Brian Manase: Director of Entertainment aspirant

We got to have a brief interview with fashion designer Brian Manase who earlier on this semester got to represent Maseno University at the East African Fashion Week. He tells us why he is determined to become the next if not the best entertainment director and what motivates him.

2015/16 Aspirant Interview call out

Elections are upon us once again. Students at Maseno University are put to task to decide who will lead them. Each year we have the same mediocre rallies, handouts and speeches only to start complaining as soon as our new elects are in power.

#WeeklySocietyFeature: Ryce Modelling Agency

Maseno University is a place filled with unexploited talent. Perharps this is what caused the genesis of this modelling agency.

Women Empowerment :Purple Pearl Movement

Saturday the 27th marked the official launch to Purple Pearl Movement in Maseno University.

#plot Art Exhibition in Maseno University

Well pips, stuff just got more interesting. This Thursday in Maseno University, there shall be an exhibition like none before.

SECOND YEAR DIES IN MASENO UNIVERSITY

Maseno has had its fair share of tragedies but these tops the list.

Yesterday, a student died because of the alleged negligence of the school hospital ambulance.

AFRICA GETS THIRD FEMALE PRESIDENT By Churchill Ongere

Ladies of the world, then men - Africa has the third female president yoh! Isn’t that just cool? Well, 56 year old Ameenah Gurib-Fakim made it. And more interestingly, she is a biologist.

3 Shades of Kenya Youth Hub by Stacey Nduta

Some of you reading this have heard of Kenya Youth Hub, the few informed ones in fact know of the event they are hosting this month. Unfortunately, others have no clue what they are all about. Well this is for each of you.

Recently, I had a sit down with the founder and CEO of Kenya Youth Hub to try get into the mind that transformed an idea to a non-profit organization successfully.

Why?

Duncan Mutwiri, a 4^th year Political Science student let me know that KYH was all about opportunity. Why I asked?

He explained that in his second year, looking for an internship was similar to climbing the great wall of China. “The concept behind KYH is to give youth access to opportunities and break the misconception that you need connections to make it anywhere in life."

What?

“What exactly does KYH have to offer that other organizations haven’t tabled yet?”

“Well, for now we are a lift model. We are focusing on preparing the youth for opportunities. This is basically through forums, conferences and summits. We want to open their minds; prove how limitless their productivity can be.”

He further explains how they’ll be launching a special and revolutionary platform during the 2^nd Youth Entrepreneurial Summit which is this 13^th March at Maseno University. 

Who?

“KYH seems to be an organization with the right focus, which team is this backing you up so well?”

“Well, KYH has individuals from diverse academic and professional backgrounds. It goes beyond being friends: it’s about having a similar vision and working towards it. Currently, the organization is led by 8 members of the executive board and 4 members in the board of trustees who lead externally so to speak and have hind sight of the tribulations and solutions in this area of expertise.”

He agrees that he did have a few falls outs possibly because the individuals lost sight of the vision.

Parting shot

“At KYH, we believe all those registering or yet to register will recognize this wave of change and realize that it’s never about waiting for the right chance but being prepared when the opportunity arises. See you there!” Register here

Art and Impulsivity: The Fighting Must Stop By Simon Wairiuko

The hill still stands. The ancient hill from where the King foraged the expanse of his loyal community. Ibwami was a resident like no other. It was the royal capital. And surround it, in a cyclical entourage were the other hills. Conical in structure, domical where the weathering had taken its toll and sometimes pyramidal pointing...don't know. The people perhaps awestruck by the architectural simplicity of physical nature, they had decided that they were part of it too. Grass for their heads in the night, daub for their walls, miniature serenity of the domical beehive for the pygmies in the girth of the Kongo forest and the pyramid and monolithic in far East. A rumbling architectural power was in place. Fractal scaling.

Mud rules; its sleek reprimanding nature means you look earthy. From earth. Made of Earth, whether it is the finest, it still is earth. Ask the Great Mosque of Djenne its all clay. How glorious it is standing so firm yet by some structural conceptions perishable and inglorious. If you want permanent, ask the South Africans. In East Africa you might find a ruin of a road- permanent by your modern standards but its ownership raked.

The hill still stands. This time in its thick savanna grass and the whistling umbrella acacias, just beneath its old granites, is a hole. A bottomless pit the glowing orange of the sunset never penetrates its darkness. If you looked through, you would notice the spiral, the staircase winding like a snake, only you see its tail. It is not the Mau Mau caves at Karura forest, no. Not even those at Mathira's Rui Ruiru (Black River). This is different.

Some time aback, before this pit that is definitely with all virtuosity a solitary hiding place, he was here. Somehow he had seen (probably in a vision at night) that the only place left virgin; green virgin, was only around the hill. Now, he had his sons, the strongest from all the seven wives, they were to pack the dried meat. Get guards from their mothers. Get itahas, mukimo to push through the first few days of the journey. It was a week's journey to the hill.

Cattle heads, goats were wealth. With the drought at Murang'a, there was a risk of losing everything that kept life; thereby losing life. That is why the migration was important. In the land beyond the Nyandarua ranges, just where the rising sun settles its healing rays every morning when it emerges from the peak of the Kirinyaga (Mt. Kenya), lies a sacred field. All animals, both wild and domestic pay homage to this shrine mostly when all hope is lost.  The old man knew this place. He knew it and he called it Mwituria (sole survivor), and the hill Kamwituria (the hill of the sole survivor).

Kamwituria. People settled. The people, the offspring, and posterity whatever you call them; just people. The school was built. It was important, its presence. Education, we want education mama, not arrows, not spears, not... we want pen and paper papa. It's alright. It's okay... the hill is scratched, it is baldheaded, it's okay... It has an electric fence all around its perimeter. No more of huts and royal paths. Well, that is alright. We get to see buffaloes in there. The Big Five. The Giraffe is the best, you should see its craft in a souvenir. And that is all good.

The hill stood. No earthquake quivered it. No tornado uprooted its umbrellas. Just cobras' heads popped up. Pythons snored... snakes. Snakes, elephants and the birds; birds chirping with a divine rhythmical tone, flying from one umbrella to another, seeking coherence and singling out the most habitable ecology in the jungle. Zebras, impalas...the grazers, gathuni, hares, gazelles, thwariga, don't forget the reindeer- well, not typical of Africa but its horns. I remember its horns were amazing. It was almost camouflaged with the twisting of the acacias around it. Lions before hyenas. Hyenas before vultures. And man before the lions.

Competition? You could call it that, but see this. In the school, two boys are fighting. One of them has this pointed head. He is tall. Both are tall. The other the head is flat. Noses. Noses are different. One seems to lose out on his nose's mischief. It's now white. He should know, how elongated the nose is. And subsequently how nosy he has become; he only came the other day. Like the rest of us, he was in uniform. Khaki shorts and blue sweater; we were all uniform! All of us are eager to get informed.

In The Silence After Sunset By Florence Awino

The New Year’s yield was abundant and so was the laughter emanating from the dense farm as people traded jabs while wrestling with copious weeds that had flourished just as well as the crop did. It was tiring yet fulfilling and the laboring went on till the sun gave way to a timid dusk. All the chatter ceased as the day’s labor was shoved onto backs and hauled back home with people bent under it at various degrees like figurines.  

There are different struggles that accost one after the sun sets. The indulgence in the memory of a ridiculously gigantic smile that gave way to a generous view of both gums on the lower and upper jaws with a curios dentition and the rebellious manner in which the lower lip curled away from the main arch of the big smile into an arch of its own, and so oddly beautiful to look at.

Each time such thoughts creep in, interrupting the present, you quickly swat them away before a plethora of stale memories shoved hurriedly into a shallow grave and hastily concealed with scant and pretentious malevolence find their way back to life. You pick up the broom that dropped from your hand in that brief moment of reverie and continue sending the maize chaff flying away from the verandah.

Sometimes you will look into the mirror appreciatively, wrapping the towel tighter around your cleavage and torso, admiring the gently parting of your behind, feeling grateful for the weight gain that came from that brief influx of endocrines that day you held hands, meandering across the town occasionally rubbing shoulders gleefully and exchanging bold glances.

He approaches the cashier and pays the fee and asks if he can be allowed to accompany you to the doctor’s room. No problem a nurse says and you walk in, take seats, he at one end of the room and you at the other and wait for the doctor who is in another room deliberately assembling a needle and a syringe.

He has a chronic phobia for needles and their prickling and he is carefully monitoring your face; looking for what kind of reaction I’m not sure. So you decide to drop your bravery for a while and pretend to squirm as the bulbous doctor come in brandishing the syringe and its contents menacingly over his head. He wasn’t the only one with needle issues.

'The Dream' (1932): Pablo Picasso for Marie-Thérèse Walter'

The needle dives into the flesh, quick and painless then blurts its contents just as fast and pulls out. He glides across the room in alarm to examine if any extensive damages resulted from the swift puncture. Just a spurt of blood, which he asks the doctor to cover up.

At the end of the mercifully brief ordeal, you hold hands again and he keeps cooing over the poor arm turning it this way and that, murmuring incoherencies and asking if it felt too sore. Just a little. I notice there is an extra spring in his steps this time then I remember he asked the nurse if the results would be instantaneous.

Days pass, you spend some of the time whipping up decent meals at your place which mostly consists of cow meat and some days drinking black coffee at his. Most of the time he will be engrossed in a laptop from which emanates eerie instrumentals, intriguing jazz or sometimes just music laced with drum beats and gleefully chanted in some Afrikaans that you cannot decipher.

Experimental music, he explains. You nod briefly and flash a smile then turn back to weeping profusely at the onions. The rest of the cooking proceeds in silence with the same music in the background. You will dish out the contents of the sufurias into two portions. His, the largest plate and the most piled. Yours is a decent portion but, he needs that energy more and he paid for the cow.  The exultance of your culinary skills forms the precedence for some foreplay interrupting the Andy Warhol documentary that accompanied the silent feeding.

Then one day as if a bad wind blew, head-splitting arguments erupt, brutal truths, gross dissatisfaction and messages full of acerbic sarcasm flying back and forth. He eventually grows horns and gives you no heed anymore. Your phone ceases vibrating every second and that singes you till everything is coal black, hard and ugly.

After a week of combating and tearing at each other you both realize that you have nagging needs to attend to and your senses return. You tenderly apologize to each other, and make up over pocket friendly wine from the liquor store. You get tipsy, he not, of war is forgotten and a different kind of entanglement ensues.

The truce doesn’t last long and sometimes torrents of tears get imbued into a pillow and dark clouds of depression hover threateningly over your head like flies over a rotten carcass. Anhedonia sets in you don’t easily recall when last a genuinely good time happened to you, or a deep belly laugh without the anticipation of fucking as an incentive.

Alas! It’s too late for the better pictures promised, ones you don’t have your mouth gaping while straining to snap a picture of you two with the back camera of a Smartphone; sandwich picnics by a waterfall or the solemn oaths that you’d still be fondly calling each other my husband and my wife come ten years. So you just pack your bags and call home, you’ll be around for supper.

You are relieved that the whole mish mash has blown over but suddenly you are fearful and apprehensive. You wonder if he has already met any hot blondes. But there aren’t any hot blondes in the country. A tad relieved, you scour through the literary magazines and books that were beginning to gather thick films of dust. How much you missed! You realize that and begin to ponder over Tendai Huchu’s story on the Second Coming of Dambudzo Marechera. It is more liberating than pondering whether he is screwing anyone out of stress.  

Perhaps over the years you will come across each other at a shopping mall. Him, face riddled with hair that wasn’t there before and voice subdued as if by a bad cold but you will suspect otherwise. You, a crown of glorious afro dotting the head that you meticulously tended with virgin olive oil, eggs and avocadoes on some long and silent weekends when you had to ward off the impending bursts of nostalgia.

Or he will have grown eccentric and cultivated hair to the length of his butt crack, smoking blunts and listening to Bob Marley while taking a fat Alsatian on a leash for a walk in the park. Maybe he will become a vocal gay rights activist earning him one slot for appearance in the local TV and several in CNN and Aljazeera.

Then he will notice that there’s no ring on your finger and ask about a boyfriend. You say nada, after you left; you spent the time just reading novels and tending to your hair. At that point the bitch who you hadn’t noticed scowling at you behind his back will ferociously leap at you. Fortunately, she is restrained and you run away shrieking into the mall.

BODA BODA – A photo essay by Churchill

Plight of the Gifted in Africa by Simon Wariuoko

Africa spells a lot of names in the global history. Perhaps its hypothetical invisibility in prehistoric bed rest is what most transpired to the continent’s widely spread denotation: dark.

Surely as current times disclose, the Dark Continent has more light to its alleged darkness which could have been an infantry conclusive idiom to a people whose language they found to be way below the ‘primates’  league. 

Yes there is a lot of darkness in Africa, and yet in the shadows of darkness we see riches. We see a lot of colours in darkness. Reflections from objects, shadows, contours, all these are representative of just what to expect in darkness.

With over 200 million in youth population (world’s largest youth population in a continent), one can only imagine the synergy that is inclusive of this darkness. But if you thought that these 200 million are in ‘darkness’ then you are wrong. What these African people see is a future as bright as the sun rays that grace their mornings every day of the year.

There is this part that we however overwrite. We, every one of us, seems to turn a blind eye on what is and can be the turning point in Africa’s history. And yet the treasure lies right in our eyes and we do nothing about it. It is innovation at stake here.

With such initiatives as the Chandaria Business Innovation and Incubation Centre, some of us are beginning to understand what the gifted need. Considering there are countries in constant hunt for persons showing remarkable skills in intelligence, Kenya can only as a country accept what predicaments fate has for us if we continually and adamantly create barricades against our own gifted souls. Insecurity could be just the least of what is expected.

It is time our visual art, both literary and fine art spoke of us at the mountaintops, time we accepted ourselves for who we are rather than what history has always thought and brought us to be. The answer lies within ourselves. The Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Zimbabwe could have signed us but for all that is good Africa cannot continually dwell on her past glories.

Could we just for a minute or so pause our daily routine and for a moment think of what is there but is literally lacking in our overall design? Could the government look back to see what happened to an earlier proposal of having some schools in the country specifically for the gifted?

We might think that sieving our young with the ultimate test of examination is a big step that always leads us to having the best of them- the gifted. One doesn’t need to be a genius to notice the mighty overflow of wasted talent that goes back to the walls of our dilapidating towns. Small wonder our young, some of them probably gifted, are lost to the death pangs of illicit brews.

Enough said, none done. We are facing one of the most sophisticated ages of civilization in human history. Whether or not our art and literature as a continent, Africa, shall be a subject in this history rests on the sole factual reasoning and revolutionary ideas—products of upholding and constantly nurturing our own gifted minds.  

TEAM TENDO, THE TOTO GARI AND HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN by Churchill 

I always had a hint as to what social innovation could mean even before I took a brief course on the same earlier on this year. And as I would discover during the inaugural East African Social Innovation Safari in April, I wasn’t so far from the meaning. What I was far from even guessing right is how the process unfolds and the challenges that come with attempting to innovate a solution to a challenge at a personal, group, communal, organizational or societal level. Five months down the line after the Safari, my problem solving methods have changed a lot and the way I also interact with people generally has transformed. I decided to adopt and use some insight I got from the ten day training and as a result I can confidently say that things are more interesting this way.

And so when I received an email from Peace and Collaborative Development Network two and a half months ago about a free online course on Human Centered Design facilitated by +ACUMEN and IDEO.ORG I didn’t hesitate to click on the discussion link to see how I could participate in it. It would turn out in the page that opened on the next tab on my browser that the course wouldn’t take a lot of time, had a few weekly assignments (ideal considering my already tight schedule), was to be done in teams and would be rewarded by a certificate of completion at the end of the course after the submission of all assignments. What mattered to me most was the fact that I am actually really passionate about change-making and getting insight on how I could do this through this course would really be something I’d not mind doing. As the course required, I had to form a team of not less than three people before we could get started on October 24^th. Wallace Odiwuor, Elizabeth Muthama, Susan Kalekye Muia and Maureen Okuto (all fourth year students) would be the four other members of Team Tendo as I decided to name it. Globally, the course had more than 16,000 participants and the last time I checked, the other teams in Kenya were just in Nairobi.

Team Tendo members, Left To Right : Churchill, Kalekye, Liz and Maureen.

Businesses, social entrepreneurs, and other innovators have used human-centered design for decades to create solutions for many different types of challenges. This course introduced us to the concepts of human-centered design to help make us more effective, innovative problem solvers.  According to the course organizers, the three major phases of the human-centered design process are Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.

In the Inspiration phase, you learn directly from the people you’re designing for as you immerse yourself in their lives and come to deeply understand their needs and aspirations. The Inspiration phase is about learning on the fly, opening yourself up to creative possibilities, and trusting that as long as you remain grounded in desires of the people you’re designing for, your ideas will evolve into the right solution. As part of the course, during the inspiration phase we had to choose a design challenge from a list of three challenges that had been identified by the course facilitators. To choose a design challenge we had to collect our thoughts around one challenge that we chose through voting then followed that with a review of what we already knew, defined what we didn’t know then reviewed the constraints or barriers to taking on that challenge. That was followed by planning our research method where we defined our audience with the challenge we chose, planned the logistics of going to the field, came up with recruitment tools and established how to create a trusted atmosphere with those we were designing for and those we had to talk to while designing.

We had to learn from experts, immerse ourselves in the context of the problem we were designing a solution for and selected an analogous inspiration that could help us understand our challenge more. At this point we were introduced to a case study, VROOM, a human-centered take on early childhood development. In this case, The IDEO.org team undertook a highly immersive inspiration phase, visiting low-income communities in California, New York, and Pennsylvania to conduct interviews with parents and to observe existing programs aimed at improving child development outcomes. The team learned that many of the parents they met had had very tough upbringings. These parents didn’t feel fully equipped to engage with their children, because their own parents didn’t engage with them. At the end of this phase we settled on challenge three where we had To Design A Solution That Would Help Parents In Low-Income Communities Ensure Children Thrive In Their First Five Years. We interacted with the community around Mabungo and Nyawita areas as part of our immersion process and also talked to child care experts around the university. This challenge had been selected as one of the #zerotofivechallenges by AMPLIFY that was also collaborating with +ACUMEN in this course. This meant that if our idea was to be shortlisted upon completion of the course, we could continue participating on the AMPLIFY platform to refine our idea based on the Refinement Phase. If our idea gets all the way to the final stage, we could be in the running for funding and design support from IDEO.org!

Wallace, Liz and Kalekye integrating findings after field research

The Ideation phase transformed our research into meaningful and actionable insights that became the foundation of our design. We begun by making sense of what we learned from our design research. These themes and insights helped us define opportunities for design that were differentiated and generative. We then brainstormed lots of new ideas and set out building prototypes to test these concepts. Continuing to test and iterate on our ideas helped shape a more innovative, effective solution. In the design process, searching for meaning in the nitty gritties you find in the field is really critical to getting down to the beat that could give you the rhythm to the solution you desire. We listened to each other and adopted a YES AND approach in place of a more common YES BUT approach that usually excludes most people ideas.  While brainstorming we had really wild ideas and encouraged each of us to generate as many as possible. We also deferred judgment, went for quantity and illustrated ideas visually. After selecting the most promising idea, we determined what to prototype and designed for them. Upon getting feedback after prototyping and prioritizing it, we had to integrate them in our next iteration. At this advanced stage, we studied Moneythink Mobile, an innovation where human-centered designers were designing digital tools to build financial literacy. Another case study was where IDEO.org partnered with Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor to design a new pit latrine emptying business in Zambia. The team designed a service called Pump Away.

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We had a mock pitching session and as you see Liz was strict!

The Implementation phase is about understanding how to bring your solution to life, and to market in the real world. In the end, you’ll know that your solution will be a success because you’ve kept the very people you’re looking to serve at the heart of the process. In this case, we learned the tools necessary to consider how we could build partnerships, refine our business (or non-profit) model, pilot our idea, and eventually get our idea out there — all these is if we were to truly

implement our idea, which is dependent on how our idea will be rated by the course facilitators.

Well if you would like to get the final presentation of our idea, The TOTO GARI, kindly mail us at bamumaseno@gmail.com and we will be very glad to mail you the power point presentation. Alternatively, comment below with your e-mail address and we will mail it to you. We are sharing it on this platform to get your feedback on places you think we might have not explored well or ignored totally. I decided to share it as the last part of this article after having taken you through the design process. Feel free to leave your questions, insight and views in the comments section. Also, wish us luck!

The Toto Gari will be something close to this

#MYDRESSMYCHOICE

When we said we were taking a good number of photos of ladies in dresses to show our solidarity with the #MyDressMyChoice movement some people called it a bluff. Well we weren’t, here you go!