From the critical and commercial success of Kwani? 01 came the next edition, kwani? 02, in 2004. This edition features contemporary literary Kenyan concerns themed on the question of identity. Building on the first issue, kwani? 02 offers all that kwani? 01 did and mirrors the post-millennial angst of young Kenyan writers, poets, cartoonists and photographers. Once again, kwani? featured in the Caine Prize for African writing 2004 when Parselelo Kantaiís Comrade Lemma and the Black Jerusalem Boys Bandwas runner up. Uwem Akpanís An Xmas Feast has since been re-worked and published in the New Yorker magazine ñ the first time an African writer has been featured in that prestigious magazine.

Following and keeping close to the great tradition set by its three predecessors, Kwani? 4 presents a wail of new voices in literary concert with the not so new. The now established talents- Binyavanga Wainaina, Muthoni Garland, Doreen Baingana- share these pages with the fast risers: Billy Kahora, Mukoma wa Ngugi and Shalini Gidoomal. And Kwani? 4 has delved deeper into the all those spaces where the Kenyan story lives: the street corners, the neighbourhood pubs, the in-between semi rural places where the clash of cultures- the traditional versus the modern- continues to redefine the social roles of the individual, dismantle patriarchal constructs and still retain the pithy wit and the devices of ancient orature that time and the ritual of the communal fireside have honed. Still, as though in ridicule of such notions of Africa as being the continent on the lee side of the Digital Divide, Kwani? 4 reaches into the burgeoning realms of the Kenyan blogosphere to bring such politically aware, borderline intellectual and only-two-degrees-shy-of-rebellious voices bringing a fresh look at the old themes of politics, slices of life and religion and placing them alongside such taboo subjects as sex beyond the hetero-normative ideal. Kwani? 4 is established in Africa as the space for cutting-edge new fiction, mind provoking non fiction and photo-essays and witty graphic narratives.

Proposing the novel concept of the "literary NGO," this study combines interviews with contemporary East African writers with an analysis of their professional activities and the cultural funding sector to make an original contribution to African literary criticism and cultural studies.

This Kwani-ni? edition tells a street-to-canvas bildunsroman of one of Kenya's most successful artists, inspired by a great love of his life. Richard Onyango tells his coming of age story; from his beginnings as a musical apprentice at the Coast, to lover of Drossie, to his emergence as a force in the international art world.

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics. Every chapter is an original research essay written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works. The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138713864_oachapter4.pdf

In April 1992, David Sadera Munyakei, a newly employed clerk at the Central Bank of Kenya started noticing irregularities in the export compensation claims he was processing. On July 31st 2006, Kenya's biggest whistleblower passed away in rural obscurity, 14 years after exposing the Goldenberg scandal, Kenya's biggest economic scandal to date, estimated at over USD 1 billion. Billy Kahora recounts his story.

In this story, Seth Karanja, Madam's professional driver, is having an extremely bad day. Tribe has risen against tribe and his niece, Wacera, has fallen pregnant. To do Madam's bidding, move from place to place and think calmly of a solution to his niece's pregnancy, Seth has to watch out for the machetes on the street. Wambui Mwangi revisits a Nairobi under siege after the 2007 elections, and presents a day in the life of this character as Kenya burns.