April Zhu

April Zhu (朱萸) is a freelance journalist and writer based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work focuses on gender, urban inequality, and China-Kenya as seen from the margin.

She is the producer of Until Everyone Is Free, a Sheng podcast on the life and work of Kenyan socialist and freedom fighter Pio Gama Pinto. She was a Senior Editor at Guernica Magazine, a 2023 Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow, and a 2020 Blakemore Freeman Foundation Fellow.

Selected works:
Bad Witness
Vanishing Line
The Look of a Nation
A Lost ‘Little Africa’
Kenya Turns Its Covid-19 Crisis into a Human Rights Emergency

features

Vanishing Line
Guernica (5 December 2023)

It is said that Al-Shabaab is why Kenya's largest infrastructure megaproject, in Lamu, north coast, cannot progress. But if we see Lamu less a battlefield than a frontier — LAPSSET an echo of a colonial railway with no raison d’être — we find a different story.

A Climate Dispatch from Kenya
Drift Magazine (1 November 2022)

When the future arrives in Kenya, it often leaves people behind. Kenya’s renewable energy plans are mired by the haunting ways in which “sustainable development” often rhymes with the colonial exploitation that resulted in the underdevelopment of the country in the first place.

What Kenya’s Killer Cops Reveal About Police Culture
SAPIENS (6 April 2022)

Police killings will not end until society reckons with the fact that certain killings are still "acceptable." This and other insights from anthropologists can help us understand why Kenya's well-funded attempts at police reform have not worked.

A Death Penalty for the Poor
The Baffler Magazine (30 July 2020)

The physical toxicity of urban informal settlements is projected onto those who live there: they are criminal, immoral, non-citizen. This logic of disposability undergirds systematic police brutality against Kenya's poor.

It takes a village
Rest of World (7 July 2020)

Unlike fintech that uses social relationships to extract profit, this community (crypto)currency capitalizes on solidarity. It values essential work — like community health volunteers' — that is otherwise "unseen" by the economy.

COVID-19 Coverage for The New Humanitarian

African countries struggle to find the coronavirus test kits they need (18 May 2020)
Coronavirus exposes Africa’s oxygen problem (16 Apr 2020)
Five ideas on how to ease the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns in Kenya (6 Apr 2020)
Which African countries are most vulnerable to the coronavirus? (24 Feb 2020)
Ready or not? Africa and the coronavirus (6 Feb 2020)

Kenya’s Labor Market Wasn’t Made for a Pandemic
Foreign Policy (10 Apr 2020)

Informal workers propped up the country’s economy — until they were suddenly struggling to survive.

Kenyan students in Wuhan plead for evacuation
SupChina (5 Feb 2020)

The African country with the most students in Hubei Province has so far offered no assistance to get any of them out.

Sustainability in Kenya
Goethe-Institut Kenya (6 May 2020)

A six-part series commissioned by Goethe-Institut Kenya that expands the meaning of “sustainability” in Kenya by drawing attention to local issues and solutions.

In Kenya, Chinese arrivals are targeted by Jehovah’s Witnesses speaking Chinese
South China Morning Post Magazine (5 Oct 2019)

The idea that Chinese migrants — through some kind of atavistic insularity — remain untouched by their new homes in Kenya flattens Chinese people and underestimates the life-altering influence of Kenya's unique religion-scape.

The Return of Ondiri Swamp
Atlas Obscura (14 Aug 2019)

Exploited for years, these vital wetlands near Nairobi are blooming anew thanks to a remarkable grassroots effort.

Sanitary Pads, The “It Girl” Of Development
BRIGHT Magazine (1 Mar 2019)

Menstrual products have become the "silver bullet" of development. But why isn't anyone talking about the real issue, menstrual stigma?

As Kenyan Maasai abandon girls' ritual cutting, elders lead the way
CS Monitor (1 Mar 2019)

Cultural elders publicly announced that the Loita Maasai were abandoning female circumcision and replacing it with an alternative rite of passage called orkuaak ng’ejuk lemurata oo ntoyie.

The Woman Who Wants To Legalize Female Genital Cutting
BRIGHT Magazine (8 Mar 2018)

In Kenya, FGC has always had its defenders, but this time, it’s a woman physician — and she’s taking it to court.

Amid Reports of Widespread Rape by Police, Kenyan Women Seek Justice
VICE (17 Jan 2018)

Sixty-five Kenyan women say they experienced sexual violence at the hands of state security agents last fall. Now, survivors are turning to activists for help in the harrowing task of reporting the police to the police.

Only God Can Kill Them
Roads & Kingdoms (7 Sep 2016)

Part pseudo-government, part brutal mafia, the Burnees lord over Nairobi’s Kibera slum.

Essays/Commentary

Bad Witness: What I Didn’t Say About Reporting on Chinese Christians in Kenya
Off Assignment (6 September 2023)

An essay about the thin line between longform journalist and native informant, about the piece I most regret writing.

The Look of a Nation
Triple Canopy (28 February 2022)

On the blindspots of a homogenizing “China in Africa” fiction, which fails to consider things like, even in an increasingly China-skeptical Kenya, the fabric that has become a visual shortcut for Africanness in Kenyan fashion has for years all come from China — virtually unnoticed.

Obituary: Emma Gama Pinto
The Elephant (31 October 2020)

We do not yet have the language to honor women like Emma in liberation struggles. Women who advocated, to husbands wearing blinkers, a complex worldview where political organising carries a steep opportunity cost.

Kenya Turns Its Covid-19 Crisis into a Human Rights Emergency
New York Review of Books Daily (22 July 2020)

Nairobi always grows in two directions at once. As it reaches for "modernity," its anti-city — slums where the Constitution doesn't work — follows. There, colonial violence is still inflicted and the war for independence still waged.

When We Lose Our Fear: A Saba Saba Reflection
The Elephant (9 July 2020)

On Saba Saba, the state denied grassroots organizers the dignity of even appearing before the Kenyan public. So they turned their own bodies — already archives of everyday state violence — into a medium that clarified police violence beyond doubt.

Homeless in the City
Africa is a Country (20 Jun 2020)
Originally published in The Elephant (2 Aug 2018)

The brutal and illegal evictions of Nairobi’s poor to make way for infrastructure demonstrates that the city remains true to its colonial origins as a space for the elite.

A Lost ‘Little Africa’
New York Review of Books Daily (5 May 2020)

Guangzhou's "Little Africa" was a window to a more complicated, ungovernable, shared future for Chinese and Africans. It called the bluff of Sino-African destiny; it was the opposite of inevitability. That window has closed.

Sinophobia Spreads Faster Than the Coronavirus
The Elephant (28 Feb 2020)

Sinophobia maps on differently in a country where China is a looming neocolonial spectre. Still, coronavirus, this diasporic disease, requires us to manage our lives against gazes. Above all, it shrinks the space within which we can grieve.

Legacies of Othering in Kibra and Chinatown
The Elephant (6 Sep 2019)

Like Kibra, Chinatowns were the frontiers of Othering, designed into nascent cities newly established by European settlers. They were “vice-towns,” diametrically opposed to other parts of the “good city.”

Why it’s farcical that UN-Habitat’s first assembly is being held in Nairobi
African Arguments (31 May 2019)

Almost all the new developments that have come to define the Kenyan capital’s fast-paced growth are technically illegal.

Reading ‘The Dragonfly Sea’
Brainstorm (7 May 2019)

A review of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s latest novel The Dragonfly Sea.

Nowhere to Run: How Urban Terrorism Is Impacting Nairobi’s Architecture and Public Spaces
The Elephant (22 Feb 2019)

In Nairobi, where inclusive, truly public spaces have long been “designed” out, where the attack happened in one of the most insulated, formidable-looking, closed-off, “safest” places, the horror of urban terror attacks runs deeper.

Winging It With Blinky
Brainstorm (25 Dec 2018)

“Blinky” Bill Sellanga’s first solo album is an anthem for the young creative just trying to “do the thing.”