Pillar route
Demographics and family
How tribe, ethnicity, migration, ancestry, women, children, kinship, generation, and population structure power and belonging.
Demographics and family
Population, fertility, households, gender, kinship, and the social reproduction of society.
- society
Genetics and colonialism: ancestry, race-making, and the myth of pure tribes
How colonial states and race science turned fluid identities into racial boxes, and how modern genetics both disproves pure bloodlines and creates new risks when ancestry is treated as political authority.
societysciencepoliticsculture - society
The Kuria of the Kenya-Tanzania borderland
A Bantu people of the Migori borderlands, ordered by clans, age-sets and a cattle economy, and divided by the Anglo-German boundary.
societypoliticscultureeconomy - nation
The Meru: generations, initiation, and the Mbwaa
The Meru as Anne-Marie Peatrik studied them: a complex polity ruled not by chiefs but by a generation-class system, its initiation and elders, and the Mbwaa crossing read as charter, not migration.
societyculturepoliticsreligion - movement
Women's power: authority, erasure, and the fight back
The power women held in Kenyan society and how colonial rule stripped it away, from the prophetesses and fighters to the male-only chiefs and land titles, and the fight back to Wangari Maathai.
societypoliticsreligioneconomy - nation
The DNA of Kenya: what genetics says about the peoples
What ancient and modern DNA say about Kenya's peoples: the three migration streams confirmed, every group admixed with no isolates, and the evidence that discredits the idea of pure tribes.
sciencesocietypoliticsculture - nation
The peoples Kenya forgot: Taita, the Tana, the foragers, and the Nubians
The smaller peoples left out of the big-tribe story: the Taita, the Pokomo and Orma of the Tana, the hunter-gatherer Waata, Boni, and El Molo, the Pokot, and the stateless Nubians of Kibera.
societyeconomypoliticsculture - nation
The coast and the Cushitic north: Swahili, Mijikenda, and the pastoralists
The coast and north before the colony: the Swahili built from African roots not Persian colonists, the Mijikenda and the contested Shungwaya tradition, the Cushitic pastoralists, and the Teso.
societyeconomypoliticsculture - movement
Kikuyu initiation rites and the 1929 crisis
Initiation in Kikuyu society and the 1929 crisis, when the missions' demand that members renounce female circumcision split the churches and fed the independent-schools movement that later flowed into Mau Mau.
societyculturepoliticsreligion - nation
The Roma: persecution and survival
The history of the Roma, a people whose Indian origin is written in their language: the migration through Persia and Byzantium, arrival in Europe by the 1400s, and the 'Egyptian' misnomer that gave 'Gypsy'...
societypoliticsculturewar - movement
Population control: policy, coercion, and conspiracy
The history of controlling human numbers: the eugenics roots, the birth-control movement and Planned Parenthood, the mid-century population-control push, and the forced sterilizations that really happened...
politicssocietyscienceeconomy - pillar
The pillars of modern power
The load-bearing power blocks of modern society, read off the data itself: money and finance; state, law, and coercion; military and security; production and labor; land and resources; infrastructure and logistics...
pillarpoliticseconomysociety - religion
The New Age and the prosperity gospel
The New Age movement and its cousins: the Theosophical roots, the documented Lucis Trust and World Goodwill links to the UN, the New Thought lineage, and the modern prosperity-gospel preachers...
religionculturepoliticssociety