Moments & Musings

They Called It a Handshake. It Was a Gun. | Moments & Musings Moments & Musings — African History They Called It a Handshake. It Was a Gun. By John Odjuma  •  October 19, 1905 — Remembered He knew. That is the part nobody talks about. Not the killing, not the skull, not the museum in London. The part that sits in my chest every time I return to this story is simpler and far more devastating than any of that. He knew what was going to happen. And he went anyway. Koitalel Arap Samoei dressed in his finest regalia on the morning of October 19, 1905. He gathered his five most trusted advisers. He walked to the meeting point at Ketbarak, a place that today hosts a golf club called the Nandi Bears Club, where well-fed people in polo shirts drink sundowners on the same ground where a great man was murdered in cold blood. He extended his hand. The British colonel shot him through it. ...

He Owned the World. Then He Sailed Away. Moments & Musings | John Odjuma I've been gone. Not dead. Not lost. Just gone. The way you sometimes step away from a conversation not because it ended badly but because you needed air. I needed air. Now I'm back, and I brought something with me. A story that has been sitting in my chest for weeks, refusing to leave until I wrote it down. It's about a man who also disappeared. Except the ocean took him. And unlike me, he never came back. *** Let me tell you something about the 14th century that your history teacher probably skipped. While Europe was stumbling through its plagues and its petty feudal wars, there was a kingdom in West Africa so wealthy, so vast, so thoroughly organised that it makes most medieval European states look like village committees. The Mali Empire. At its height, it was over a million square kilometres, with the Niger River running through i...