Moments & Musings

Housewives of the Lakeside Before feminism had hashtags, the lake had heroines. On today’s episode of Housewives of the Lakeside , Mama Grace Onyango reclaims her mayoral seat, Orupa the Rainmaker side-eyes the British, and Aloo the Midwife threatens to report every missionary to the ancestors… Before colonial pencils erased them and missionary sermons sidelined them, Luo women were the backbone, brain, and spirit of the community. They weren’t just “wives of...” or “mothers of...” They were rainmakers, oracles, political pioneers, and generational architects. They led without asking for permission, healed without textbooks, and negotiated with the wind and sky like old friends. Take Grace Onyango, for example—Kenya’s first female mayor, elected in Kisumu in 1965, and the first woman to sit in Parliament just four years later. Long before “women’s representation” became a checkbox in political manifestos, Grace wasn’t just in the room—she ran it. She replaced male clerks with women an...

  Say My Name, Say My Nation To name is to own. To rename is to conquer. But to reclaim? That is to rise. A little girl stands in line at a dusty mission school, dress too big, hope too small. The priest kneels before her and says, almost kindly, “Your name is Elizabeth now.” She hesitates. Her lips move. “But—” Her mother’s eyes, quiet and pleading, say it all: Not here. Not now. Survive. And so Nthabiseng—the name sung by her grandmother, the name braided into lullabies and blessings—becomes Elizabeth. Just like that. But the song doesn’t die. What’s in a name? More than sound. More than syllables arranged for convenience. A name is memory. A name is soil. It is the village where your umbilical cord was buried, the rhythm of your people, the scent of history carried in vowels. In the colonial world, names became battlegrounds. With each renaming, empires did more than alter a map—they tried to erase a soul. They called it Victoria Falls, but the people already had a na...

  President Who Outlived Time In a world where some leaders opt to retire before their first grey hair, Paul Biya remains the last man standing—an immovable object in a continent of shifting powers. At 92, while most of his peers are either resting in memoir-worthy retirement or slipping quietly into history, Biya still rules Cameroon with the same deliberate patience he has wielded since 1982. Age, in his case, is not a weakness but a strategy. He isn’t just the oldest sitting president on Earth; he’s also one of its most enduring—a monument to political longevity in an era that worships disruption. Paul Biya was born on February 13, 1933, in Mvomeka'a, a quiet village nestled in the thick greenery of southern Cameroon. At the time, Cameroon was still under French colonial rule, and Biya's early life was shaped by mission schools, Catholic doctrine, and the kind of rigid discipline that leaves a lasting mark. His father, Etienne Mvondo Assam, a catechist and local authorit...

  The Devil Wears an Apron What I learned when Nairobi County tried to tax the “secret society” everyone said would make you rich or damned. Growing up in Kenya, we didn’t need Netflix thrillers. We had the Freemasons. Their lodge—an old, grey-stoned mystery on Nyerere Road—sat like a horror movie set right in the middle of Nairobi. To kids like me, it was more myth than building. We’d hear tales whispered during blackouts: how members drank blood, worshipped serpents, avoided churches like vampires, and somehow never seemed to die. One classmate swore his uncle joined and instantly bought a Range Rover. Another insisted there was a handshake that unlocked bank vaults. A third said they met inside volcanoes. We all nodded solemnly. None of us had ever seen the inside, of course—but the mystery was part of the allure. So imagine the collective gasp in May 2025 when Nairobi County officials marched up to the Freemasons’ lodge and pasted KSh 19 million in unpaid land rate no...

  The Midnight Call It’s just past midnight on September 26, 1983. Deep inside Serpukhov-15, a secret Soviet command bunker hidden in the forests outside Moscow, alarms explode into the stillness. Red lights flash. Sirens howl. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, seated at the helm of the Soviet Union’s early-warning system, stares at the screen in disbelief. According to the Oko satellite network, the United States has just launched five intercontinental ballistic missiles. Five Minuteman missiles, heading straight for the Soviet Union. The screen demands action. The protocol is explicit: confirm the launch and report up the chain. From there, the Kremlin would almost certainly initiate an all-out retaliatory strike. Thermonuclear war. The unthinkable. The end of civilization. Only Petrov stands in the way. And he hesitates. Just weeks earlier, the Cold War had taken a deadly turn. On September 1, 1983, the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, mistakin...

  The Beautiful Mind They Couldn't See That time, a Hollywood bombshell invented the technology powering your mobile phone—and men were too busy staring at her face to notice. It's 1942. While American men in crisp military uniforms are busy explaining to women how to plant victory gardens and ration stockings, a Hollywood actress is quietly inventing technology that will one day make your Netflix binging, GPS navigation, and doomscrolling possible. If that sounds absurd, welcome to the cosmic joke that was Hedy Lamarr’s life. In Hollywood's golden era, Lamarr wasn't just famous—she was the prototype for every femme fatale who followed. With cheekbones that could cut glass and eyes that launched a thousand starlets, she was mathematically, scientifically, indisputably gorgeous. Directors loved how she could stand still and look breathtaking. Meanwhile, the men making decisions about national security would have fallen over their polished desks had they known she w...

  From Mourning to Marvel We had traveled overnight to Seme for my sister’s father-in-law’s funeral. You know the type of ride—long, bumpy, and so unforgiving your spine starts writing its own resignation letter. We arrived in the wee hours: too early to mourn, just in time for mischief. With hours to kill before the burial ceremony, I had an idea. “Why not visit Kit Mikayi?” I said, already halfway into Google Maps. The legendary rock formation was just a stone’s throw away—pun absolutely intended. Having grown up on tales of its mystery and majesty, it felt borderline blasphemous to be this close and not pay homage. And just like that, we pivoted from grief to geology, from mourning to marvel. Seme, by the way, isn’t just a random dot on the map. Among the Luo, it’s known—almost reverently—as piny mar kite’ , “the land of stones.” And they mean it. On our way to Kit Mikayi, we passed open fields scattered with enormous, almost theatrical rock formations. Some looked like th...