Kenya

Forceful evictions are still common in Kenya.

‘We must say these things before we die!’ – Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, revolutionary founding president of the Pan African Congress, apartheid prisoner and noted pan-Africanist

Tuesday July 8, 2014

FROM: FRIENDS OF KARURA FOREST, COALITION FOR CONSTITUTION IMPLEMENTATION, ACTIVISTS AND MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC IN NAIROBI

TO: THE WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES AND THE WORLD COMMUNION OF REFORMED CHURCHES

Vegetables grown on African farms are sold in retail outlets in Europe and the Middle East, while the aroma of coffee, tea and cocoa grown in her fields fills the air in most coffee and confectionery shops, outside of which the scent of flowers grown with her water fills the sidewalks.

In her poem Dahabo Musa, a Somali woman, describes infibulation as “three feminine sorrows, the procedure itself, the wedding night when the woman has to be cut open, the childbirth when she has to be cut again”.

Destitution and a government bureaucracy that is easy to manipulate make Kenya a prime space for global terrorism. First of all, it is crucial to appreciate that global terrorism is a business.

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.

Despite scholars and human rights crusaders agreeing that repatriation should be voluntary, governments have defined and carried out repatriation in different formats.

The 2 February 2014 raid on Masjid Musa Mosque (now renamed Masjid Shuhada - or the Mosque of Martyrs) in Mombasa to counter an alleged terrorist recruitment exercise has elicited divergent arguments from sections of the Kenyan populace.