AwaaZ Magazine

Cover Story: KATIBA 2010 Success & Challenges

Religion and The Kenyan Constitution

The first time visitor to Kenya will soon discover that Kenya is a very religious country. Churches and mosques are...

The Right To Culture

By Lotte Hughes and Emily Kinama By-lines: Lotte Hughes is an historian working on contemporary Kenya. Until recently she led a major...

Women’s Gains under the new Constitution: Does reality match expectation?

By Prof. Jill Cottrell Ghai The constitutional vision The overall vi...

Friend or Foe: The Government of Kenya and Freedom of Expression

By Henry O Maina. By-line: Henry Omusundi Maina is the Regional Direc...

The Right to Health in Kenya: A case of contradictory narratives

By Allan Maleche, Tabitha Griffith Saoyo and Nerima Were. By-line: Al...

Electoral Integrity

By-line: Seema Shah is an independent researcher focused on electoral...

The Vulnerable Guardian Angel: Kenya’s Parliament in the Post-2010 Constitution

By Gitungo Wamere Jessica Musila of Mzalendo Trust By-line: Gitungo...

The Institutional Transformation And Performance Of The Judiciary After 2010

By Walter Khobe Ochieng By-line: Walter Khobe, is a Lecturer at the D...

Devolution: Why People Wanted it, and What They Got

By Prof. Yash Ghai. I. Hopes and plans Some history At independence...

Motion Without Movement; An Insider’s Reflection on Policing Reforms

By: Tom Kagwe, J P Introduction ...

Regular Columns

FROM HERO TO ZERO: Our age of moral pers...

Is it possible for us to celebrate and perpetuate someone’s achievements whilst condoning that person’s human failings? The world has become very condemnatory, lately. And viciously so. If we read more or less the same newspapers, watch more or less the same TV shows and use more or less the same social media, then we have been made more or less part of the burgeoning, universal inquisition. It’s guiding tenet is simple: if evidence is found of past ethical misconduct on your part, no matter how long ago, then you must be ‘outed’ at the earliest opportunity, stripped of all your...

‘I Will Kill You!’

‘I will hunt you down ... I will find you ... and I will kill you’ - we are all familiar with muscular American men saying this in countless movies and other entertainment tropes. A typical scenario involves a hot-blooded white guy, in the prime of his life, who has been mugged, assaulted, beaten or otherwise physically harmed, or someone close to him – a wife, daughter, niece, friend – is raped, killed or seriously injured. This, then, is how he reacts, filled with an uncontrollable urge to inflict the bloodiest punishment on the perpetrator of the crime. But whoever that person...

Editorial cartoons

Letters to the Editors

A critique (first of three) by Karim Hirji of articles published in AwaaZ Volume 15, Issue 2 2018. ...

Special Feature

K D Travadi : A Radical Visionary

By Shashi Tavares. Service to humanity is service to God KD Travadi's voice, loud and clear, thundered across the Kenya Legislative Council chamber as he debated the White Paper on the Civil Service with Tom Mboya, on 16 December 1960. He said: ‘... and I myself, am in my 44th year in this country - I have had my children and children's...

He Did Not Want Statues Of Himself

India should see the removal of Gandhi’s statue in Ghana as the decision of a sovereign people ‘It will be waste of good money to spend Pounds25,000 on erecting a clay or metallic statue of the figure of a man who is himself made of clay …’ Gandhi, Harijan on February 11, 1939. His view ignored, Gandhi statues were proposed, in his...

The Gift Of Gandhi Statues

Every time I read about protests in Africa against the installation of...

Beneath The Saintly Legacy Of Gandhi

The saintly legacy of Gandhi is being questioned. In 2016, the Univer...

Twentieth Century Africa Travelogue

Tamale 1983 ‘We could fly you into Upper Volta and drive you down acr...

God, greed, and homophobia

The Christian right in the US has been a bulwark of reaction for decad...

Intellectuals meet to recognise his scholarly and revolutionary contribution in the country and beyond

Date: 11 January 2019 Venue: Soma Mkawahi, Mikocheni, Dar-es-Salaam ...

Amnesty International Personalities

Jill Cottrell Ghai, Prof. Yash Pal Ghai, John Allan Namu, Wambui Otien...

AwaaZ Magazine Fundraiser

Supported [in part] by a grant

Foundation Open Society Institute in cooperation with the Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa of the Open Society Foundations

Friends of Awaaz

Yash and Jill Ghai, Mohez Karmali, Gijsbert Oonk, Vijoo Rattansi, Victoria Commercial Bank Charitable Trust, I& M Bank, Willy Mutunga, Chandaria Foundation, Asian Foundation

About Awaaz

Awaaz is a magazine published tri-annually out of Nairobi, Kenya. It aims to provide a broad platform for debate and reflection on issues of both contemporary and historical interest. What started off in 2002 as a focus on the role of the South Asian community in the historical, political and socio-economic spheres of Kenya; has now broadened to cover the larger debates on diversity, democracy, human rights and social justice. The magazine also critically examines the role of minorities both as communities in Kenya and East Africa; as well as a concept of human rights in a society be they ethnic, racial, gender based, sexual or political.