ReadingKenya 🇰🇪

Getting to know my Kenya, the country it is, the people we are. How better to do this than through her literature? #ReadingKenya

[ReadingKenya 🇰🇪 @ReadingKenya]

What does it mean to be a Kenyan? I’m looking for books on Kenya and by Kenyans, preferably fiction, especially from or about our lesser known communities or communities of lower population. Kindly recommend books and sources? #ReadingKenya #KoT #KenyanBooks #BookRecommendations

[ReadingKenya 🇰🇪 @ReadingKenya]

Thought-provoking article. Kenya@50 is worth reading.
https://t.co/oIcWVUJamb #ReadingKenya #Kenya

[ReadingKenya 🇰🇪 @ReadingKenya]

@iamToluDaniel @TroyOnyango But also, homegrown institutions can begin to resolve the issues you point out. One of the immediate difficulties around this are the inextricable commercial aspects of the industry.

[ReadingKenya 🇰🇪 @ReadingKenya]

@iamToluDaniel @TroyOnyango I struggle a little with this idea of legibility, and I’ve got more thoughts than a tweet could capture.

[Oscar Kibet @KibetMaiyo12272]

By Meja Mwangi and published in 1980

[ReadingKenya 🇰🇪 @ReadingKenya]

@CIAtumah @AfroBloggers It really is. It’s the book I recommend as a sterling example of writing children.

[MGM @mwanigaminage]

This book by Meja Mwangi needs to be made available to learners across Kenya. So many history lessons, so well written! I couldn’t put it down 👏

[Sparrow🦜 @_KabiruMuraya]

Lexa Lubanga has single handedly kept the zeal in keeping Meja Mwangi flame and flag high.
She's one iron Lady I Know can move the literary world to Mars

[Kinyanjui Kombani @KKombani]

Of the many Meja Mwangi books that I have read, none has a more profound impact on me and my writing than 'Little White Man' (also published as 'Mzungu boy'.

[Drunken Lectures @drunkenlectures]

Calling out to all academics, researchers, students, writers, yappers, thought sons n daughters everyone and everybody!!
We are working on a body of work that needs your contributions! We wanna publish! Not hinting what yet. Is it a book? A website? A journal? A newspaper?

[Silas Nyanchwani @nyanchwani]

Meja Mwangi, who died yesterday, is/was the Greatest KENYAN Writer of all time.

I emphasize KENYAN, before I get into trouble with Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s disciples. Ngugi, who died in May this year, was a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, a continental (African) and global figure, widely regarded as one of the most consequential postcolonial writers, thinkers, and philosophers, especially in the English-speaking world.

But back home, Ngugi’s universe was the Kikuyu community (nothing absolutely wrong with this, as some of his detractors kept harping about it every time he was perennially nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature). Ngugi’s first four novels were set against the backdrop of the Mau Mau and colonialism. None of these in any way negates Ngugi’s contribution to Kenyan letters, but he was of the world.

Enter Meja Mwangi.
Meja was ours. Kenyan to the core.
Meja Mwangi’s literature was more cosmopolitan, as most of his books were set in Nairobi, a synecdoche for Kenya and the Kenyan.

I first read Going Down River while in Class 8 or Form 1. I couldn’t put the book down. The prose was viscerally realistic. The writing was too detailed; it’s little wonder I learned later in life that Meja Mwangi went on to be a filmmaker. I wish I could watch any of his screen productions. Mwangi was only 28 when he penned what I consider the greatest Kenyan novel of all time and generations.

Nearly 35 years later, when the film Nairobi Half-Life was released, I observed that very little of Nairobi had changed between 1976 and 2012. Nairobi Half-Life was a descendant of Going Down River Road. That Nairobi underclass that will never change, no matter the speed of our internet, the Expressways, you people adopting BDSM, and such.

Around 2014, my uncle (bless his soul) took me back to Kibera to show me where I was born and spent part of my childhood. It was almost 20 years later. For sure, the roads were now paved, and there were huge streetlights, but that slum vibe was still there. My uncle took me to a woman who had been brewing chang’aa since the 1980s, still doing her thing, and introduced me to her, and told her this is the Son of Norah, and she was like, “How did you get so big?”

While there, I couldn’t help but think about how every part of Nairobi changes: people move on, out, and about, but our slums eternally retain that gritty persona. People may come and go, but newcomers always slip into the slum persona like gloves.

Anyone who grew up in Nairobi’s slums, Eastlands, Kawangware, Kangemi, can identify with all the characters in Meja Mwangi’s books, such as Going Down River Road, Kill Me Quick, Cockroach Dance, and a host of his other latter-day works. Any Kenyan, for that matter, save for the upper middle-class and the rich folks who live in a completely different Nairobi. Kill Me Quick " is the story most of us can relate to, because education promised us so much, and we moved to Nairobi, but now we live with no jobs, and all we can do is drink cheap liquor (Kill Me Quick), eat miraa, and smoke joints, because we are disillusioned. Younger millennials and Gen Zs definitely know what I am talking about.

Along with other writers such as Mwangi Ruheni, Mwangi Gicheru, Charles Mangua, and the Kibera brothers, Meja was among those who captured the zeitgeist of Nairobi and Kenya, as writers like Ngugi became full ideologues and full-time revolutionaries. Mwangi opted to be a revolutionary with his pen, hiding behind satire (that escaped authorities), while entertaining and provoking us.

Sadly, Mwangi was extremely reclusive and rarely granted interviews to scholars or journalists.

Last year, he wanted to come out and meet his fans and lovers of his work, thanks to the spirited efforts of his adopted literary daughter, @Lexa_Lubanga. We cleared our schedules in readiness to meet the man, the myth, and the legend himself, but unfortunately, he was taken ill, and that particular meet-up didn’t happen, and none would ever happen, as he has been sickly, and now he is gone.

A few years back, I asked what the Kenyan novel should be, and my choice was Going Down River Road.

The irony of his dying on the Eve of our 62nd anniversary of Independence is not lost on me, more so when successive regimes are determined to keep the youth poor, unemployed, and disillusioned, like a character in Mwangi’s book.

You can draw a straight line from Going Down River Road, to Ukoo Fulani’s Tafsiri Hii (1997), to Nairobi Half Life (2012), to Wakadinali’s Geri Inengi (2021), to whatever song that will come out of Kayole in 2030, depicting the never-changing life in the ghetto.

He leaves behind a vast body of work.

May Meja Mwangi travel well to the land yonder. Say hi to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, David Mulwa, Mwangi Gicheru, Margaret Ogola, Grace Ogot, Micere Mugo, Binyavanga Wainaina, and all the great men and women of letters we lost.

Photo: Courtesy

[ReadingKenya 🇰🇪 @ReadingKenya]

@joemacharia_ @nyanchwani Any chance you can lend me your copy?

[ReadingKenya 🇰🇪 @ReadingKenya]

@Geoz_ @nyanchwani This is out of print, sadly.

[ReadingKenya 🇰🇪 @ReadingKenya]

@wooliekondoo @nyanchwani He wrote 25 books. Of these, I believe just 3, dubbed The Nairobi Trilogy, are set in Nairobi.

[Wallace Kantai @wgkantai]

Many will (rightly) praise Meja Mwangi for his remarkable oeuvre. But one book constantly gets left out, perhaps because it is perceived as (only) a children’s/ YA book. But ‘Little White Man’ is perhaps Meja’s best book. Certainly in the five best novels ever written in Kenya.

[Lexa W. Lubanga @Lexa_Lubanga]

Meja Mwangi books that I would pay anything to read them for the first time.❤️

1. Rafiki Man Guitar
2. Burying Caesar
3. Gazelle that dreamt she was na Elephant
4. The Cockraoch Dance
5. Christmas Without Tusker
.
#readmejamwangi #mejamwangi #mejaturns77 #kenyanliterature

[ReadingKenya 🇰🇪 @ReadingKenya]

@Mishi_2210 15 squares

[Lexa W. Lubanga @Lexa_Lubanga]

❤️😞.

[ReadingKenya 🇰🇪 @ReadingKenya]

@mwanigaminage Took my breath away.

[ReadingKenya 🇰🇪 @ReadingKenya]

Once in a while you come across a piece of writing that takes your breath away and then some. And kuna vile Kenyans will get it and get it and get it again. #ReadingKenya #GloriahMwaniga #Nairobi

[MGM @mwanigaminage]

I wrote an elegy for Nairobi. A city that I love so much but also …

Here’s the link to the prose poem
https://t.co/nn3uZaBhxW

[ReadingKenya 🇰🇪 @ReadingKenya]

@mullaaxo Hi Muna. I’d love to get in touch.