Edwin's Corner

Justice is served I bow and stride into the City Hall Magistrate’s court on a warm Friday morning in the center of Nairobi. Court is in session. A subdued silence inspires me to pay attention to the cases being mentioned. As I sit down on a cold antique bench, I am reminded of archaic British furniture. I am here to observe the wheels of justice grind along and more importantly soak up why the common man is so disgruntled by the country’s justice system. There hangs a coat of arms patched high behind the magistrate and right below it is a wall clock that has stopped working. I assume its part of the décor.   In hindsight those two are very symbolic of the state of the justice system in Kenya. Let me explain, for one the coat of arms was predicated on the royal coat of arms, which appeared in every courtroom in England and its extensive empire. It demonstrated that justice came from the monarch. This is why lawyers and court officials bowed when they enter...

One of the hardest things to embrace and accept in Kenya is that the public education system that a majority of us have gone through is a failure in its entirety and no matter how many patches we apply, or clutches we give it to stagger on, it still is a failure. Typical Classroom in Kenya Don’t get me wrong it worked fine in another century and a different generation, but its usefulness ended a long time ago and just because factories are producing typewriters it doesn't mean every person has to learn how to use one. Let me clarify that statement, the problem with the public education system is that it is predicated on mechanical mass production where people go through a moving conveyor belt called the education system. They are grouped by age and expected to go through higher and higher levels of indoctrination so that at the end of the production line, they conform to a specific ‘quality’ assurance criteria that renders them ready to join other similarly standa...

Soldiers in Trenches in WW1 As men from across the world fought side by side in the 1 st World War, an insidious disease was mutating in the trenches of the Western front-line. Late in the spring of 1918, the Spanish wire news service Agencia Fabra, sent cables to Reuters’ service headquarters in London, stating the nature of the disease. The 1918 influenza epidemic had originated from China, mutated in United States and exponentially transformed in the close quarters present in the battlefields of the war in Europe. It is noted that after it was over, 50 -100 million people across the world, as far as the remote Polynesian Islands had died.   Men in War Hospitals in WW1 Strangely it was called the Spanish Flu, not because it originated from Spain, but because Spain a neutral country had a more independent stance while reporting about the war.   During the war information was carefully selected, distributed, emphasized and framed to serve the ...

Arthur Golden said, “Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are”. After the Second World War Japan’s prestige was in shambles, all its cities bore severe marks of war. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were utterly devastated. More than 3 million people had died, and a further 10 million faced eminent death by starvation .   But the Japanese, a resilient, focused and hardworking people enameled by the Samurai honor code where the ultimate price was offering ones life in Harikiri (ritual suicide by disembowelment) stood firm.   The Korean War of 1950 -1953 was considered a ‘gift from the gods’ by the Japanese and allowed them to implement a well-coordinated plan of industrialization. By the 1964 Summer Olympics held in Tokyo, the world was sufficiently shocked by the level of development that Japan had just gone through in less than 20 years. Another nation that se...