Kenyan Pundit

After a marathon day of traveling, I finally made it to Camden Maine. Small (cute!) little town. Will try and have some pictures up at some point. Had dinner with a couple of interesting folks last night including Zivanai Masango a musician from Zimbabwe who is now based in New York, David Gweyu, a former deputy Minister of Information and Technology in Ghana, and Suketu Mehta author of Maximum City (for those talented writers on KBW, si you unleash something similar on Nairobi? It’s time to start getting paid and telling our story in our voices).

The conference starts with a presentation by Graham Flint of Gigapixl (kinda like a Google Earth type project, check out the website, the image quality/sharpness is amazing), displaying his extremely high-resolution photographs, and Bob Hanner, telling us about the DNA Barcoding project.

You can listen to the audio stream here.

Will try and have regular updates.

So I was supposed to do two more posts on the referendum - one on devolution and one on the youth…but that was before I forgot my FES cheatsheet at this place where i was do-ee-a-ring on the highspeed connection and then once I got the cheatsheet back and made it all the way to the cybercafe, I realized that I didn’t have my flashdisk that had the commentary from the speakers….foiled again. Hopefully I should have them up in the next day or two.

Then there’s going to be a live TV and radio debate on the referendum that promises to be both substantive (Ok we hope) and hot I was itching to live blog, but I have a flight to catch later on tonight and I am not sure how much of it I’ll be able to catch. My mum has generously made the services of her little ka-handheld radio available so that i don’t miss anything on the way to the airport so hopefully I will be able to blog most of the debate. Those of you who listen to the radio online shouldn’t miss it…if anything it signals some progression in Kenyan politics and in the media’s role of keeping the public informed. On the “No” side will be Mutula Kilonzo, Anyang’ Nyong’o, and Chris Okemo. On the “Yes” side will be Raphael Tuju, Paul Muite and Mukhisa Kituyi. I was having dinner at my aunt’s place last night and the general consensus was that the “No” lineup sounded “more impressive.” We’ll see how that pans out (the “No” ground campaign is definitely the one that’s on a roll).

So where am I off to? To Camden, Maine for this year’s Poptech Conference. I will be attending as one of the twelve Sun Pan-African fellows. I am super-excited to be attending the conference, looking forward to meeting with the other fellows (including Ndesanjo of Jikomboe), hope to return with some concrete ideas/projects, and will try not to be over-geeked (gawked?) out while I am there.