. We children learned early that the government saw us as renegades, and in time, we wore that label with a strange pride. Marginalization was our teacher. The potholed roads, the underfunded schools, the deliberate neglect—all whispered the same les...