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Nyabola Nanjala. 2018. Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya. London: Zed Books. 273 pp.
Nyabola Nanjala is a political analyst, a writer, and humanitarian advocate based in Nairobi. Her accomplished academic achievements include two MSc degrees from the University of Oxford, which she earned as a Rhodes Scholar. Additionally, she holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School. This highly refreshing, innovative, and descriptive narrative sheds light on contemporary Kenya, highlighting the impact of technology on its political and social systems, and plumbing the depths of the intersection between technology and politics.
The introduction begins with this riveting sentence: "It began with a rumour." Nanjala then proceeds to comprehensively narrate the (in)famous role that social media played in the near demise of an indigenous bank, Chase Bank, Kenya in April 2016, when messages on various WhatsApp groups announced that the bank was financially troubled. The rumour jumped onto Twitter with a well-known Kenyan personality, Mumbi Seriki tweeting that the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) while conducting audits of Chase Bank had discovered billions of Kenyan shillings missing from...