Category: Features

By Chelangat Caren,

 

On a sunlit morning at Daystar University’s Athi River campus, the sound of hymns mingled with the clink of polished gavel replicas. It was not a courtroom in session, but something that could reshape it: the unveiling of the David Musau Mumama Learning Complex, Daystar’s new home for legal education.

 

In a country where courtrooms often feel distant and justice feels delayed, Daystar has laid a foundation—literally and philosophically—for a different kind of lawyer. One trained not just in statutes and precedents but in ethics, faith, and the weight of responsibility that comes with holding the law in your hands.

The complex is more than glass, steel, and lecture halls. Vice Chancellor Prof. Laban Ayiro called it “a demonstration of faith put into action,” noting that the land itself was a significant donation, given with a long-term vision for Kenya’s legal landscape.

 

Named after David Musau Mumama, the facility stands as a tribute to sacrifice and partnership. It represents years of fundraising, collaboration with legal practitioners, and a belief that legal training in Kenya needs more than technical skill. It needs moral anchoring.

 

The launch, officiated by Anglican Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit, drew students, faculty, and legal professionals under the theme _Excellence in Christ-centred legal education and leadership for nation building.” The message was clear: Daystar is not training lawyers to win cases at all costs but training leaders to rebuild public trust in justice.

 

Kenya’s legal system has long struggled with perceptions of corruption, delay, and detachment from the lived realities of ordinary citizens. Law students graduate fluent in precedent but often unequipped to navigate the ethical gray zones that define real practice.

 

Daystar’s response is to embed ethics into the very architecture of learning. The complex is designed to expand academic capacity, improve practical training facilities, and create spaces where moot courts and client consultations feel less like simulations and more like preparation for the weight of advocacy.

 

Archbishop Sapit’s address cut to the core of this mission. “Law may codify justice and courts may interpret it, but justice itself does not originate from human systems; it is rooted in the character of God,” he said. Without ethical grounding, he warned, the law becomes a tool for the powerful rather than a shield for the vulnerable.

 

That warning lands differently when spoken inside a new facility built on donated land, by a university that openly roots its identity in faith. It’s a challenge to the legal profession: Will you use this training to serve or to exploit?

 

The timing is significant. Daystar’s School of Law has been steadily growing its reputation for producing graduates who think critically and act ethically. The new complex signals an ambition to scale that impact.

 

Students now have access to purpose-built spaces for legal scholarship, public lectures, and innovation in legal practice. The recent public lecture on legal scholarship, held just before the launch, showed the kind of academic conversations the school wants to host—ones that connect theory to Kenya’s social and political realities.

 

It also positions Daystar to contribute to East Africa’s cross-border legal services landscape. Partnerships like the one between BM Musau Advocates LLP and Interlaw Global, recently highlighted at the university, point to a future where Daystar-trained lawyers operate beyond Kenyan borders with a distinct ethical brand.

Buildings don’t make lawyers. People do. But the right building, built for the right purpose, can shape the kind of people who walk out of it.The David Musau Mumama Learning Complex is Daystar’s statement that legal education can’t be separated from character. In a profession often criticized for prioritizing procedure over people, Daystar is betting that faith, ethics, and academic rigor can coexist—and that the graduates who walk these halls will carry that balance into courtrooms, boardrooms, and public office.

 

As the hymns faded and the doors opened to students, one thing was clear: this isn’t just a new facility. It’s an invitation to reimagine what justice looks like when it’s rooted in something deeper than statute.

 

If that invitation is taken seriously, the impact will not stay within Athi River’s gates. It will walk out into Kenya’s courts, its communities, and its future.

 

By Benjamin Huegel,

After centuries of being omitted from the national narrative, 2.6 million African-Mexicans are finally being counted, but the struggle for cultural preservation continues.
The building itself is unremarkable, at first glance just another commercial building in Costa Chica, vandalised with intricate graffiti. Closer inspection reveals that this is not merely graffiti but a surprising chronicle of a people’s history. It depicts bronze villagers strumming their guitars and, looming over and around them, dramatic dancing devil-men.
Stepping inside, the mural continues, showing luscious landscapes and the portrait of one of the founding members of the country. His hair is dense, and his skin a dark brown. On opposite walls hang photographs of Mexicans wearing traditional attire, but once again, their hair is different, and their skin is darker. This is the Afro-Mexican Museum in Costa Chica, Guerrero, Mexico.
Not long ago there were 68 constitutionally recognised ethnic groups and more than 300 different languages in Mexico. Most populous among these are the Nahuas and the Yucatec, whose roots go back to pre-Hispanic days.
But one group that has been largely unrecognised is the Afro-Mexicans, or Afro-Mestizos, as they are known locally. When the museum in Costa Chica opened in 1999, it was the very first formal recognition. The municipal president likened it to a “stone that says we exist, which will be remembered by visitors for 2,000 years.”
The museum houses a unique collection of photos and displays showcasing the history of this group as far back as the 17th century. One display is a large model of a Spanish galleon split in half to reveal the inhumane conditions in which their “cargo” was transported across the Atlantic. Although history has shown that some Africans arrived voluntarily, most of the original African population arrived in shackles.
By the early 1600s, forced labour and European diseases had largely decimated the indigenous population. Demand for an alternative workforce increased exponentially. Colin A. Palmer, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, writes that between 1530 and 1640 around 110,500 slaves arrived in what was then New Spain.
It is in these early years of New Spain that Gaspar Yanga, a runaway slave of Congolese descent, led a slave uprising against the Spanish Crown. The newly freed slaves were victorious and established San Lorenzo de los Negros in Veracruz (renamed Yanga in 1932), the first free town in the Americas.
In the last days of the slave trade, more of these free towns sprang up around southern Mexico; Costa Chica is one of them. A diorama at the centre of the museum shows visitors small circular mud huts surrounding a busy market and farmers harvesting their crops.
Artefacts belonging to this Afro-Mexican culture are also proudly displayed, among them hollowed-out gourds and ritual masks. Masks like these, adorned with antlers and horsehair, are still used today in the Dance of the Devils, a ritual originally performed by the slaves, as an appeal for the gods to liberate them from Spanish oppression. Few could have guessed that liberation would come, two centuries later, by the hand of their very own descendant.

September 16th, 1810, marked the beginning of Mexico’s war against Spanish rule. That same year, Vicente Guerrero, an Afro-mestizo and humble mule driver, joined the struggle, moving quickly up the ranks of the rebel army.
Victory was slow to come. Despite countless defeats, betrayals and the deaths of most of its founding leaders, the movement was kept alive by Guerrero, now a general. Finally, on the 27th of September 1821, he marched into the capital of a newly independent nation, and in 1829 he became the second president of the Mexican Republic.
His policies were revolutionary even by today’s standards. Free education and agrarian reforms that favoured the lower class – the kind of policies that conservative elites won’t accept willingly. Less than nine months into his presidency, Guerrero was betrayed and assassinated. His most celebrated contribution to the country was the abolition of slavery.
As of 2020, Afro-Mexicans represent 2% of the total population (2.6 million). Despite their significant numbers, many Mexicans are not even aware of their existence. One of the reasons is that Afro-Mex identity has long been omitted from the country’s history or, in some cases, completely whitewashed. Guerrero himself is often depicted in paintings and textbooks with white skin and European features.
Few of the contributions mentioned in this article have made their way into state-mandated textbooks. Speaking to the Pulitzer Centre, social anthropologist Gabriela Nieto said that when Black history is incorporated, it is often through the context of slavery: “The participation of Afro-descendants is left out.”

Today, the Costa Chica museum, that stone to serve as a reminder of their existence for 2000
years, faces foreclosure. The founding committee has abandoned it, and its staff has been unpaid for 15 years. Its sole attendant, Angelica Alvarado, acts as curator, tour guide and caretaker. “The doors to the museum must stay open because there are children growing up here who do not want to be Black,” she told the Guardian. “This space shows us where we came from, who we are and why we should be proud of our identity.”
Much like the war for independence, the fight for recognition has been slow, but there is progress. In 2019 the number of recognised ethnic groups increased from 68 to 69 with the addition of the Afro-Mexicans. And 2020 marked the first year that Afro-Mexicans were able to self-identify in the National Census. “We exist,” a Black resident of Costa Chica told the Guardian. “We have a culture, and we proudly say that we’re Mexican.”