(Link Gems is a weekly round-up of interesting articles and essays from around the web)

• Anna Clark on The Mysterious Death of Sammy Wanjiru, the Kenyan long-distance runner (from Grantland).

“Here is what we know about the death of Sammy Wanjiru: It happened late in the early hours of May 15 at his posh home in Nyahururu, a Rift Valley town about 100 miles from Nairobi. Sammy fell from a second-story balcony — a drop of about 16 feet — and landed on the pavement outside. He lost consciousness. Hospital doctors could not revive him.

Here is the mystery: whether Sammy fell, jumped, or was pushed.”

• Here’s What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About… (in Business Insider and via Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog in The Atlantic).
• A nice piece on Doreen Baingana’s return to Uganda, her homeland.  She wrote Tropical Fish and Other Stories .
• On SlutWalk and Racism from The Crunk Feminist Collective: 

“But let me tell you, for the record, what I do and don’t understand (all at the same time):
(Why) White folks love the n-word and they keep trying to find a way to use it. And ain’t nobody fooled by these claims of confusion, because for some reason that confusion about off-limits terminology doesn’t extend to those terms reclaimed by Jewish communities, LGBTQ communities, or people with disabilities. Only to the n-word.
(Why) Black women and the fact that we are always Black and female at exactly the same time is a fact that continues to elude white women.”

• Richard Bowden on the new film, When China Met Africa, by the Francis brothers (source:  African Arguments).
• Gukira on Reading Binyavanga I.  I’m very interested in this series:

“Over the next few weeks (perhaps months), I hope to engage with One Day I Will Write about This Place. I’m interested in what it means to read it now, what it means to read it as a Kenyan, what it means to read it as an academic, what it means to read it as Binyavanga’s friend, what it means to read it as someone with an oblique relationship to Kenyan masculinity. Each of these positions (and several others that remain unmentioned) condition a certain reading experience: each position comes with certain expectations, certain desires, certain assumptions.”

• Pedro Pires and the Mo Ibrahim African Leadership Prize: I think I agree with Mike Jennings (from African Arguments).
• An excellent and hilarious explanation on why the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk is unpopular in Turkey, his own country (from Fikir Mahsulleri Ofisi).

“Few people seemed to share my experience, not only with My Name is Red but with his other books too. People found Pamuk’s writing style tedious, his sentences too long, his characters too cynical and unlikable, and his references too Islamic and oriental – “he makes Turkey sound like a Middle Eastern country” people would often complain. Pamuk was like nothing they read, and they didn’t like it.”

• For fun and writing: The 25 Synonyms for “Expression” (source: DailyWritingTips).
• An open letter to Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister (source:  The Standard):

“I do not think it is wise to take comfort in being Prime Minister, Ministers or MPs and councillors in a government such as this one, at this stage. Everyone knows that MDC does not have any say in what is going on in this hopeless inclusive government arrangement. While the most reasonable minds take it that the struggle for democracy is still on, the behaviour of your ministers leaves a lot to be desired. The electorate wants to know why your party seems to be losing focus and concentrating more on the ministerial vehicles. Is the issue of driving posh vehicles the purpose of being in government? If that is the case, why would you want to convince the electorate that your party is different from the Zanu PF government?’