My folks are settled in shagz. Finally. Can you hear the vuvuzela and the song and dance that festoon that word ‘finally’? Here’s the thing, my folks were stuck to the urbanity of the city. It’s like they were waiting to apply for jobos and start their careers anew after

It wasn’t like she was never dramatic, Mama Kananu. She wasn’t the type of woman who understood what subtlety or courtly behaviour meant. She took all news with an unnecessary and innocuous thrilling disbelief. As if it was extraordinary and unusual. As if were the first time she was ever

The folly with running a column as intimate as ‘My Mother and I’ is that you start to let out the family secrets. Obliviously, good naturedly and passively so. Their dirt hangs on the sinews of these words, it reeks from the title right to between the cracks of your

Market days at Kawangware were on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was the closest market to our digs. My Mum made the trip there for grocery shopping and the posho mill (I’ve just paused to remember how she’d get out with flour lining her eyelashes and eyebrows. Hehhe. Such a retro

It started with a question over a cup of tea. It always starts with a question over a cup of tea, doesn’t it? Or any drink in your hand for that matter. Questions we imagine are sober in the moment but whose consequences, months later, will come back to bite

There’s a sewing machine we’ve been moving house with ever since I first saw it creep up into our living room in late 1990. It has simply refused to go away. Even OLX can’t catalogue it. Weeks before its arrival, I imagine there was flurry in the household with my