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Fortunately, life took a while to kill him, but not long enough for us to get used to his absence from our midst. Because Meja Mwangi always looked ahead to Kenya’s future, even when it still pretended not to recognize itself in the mirror, and today, without him, this society moves towards the future at two different speeds and what we insist on calling “development” seems even more centrifugal, more disjointed, more difficult to describe without lying. In a Kenya that was still searching for its literary voice, and which had professors who were as cumbersome as they were cultured and brilliant, such as Ngũgĩ himself, to recount the history, transformations, and contradictions of the country, Mwangi’s novels, even when he goes back to relive the Mau Mau epic, do not claim to bring the reader over to the writer’s side, but to involve them in situations so real that they become educational, probably without meaning to. He has never celebrated himself, never created controversy on purpose.
This is probably why, in the year 2025 that took away that most celebrated giant Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Meja’s passing went almost unnoticed by the newspapers and the crocodiles of social media. Yet Meja is surprisingly well known and loved by young people, by Gen Z. This is because his novels have such contemporary language, characters, and visions that even those who live in suburban Kenya today can relate to them, and the scenes he evokes are very close to the way young people themselves tell stories, which today may be expressed through rap music or graphic novels rather than in “novel form”.
A run through Meja’s writings
When Meja begins writing about her people, between the 1960s and 1970s, independent Kenya is already losing its innocence. Tom Mboya has been murdered, there follows the mysterious Argwings-Kodhek accident, but in the undergrowth of the corridors of power, there seems to be such wild and uncontrolled freedom of action, thought, and invention that for a writer not yet thirty, arriving from Nanyuki, the capital offers stories that begin with morning tea and mandazi and end at dawn outside the bars of River Road and the Cross Lane brothels.
Meja was passionate about cinema, feeding on French and Italian neorealism wherever he could, but also on American action films. He wrote his first stories as screenplays, painting the characters as if they were about to leap off the page and take shape, even though they know that a bullet, prison, or prostitution awaits them.
Cinema is made up of details, lights, close-up glances, nuances punctuated by music or a cut in the frame. Meja Mwangi’s literary greatness lies in his ability to use his visions and often his irony to render all this in his “blind cinema” and get the reader to imagine it so well. More than his contemporary colleagues, Meja’s writing is influenced by the lessons of crime writer (and screenwriter) Raymond Chandler and the disenchanted, romantic cynicism of the great John Fante, father of the beat generation and another soul of downtown.
That downtown Meja painted from the worn leather seats of matatus, from the daily procession of thousands of compatriots walking in the May rain without umbrellas and dressed the same way in January, without ever slipping into folklore or cheap compassion. He uncovered uncomfortable truths and popular passions and gave them the dignity of a high-quality novel. Without self-celebration, out of a habit of observing but deeply experiencing what he would later write about.
In his masterpiece Going Down River Road, suspended between autobiography and disillusionment, Mwangi tackles rural-urban migration and the daily commute of those who travelled from the outskirts in search of fortune in an expanding CBD. In the earlier Kill Me Quick, he focuses on the harsh process of settlement. It is an initiation into the city’s perverse logic, where you either bare your teeth or are devoured by jaws disturbingly similar to your own; at first you refuse to believe it, then you adapt. The young Meja – protagonist of the novel that would inspire generations of screenwriters, musicians, and pop artists who gathered in the most infamous and creative clubs between River Road and Grogan Road – must choose whether to risk his life amid the daily traps of an independence made of fragile opportunities and constant deceit, or to join organized crime and the ruthless codes of one of the capital’s earliest baby gangs.
As someone said (but Meja himself just smiled at me and, coughing, said, “I don’t remember”), he is the one who coined the grim wordplay “Nairobbery”, which became the city’s nickname for many years, creating in the collective imaginary a sense of insecurity previously unknown, one that would shape the years to come, forcing Westerners and Kenya’s upper classes to avoid entire neighbourhoods, while pushing the poor to embrace lifestyles they would never escape.
A people walking on foot for miles and miles through an unfamiliar city that grows more familiar each day, only for seemingly quiet streets to turn, at night, into realms of danger and excess, of lives without tomorrow. If you have never heard, while reading a novel, the sound of your shoes on the asphalt, between uneven sidewalks, sudden potholes, and organic obstacles, or felt the taste of warm beer in your mouth, pick up Kill Me Quick or Going Down River Road. This is not salon literature, it is cutting-edge. Police sirens mounted on dry, cinematic, often ironic prose. Reading them means walking alongside their characters, understanding that Nairobi is not a symbolic capital, but a living organism that waits for no one.
“Gut and balls”: The inspiration behind his writings
In an interview he gave me, which I included in my book Nairobi, The Visible City, Meja told me what inspired him most, the driving force behind the tenacious life he lived in his early years in Nairobi and which armed his pen.
“Social inequalities, spoken of as a weed born out of nowhere, an exclusive evil of the Third Millennium, sprouted in Nairobi then,” he told me, ordering a beer in the downtown-style bar where we hang out. The migration to the cities created a competition never seen before, which contrasted with the community spirit of the rural areas. There were those who went to work in the homes of Indians or other Kenyans, trying to earn a living and send something back to the village. At the same time, the new ruling class bought land close to the CBD, building houses for the toiling masses or warehouses for products and materials for which they held the exclusive rights to import, thanks to their inclusion in the ganglia of politics and bureaucracy.
Almost all the big Kenyan businessmen, especially those who had been involved in the independence process, began to establish their empire from Nairobi. That aspect was something new in Kenya, a modern aspect of business centralization: the operational headquarters in the city and the production centres, such as farms or factories, in the hinterland, if not further away. The Nairobi of today was born in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Along with the offices and shops came a vibrant undergrowth of restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues, as well as suppliers of every need and bargain hunters. The infamous matatu also materialised at that time, to ferry back and forth the many commuters of the exponentially growing Nairobi. The migration from rural areas of those seeking opportunities also brought with it new poverty and exploitation – which flirted with crime and lives at the margins, between drugs and prostitution. River Road was a bit of a watershed, a way of snatching away with tooth and knife an ephemeral remnant of the city. But Nairobi was also a workshop of creative insights for me as well as for a whole generation of Kenyan writers and artists, who used to find themselves in seedy bars and inns, amidst drinkers of home-brewed alcoholic poison, brawlers, prostitutes, and professional shooters, from which getting out alive was indifferently a matter of “gut and balls”.
I believe it was the awareness and excitement of being able to tell a story that was new to his country and its people that inspired Mwangi. He was the first, but he could never have done it so accurately and completely if he hadn’t immersed himself in that reality as a participant, rather than as an outside observer. This is the real secret of Meja Mwangi’s writing, and this is why he is considered a master by any author who has recounted these particular aspects of Kenya after him.
Meja in Malindi
In Malindi, where I met him and where he had lived for years, his discretion became almost natural, the buen retiro where you don’t need to be old to be retired, but where you never really retire. Like the ocean with its tides, it recedes, but it always returns.
Meja returned like that, in his writings, in conversations, in the short, warm emails we exchanged.
The first beer we shared was a Balozi. “Too much sugar in Tusker now,” he said, in the same tone he might have used to comment on constitutional reform. And to think that he had even written a very funny book about Tusker – No Christmas Without Tusker.
Although he no longer immersed himself personally in the realities of society’s underworld, Meja continued to take an interest in changes within Kenyan society until the very end. He read, took notes, and imagined new novels based on news reports and the opinions they provoked.
We talked about geopolitics, literature, young people, how Kenya had become a chronic adolescent, suspended between the desire to grow up and the temptation to stay in the den.
Every meeting was a lesson for me, but without a lectern, just a bar counter. Just like his books, which taught me to read Kenya not as an enigma or in an epic way, but as a luminous wound that is always worth looking at.
