And I know she meant that in terms of sex. One hundred percent. But indulge me for a second, because I think she's stumbled onto a much broader phenomenon. The uneasy relationship between feminism and women's desires.

I have another friend. She’s 19. And she wants to get married early. By early, I mean 22 or 23. Now, I think that's waaaay too early. But that's my opinion. She's entitled to want something different.

What fascinates me is how quickly her desire gets put on trial. By me. I don’t ask whether her getting married at 22 would maker happy, or fulfilled. I ask (myself) whether she has inhaled this patriarchy crack cocaine. And her desire registers more as a political statement rather than a preference. A rather regressive political statement unfortunately.

In Jennifer Nansubuga’s book The First Woman, she introduces us to a very peculiar character. She’s brilliant. Exceptionally good at maths. The sort of girl everyone expects to become something extraordinary. And yet, her biggest dream isn’t to be an astronaut or an engineer.

She wants to be a wife.

So riddle me this dear reader, what do we do when a woman freely wants the very thing feminism fought to ensure she no longer needed to want? What happens when a woman's freely chosen desires resemble the very roles feminism worked to make optional

Which brings me to an uncomfortable confession : I don’t just scrutinise other women’s desires. I scrutinise my own.

I love doing my makeup. I love shopping. If I have children one day and decide I want a mommy makeover, I'll probably get one. Hell, I'd probably get cosmetic surgery even if I never have children.

I love chivalry. I like it when men get me flowers. I like being driven around. I like doors being opened for me. I like a man reaching for the bill. And yes, I like being boy crazy. I enjoy having crushes. I enjoy flirting. I enjoy the ridiculousness of being completely, embarrassingly excited about a man.

The feminist in me knows every one of those desires can be analysed. Every layer of foundation can be traced back to beauty standards. Shaving can be traced back to the ideals of feminine youthfulness. The insinuation of wanting cosmetic surgery after having kids can be mapped back to the patriarchy. Every act of chivalry watered down to traditional gender roles. Every crush to heterosexual scripts. I know the discourse. And honestly, I don’t particularly care.

I don’t think those analyses are baseless. Some of them are insightful. Most of them are probably true. But this is Nicole Nyamweru’s life, not feminism’s. Mine.

So, I’ll wear the makeup. I’ll flirt with the boy. I’ll appreciate when the door is opened for me. I’ll get the cosmetic surgery if I decide I want it. And I’ll shave when I want to. Not because I’ve failed to interrogate my desires. But because I have. And after all that interrogation, they’re still mine.

Which makes me wonder if I’ve misunderstood feminism, or if we’ve misunderstood freedom.

I don’t want feminism to become another rulebook. Another authority telling women which desires sufficiently enlightened and which ones are require correction. I thought the point was to expand the range of lives women could live. Not to quietly rank those lives afterwards.

Is this a defence of choice feminism? I don’t know. But I hope not.

Feminism can explain why I enjoy beauty. It can argue that what I experience as pleasure in this context is, at least in part, obligation. It can explain why I like chivalry. It can interpret it as a patriarchal bargain dressed up as romance. It can explain why marriage still appeals to so many women. It can critique cosmetic surgery as an industry built on women’s insecurities. It can do all of that.

But is explanation obligation? Does understanding where a desire comes from create a moral duty to abandon it?

If I can trace a preference back to culture, does that make it any less mine? Because if social conditioning is enough to disqualify a desire, then we’re left with an uncomfortable question: which of our desires survive that level of scrutiny?

And I want you to really sit with that for a moment.

Which of your desires arrived untouched by your family, your friends, your country, your religion, your class, your gender, your algorithms, your generation?

Because if that's the standard, that a desire must emerge unsullied by social influence before we can honour it, then I fear we’ll have nothing left to desire.

I don’t think I’ll ever be the perfect feminist. And maybe that’s okay.

I refuse to believe that liberation is measured by how many desires I’ve managed to talk myself out of. I refuse for my feminism to turn it into another authority that stands over my shoulder, auditing every joy, every preference, every desire.

Like I said, this is my life. And I will not die before I have mastered Uche Natori’s routine.

In the immortal words of Natalie Nunn, I BE DOING WHAT I WANT!

Before I finish, I'll risk sounding hopelessly conventional, but I have to say, I like feeling feminine. Don’t ask me what that word means, mi sijui.

Ni hayo tu kwa sasa,

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru.

Then, he gets another woman pregnant. And when confronted, he reaches into the same dusty box of excuses men have been rummaging through since the beginning of time. His childhood was difficult. His father drank. He never learned how to love properly, blablabla. Also, he has a secret family. And, he’s sleeping with a girl half his age.

Cliché.

Entirely cliché.

It’s a tale as old as time. There is not a single part of this story that would surprise your grandmother.

Yet, despite this sheer predictability, The Polygamist is impossible to look away from. And it’s not because Jonasi Gomora is uniquely evil. It’s quite the opposite actually. The tragedy of Jonasi is his familiarity. How common this genre of man is. We have all met a version of him. Maybe not on the same despicable scale, but similar traits nonetheless. The man who believes that love, once earned, becomes permanent. That forgiveness is an inexhaustible resource. (I’m speaking on your behalf please. This has never been my reality, and I rebuke the possibility it in the name of JayZ)

“I’ve hurt her. I’ve humiliated her. But Joyce loves me.” He said that, verbatim. And he believes it. And I know he believes it, because that assumption lurks beneath every decision he makes. It lurked when he spread open Matipa’s legs right after his wife gave birth. It lurked when he has his way with Lindani right there in the kitchen of the home him and Joyce raised their children in. It lurked in every lie, every betrayal, every act of cruelty.

Jonasi holds on to one cardinal belief: no matter how much damage he causes, there will always be more grace to spend. And the worst part is that, for most of the show, he’s right. Joyce does loves him. And she forgives him over and over and over.

That’s why it’s such a hard watch. The tension is not whether Jonasi will hurt Joyce again. Because the obvious answer is yes. He will hurt her. The next worse than the last. The tension comes from wondering whether there exists a limit to what love can survive.

I am increasingly convinced that women can survive almost anything.

Women give birth in war zones. They endure miscarriages, heartbreak, betrayal, grief, and the strange indignities of inhabiting a body that seems determined to reinvent pain every decade. Menstrual cramps at fifteen. Childbirth at twenty-five. Hot flashes at forty-five. And whatever fresh hurricane awaits beyond that.

I don’t know whether it is nature or nurture, this ability to endure. Biological predisposition perhaps. Or maybe endurance is simply drilled into us from the moment we are born, passed from mother to daughter in whispered warnings and Sunday sermons. This unfortunate curriculum of womanhood where we are taught that love requires sacrifice. That marriage requires patience, because you will suffer. And that suffering is not only inevitable, but noble.

Nature, nature, whatever it is. Capacity is developed either way.

My thing is, I never want to discover the limits of mine.

I want to leave this earth having barely scratched the surface of my endurance. I do not want to be forged by fire. I do not want to be tempered like steel and hammered into something stronger by repeated blows. I do not want to discover how much pressure I can withstand before I crack, nor how many storms I can survive before I learn to call myself resilient. Most of all, I do not want to be dealt a terrible hand and congratulated for how “gracefully” I handled it. Or congratulated for how strong I am. Strength is such a poor consolation prize.

Of course, life is indifferent to such wishes. Grief is inevitable. Loss is inevitable. Disappointment is inevitable. To be alive is to suffer, eventually. No hills without valleys, and I have made my peace with that.

What I have not made peace with however, is sacrifice.

At one point, Joyce asks Jonasi, “Do you know what I’ve done for you? What I’ve sacrificed? Twenty years of my life.” Twenty years. That’s longer than I have been alive.

Twenty birthdays. Twenty anniversaries. Dozens of funerals attended in black. Photographs fading at the edges. Old dreams gathering dust in forgotten corners. A thousand ordinary Tuesdays surrendered so gradually that the surrender goes unnoticed until it is complete.

And that is what terrifies me. Not suffering. Suffering is child’s play. What’s worse is the sacrifice. The idea of laying yourself bare at the alter of a man, for something as naive as love. Losing yourself for something as arbitrary as the institution of marriage.

I can survive heartbreak. I can survive grief. I can survive whatever misfortune the fates decides to place in my path. What I cannot bear is the thought of arriving at the far shore of my life only to discover that I spent it crossing somebody else’s ocean. Just because I loved him.

And this love, Joyce’s love, it barely demands everything at once. It takes in instalments. First, it takes your certainty. Then your pride. Then your anger. Then it teaches you to doubt your own instincts. To lower your standards. One day you’re defending him to your friends. The next you’re defending him to yourself.

A compromise here. A silence there. A dream postponed. A boundary softened. A wound forgiven before it has healed. And then another. And another. And somewhere in the process, without ever making a conscious decision, you become fluent in the language of abandoning yourself. And one day you look around and realize the house is gone, though you never heard the walls collapse.

I would hate myself. I think I would kill myself actually.

And that’s why Joyce scares me. Not Jonasi. Joyce.

Because I look at her and I feel like I’m peering through a window into a future that could have been mine. One that could have been any woman’s really. A future where love slowly eclipses everything else. Where I become an expert in forgiveness. Where every disappointment is explained away. Where every sacrifice feels temporary until I wake up one day and realize I’ve spent decades making them.

And for what?

To stand in my kitchen twenty years later and ask a man if he knows what I’ve done for him? If he knows what I’ve given up?

No. Absolutely not.

I want many things from love. I want tenderness. I want devotion. I want the sort of affection that makes ordinary days feel luminous. And I will give that love generously and receive it just as freely. But I refuse to become a monument to my own endurance. I refuse to look back on my life and find the ghost of a girl who kept setting herself on fire to keep somebody else warm. Because when all is said and done, all I have is myself. And I cannot afford to lose her.

Ni hayo tu kwa sasa,

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru.

There’s a plague in this city. A sickness. And I’m gonna diagnose it. It’s simple really:Nairobians are lonely. Not uniquely irrational, not uniquely desperate. Just, lonely.

Walk with me.

There’s a very ferocious and relentless hustle culture entrenched in this city. Omnipresent. Dominant. And for good reason. People need to eat. Ju for real, Nairobi shamba la mawe. But, in a city governed by hustle culture, everyone is conserving themselves.

People spend three hours commuting, work jobs that spill into evenings, chase side hustles on weekends, answer emails at dinner and calculate whether they can afford to be ten minutes late. Every interaction is inherently transactional because time is a resource. A scarce one.

Community-building on the other hand, requires surplus. It requires lingering after work instead of rushing home. It requires checking in on a friend without needing anything in return. It requires the luxury of boredom, of dropping by, of saying, “I saw this and thought of you.” It requires being able to waste time together without feeling that time has been wasted. It requires saying, “I’m at the supermarket. Do you need anything?” Having enough slack in your day to call someone just because you’re walking home.

But hustle culture leaves little room for that kind of generosity. So when someone does spend their time on you—asks whether you got home safely, remembers your coffee order, sends you an article because it reminded them of a conversation you had, it rarely registers as ordinary consideration. And whether the gesture is inherently intimate or not is immaterial because, well, a majority of the populace is unaccustomed to sustained attention.

Nairobi doesn’t leave room for people to be remembered. The way you take your coffee. The fact that you avoid looking directly at red traffic lights because your astigmatism makes them bloom. That you always peel the cheese off pizza first. That you hate voice notes but will happily read a five-paragraph text. How many people know those things about you?

Hustle culture doesn't leave much room for that kind of remembering. To remember someone, you have to observe them. To observe them, you have to spend unhurried time with them. To linger. You have to hear the same story twice, notice the same habit three times, file away details that have no strategic value except that they belong to another human being. Giving them the honour of existing in your memory, and not feel like its wasted space. To decide that the details of their life are worth carrying around in your mind.

But we’re all rushing. Rushing to work, rushing to school, rushing home, rushing to the next deadline, the next side hustle, the next opportunity. We become experts in scheduling and strangers to one another’s particularities.

So when someone remembers you, really remembers you, it lands with disproportionate force. They order your coffee without asking. They know which side of the road you prefer to walk on. They send you something because they know it’ll make you laugh, and it feels like intimacy. Indistinguishable from being loved. Because it’s so rare to be remembered. And that’s because platonicism is one of hustle cultures biggest casualties.

Friendship requires a kind of extravagance that modern life no longer tolerates. Wandering into someone’s office just to chat. Sitting in silence. Spending six hours together and accomplishing nothing except enjoying each other’s company.

But we have become people who schedule coffees three weeks in advance, cancel because work ran late, school is crazy, and promise to “catch up soon” until soon becomes six months. In addition, our families are exhausted. Our friends are overbooked. Our coworkers are racing deadlines instead of sharing lunches. We no longer have the time to build the kind of relationships where affection can exist casually and abundantly.

So romance becomes the last refuge of tenderness.

It becomes the only place where people expect to be checked on without asking, remembered without reminding, listened to without interruption. Romance becomes the sole remaining institution for sustained emotional attention. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why situationships make you lose your minds.

If you think the tragedy of the situationship is just that it fails to become a relationship, you’re half right. The other half is that in this rushed busy bustling city, it is unfortunately the one avenue of tenderness many people have left. And when it refuses to deliver what it promised, being checked in on, remembered, prioritized etc. kichwa itaruka. Unachizi, and deservedly so.

With this death of friendships, relationships are forced to inherit responsibilities they were never designed to carry. You expect one person to be your best friend, therapist, emergency contact, roommate, biggest fan, confidant, entertainment, emotional regulator. Proof that you matter.

And don’t get me wrong, you do need those things. I know I do.

But no single relationship was ever meant to provide them all. They were meant to be distributed across a village: friends who remember your coffee order, siblings who know when you’re lying about being “fine,” neighbours who check in, coworkers who become lunch companions, the person who sends you a meme because it reminded them of you, the cousin who always picks up the phone.

That kind of life doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be built. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes cancelling fewer plans, asking follow-up questions, hearing the same story three times without impatience, remembering birthdays without tiktok reminders, and storing away tiny, seemingly useless facts simply because they belong to someone you care about.

You cannot outsource the work of belonging to romance. You cannot bypass the slow construction of community by asking one partner to monopolize intimacy. And as such, you cannot go hallucinating talking stages in the hope that they’re about to be your everything.

Build a life so rich in friendship, community, and low-stakes affection that a "Did you get home safe?" text can simply be what it is: kindness. Freely given without the burden of becoming a talking stage that has to lead to fully-fledged relationship.

Besides, it’s literally so much more fun to get to know someone when you’re not auditioning them for the role of your “everything”. It’s better when it’s light.

Ni hayo tu kwa sasa,

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru.

Entergalactic is such a beautiful film. It’s like, a playlist turned visual. The colours, the lighting, the way Kid Cudi’s music blends into the city. It captures a very specific feeling. Being young, creative, ambitious and convinced your life is cinematic. Yet, you’re confused. Incomplete.

And the thing it gets right about cities, like New York, and honestly even Nairobi in a different way, is how romance and ambition start overlapping. Your apartment, (my room) your art, your friends, your love life, your identity, it all becomes one giant aesthetic, emotional project.

My room isn’t just “my room” It’s evidence of some sort. Evidence of who I think I am. My posters, my lighting, my playlists, the mug I drink from, the books on my floor, they all feel symbolic. Same with my clothes, my friends, the places I go, even the way I speak online. Art, love, friendship, they aren’t separate categories. They all feed into the construction of my identity.

That’s why Entergalactic feels so immersive. It captures so perfectly this phase I’m in. This phase a majority of us are in. Where life feels intensely curated. Becoming who you want to be by pretending you already are.

Jabari is the clearest example. On paper, he’s succeeding. Cool apartment, creative career, attractive, socially fluent, surrounded by aesthetically pleasing people and spaces. But emotionally, he’s still deeply uncertain. He wants love, validation, artistic success, independence, intimacy; and he’s trying to balance all of them without looking needy or unstable.

And Meadow is similar. She appears composed and self-possessed, but there’s still uncertainty beneath it. She’s figuring out how to balance her vulnerability with her independence, wanting intimacy without losing herself, trying to maintain creative ambition while emotionally opening up

And I see it in all of us. This urbane adult condition. Performing identity before you truly feel it. Buying expensive records before you know what your music taste is because you want to be the kind of person who owns records. Spending hours perfecting a morning routine—matcha, journaling, meditation, Pilates—without asking whether you actually enjoy any of it. Meticulously curating a Spotify profile to communicate taste, with the hope that others will infer depth or originality. Buying a film camera because you want to be "the kind of person who notices beauty," even if most of the roll stays undeveloped. Buying ten philosophy books and leaving them artfully stacked on the bedside table but you haven’t finished a single chapter. It’s everywhere.

And my thing is, I don’t think this is hypocrisy.

I think it’s aspiration.

Sometimes we build the life before we build the self. We buy the records before we know our taste because we’re hoping taste will emerge through proximity. We decorate the apartment before we feel at home. We call ourselves writers before we’ve found our voice. We rehearse an identity until, one day, it stops feeling like rehearsal. It becomes who you are.

The danger, I think, is when we mistake the props for the person. When owning vinyl becomes a substitute for listening deeply. When the aesthetic becomes so polished that there’s no room left to discover who you actually are.

So, Jabari and Meadow are performative as fuck. But they don’t feel fake to me. They feel unfinished. They’ve already assembled the apartment, the clothes, the career, the city, the soundtrack. They’ve built lives that look coherent from the outside. But internally, they’re still negotiating who they are. Maybe that’s the real condition of modern adulthood: living one version ahead of yourself and hoping your life catches up.

THATS why the film feels so familiar. It understands that for some of us, consciousness is a spectator sport. We experience life twice: while becoming, and while watching ourselves become.

I was about 7, when I decided I hated it. But as I said, it’s never been just a colour. It’s an idea. A symbol. It’s what it represents. Pink is feminine. It’s soft. It’s light. It’s girly. And that’s precisely the issue. It’s girly.

When you're seven, your world is small enough to be mistaken for universal. School, books, television, adults. Whatever they tell you about girls becomes what you believe the world thinks about girls. And when all these avenues of the “world” emphasize that you’re just a girl, and all that’s ahead of you is as bleak as simply becoming a girl, who just happens to be older, you resent it.

You are limited. You are trapped. You are caged in the “girls don’t laugh like that” and the “ you hit like a girl” when the boys are fighting. And you imagine that all this, is propagated into the future. And you find out that you are in fact, right. The talks in high school on “when you’re a wife, you are to…” not to mention the “men don’t like women who…” Just rules and rules, limits and limits, cages and cages.

But you don’t have the language for all this when you are seven. Because you’re seven. So you pick the next best thing, a representation. A representation of that girlhood you resent, that girlhood that seems to be hell bent on stifling you. Controlling you. And you land on pink. That soft, light girly colour. And decide you hate it.

You’ll move to blue. To black. Grey. You see a pattern here, no? Masculine connotations. Maybe even white. A blank page. A canvas for you to assemble yourself on. To define who you are for yourself. You have a very simple bottom line: as long as it’s not that stereotypical girly colour.

Then one day, you will meet a woman so extravagant it’s magnetic. And you will feel her presence and be in awe of her essence. Her womanhood, her girlhood, they do not limit her. They do not stifle her. They do not control her. Her rules are her own. And you will marvel. Marvel because she is magic. And you will stop running away from woman hood and embrace it.

And then another day, you will read a book. Chimamanda maybe. That’s what everyone is reading. And you will be mind blown. That there is a whole other realm of being, outside this dimension you have been existing. You will see the word “feminist” and it will intrigue you. And then you pick up another book, this time Bell Hooks. And her feminist theory will name and shame every single limit the seven year old you ever felt was imposed on her. And it will dissect and discredit every cage 16 year old you ever felt she was trapped in. And you will think “why should I care what type of woman men want” and you will be high off your newfound freedom.

And one day, you will sit down. And you will realize, there was nothing wrong with being a girl, but there’s everything wrong with society associating it with weakness and smallness, because you have never been weak, and you will never be small. You are strong. Capable. Powerful. And THAT is what girlhood is. And before you know it, there you are, at Pink’s doorstep. Asking her to let you in.

My favourite colour is green now. But I still know where home is.

I imagined it as something elegant. The kind of thing that lived in marble halls and behind heavy wooden doors, spoken in low voices by people too intelligent to be governed by ordinary human impulse. I thought nations were moved the way chess pieces are moved: deliberately, mathematically, by detached geniuses always thinking three steps ahead. Strategy. Optics. Precision. Like Frank Underwood. Or Cyrus Beene.

Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships. Whether myth or history, the phrase survives because it captures something ancient and embarrassingly human about power: men will burn cities over wounded pride and desire, then immortalize it as glory.

Glory.

Not success. Not mere victory. Glory. Something almost holy in the way history speaks about it. And somewhere between the speeches, the monuments, the military titles, and the history books, we forget what drove so many of these men to do what they did in the first place.

They were men.

Not gods. Men. Not perfectly rational architects of history hovering above ordinary human weakness. Just men. Proud men. Humiliated men. Angry men. Grieving men. Men terrified of irrelevance, desperate to be remembered. Men unable to endure shame. Men mistaking a legacy for immortality.

And I think that’s why history often feels cleaner in retrospect than it did in real time. We sanitize things. Rename them. Re-see them, through the comfort of distance. We take what was raw and immediate and human, and we smooth it into something rational.

George W. Bush invaded Iraq to avenge his father. Bill Clinton bombed Serbia so we’d forget he was sleeping with Monica Lewinsky. Napoleon… well, Napoleon. Henry VIII created the Anglican Church because the Pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Putin has been throwing tantrums for almost 3 decades because he’s humiliated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Julius Ceaser didn’t cross the Rubicon because it was inevitable. He was scared. Scared of embarrassment. Alexander the Great burnt down Persepolis out of vengeance. For the Persian invasion of Greece or whatever. Butttt, sources say it happened during an emotionally charged drunken celebration. Strategic? Maybe. Emotional spectacle? Also yes.

Richad Nixon bombed Cambodia because of paranoia. Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the Vietnam situation because he was scared of appearing weak. Hitler was Hitler because Germany was humiliated. Matter of fact, colonial powers were annexing left right and centre because they were measuring dicks. Talm bout some “resources” and “geographical advantage” It was a bunch of men in a pissing contest.

So, maybe power is strategic. But you know what else it is? Brute. Neanderthal. Primal. Animalistic. When stripped of ceremony, stripped of the polished vocabulary we use to make it bearable, beneath the marble and the policy papers and the carefully rehearsed speeches, it collapses into something far more primitive: territory, survival, dominance, fear. Sometimes, even love.

And I think that is where Kenya becomes impossible to ignore. Because here, power has never been particularly interested in pretending to be sophisticated. Or rational. It doesn’t bother. Kenya is simply more honest about the emotional nature of power.

You see it in rallies. These old dudes get on cars and outrightly insult each other. Speeches are not about governance, or policy, or ideology. They’re about humiliation. Or loyalty or accusation. Public displays of who is powerful, who is irrelevant, who is still feared, and who is no longer worth respecting.

Power here is not hidden behind abstraction. It’s so…loud. Too loud. There’s no distant mystique around it, no carefully preserved illusion of detachment. No academic distance that allows you to theorize about motives or infer intentions. Instead, it is immediate. Direct. Uncomfortably explicit.

We are not left to wonder what is happening behind closed doors because the doors are never closed. We are told. Sometimes loudly. Sometimes jokingly. Sometimes as accusation. But we are told nonetheless. And if we aren’t, the most they’re doing is just stealing cash and buying ugly dior sunglasses.

There is no real space to romanticize it into something elegant or mathematical. No room to build theories of detached strategists moving pieces on a board. The pieces speak back. The players speak directly. The game is narrated while it is still being played.

But if I’m wrong and there’s order beneath all this noise, I can respect that. I think.

Ni hayo tu kwa sasa,

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru

Also, I’m not saying the textbook history versions are wrong, I’m arguing it’s post-hoc emotional laundering.

u

And maybe that is true for some people.

But the older I get, the less I recognize myself in that metaphor.

Because a mosaic implies accident. A passive becoming. Something shattered and rearranged by circumstance. As if when people touch you, it is inevitable for fragments of themselves to remain behind in you. Their way of holding a coffee cup, folding a sleeve, pausing before speaking, tying their laces with no knots, just one bunny ear after the next.

People call that beautiful. And I think its beauty lies precisely in the unwillingness of it. You did not choose to carry them with you. You did not sit down one morning and decide to inherit their habits like heirlooms. It simply happened. Quietly, beneath your noticing. Love slipped into your architecture of you without permission. One day their phrases appear in your mouth, and their mannerisms surface in your hands.

And there is something unbearably tender about that kind of unwilling inheritance. The idea that another person altered you so deeply their presence survived even after they leave. And you notice it.

But that is not me.

I do not dissolve like that. I do not leak people into who I am. Into how I am. I do not wake up carrying traces of someone else in my gestures, in my words, unknowingly repeating them like prayer.

Nothing remains unless I allow it to remain.

I do not stumble into becoming.

I started going to art galleries as soon as I finished high school. There was something about them that made immediate sense to me. Artists have stories they are trying to tell; entire bodies of work with a spine, a central tension, something holding everything together from underneath. Nothing is random. Everything is placed with intention. Precision. Sometimes a lack of it. Every brush stroke, every revision, every omission.

But galleries do something to that intention. They dismantle it. They are selectors. They do not always take the whole story. They choose fragments. Certain pieces over others. Certain versions of the truth over the rest. And meanings begin to shift.

The artist’s spine is no longer fully intact. It is rearranged, reframed, sometimes even softened or sharpened depending on what the gallery chooses to show. Their will begins to sit beside—and sometimes above—the artist’s. What is not displayed begins to disappear from reality. And what remains becomes the story.

The meanings are curated. And in that curation, something undeniably absolute happens; control over interpretation changes hands. What the artist meant to say is secondary to what the gallery constructs. And I learned, standing in those rooms, that I am not separate from that process. I am the same.

I do not carry people forward in me by accident. I do not just wake up altered. I choose what remains. I choose what is allowed to outlive them inside me. I select what becomes part of my exhibition. I decide what is placed under light again and again, what is returned to and re-seen until it becomes part of who I am. What is given room to breathe and shift inside me. And I also decide what is closed off completely, no archive, no record, no trace.

So, no. I’m not a mosaic. I’m a museum. Deliberately assembled, endlessly reassembled. And what remains is always, only what I choose.

Anyway. I’m mad as hell. Because why am I bored in what is supposed to be an archive of this country’s history? How do you make centuries of migration, resistance, invention, colonization, ritual, music, language, violence, survival, beauty, feel so emotionally weightless?

Then I remembered half of colonization was, in fact, looting. That’s the how. Ladies and gentlemen I introduce you to British Museum Act of 1963. One of the many charming legacies of empire is that Britain made it legally impossible for the British Museum to return many of the artifacts it acquired during colonialism.

Section 3(4) of the act states: “Objects vested in the Trustees as part of the collections of the Museum shall not be disposed of by them otherwise than under section 5 or 9 of this Act…” Which legal gibberish for “bla bla bla we’re keeping everything”

Under Section 5, the museum can generally only dispose of objects if:

A)they are duplicates,

B)damaged beyond usefulness,

C)are considered unfit to retain.

So basically, the only conceivable way Britain returns anything, is after they break it.

The Nandi have spent generations asking Britain to return the head of Koitalel arap Samoei. Think about how insane that sentence is. Colonization was so violent that “Please give us back our ancestor’s skull” became a legitimate political request. And it looks like the only way they can get it back is to, I don’t know, crack the cranium?

The British Museum has what is described to be an “unparalleled collection.” Approximately 8 million pieces. Eight million. I think it’s an insult, an insult to us especially. They’re hoarding our culture, meanwhile in Nairobi, we argue over how to make glass cases feel alive.

The British Museum has given several flimsy reasons as to why they are “unable” to return historical pieces. And I’m gonna discuss them. Walk with me.

1.The risk of Setting a Precedent and “Emptying Museums”

They argue that returning one major artifact could open the floodgates to countless other restitution claims, and that would lead to the dismantling of their collection. Interesting choice of words. “Their collection”

Essentially, their fear is that justice might be contagious. These guys are legitimately telling us “we can’t return what we stole because then people might ask for the rest of what we stole.” And this is being presented as a legitimate institutional position. And we’re supposed to take it seriously?

2.The Museum act of 1963.

See, I don’t understand how a British Statute believes it has the jurisdiction to decide the fates of artefacts that are not of British Origin. And if the issue is the law, if we are really being told this is purely a legal constraint, then what exactly are we looking at? You’re telling me the same state that authored the rules of extraction is now suddenly unable to author rules of return? The same legal system that once moved objects out of colonized territories is now experiencing a convenient form of paralysis when it comes to moving them back? So legality is flexible when it enables possession, but immovable when it’s enabling restitution? Oh okay.

3.The “Universal Museum” concept

The British Museum decided it’s the Museum of the world. They said, and I quote, “The Trustees believe that the collections are held in trust for the benefit of the world and future generations, that they are best preserved and made accessible in London, and that they contribute to a universal understanding of human history.”

How generous. How generous that they have appointed themselves global custodians of humanity’s memory. In fact, it’s so generous that we might as well forgive them for stealing everything in the first place. Clearly, the real crime would be questioning the gift they have so graciously given the world.

You know what’s funny, they probably actually think this.

4.Historical Context of acquisition.

The British Museum maintains, for many objects, that they were acquired legally under the laws and customs prevailing at the time of their acquisition. The argument essentially is, it was legal then, therefore it remains legitimate now, which is an interesting way to reason about history. Slavery was also legal then, is it legitimate now?

The insinuation that legality is a timeless moral category is almost laughable. It’s desperate. Just grasping at straws. But you know what’s more desperate? The claim that these objects were not “stolen” in the contemporary legal sense. Instead, they were “acquired through treaties,” or “gifted”; even when those treaties were negotiated under duress, within deeply unequal colonial power dynamics.

5.Preservation Capabilities

Now this one is just an outright insult. The argument goes that these objects are best preserved in London, that British institutions have the infrastructure, expertise, and environmental controls necessary to protect them from decay.

On its face, it sounds technical. Neutral. Practical. But it’s reeking with imperialist, frankly racist assumptions, that care is something only Britain centre can properly administer. As far as I’m concerned, that elephant in the middle of the foyer at Nairobi Museum looks impeccably taken care of.

So yes—glass cases. Tiny labels. Fluorescent lighting. An elephant standing in the middle of the room. A winnower maybe. Don’t forget the Maasai Shuka. That’s all you have in your museums, because the rest of what you own is stuck overseas making sure The British Museum is “Universal”

Are you angry? You should be. I know I am.

Ni hayo tu kwa sasa,

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru

The central argument of “Kenyan Feminism Is a Distraction From Class Consciousness” is relatively straightforward: Kenyan feminism is an elite, urban, NGO-adjacent politics imported from the West and detached from the material realities facing the overwhelming majority of Kenyan women. According to the author, most Kenyan women are too economically precarious for conversations about patriarchy, representation, or gender politics to have any meaningful relevance. What women need, he argues, is not feminism but economic empowerment. Sounds sober, no?

To be fair, there is truth in parts of this critique. A significant portion of visible Kenyan feminist discourse is elite, English-speaking, university-centred, and heavily influenced by Western liberal feminism. And to be honest, I agree with him. There is absolutely a conversation to be had about politics that can fluently discuss representation in boardrooms while remaining disconnected from women struggling to afford food, water, transport, rent, or healthcare.

But this is not a problem unique to feminism. As a matter of fact, nearly every political movement in Kenya suffers from some form of elite capture. Socialism, Pan-Africanism, anti-corruption activism, environmentalism, constitutionalism, even class politics itself are often concentrated within urban, university-educated circles that remain largely inaccessible to the ordinary people they claim to represent. Kenyan leftist spaces are academically insulated

The existence of “elite feminists” therefore, is not proof that feminism itself is useless. It is merely proof that political movements operating under capitalism are vulnerable to elitism and detachment from the material realities of the ordinary mwananchi. It’s disingenuous for him to uniquely pathologize feminism while similar dynamics exists everywhere else. Basically, it’s not the gotcha the author thinks it was.

Now, the problem is that the author mistakes elite liberal feminism for feminism itself. And the irony of the piece is impossible to ignore: the author constructs a critique of feminism using categories that feminist theory itself produced decades ago, despite generations of feminists being the very people who forced the world to recognize women as economic subjects rather than merely wives and daughters.

Nearly every structural issue the author highlights - unpaid labour, economic dependency, gendered poverty, sexual exploitation, unequal asset ownership, and the disproportionate economic vulnerability of women- was not even recognised as an “issue” in public and policy discourse before feminist intervention. It is feminism that made it possible to even ask why women are financially dependent in the first place. Who asked the question: why should a woman not be able to open a bank account in her own name? Why should her wages be legally and socially assumed to belong to her husband?

The author also raises sexual exploitation and prostitution as evidence of economic collapse. And yes, poverty increases vulnerability across genders. But it does not distribute that vulnerability evenly. Poor men and poor women both exist, yet poor men are not systematically pushed into sexual commodification at the same scale that impoverished women are. That difference demands explanation, and that explanation is the patriarchy. And the political tradition that has spent decades theorising, documenting, and resisting the gendered structuring of economic vulnerability is feminism.

So the question becomes: how does one describe a world in which gender so clearly shapes the experience of poverty, labour, and violence, and then conclude that the political framework most explicitly built to analyse those structures is “useless”?

Where he fails intellectually is in treating the most visible form of feminism as synonymous with feminism in its entirety. What is most visible, urban online feminism, donor-language advocacy, substack articles etc. is not the full political feminist landscape. It is only the most publicly amplified. Dare I say the smallest, because it’s just Nairobi.

Kenya has feminism that does not primarily exist in think pieces or conferences. It exists in labour organizing, in informal settlements, in rural women’s groups, in markets, in unions, and in legal and health advocacy spaces that rarely get labelled as “feminist” in the first place.

Table banking for rural women will never be called feminist, but it is. Chama ya wamama will never be called feminist, but it is. The Linda Mama program for maternal healthcare was never framed in feminist language, but it’s feminist policy in practice. Even burial societies, which are rarely discussed in political theory, are deeply gendered institutions where women collectively absorb the economic shock of death in ways the state does not. That’s feminism.

Women’s market associations in places like Gikombaa and Wakulima markets, where they collectively negotiate space, pricing, security, informal credit systems etc. is never called feminist, but it is. Kongowea Market in Mombasa, the same happens, but who gets on twitter and says “ Hey everyone, look, it’s feminism in action” No one. So you people don’t know OF it, and decide twitter threads and Substack articles are the end of the road for the feminist brigade.

In Kibera, Mathare, Mukuru, and Korogocho, women’s savings groups double as emergency welfare systems, covering rent arrears, school fees, hospital bills, funeral costs. That’s feminism, feminism WORKING while class consciousness exists in the vaults of the internet. And you want to call it useless. Half these women wouldn’t identify as feminists. But like it or not, they are. And their feminism is putting food on their table, and educating their children, clothing them.

The point is not that elite feminism does not exist. It does. The point is that it is not the totality of feminism — and treating it as such flattens an entire landscape of political struggle into its most visible and least representative expression.

Also. The author credits Deng Xiaoping with improving women’s lives through economic growth in China. Which is just historically incomplete. Mao-era China had already massively transformed women’s legal and social status before Deng. And the transformation of their legal and social status was indubitably wrested on the belief that women are deserving of equal rights and equal freedoms, which in other words, is feminism. Mao’s feminist frameworks paved the way for Deng’s economic improvements.

Also. Maslow’s hierarchy was misused. It’s not a political theory. Nor is it an economic mode or an explanation for liberation movements. Contrary to what that author believes, oppressed groups have ALWAYS fought for dignity before material comfort.

Black Americans fought segregation while poor under Jim Crow. In South Africa, the anti-apartheid struggle was done by Black People living under legally enforced economic exclusion, pass laws, and labour exploitation etc. Anti Colonialism in Kenya was done by landless militia. The independence movement in India against British colonial rule unfolded alongside famine and abject poverty. In Latin America, revolutionary and anti-imperial movements Cuba and Nicaragua were driven by populations living under severe poverty, and authoritarian repression.

So, as you can see, mass political mobilisation did not wait for material stability, it emerges from it. Feminism did not, will not and does not wait for material stability, it emerges from it.

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru

Leftists can be exhausting to talk to. We interrupt you to correct your terminology. We reference theorists you have never heard of. We use words like “material conditions” in casual conversation. We say things like “that argument was dismantled forty years ago” with the kind of irritation usually reserved for people who microwave fish in office kitchens. Catch me on a bad day and I’ll speak in citations only.

I understand why people find us insufferable. And we are, make no mistake. But I also think people fundamentally misunderstand where that exhaustion comes from. Because many conversations are not actually conversations between two equally informed people arriving at different conclusions. They are conversations between people operating from completely unequal levels of study pretending they are engaged in the same intellectual exercise.

And I think this is why so many politically literate women (kina mimi) are accused of being “mean.” Because what many men describe as “trying to have a conversation” is often just outsourced learning.

“Why can’t we just talk?”
“Why is everyone so hostile?”
“I’m just asking questions.” nyanyako.

No. You are not “just asking questions.” You are arriving at a discussion about systems people have spent years studying, then expecting those same people to pause, flatten decades of scholarship into digestible conversation, gently guide you through it, and manage your emotions while doing so. Na mi sina time. Nitadismantle patriarchy ama nitakubembeleza ?

We’re not conversing. You’re learning. And as far as I’m concerned, I wasn’t commissioned to be your tutor. We need to stop pretending all participation is equally informed. And this is directed at that bullshit article that was written, and thankfully deleted, the other day. (Wewe kama hauko tuned in to udaku ya substack Kenya style up)

If I have spent years reading feminist theory, political sociology, Marxist analysis, gender historiography, if I know the names, the arguments, the internal disagreements, the evolution of the field, and your understanding of patriarchy comes from podcast clips, Twitter threads, intuition and the holy spirit, then we are not entering this discussion from the same intellectual position.

Which is fine, by the way. Nobody is born knowing Deniz Kandiyoti or the concept of patriarchal bargains. But if you do not know them, then approach the conversation with the humility of someone entering a field, not the confidence of someone dismantling it.

What you experience as feminist, leftist elitism, and, what’d he call it, misandry? is actually the frustration of hearing somebody confidently reinvent a theory that scholars resolved in 1988. Juzi tu, nimeona ameandika kwa Subscriber chat ya Annette ati, and I’m paraphrasing, “I just don’t like how you guys act like you don’t benefit from the patriarchy” Well news flash, this is the ENTIRE PREMISE OF LAST CENTURY SECOND WAVE FEMINISM. Congratulations. You have just arrived. Sasa ng’ang’ana ufike penye tuko SAHI.

Feminist scholars have already interrogated this. Extensively. The question of what women gain from patriarchy, what protections it offers, what comforts it rewards, and what women surrender in exchange was not some revolutionary anti-feminist revelation discovered in a subscriber chat in 2026. That conversation was happening decades ago.

Entire frameworks emerged from it. Concepts like benevolent patriarchy. Patriarchal bargains. The negotiation women perform within oppressive systems. Feminists have long acknowledged that patriarchy does not sustain itself purely through violence; it also sustains itself through reward. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Because you do not read. But never hesitate to speak.

And I do not even mean that as an insult anymore. I mean it literally. Niggas genuinely do not read the foundational literature of the subjects and proceed to speak about with the most conviction. Kama tu huyo Donald Trump anasema semanga hapendi.

So what keeps happening is this strange phenomenon where politically under-read people keep accidentally rediscovering feminist theory and presenting it as a devastating critique of feminism itself. Then when women respond with irritation, suddenly we are “condescending,” “hostile,” “vulgar” But what exactly is the polite response to hearing somebody proudly present a decades-old feminist observation as though they alone unearthed it from the intellectual underground?

And the root cause is that we have become so obsessed with the democratization of opinion that we have started treating expertise as inconsequential. “Everyone’s opinion matters” nyanyako. Is everyone entitled to their opinion? Absolutely. Does every opinion deserve equal intellectual weight. Absolutely not.

Feminism is one of the only fields where people have never read the foundational literature still expect their opinion to carry the exact same intellectual weight as someone who has.

Nobody does this with engineering. Nobody walks up to a civil engineer mid-construction and says, “Well in my opinion, you’re calculating load-bearing stress wrong,” while having never opened a physics textbook. Nobody stands at the edge of a half-built bridge and confidently insists the tension distribution “feels off.” You don’t tell a pilot, mid-flight briefing, “I just feel like lift doesn’t work that way,” and expect that to be treated as a valid counter-position. But feminism? Marxism? Political theory? Suddenly everyone’s algorithmically assembled thoughts are considered equally authoritative.

And when leftists, feminists, liberals etc. react with frustration, impatience, even condescension, the conversation immediately becomes about our tone instead of the far more uncomfortable reality underneath it: some of you are attempting to debate fields you have never seriously studied. And you need to shut up. Shut up forever. Or until you read angalau.

“Why can’t we just have a conversation” We will. When you know what you’re talking about

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru

I remain fascinated by the African elite’s relationship to philanthropy. Millions are poured into church fundraisers, extravagant harambees, and public displays of generosity, yet galleries close quietly, independent magazines die broke, filmmakers beg for funding, and musicians survive on “exposure.” The African elite, and political class, will donate staggering amounts to churches while treating artists like hobbyists. Cathedrals rise. Cultural institutions collapse. And then we wonder why so much of our imagination is imported. Why State Couture held a fashion show with the theme “winter” and the only snow we have around here is the one Joho smuggles. Allegedly

I read an article the other day about how Kenya’s creative space is classist. There were hints of truth in it, but I think the diagnosis was flawed. The reason Nairobi’s creative scene is dominated by Chicago-esque fashion, UK drill from Kilimani, and aesthetics imported from everywhere except here is not because of classism, it’s because rich people do not “rich” right.

Fashion sketchbooks gather dust in Kibera. Sculptors in Mukuru kwa Njenga improvise masterpieces out of scraps because they cannot afford glue guns and silicone moulding. Young filmmakers edit entire projects on cracked laptops with pirated software and failing hard drives. Musicians are expected to survive on “exposure,” as if visibility can pay rent or buy studio time.

There is no shortage of talent in this country. There is a shortage of patronage. The wealthy owe society patronage. And they’re failing, failing terribly. Wealthy classes are not meant to have the luxury of merely consuming culture, it’s their job to cultivate it.

Lemme cook.

Every artistic golden age in history was built on patronage. The Renaissance did not emerge because Michelangelo suddenly discovered “grind culture.” The Medici family bankrolled him. Just like they bankrolled Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, just to name a few. They funded sculptors, architects, thinkers. We wouldn’t have Oration on the Dignity of Man if they didn’t fund Pico della Mirandola.

The ceilings of the Sistine Chapel exist because Pope Julius II commissioned them. Leonardo da Vinci worked under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza. The Florence Cathedral was not built by “exposure.” It was financed. Financed by wealthy guilds and political elites who understood that art was how civilizations announced themselves to history. All our political elites do is chopper to schools made of mud and hand out 50 bob notes.

Even modern Hollywood, the machinery currently exporting American imagination to the rest of this planet, was built by moguls willing to bankroll culture at industrial scale. Families like the Warner brothers built studios. William Fox Created Fox Film Corporation (later 20th Century Fox). He invested heavily in production, distribution and later theatre ownership. Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew etc. These guys transformed American actors, musicians, directors, and writers into global mythology. With money. They funded them.

As a matter of fact, European classical canon people worship today was financed by aristocrats. Mozart relied on imperial courts and noble patrons. Ludwig van Beethoven was funded by Archduke Rudolf of Austria and Vienna’s elite families. Opera houses across Europe survived because monarchies and ruling classes poured droves, and I mean droves of money into orchestras, theatres, and conservatories as symbols of national prestige.

Let me reiterate. Symbols. of. national prestige. That is what art is supposed to be. And yet here, there seems to be a narrow and almost outsourced imagination of what “prestige culture” looks like. For some reason, the only art we consistently elevate is the Maasai shuka white people wrap themselves in at the entrances of game drives. And the beaded jewellery from Samburu. Which, by the way, is underpaid and riddled with exploitation, but that’s a whole other conversation. Our art is repackaged for tourism. The only art taken seriously is the versions they assume can be consumed at the Karibu Kenya signs at JKIA.

In a sense, we are colonizing our own art. Not in its production, but in its funding. They are choosing to sustain only the forms they believe will be legible to white tourist consumption, while everything else struggles to survive in the margins.

So, I don’t think the verdict that “Kenya’s creative space has a classism problem” is entirely fair. Let the Kilimani kids do their winter-themed fashion shows. Like it or not, that is their culture (though imported, lol) shaped by white Christmases in Washington and parents who told them about Santa and his little helpers. They have the means to display their imported references, and so they do. That is not a crime. Let them live.

What we are not going to do is misplace blame. They are not responsible for the structural conditions that stifle more indigenous, locally rooted art forms. The real issue is patronage — or rather, its absence.

So, brethren, I hereby command you to become patrons of the arts. Not in theory, in practice. Buy your brass pieces from Kariokor. Hang paintings from Kioko Mwitiki’s gallery on your walls. Support woodworkers and buy your mwikos from the hawkers on Ngong Road traffic. And for crying out loud, start going to art galleries. (like me, hehehe)

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru.

without it, life flattens; with it, even the smallest gesture trembles with weight. ache is a tool, a consort, a mirror of unrelenting intensity. it demands attention, demands witness, demands that the world bend to recognize the fire burning quietly within. and in that torment, there is creation; poetry that bleeds, that claws, that insists on being felt in the marrow of those who dare encounter it.

perpetual sadness, my perpetual sadness, that i was fighting to abandon, was my companion. ironically

there was always something to carry. some quiet affliction. some private ache that followed me around like a shadow that never got bored of me. i was never alone. there was always something with and within me. so much wanting, so much needing. i needed things to change. i needed to get out. i needed to save myself. i needed confession, even to no one at all. i needed chaos, to create it and to escape it. to disband and disperse and be back in a pulse.

it made me feel occupied. necessary. necessary to myself.

and there was poetry in that. in the longing. in the lack. in the ache that made everything feel layered and meaningful and slightly out of reach.

and now i’m okay. and it’s just me. no dark passenger. no background noise. no constant demanding to be interpreted. no familiar heaviness to return to at the end of the day. just quiet i don’t fully know what to do with.

i didn’t expect “being okay” to feel like this. this…boring (?) this anti-climatic. overwhelmingly underwhelming. nothing hurts. but nothing is holding me either.

i keep wondering if this makes me ungrateful, missing something that once hurt me. missing the grief, the melancholy, the version of me that was always reaching for something just out of frame.

but i don’t think i miss the pain itself. i think i miss who i was inside it. the girl who felt everything intensely. who had language spilling out of her. she could sit in a room and hear the music of her own pain. i miss the girl who needed everything and everyone to reflect her depth back at her. she was fierce in her longing, relentless in her desire. she could devour a moment and leave it trembling. she was constantly in motion, even when she was still. the one who always had something to want, something to chase, something to run away from, something to write towards.

i spent so long being driven by this need to escape, that i don’t quite know how to move without it. and that’s the disorienting part. because when the sadness left, it didn’t just take hurt from me, it took my structure. my urgency. the gravity that held everything in place.

without it, i’m left with what? myself? im left with myself. and im here. im not in my head, fighting for my life. counting from 1 to 10 and from 10 to 1. im here. uninterrupted. uncontained. a little unfamiliar.

and i’m realizing things

for example, the depth was never the sadness. the sadness just revealed it. i conflated the two. that the poetry didn’t come from the pain. it came from my ability to notice it, to sit inside it, to give it language.

so the depth is still here. i think. it’s just quieter now. less desperate. less insistent. no longer clawing to be heard. it’s timid. and maybe that’s why it feels like it’s gone. because it isn’t shouting anymore.

i think this is what happens when you’re no longer being held together by suffering. you have to decide what holds you instead. and the answer is you. just you. you hold you. i hold me.

no ache to anchor me. no urgency to propel me forward. no persistent sense of lack to map my days. just a vast uncharted space where needing used to live. and i’m still figuring out what to build there.

something softer, maybe. something chosen. something that doesn’t hurt, but still has weight. i don’t know yet. i am out with lanterns looking for myself.

i understand the allure of self-inflicted sorrow. why tortured poets sometimes choose to remain in their torment.

Ni hayo tu kwa sasa,

wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru

Tafadhali if you recognized the Fiona Apple, Emily Dickinison and Dexter refrences njoo tufunge ndoa.

Then the first split.

Mitosis

An intricate deliberate unwinding. The mirrored dance of chromosomes. A line drawn through what used to be indivisible. The cell cleaves itself in half, and suddenly there are two small worlds where there was once one.

They are not strangers, these cells. They carry the same script folded in their nuclei, the same memory of the first membrane that held them. Even as they multiply ,two, four, eight, thousands, billions, they never quite stop reaching for each other.

They press together in tissues like a crowded city of tiny suns. They pass ions like cheeky little notes slipped under doors. Like lovers in neighbouring rooms of an old house, sliding letters beneath the floorboards because the walls are too thin for secrets, yet too thick for touch. Like the brush of fingertips through the slats of a fence. Like two people sharing breath in winter, watching their clouds of warmth mingle in the cold air until it’s impossible to tell whose exhale was whose.

Signals travel through them. The way candlelight travels down a long table at dusk, one flame leaning into the next, until the whole room glows with borrowed fire. Like a row of lanterns along a harbour wall, each catching the wind from the last and answering with its own small bloom of light.

That’s osmosis. The purest, most intimate form of physiology. And it’s water moving across membranes. One side giving, the other receiving.

The body feels like a constant, urgent reaching; billions of cells striving to remember the wholeness they were born from. Cells in perpetual conversation, trying to remember the first moment of oneness. Oneness they cannot return to. Their division is permanent. The membranes are real. Their boundaries are necessary. They settle for the next best thing: entwinement.

The leaning of one life into another, offering of what it can give without losing itself. Every signal, every exchange, every molecule drifting across a membrane is…confession. We were once one. I was you and you were me. Remember?

Maybe intimacy—real intimacy—is like that. A willingness to exist near enough to another that something flows between you. A choice to exist within reach of another. To let water pass, to let warmth pass; to let life itself slip from your world into theirs.

To keep your borders but still share.

Intimacy is osmosis.

Goodness. There’s poetry in everything if you look hard enough

Before I can switch devices, my phone buzzes. A Pinterest notification. A pretty top. I click. It’s Shein.

Should I ship it?

Immediately: No. I can’t. It was probably made by children in sweatshops. So I close the tab. Ethical consumption.

I scroll lower. A beautiful burgundy bag. And I mean beautiful. I almost add it to my cart. But it’s from Marks & Spencer. So I don’t. I remember investigations about their supply chains using “vulnerable labour.” “Vulnerable labour” ? It’s Syrian refugee children in factories in Turkey. So I don’t add it to my cart. Ethical consumption.

But what’s the point, really?

I don’t buy the bag. I don’t buy the top.
And yet I’m typing this on an iPhone. I’m about to go doomscroll on my iPad. Both depend on cobalt mined in Congo, where child labour in artisanal mines has been documented. I stream music on Spotify. As a matter of fact I was excited about Spotify Wrapped. And Spotify is funding a genocide as we speak. (Allegedly lol) I love Doritos. Whole time PepsiCo (their parent company) has faced criticism over palm oil sourcing linked to child labour in parts of its supply chain.

I’m planning on taking a shower when I’m done writing this. I’ll use a Dove Beauty Bar and St. Ives body wash. The packaging says “cruelty-free.” But both brands belong to Unilever, a multinational giant repeatedly criticized for supply chains tied to child labour. So how “cruelty free” is it really.

I’ll probably want coffee later. There’s Nescafé in the house. I like coffee. I like Nescafé. Especially the hazelnut one. But it’s owned by Nestlé — a company long criticized for labour practices in cocoa production and other “supply chain issues” It’s Children. They have children in their supply chain.

So maybe I’ll drink Milo instead. But Milo is Nestlé’s too. So there’s that.

I’m complicit. We’re complicit. We’re complicit in every single system we claim to oppose. We’re complicit in capitalism. We’re complicit in modern forms of slavery when children stitch our clothes and harvest the cocoa in our chocolate. We’re complicit in wars funded by the minerals in our batteries. We’re complicit in imperialism. We’re complicit.

Is there an out?

Can I opt out of cobalt, if it’s in practically every single device on planet earth? Can I opt out of global shipping routes? Of multinational conglomerates that own everything from my soap to my coffee to my playlist?

I’ve been reading on this, on ethical consumption, and many political theorists argue that in a global capitalist system, it is structurally impossible. Every product passes through layers of subcontractors, suppliers, mines, factories, ports, trade agreements; networks so vast and opaque that no individual can fully audit them. The harm is diffused across continents. Across oceans. The responsibility is diluted across corporations. And the consumer is the only one left holding a receipt and a conscience. They count their profit and we count our sins.

Total ethical purity, they argue, is a fantasy.

So what am I supposed to do with that?

Did you know, oil companies, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, knew fossil fuels were damaging the planet. Internal documents later revealed that some of the largest corporations (Exxon, Shell, Chevron) understood the connection between burning oil and climate change decades before the public did. And rather than radically change business models, they shifted the burden of responsibility onto the consumer. To me and you. The messaging was:

“Don’t drive that gas-guzzler. Recycle more. Take shorter showers. Use energy-efficient light bulbs. Don’t buy a car, use public transportation”

The effect? The effect is me. Me feeling morally accountable for systemic problems I had almost zero hand in creating, but I’m expected to solve. The effect is you feeling guilty for buying a top from Shein. The effect is leftists on TikTok telling you to stop streaming from Spotify. The effect is an article that tells you to stop buying the Starbucks cold brews they have stocked in supermarkets, because Starbucks is funding the genocide in Gaza (allegedly) (I’m saying allegedly for legal purposes purely)

There are two options here.

Option one is the entire Third Estate rises up and refuses to buy from corporations that exploit labour, strip forests, poison rivers, and burn the planet. Every single person, everywhere, boycotting. I apologize for my defeatist outlook, but I genuinely believe that’s impossible.

Option two is the law. Policymakers, parliaments, congresses — they mandate change. They set regulations. They enforce accountability. But… another dead end. Lawmakers, I’ve come to learn, are recycled lobbyists, sitting in boardrooms one week and chambers the next, writing rules for the corporations that fund them. It’s just… hopeless.

So, how do we live consciously, knowing it’s impossible?

My answer is we don’t. We will never. Not fully. Not cleanly. Not without compromise. But we have to try anyway.

Thrift your clothes, buy from your Mama Mboga, walk to places, or use a Matt, turn of the tap when you’re brushing your teeth, hell, boycott Spotify and refuse to upgrade your phone when Apple drops iPhone 18. Most importantly, we refuse to let guilt consume us.

It is not your fault. It’s not your fault that the people in charge are greedy. Not yours that they exploit children. Not yours that they enslave. Not yours that they fund genocide. The guilt belongs to them.
The blood is on their hands.
And some of it is on yours. I won’t deny it. The difference is this:
you are conscious of it. You lose sleep over it. You question your purchases.
You are interested in righting your wrongs. To the best of your abilities at least, and they are not. They have never been. And probably will never be.
They are interested in weaponizing your conscience, in making you feel horrible forever, for using things they create. They manufacture guilt. They monetize shame. They flood you with documentaries. With think pieces. With “ethical consumption” checklists.

Fuck them. ExxonMobil and their cheeky little big oil friends do not get to guilt me over my “carbon footprint” while their pipelines redraw coastlines. They spill oil into oceans and kill ENTIRE ecosystems bruh. If I have a carbon footprint, they have a carbon CRATER. They don’t get to shame me for using a car while they flood the sky with gases which turn the planet into a fucking microwave. They do not get to sell a catastrophe and invoice me for the smoke. They started this industrialized fire, now they want me to feel guilty for the match? It’s not fair. The blood is on their hands.

So, the only ethical consumption under this empire is, in fact, pussy. Consensually, obviously. No supply chains. No cobalt. No child labour.
Just mutual pleasure and zero externalities.
Offset your carbon crater with cunnilingus. Balance your wrongs and rights. Be an eater.

Also. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Ni hayo tu kwa sasa,

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru

Within the borders of my body, substances have been beautiful. Euphoric even; and not in the cheap, neon way people warn you about. It’s more sophisticated. More poetic.

The world rearranges itself into something almost tender. Colours don’t just sit there; they move towards me. I can taste them. Music wraps its hands around my ribs and reminds me I have a pulse. Even silence feels textured, like velvet pressed against the mind. There is a loosening. An untethering from who I am. From who I need to be. And it’s liberating; violently so. It’s a strange, suspended freedom. I am absent, yet present in the most perfect way. It feels like being briefly forgiven for existing. Even though I was never sorry in the first place. Absolution without confession. It’s perfection.

And that’s the problem.

Have you ever flown down a highway on a boda at night, perfectly drunk, after a PERFECT night out. City lights dissolving into streaks, blurred and golden, headphones on, the world reduced to bass and breath.

Nothing exists beyond motion. Beyond sound. Beyond yourself. The streets stretch endlessly, and you feel unmoored, weightless, like gravity has forgotten you. Every turn, every sway, every pulse of the music playing in your ears whispers: you are free. you are alive. and its beautiful.

Why would I ever want to walk away?
Why deny myself the pleasure?
Why deny myself the company of something that has only ever been so kind?

I know you’re probably thinking: “Everything in moderation.” And I agree. Everything in moderation. But on God, substances have no benefits apart from momentary joy.

Do you think that’s a fair bargain? Short-lived pleasure for potential long-term harm? My honest answer is I don’t care. I live life in the now. And in my now, I want to feel good. I want to taste colours and see scents. I want to fly and land every time I take a puff and exhale. That’s what I want. I want to feel the edges of the world blur around me. I want the universe to lean in, just for a moment, and remind me I exist. To brush its fingertips against my skin, to whisper the edges of light into my eyes, to make me feel both impossibly small and impossibly infinite at once. To let me taste eternity in passing, to feel the thrum of life that doesn’t ask for my caution, that doesn’t care if I’m careful or reckless, only that I am awake. Only that I am here.

What does this make me? Irresponsible? Stupid? A hedonistic 21st-century woman. Perhaps it does — all three, who is to say? But if I quit right now, it would not be because I want to. It would be because I should, because my parents, the world, expect me to. And that is not living. Not truly. Not honestly. Not authentically.

And yes, it is so foolish, because I am fully conscious of the edges I tread. That I might become dependent. That I might slip into psychosis. But the word is might. Not will. Might.

What kind of life would I be living if I let risk shape my every step? A safe life?A responsible one? Or a soulless one. A pale, hollow, performed for others life that whispers: “you exist, but only as they allow”?

I am obsessed with freedom. Obsessed with autonomy. My obsession has carried me to places I would never go if a gun were pressed to my head. So if I must quit — and I will, when I must — it will be on my own terms. A decision I claim for myself, not one handed to me by expectation or fear.

So, sorry, Mom and Dad. But I gotta do what I gotta do, you know?

See you outside todayyyy💃🍸

Tbh Mi ata nadhani vitu mi hufanya ni polite.

Ni hayo tu kwa sasa,

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru

Sylvia Plath said “I am nothing if not pathetically intense. And I cannot be any other way” I read that line was I was 15. And I felt it. I felt in my flesh, I felt it my bones. Someone had given a name to the hurricane in my chest.

I sat with that quote then.
I sit with it now.

I’m just like her. I know I am just as intense; achingly, embarrassingly, devoutly so. Fierce in my fixations, faithful to my own undoing. But unlike her, I can be another way.

My mind, it’s not a prison sentence I have to endure. It’s a river bending through stone. Folding, unfolding, malleable as clay in my own hands.
It is changeable.
It breathes. It hums. It remembers it can be rewritten.

I am not trapped.
I am not bound by the ghosts of my own wiring.
I am not doomed to remain the same.
I can unlearn.
I can rebuild.
I can become the storm I once feared
and the calm that follows.
I am not doomed to be who I am forever.

If God is real, He did not forge us as we must remain. He did not condemn us to ourselves. He did not chain us to who we once were. He did not imprison us in our own skin.
If God is real, He left the doors open.

And behold Ladies and gentlemen, neuroplasticity. The brain’s mercy. The mind’s holy rewrite. The science of becoming someone new, again and again. It happens in whispers, this secret conversations of neurons.

So. The brain.

The brain is a very metabolically expensive organ. What it doesn’t use, it abandons. It does not linger in empty rooms. It does not waste light on hallways no one walks. If a neural pathway lies dormant, and its whispers grow faint, neurotransmitters falter, and receptors close their doors.
Synaptic branches fold into themselves and the paths becomes harder to tread. The mind preserves what it travels and it prunes what it ignores. Which is to say, when you stop walking the roads of your own mistakes,
your brain lets those roads fade. (Synaptic pruning)

Neurons speak. And if they speak often enough, those neural paths grow strong. Strong enough for actions to graduate from decisions to instinct. They hum with familiarity. Thoughts repeated become roads paved in light,
The mind rewards repetition, the paths we walk most, become the ones we are destined to follow. (Synaptic strenghtening)

So, now I close doors, and I do not spill my blood on locks that were never mine to turn. I light sage and roll out my yoga mat instead of crashing the fuck out out. I let things be, instead of setting myself ablaze for them. I breathe more often. I fold myself into rituals: a song I let myself play too many times, or my colouring book. And the world continues, without me burning for it.

I am the captain of my ship. The master of my soul.

So yea. Kitambo nilikua nadhani mi ni wazimu. Sai najua mi ni wazimu. Lakini I’m making myself a new brain from scratch. Re wiring this entire ho, No joke. I hope my new brain means my hair grows longer.

Ni hayo tu kwa sasa,

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru.

There is a well‑documented phenomenon in which individuals who have been chronically marginalized, begin to internalize the logic of the systems that oppressed them. For example, the colonized often adopt the values, attitudes, and even hierarchies of their colonizers. It’s a psychological strategy for coping with incessant subordination. Frantz Fanon explores this spectacularly in Black Skin, White Masks. He shows how deeply oppression shapes thought and social perception. This phenomenon is referred to in academia as “internalized oppression”

What I want to discuss, however, is not simply the adoption of the oppressor’s ideals. It’s how the chronically marginalized sometimes turn the logic of dominance outward, replicating opression to those they perceive as even more vulnerable. Sigmund Freud called this “identification with the aggressor” where victims of abuse ( in our case oppression) adopt the behaviours of their abusers as a coping strategy. In these diaspora wars, it manifests as lateral hostility; ie. “Africans are not black. African Americans are the only Black people” It sounds like identity policing, but it’s really just the oppressed trying out the role of oppressor. Plain and simple. They want to know how it feels to be the one excluding, instead of being the ones excluded.

I deliberately use the term “chronically marginalized.” Chronically, because the oppression of Black people in the U.S. was never temporary. It was structural. Cumulative. More importantly, it’s ongoing. I am conscious of their experiences. I see the weight of their history, the constant reminders of limitation. I understand it. But understanding does not equal exoneration. Pain may explain behaviour, but it does not sanctify it. It doesn’t cleanse it. It doesn’t make it okay. Choosing to replicate the hierarchy of dominance outward, coping mechanism or not, remains a choice; a moral choice that deserves to be interrogated and called out. And I’m calling it out.

It’s Black History Month. And African Americans want to ‘own’ it. To gatekeep it. It’s a disservice to American Civil Rights Activists honestly. W. E. B. Du Bois organized Pan-African Congresses. Du Bois literally relocated from the US to Ghana (1961) at Kwame Nkrumah’s invitation and became the editor of the Encyclopaedia Africana. (It was project meant to chronicle African history, culture, and achievements from an African perspective.) We have a street called Du Bois at the heart of Nairobi bruh. That’s how deep these ties went.

Malcom X and Pio Gamma Pinto (Kenyan) are documented to have mutual influence on each other. MUTUAL. They shared ideas on the liberation for ALL. Matter of fact, they were assassinated within days of each other. Call it a coincidence all you want, but I know Malcolm X and Pio Gama Pinto were killed because them linking African liberation, and Black American freedom was a real threat. A real threat to the powers trying to keep us divided and oppressed.

So, I am African. And I will be celebrating Black History Month. And I will use the word nigger. Because, I am, and will always be, Black. I’m Black AS FUCK.

Ni hayo to kwa sasa.

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru.

Every so often there’s demands that keep resurfacing in this country: remove the chokoras from town and take them somewhere else. (Chokoras are street kids)

Notice what is not being demanded. No one is shouting “take those kids school”. No one is demanding their housing. No one is interrogating the structures that produce children on pavements. Just removal.

Because the issue, for many people, is not that street children exist. It’s that they are visible. And it’s inconvenient.

I am not discrediting the experiences that make some people want these children out of their sight. People feel unsafe. Deservedly so honestly. They steal. Juzi naskia walikua wanapakana mafi. That reality exists.

But let’s interrogate it properly.

If you were nine years old and starving; not metaphorically hungry, but actually hungry, and every time you begged, people looked through you instead of at you… what exactly would you do?

If you hadn’t eaten since yesterday. If your head hurt from the sun. If your slippers were worn down to nothing and the pavement was burning your feet, and every adult around you crossed the road when they saw you coming. What would you do?

If you learned, very quickly, that being polite doesn’t feed you. That saying “please” doesn’t change anything. That people would rather protect their handbags than acknowledge your existence. What would you do?

Would you sit there and starve quietly so you could feel morally comfortable? Or would you grab the first opportunity to survive?

Children are not born thieves. Children become thieves. They are dealt a brutal hand and forced to play it in public. And you? You’re collateral. You are PRIVILEGED enough to be collateral. Privileged enough to be afraid of the thief instead of becoming one. Privileged enough to debate “removal” instead of debating why a child is surviving on asphalt in the first place.

The distance between you and the chokora who steals is not morality. It is luck. Purely

The question you should be asking yourself right now should be “well where is the government?” — exactly. Where is the government? Because street children are not a mystery. They are not a natural disaster. They are not a random inconvenience that fell from the sky.

They are policy failure, that happens to be human in form. Where is the child protection system? Where is the social safety net? Where is the follow-up when families collapse under poverty, addiction, violence, displacement?

We have budgets. We have ministries. We have press conferences. We have endless speeches about “the youth being the future.” But the present? The present is a nine-year-old sleeping under a shop in Moi Avenue.

If a child can live on the streets for years without intervention, and grow up into a thieving adult, perpetually drunk on that nonsense they sell in back alleys, numbed by sniffing glue, wearing shirts stiff with dust and time, that’s not an individual failure. That is state abandonment. And you cannot criminalize the outcome of your own neglect. I repeat. You. cannot. criminalize. the. outcome. of. neglect.

And it is wild how quickly we demand discipline from children while excusing incompetence from adults in power. Instead of breathing down the necks of the people in charge to give these children dignity; housing, food, intervention, people are breathing down their necks to make the children disappear. Not to be helped. To Disappear.

People are essentially saying, “Yes, they can exist. Just not where I can see them.”

Which is basically, “I am comfortable with their suffering. I am uncomfortable with witnessing it.” And that’s sick and twisted.

Street children are not an infestation. They are…evidence. Evidence of economic failure. Evidence of corruption. Evidence of a state that has abandoned its most vulnerable, and evidence of a society that would rather not look too closely.

You can clear the CBD tomorrow. You can push them to the outskirts. You can relocate them, arrest them, intimidate them out of sight. And there will still be more. There will always be more.

You cannot police away poverty. You cannot cast a spell to exile the consequences of neglect. You cannot remove a symptom while protecting the disease.

If you truly want fewer children on the streets, then demand better from your government. Demand dignity. Demand systems that work. Demand intervention before desperation becomes identity.

But stop pretending the problem is visibility. Because it’s not. The problem is abandonment. And the fact that you’d rather not see it.

Ni hayo tu kwa sasa.

Wenu mpendwa,

Nicole Nyamweru

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Let me say this outrightly; this piece is not accusatory. It’s diagnostic. It’s analytical. Homeboys are mean to their homegirls, and this is not a “gender war” thing. It’s the truth. Ukweli.

So let’s not fight in the comments. Or my DMs. Thanks.

And before I hear, “Not all homeboys are mean to their homegirls. Stop generalizing,” I need you to understand that some things are so obvious, we don’t have to say them out loud.
When I say, “mangoes are sweet,” I obviously don’t mean every single mango that has ever existed on this planet is sweet.

So if you say “Well, I had a bitter mango yesterday, so you’re wrong” you’re kinda dumb. I hope you catch my drift

Hegemonic masculinity

Hegemonic masculinity refers to the dominant idea of what a “real man” is supposed to be: emotionally restrained, competitive, heterosexual, self-sufficient, and in control. It is not how most men actually are, but how they are expected to perform. You know, the spell most niggas are living under.

It spills into everything. And by everything I mean everything. Militarization as the default problem solving method. Colonialism and the endless expansion of territories. Environmental collapse, how we’re dominating nature rather than coexisting with it. History too; nations refuse to say sorry. How the law chooses punishment over repair. Capitalisms obsession with “crushing the competition” and how profit has to dominate to earn respect. All this is hegemonic masculinity. And it spills into friendships too.

I don’t want to pretend I know what boy-on-boy friendships are like, but I do know what girl-and-boy friendships are like; especially now with all the “rage bait” in the mix. Being mean is now considered funny.
And being reasonably pissed off is dramatic? No. Entertaining. Being reasonably pissed off has become entertaining.

I believe in banter. I think it’s beautiful. But on my life, these niggas cross the line. I go on TikTok and it’s girls posting screenshots of their conversations with their homeboys and it’s just roast after roast. Calling them ugly, telling them no one wants them. Calling them stupid. There’s no name in the book I’ve not seen. And you open the comments, and its a bunch of girls saying they go through the EXACT same thing with their homeboys, but there’s love there so it’s okay.

They’re probably right. There’s probably love there, but why the fuck is it expressed this way? Guess.

If you said hegemonic masculinity you’re right. Pat yourself on the back.

Hegemonic masculinity robs men of the purest part of the human experience: affection. Affection is so feminized that they can’t get it, nor can they can they give it—unless they have a girlfriend, or their mommy is particularly touchy feely. The people they spend the most time with, and talk to most often (their guy) friends, don’t give them that.

Now factor in the fact that these guys spent four years in boys’ high schools. From the stories I’ve heard, boys’ high schools are the breeding ground for hegemony. Hierarchies. Respect instilled via dominance and fear. I don’t think they even say I love you to each other in those four years. Or cry in each other’s arms. So that’s four unaffectionate years.

Then they’re thrown into society, and they’re dealing with us.Girls who say I love you at the end of every phone call. Girls who wipe each other’s tears. Girls who give each other friendship bracelets. We’re just cute as hell and lovey-dovey, and these niggas act like we’re like them. And we’re not.

We’re not scared of affection. We’re not obsessed with maintaining some facade of being strong and impermeable to emotions. We’re not embarrassed by tenderness. We cry in front of each other. We say I love you without hesitation. We celebrate each other, comfort each other, and don’t worry about who’s “strong” or “weak.”
Our friendships are messy, yes, but they’re honest. They’re warm. They’re unapologetically affectionate.

I don’t speak that language, of love been expressed by being mean. And neither should you.
And I’m not speaking just for me with this article, I’m speaking for girls. I’ve asked every girl I know what they think about being rage-baited, and NONE of them fuck with it.
I’m not asking for the niggas to be exactly like us. All I’m saying is, everything in moderation, you know? You can be sweet. Doesn’t make you any less of a nigga.
Ni hayo tu kwa sasa.

With love,

Nicole Nyamweru

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Ik these 2 were a couple, I just couldn’t find a better cover photo.

Every Friday, every Wednesday, matter of fact if it’s December every day, you’ll find people at the liquor store closest to my school. Bottle in hand. Cig in the other, and “pass the tonk” and “pose for my locket” every 2 seconds. (Tonk ni vape, for my millennial audience)

There are no chairs. No benches. No grass. No music even. People sit on hard ground, scorching hot from hours under the sun. Or they huddle beneath a roof so tiny it barely counts. Or they simply stand, backs pressed against a wall, basking in the quiet glory of the presence of other people.

The presence of other people.

That’s what it’s all about.

“Drinking culture” is framed as a relationship with alcohol. It’s not. It’s a relationship with community. A relationship with belonging. People are chasing ritual, shared time. The permission to linger. Alcohol merely becomes the socially sanctioned glue. Drinking isn’t the point, it’s the excuse of existing together.

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg describes Third spaces as informal public places, neither home nor work, where community is built organically. We have none. So we created our own. And I’m so tired of people framing it as a vice.

The president got on a podium the other day lamenting the youth “immersed in drug use.” Sure, there’s some truth there. But the accusatory finger he’s pointing at us? It would better serve pointing at him. This government doesn’t take urban planning seriously. There are no third spaces. Rather, there are no third spaces that don’t have a price tag. You want companionship? Want to be seen, to talk, to exist among others? That will cost you.

When there are no free places to belong, people improvise. They gather outside liquor stores, huddled under tiny roofs, sitting on scorching concrete. They share bottles, cigarettes, vapes, whatever they can. The drugs are not the root of the problem; they are a symptom. Society that has made human connection expensive, scarce, and inconvenient. Community is missing, so people make it themselves, in the corners and cracks left by a government that forgot how to plan for presence.

BRING BACK THIRD SPACES.

BRING BACK FREE THIRD SPACES.

Ata sijui mbona nawatetea na tukifunguliwa mkifunguliwa third spaces, tutaenda mtaneda kulewea uko.

See you in Total.