Nairobi, Kenya | AFP | Three people were shot dead Friday in Nairobi, an AFP reporter saw, as police dispersed thousands of opposition supporters welcoming home their leader Raila Odinga from an overseas trip. The three men, all with bullet wounds in the upper body, were seen lying on the …
Read More »Jubilant crowds dub Kenya’s top judge ‘an African hero’
Kibera, Kenya | AFP | “Baba! Baba!” the men cried, screaming out the nickname of Kenya’s opposition leader Raila Odinga as they rolled about in the middle of a road, clutching a campaign poster with his picture on it. Moments earlier a man in a full gorilla suit zipped by …
Read More »UHURU: from millionaire playboy to Kenyan president
Nairobi, Kenya | AFP | The son of Kenya’s founding president and a man who epitomises the country’s elite, Uhuru Kenyatta hopes to win a second and final five-year term in elections on August 8. The 55-year-old US-educated multi-millionaire, whose family owns an array of businesses, properties and tracts of land, …
Read More »Kenyan cattle herders defend ‘necessary’ land invasions
Crocodile Jaw Bridge, Kenya | AFP | Close by a narrow, rickety bridge in Kenya’s central Laikipia highlands two herders sit on blistering hot rock next to the muddy trickle of the Ewaso Nyiro river to explain why they routinely break the law, invading private land to graze their cattle. “The …
Read More »Athletics: South Africa top World U-18 for first time
Nairobi, Kenya | AFP | South Africa completed a clean sweep in the boy’s sprints to top the medals table for the first time at the World Under-18 athletics championships in Nairobi on Sunday. South Africa, fifth in 1999 and 2005, amassed ten medals including five golds over the five-day championships. …
Read More »Kenya’s social media election: attack ads and data mining
Nairobi, Kenya | AFP | A strikingly toxic campaign ad was unleashed online in Kenya just weeks before national elections — a potentially explosive move in a country where politics and ethnicity are closely aligned. The 90-second video, shot in moody monochrome, presented a dystopia in which Raila Odinga, the leading …
Read More »Politics not pasture drives violence in Kenya’s heart
Kamwenje, Kenya | AFP | Footsteps came first, then unfamiliar voices, the smell of cow dung and the kicking in of the front door. Suddenly awake, John Mbogo wrapped his 11-year-old daughter Tabitha in his arms and rolled under the bed. His wife, Anne, crawled next to them, eyes wide. Torchlight …
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