Category: People
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Schizophrenia, Depression and Pill Fatigue
I was diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression on 17 January 2020. The first two drugs I got on were olanzapine (an antipsychotic) and mirtazapine (an antidepressant). Initially, I was very disciplined with my adherence but eventually I got less and less consistent around the third month. In March 2020, the world shut down due to…
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Colonel Mustapha and the Case for Universal Healthcare
If there’s one thing that Kenyans love it’s gossip, especially when that gossip is around a celebrity. Even better when that gossip is around something considered shameful or embarrassing. Is life even interesting if you didn’t hear that so and so did this or that and there are pictures or videos to prove it? Tapping…
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Shakahola Is The Kenyan Jonestown
Guyana, 1974. Nearly a thousand worshippers at the People’s Temple Of The Disciples of Christ follow their leader, the charismatic Preacher Jim Jones, from the boardwalks of California to a 3,800 acre parcel of Guyanese forest. Those who migrated were promised a land of paradise, free from the racial and capitalist injustices of continental USA.…
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Debunk Speaks To Wanjira Wanjiru
WANJIRA WANJIRU is a grassroots activist who co-founded the Mathare Social Justice Centre and the Matigari Youth Book Club. She is a BA student at the University of Nairobi and co-host of the Liberating Minds podcast on YouTube and SoundCloud. Wanjira was nominated as human rights defender of the year in 2020 for raising awareness…
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Surviving Nairobi As An African Immigrant
I slide and lean back on the leather seat watching my feet soak in a pedicure massager. It is a few minutes past 2 p.m. My eyes pace around the room on the fourth floor of a building on Nairobi’s Moi Avenue. As it tends to happen, the place is a salon, a barbershop and…
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Debunk Speaks To Nabalayo
Nabalayo is the fairy godmother of the Nairobi Underground. She’s a multi-talented artist whose self-produced debut album, Changanya, is well on its way to being a classic. She creates immersive soundscapes, her music a feast for the senses, a salt bath, a continuing reverb moving through everyone who partakes. Karwitha Kirimi speaks with Nabalayo for…
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HIV/AIDS. A Kenyan Short Story
On 15 January 1985, the front page of The Standard newspaper carried the headline: ‘Killer sex disease in Kenya.’ That headline referenced the story of the first HIV-related death in Kenya. Cited in the East African Medical Journal, the story went that the deceased was a 34-year-old Ugandan journalist who had been hospitalised at the…
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Debunk Speaks To Gakunju Kaigwa
Gakunju Kaigwa is a Kenyan sculptor with a Master’s degree in Public Art from the University of Dundee in Scotland. Although he began his career painting, Kaigwa discovered his real passion in the early ‘80s as a sculptor. He works with wood, glass, steel, resin, bronze and many other materials, using each medium to express…
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Family Is Plasticine. Do We Have A Choice?
To the children of families, you no longer call yours, This note was written to me by someone that held my heart with care. I never saw her again but it didn’t matter. They were one of the first people that would hold my truths as truths. Some of us know the violence born in…
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Debunk Speaks To Abdullahi Bulle (NuriaStore)
ABDULLAHI BULLE dabbled in many business ventures before deciding to start an online bookshop in December 2015, at a time when paper books were being replaced by e-books. He founded NuriaStore, an online bookshop in Nairobi that specialises in delivering books to customers not just in Kenya but across Africa and the world. Today, Nuria…