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piqer for: Global finds
Ciku Kimeria is a Kenyan author "Of goats and poisoned oranges" - (https://www.amazon.com/goats-poisoned-oranges-Ciku-Kimeria-ebook/dp/B00HBBWPI6), development consultant, adventurer and travel blogger (www.thekenyanexplorer.com). She writes both fiction and non-fiction focusing on African stories that need telling. She has worked on diverse pieces for various international and local publications including Quartz, Ozy, The East African etc. She has travelled to 45 countries – 16 of them in Africa. 153 countries to go and 63 territories!
"Of goats and poisoned oranges" has been extremely well received in Kenya and beyond. It tells the story of a Kenyan middle aged power couple and their complicated marriage. The novel explores issues of greed, revenge, betrayal and murder. It runs from the 1960s to 2013. It has been described as “Wicked, funny, poignant, wacky, human, a big ball of fun and danger”, “A unique and captivating book”, “Fun and intriguing”, “Impossible to put down once you start reading.”
She recently moved to Dakar, Senegal from Kenya to work on her second novel. She also works at as the Africa Communication Manager at a leading global strategy consulting firm.
She holds a B.S. in Management Science from MIT with minors in Urban Planning and International development studies.
Thinking of the climate apocalypse from a spiritual perspective
As I listened to this podcast, I couldn't help but feeling something I felt many years back as I read Unbowed - a memoir by the Nobel prize winning Kenyan environmentalist - Wangari Maathai. She was a strong woman - one who was persecuted terribly by the authoritarian regime I grew up in. What however struck me the most about her book was the spiritual connection that Wangari Maathai had with the environment and trees in particular. Flipping through the pages, I learnt things I had never known about how indigenous people and my own Kikuyu people, long before westernization felt a close bond to the world and everything in it. We asked for permission from trees to cut them down if we needed firewood, the rainmaker interceded on behalf of people when the rains failed - to understand why the raingods were angry at us, we talked to animals, plants, rocks, rivers. We knew that we all needed each other to survive.
In the wake of the various damning climate change reports that are coming out, it's important to think of exactly what this means for all of humanity beyond a material level. As the speakers say, it's very easy for those of us who live in a bubble (middle class, not directly dependent on land for our immediate nutritional needs, not living in a shack in Bangladesh where monsoons can destroy one's home in an instant.) It's almost easy to believe that we are independent from the world we live in.
What we really should be doing is grieving the cord we cut from ourselves, nature and other life forms, that allows us to deceive ourselves that one can exist without the other.
Join Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown, two sisters who share many identities, as writers, activists, facilitators, and inheritors of multiracial diasporic lineages, as well as a particular interest in the question of survival, as we embark on a podcast that delves into the practices we need as a community, to move through endings and to come out whole on the other side, whatever that might be.
