Lennox Odiemo-Munara provides us with a taste of ‘Ten Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing’, which revisits the winning short stories and those by other renowned writers of African literature. Odiemo-Munara concludes that as the Caine Prize enters its second decade, ‘we are certainly sure of marvelling the more at the grounding of a… literary tradition of a continent. It is a tradition that… “will bring many unsuspected gifts and wonderful surprises to the world in the fullness of time”.’

Horace Campbell’s is a timely and necessary call on the African person to seriously reflect the Zimbabwean condition in the light of the so-called neocolonial/neo-imperialist politics.

While we do not deny the horrors of these 'neo-influences', we sadly underline the tendency to over-emphasise them and the failure to see Mugabe & Co.'s ugliness. I was participant in the CODESSRIA Conference, and, yes, the argument by Mamdani, Shivji... (lead proponents of the Statement) about Zimbabwe seemed intellectually so strained (a colleague saw it as vacuous!).

Of course to talk of military intervention in Zimbabwe is naive, but to continue praising Mugabe's banal conceptualisation of 'independent Zimbabwe' is surely a madness.

Simiyu Barasa ‘s reminds us of the extreme care we ought to take as human beings to ensure that sanity is an everyday leitmotif in our existences.

Haply, in every sense, recoursing back to Immanuel Kant, even in the most desperate of our conditions, to reaffirm that we still cherish the 'essence of humanity' and aspire towards a 'highness'.