Kwani? Journal

Kwani? 04

Editor: Billy Kahora & Binyavanga Wainaina
ISBN: 9966-9836-6-X
No. of pages: 430
Size of book: 235mm x 155mm
Price: Ksh 650 ($19.5)
Year of Publication: 2007

The fourth volume of Kwani? presents a multitude of new literary voices from Kenya and the African diaspora. Well-known contemporary Kenyan writers, Binyavanga Wainaina, Muthoni Garland, and Doreen Baingana share these pages with fast rising newcomers: Billy Kahora, Mukoma wa Ngugi and Andia Kisia. Kwani? 04 delves deeper into the subversive spaces from which Kenyan stories struggle to emerge: the street corners, the neighbourhood pubs, the in-between semi rural places, Kenyan small-town hinterlands where the clash of cultures - the traditional versus the modern - transitions between new cash economies and older ‘arrangements’to redefine the changing social roles of the individual, dismantle patriarchal constructs and re-mix new and old ritual and practice.

This edition places politically aware voices that reside in a borderline space between the public intellectual and the ‘rebel’, to address the Kenyan existential in politics and religion, alongside such taboo subjects as sex beyond the heterosexual ideal.