To be a woman in Kenya is to be repeatedly un-homed. This society refuses the right of women to be at home, as the increasingly frightening statistics on domestic violence indicate

I am finding it very difficult to join in the jubilation about Senator Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.

I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him if he had come to know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.

If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to retain most elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.

Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he had remained ours, with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death.

I've had you on my "favourites" side-bar for the longest time, and I had (bad Wambui!) not visited for some time. Thus I am doubly grateful, doubly astonished, and doubly honoured that a) you even read the thing I wrote in Kwani - I think that was the one article everyone else skipped over and b) that you were so gracious and complimentary about it.

I am as vulnerable to flattery as anyone else, but this comes at a particularly opportune time, as I was just deciding that the quality of my writing could be matched by my cat, and that the last decent idea I had was to grow dreadlocks, which didn't help my intellectual output. So thank you from my heart, really, for the shot in the arm that you have just given me, and my very best wishes.