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Nairobi as a city has been a prominent feature in many literary works set in Kenya from the pre-independence period, when the city started taking form, to the present. The city has also continued its presence in futuristic literary representations from Kenya. This article is concerned with Nairobi as a city and its representations within short stories in the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. It analyses selected prize-winning and shortlisted stories in a literary project that aims to map the Nairobi city space, exploring both its precarity as well as its stability as presented through literature. Through the characters in these prized stories, the article foregrounds the journey motif as a tool used by the writers to explore and present the postcolonial city though contemporary lenses, paying particular attention to the significance of the chaos and informality used to describe the city. The article seeks to read the postcolonial African city in its complexities outside of the conventional binary lenses of local versus global, rural versus urban, and modern versus traditional. It acknowledges the significance of an international literary prize not only in shaping creative narratives but also in capturing the 'spirit of the moment'. Through an analysis of these short stories under the larger umbrella of an international literary prize, this article attempts a reading of the creative representations of a city exploring the multi-layered nature of both text and physical space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I this article I explore the place of the future African city as presented in contemporary African speculative fiction. I focus on the short stories in the anthology Imagine Africa 500: Speculative Fiction from Africa (2015) to look at how the urban space is conceptualised in these narrations of an imagined future Africa, 500 years from the present day. While the discussion looks at the urban space and imagined technological development, it highlights the ecological narratives and the contrast drawn between the city and the rural and the local and the foreign, as imagined for the future by relying on the employment of food imagery in these stories. I look at the use of food in these speculative narratives as a link between the familiar and these strange, imagined futures as presented in the anthology. I aim to provoke a debate on the imaginations of what a future African city may look like as presented through literary works and the significance of these imaginings today within developmental and environmental lenses. I read the future city through use of language, space, images, form, and style to look at how the modern short story is theorising on African futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers choral music as a repository of history within the Kenyan social and political realm. It examines this music genre as a tool used by different government regimes not only to document the official version of Kenya's history but also to enforce specific political ideologies on the public. The article argues that state influence in the composition, performance and distribution of choral music promotes a culture of forgetting historical injustices, with the aim of forging a united Kenyan nation. Much choral music composed and performed in the immediate aftermath of Kenya's struggle for independence urged the public to forget colonial injustices in order to build the new country. We explore how these songs continue to play a significant role in postindependence Kenya, primarily by means of a network of distribution that involves airplay on both private and state broadcasters and during national holidays. The adaptation and exploitation of these songs by different Kenyan regimes signal an impulse to silence public memories of political injustice. Our article exposes the impossibility of such forgetting, and demonstrates the contradictions between forced public amnesia and autonomous private recollection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]