AWAAZ

AwaaZ is a magazine published tri-annually out of Nairobi, Kenya, under the Institute of Kenya South Asian History and Culture (IKSAH).

It aims to provide a broad platform for debate and reflection on issues of both contemporary and historical interest. What started off in 2002 as a focus on the role of the South Asian community in the historical, political and socio-economic spheres of Kenya; has now broadened to cover the larger debates on diversity, democracy, human rights and social justice. The magazine also critically examines the role of minorities both as communities in Kenya and East Africa; as well as a concept of human rights in a society be they ethnic, racial, gender based, sexual or political.

A FORCE MORE POWERFUL
‘In a contest of violence against violence,’ the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed, ‘the superiority of the government has always been absolute....READ REVIEW

LAUGHING IN THE FACE OF TERRORISM
Read Bahadur Tejani’s passion and his pain in Farewell Uganda which he wrote in 1974 after Idi Amin exiled him from Uganda. Wole Soyinka published it in Transition 45......READ REVIEW

MOMO THE MONKEY
MOMO THE Two Kenyan South Asian children, a boy and a girl, adopt a baby monkey and decide to call it ‘Momo’.......

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A force more powerful NON_VIOLENT IN AMERICA
This documentary history of non-violence compiles all first-hand sources documenting the history of the movement in the USA....READ REVIEW

Popsamti POP SAMITI
‘This is the start of a new era which will challenge the status quo. Global culture will increasingly resemble the culture of South Asia and the question is who will define what this culture...... READ REVIEW

EMERGING ISSUES IN TEFL
Those in the know would never intone four separate initials but rather speak simply of ‘Teffel,’ a word unto itself........

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Other Articles On Non Violence:

NonViolence - Passive Physically but Active Spiritually By AWAAZ
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Partnership for Change
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Flight or Fight . . . or Non-Violence? By Njonjo Mue
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Non-Violence & The Kenyan Anti-Imperialist Movement By Onyango Oloo
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The Defiance Campaign and South Africa Today By Derica Mej Lambrechts
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Gandhi the man behind the myth Gandhi...the man behind the myths

‘The Saint has left our shores, I sincerely hope forever.’
Jan Christian Smuts, the South African minister, uttered these words in 1914. The saint was none other than Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on his way home to India after 21 years in South Africa. Saintliness certainly came to personify Gandhi’s life and his demise at the hands of an assassin’s bullet sealed his iconic status and sanctified him as the Mahatma, India’s ‘Great Soul’.

As the ‘father’ of non-violent direct action Gandhi is credited for providing the inspiration behind Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, the peace campaigns of the Greenham Common women and today with protests over climate change and war.

In India and elsewhere Gandhi has also been criticised for being ‘anti-modern’, a hard line traditionalist, a blackmailer who used fasting as a means of getting his way, on the left he is seen as the ‘mascot of the bourgeoisie’ and anti-working class. There are elements of truth to all these accusations but it is important to bear in mind that bourgeois nationalism is far from straightforward, much less pure and fundamentally flawed. Indian nationalism was no exception.

Childhood
Gandhi was not from a staunch nationalist family, like Nehru, nor was he from the professional urban elite like Jinnah. Gandhi was born in 1869 into a middle caste family a trading and money lending community who had a reputation for being shrewd, wily, thrifty and good businessmen. His birthplace was the small town of Porbandar, in a semi-independent princely state on the southwest coast of Gujarat where his father’s family had for two generations been diwans (advisers) to the princes and kings. Growing up in a princely state little contact with or experience of direct British imperial rule........MORE

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firaaq FIRAAQ

FIRAAQ is a masterpiece: a rounded, probing, conscience-pricking, highly accomplished directoral movie debut by Nandita Das. It is set in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots of 2002, in Ahmedabad, though the name of.....READ REVIEW

chandrocky THE KINDNESS OF SERPENTS

The modernist Indian-Canadian writer-director, Deepa Mehta, has produced yet again another film to tease our comfort zones and ruffle our feathers. In her earlier trilogy of the elements - Fire, Water and Earth - she addressed......READ REVIEW