Stories of K

  By Kevin Kogo  They came with hired hands,   not signs, but switchblades—   smiles like split receipts.   The state’s dirty change   jangling in their pockets,   each coin a betrayal.   "Make it ugly," someone whispered,   so they did.   Broke windows we didn’t own,   threw stones we didn’t throw,   set fires we didn’t light.   All while grinning,   like this was just another gig—   another day, another bloodstain.   They wore our struggle like a cheap suit,   ill-fitting, borrowed,   stained with someone else’s agenda.   Cops hugged them like brothers,   then turned and clubbed ours.   We saw it—   the way they checked their phones   mid-chaos,   waiting for mobile money confirmation   before throwing the next brick.   Traitors don’t alwa...

  By Kevin Kogo Silence Is Betrayal.   To know, to see, to comprehend the grotesque injustice the state and its machinery inflict upon its own citizens and still choose the cowardice of fence-sitting is to admit that your education, however expensive, has rotted into nothing. You are a collaborator in your own oppression.   A young man—a father, a husband, the only son of an aging parent—was torn from his humble home 400 kilometers away. Dragged onto a bodaboda, hurled into unmarked Subaru, beaten, tortured for hours, and finally strangled to death. But the monsters weren’t done. They paraded his grieving father—exhausted from a night-long journey—onto a cold bench at Central Police Station, left him to wither for hours, then spat in his face with a lie: "Your son banged his head on a wall killing himself ."  Albert Ojwang’s death didn’t just break the camel’s back—it shattered our faith in this system. We were the obedient ones. The ones who marched with f...

  By Kevin Kogo Happy Madaraka Day 13 years.   A whole decade choking on smoke and silence,   bare feet splitting on thorns,   unarmed—just fists and fury,   untreated—just wounds and whispering spirits.   200,000.   Not numbers—   bodies stacked in the mud,   mouths stuffed with forgotten names,   bones left to bleach under government sun.   The forest remembers.   The trees still hum with bullet holes,   the mugumo roots cradle old screams,   the dirt hoards the weight of dreadlocks   shorn and scattered like cursed seed.   They called it victory.   But what is a victory when the hangman’s rope   still swings in the wind 62 years later?   When the generals’ ghosts rot in unmarked soil,   and the new masters wear their faces?   Today, we scrape your memory from the dirt.   W...