African Culture Websites

The Kenya Crisis has caused attention to the people in Kenya and African culture in recent times. Kwani is an amazing organization that empowers African history in Kenya to be documented. Kwani devotes funds to the intellectual and creative people who will preserve the culture and freedom of Kenya. Books and writers are working on bringing the history and culture of Kenya to the forefront of people’s minds for generations to come. The Kenya Crisis has brought attention to the the election instability, culture and history of Kenya. Rocketboom’s wikia page provides a chronicle of the crisis and links to Kenyan blogs including Kwani, a journal about African culture in Kenya. The website gives you the information you need right on the home page and is easy to navigate.

The Cambridge Journal is a website that covers the history and culture of Africa. It’s information comes from a list of editors and includes published information from journals and focuses on a wide variety of regions and geographic cultures. The topics of this website are not all based on old African civilizations, but most is. It’s for people willing to subscribe and pay. There is a link to a small amount of free journals on the website which link to information open with no charge. This information is free for anyone to consume, but limited in the breadth of topics. The free information includes health information, language, history and reviews among other topics.

The Cambridge Journal’s approach let’s the reader navigate through the information by powering it’s own search box. You can type a keyword into the search box and check a circle that tells the website if you are looking for journals or related content. The search results appear similar to how they appear if you search on google. They are listed out with a title and a little bit of meta data attached so you can read what the search result is about before having to click on the link. On the right hand side of all search results you can check a box that will add the journal to your cart. It appears the search results only result in different journal results instead of all information related to the key term such as blog posts or articles. After browsing the free journals I came across an interesting journal that I think is worth checking out. It’s called “Urban History” and covers everything from social to economic features in Africa. The journal talks about cultural aspects and politics of cities and towns through out their history.

Kwani is different from the Cambridge Journal because it’s not about reading journals from people who have formulaically written history on Africa. Instead Kwani is a journal itself. It is not a place to search for journals. Kwani empowers writers to go out an document Kenyan history through creative ways like poetry and fiction where as the Cambridge Journal is a resource that shows you thousands of journals on different subjects. The two websites are similar because they help to get written information out there about African culture. They both preserve and document African culture, heritage and history. Both are resourceful and helpful journals. I’m not going to lie, Kwani has a far more engaging website with a community that is flourishing, for example, on Facebook they have 500 involved members and are growing.