Edwin Rwigi

The year is 2014, and in quite a cinema-isque fashion, 50-year-old Margaret finishes her 21km half-marathon in determined eager stomps, running right into the arms of her husband, the President of the Republic of Kenya.

President Obama’s US-Africa Leaders Summit came hot on the heels of the BRICS 6th Summit in Fortaleza Brazil where the new BRICS bank – New Development Bank – was formed, which is seen as a contemporary, if not a rival to the Bretton Woods institutions, that is IMF and the World Bank.

The other week Twitter became the unlikely host of a non-scripted online debate on Sino-African relations.

I came to Mwea in 1954 as a detainee having been captured by the colonialists; I was brought to Tembere, which by then was a vast wilderness inhabited by buffaloes and other wild animals and hardly any human beings.

What an uncanny assault on the senses! An unfamiliar stench saturates the air around and if I weren’t looking I don’t think I could have quite told what it was. What smells like a fertilizer experiment gone bad – manure-ish-blood!

‘Brazil has the largest population of blacks outside of Africa, in fact second only to Nigeria.’ I have always know this at the back of my mind as one of those ‘do-you-know-facts’.