One of the easiest things in the world is to mistake an outcome for a story. A beautiful home. A thriving business. A failed marriage. A child in an expensive school. A forty-year-old with no savings. Someone who seems to have it all. Someone who appears to have fallen behind. We see the destination and instinctively begin filling in the journey. Hardworking. Lazy. Disciplined. Irresponsible. Lucky. Entitled. Deserving. Wasteful. Perhaps the most dangerous thing about human beings is not that we judge one another. It is how quickly we become certain that our judgment is correct. Because every life has invisible expenses. Not just financial ones. The kind that never appear on a bank statement or a résumé. Some are chosen. Some are imposed. Some are wise. Some are costly mistakes. Most are a complicated mixture of both. One person reaches middle age with very little savings because they spent years paying school fees for younger siblings. Another because they repeatedly made poor financi...
When Kenya descended into bloodshed in the wake of the 2007 general election, the world watched in disbelief. Over 1,300 people were killed, hundreds of thousands were displaced, families were shattered, homes torched, and neighbors turned against each other overnight. We called it election violence. But was it? The truth is more uncomfortable than the slogans, the press briefings, or the reconciliatory church prayers we clung to in the aftermath. What happened in 2007/08 was not simply about a stolen vote. It was the cracking open of decades-old wounds — social, economic, tribal, and political — that we, as a country, had consistently refused to face. We blamed the devil. We called for peace. We urged forgiveness — often from the very people who had been violated. But we never stopped to ask: What were we really forgiving? What had we truly understood? The Road to Rupture: Seeds Sown Over Decades To understand the violence of 2007/08, we must step back — far back. Land : At the heart ...