Moments & Musings

  The Psychology of Secrecy and Forbidden Desire There’s a strange sweetness in what we’re not supposed to taste. A thrill in the off-limits. A magnetism in the maybes. The human soul, poor thing, is built like a moth: it sees flame and says, “How warm would that be… just for a second?” We love rules. We really do. But only so we can break them artistically. That’s why the Garden of Eden had only one law. One. Out of the whole buffet of fruits, it’s the one apple on the “Do Not Eat” list that got Eve thinking, “But what if?” And what about the angels? Not the metaphorical kind with trust funds and Pilates memberships. The real deal. Glowing beings stationed to watch over Earth. It’s written in Genesis and whispered in Enoch — that some of these celestial watchers caught feelings. They saw the daughters of men and decided: “Yeah… I’m coming down for that.” These were not minor angels; these were management. They abandoned glory for desire, fell from grace like love-drunk Icaruses ch...

  The Boy King Who Defied Empire, Crossed Boundaries, and Died in Exile History rarely remembers softly. It remembers with scorched earth, twisted tongues, and blurred lines between villain and victim. Such is the tale of Danieri Basammula-Ekkere Mwanga II Mukasa, the 31st Kabaka of Buganda, a boy-king crowned at just sixteen, draped in royal barkcloth and thrust into the centre of East Africa’s most volatile intersection: empire, religion, and desire. Born in 1868, the son of Kabaka Muteesa I and Abakyala Abisagi Bagalayaze—his tenth wife—Mwanga inherited more than a kingdom. He inherited a storm. Buganda, then a powerful, cosmopolitan kingdom with eyes on Lake Victoria and feet firmly planted in centuries of tradition, had become a battleground for outsiders and ideologies. British imperialists were carving borders with treaties and rifles. Islamic influence from Zanzibar brought Swahili culture and religion. And Christian missionaries—Catholic and Protestant—were embedding thems...

  Fail Spectacularly What if the thing that cracked you wide open is the very thing that sets you free? We live in a world drunk on early success. Nineteen-year-old CEOs. Six-year-old pianists. Twelve-year-old chess wizards with foreheads like satellite dishes. Meanwhile, the rest of us sit there feeling defective because we haven’t “made it” by breakfast. It’s ridiculous. But let me tell you something raw. Failure isn’t a flaw in your system. It’s the factory reset. Take Edison. Four months in school. The teacher calls him mentally deficient. His mother pulls him out, teaches him herself. That failure was his starting gun. He goes on to light up the world and now we use his invention to scroll TikTok at 2 AM and ignore our own potential. Failure is nature’s way of testing if you really mean it or if you were just playing around. You say you want it. Great. Let’s see how you handle being kicked out, laughed at, broke, ignored, and doubted by relatives who only remember your nu...

  Loose Grip, Full Heart We are professional collectors of nonsense. Masters of the art of clinging. We hold grudges like they're family land we're protecting from cousins we don't even like. We drag heartbreaks around like old sacks—patched, torn, but somehow still ours to carry. Some of us are still stuck on exes who moved counties, found new accents, and started new WhatsApp groups without us. Yet here we are, replaying stale Sunday afternoons like they were the best TV drama never filmed. We know every line by heart, every pause, every disappointment. We've memorized the script of our suffering. Meanwhile, we stay in jobs that chew up our joy but polish our LinkedIn profiles until we look like serious people. We keep clothes that haven't fit for decades, whispering "One day..." while spooning cold food straight from the sufuria. In our drawers, dead phones tangle with old chargers—because what if the world ends and you need your cracked Tecno to call.....

  Kenya’s Bill Nobody Prints They don’t print this bill. They don’t slip it into your payslip with the PAYE and the SHA They don’t pin it to the door of the county office or post it on the KRA website. But make no mistake, it’s there, hiding in plain sight, waiting to pounce the moment you think you’ve finally sorted your taxes. It comes wrapped in a whisper. Boss, hii file lazima ikule mafuta kidogo. It stands in traffic, one hand on your window, the other playing the piano on your guilt. It sits behind every desk where your signature needs speed. It is Kenya’s hidden invoice, the tax that doesn’t care about receipts, doesn’t clock out at five, and doesn’t fear the law because the law itself sometimes owes it a cut. Nobody ever warns you about the dark tax when you’re fresh-faced, new on the job, clutching that first salary slip like your mother’s last blessing. They’ll lecture you about PAYE, about VAT, about the small statutory deductions. But the biggest deduction, the one that...

  Kenya’s Forgotten Rebellion Against Empire Along Kenya’s northern coast, where the muddy creeks of the Tana River meet the Indian Ocean, the mangrove forests still whisper secrets. If you stand by the crumbling ruins of a coral palace near Kipini, you can run your hand across ancient walls scorched by empire. These walls once belonged to Witu, a kingdom that few remember but whose defiance left a mark that fire could not erase. Most schoolbooks tell us that Africa fell easily to European conquest. Witu’s story shatters that illusion. In the mid-19th century, a rebel Zanzibari prince named Ahmed Simba — known as the “Lion of the Forest” — founded this hidden sultanate deep within the swampy labyrinth of Kenya’s coastal rivers. He welcomed runaways and outcasts: people fleeing the reach of Zanzibar’s slave traders, free communities determined to escape the tentacles of foreign merchants, warrior bands who refused to bow to sultans across the sea. Together they carved out a sanc...

  The Bullet We Never Buried Some men become statues when they die. Tom Joseph Mboya became a question Nairobi still asks itself every July when the dust settles on Moi Avenue and the matatus grow quiet — if only for a heartbeat. It was a Saturday, cold as any other, July 5th, 1969. Tom Mboya — Rateng’ Andura Jamatenga, the man with a tongue like a whip and a heart stubborn enough to challenge empires, stepped out of Chani’s Chemists holding a small bottle of Alpha Keri lotion for his dry skin. One moment, he was framed in the doorway, exchanging pleasantries with Mrs. Chani. Next, the assassin’s bullet ripped through the easy laughter, the dusty street, and our fragile hope. They say he was dead before the ambulance’s wheels found the broken Nairobi roads. Some swear they heard the city wail when Dr. Rafiq Chaudry folded his stethoscope and walked away. The bullet tore through his rib, nicked his lung, punched a hole in his aorta — and Kenya’s chest has never fully healed. But Tom...