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Educated Kikuyus become increasingly unsettled over land as Wacheera, Ekeno get married
That evening, when he returned, their home felt different—both warmer and heavier. And in the quiet of that small room, as the winds stirred the grass outside and the fire crackled its last, Ekeno clung to her like a man holding onto the last piece of a beautiful dream. He knew his days as a passive observer were ending. Soon, he would join the movement—quietly at first, then fully, body and soul. And if fate demanded it, he would give everything for her, for their unborn children, for the land that had raised him.
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Esther had been told, now and then, that she had a beautiful smile, but it was not often that she found a reason to smile. As she looked at her passport, she knew that not only had Lady Luck smiled upon her, she had, for good measure, also thrown in a happy giggle. In her little palms, she held her passage to the United Kingdom – wealth and good life were beckoning. She thought about how it would be like to not live in poverty, which had stalked her life like a shadow. It was the same poverty that had stalked generations before her.
The first item on the menu for any politician, big or small, is printing costs: posters, flyers, banners, caps, T-shirts, and even motorcycle reflector jackets for the boda-boda riders so they recognize your name early. I will tell you more about the posters and reflectors—the tortuous processes and the “colourful” characters and low-down weasels who inhabit these spaces—in the next chapter. Suffice it to say that, thanks to a Communist Party comrade, I was able to find a good man called Maxwell deep in the bowels of River Road. In his dusty, third-floor office with a window facing smoggy skies, we bargained for posters, flyers, and banners for Ksh85,046.
The goal of the Banda Book Day celebration was to connect pupils with children’s authors, encourage reading for pleasure, and help young people tap into their own creative potential.
For whatever reason, Maendeleo Chap Chap hadn’t materialized. My friend and fellow EPL football fanatic, Mwingi West MP Charles Ngana Ngusya (CNN), assured me that if I wanted a Wiper nomination for Nairobi West, he could get it for me. But with his party leader, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, being a bitter foe of my great friend Governor Alfred Mutua, Wiper was as attractive as keeping a viper as a house pet. I briefly considered the Muungano Party, whose chair was then Governor Kivutha Kibwana, a humble man and healthcare champion who had taught me jurisprudence at the Parklands Law Campus, University of Nairobi, at the turn of the millennium. But unable to reach him on his personal phone that week, I dropped that option.
It is mind-boggling that hundreds of years after fleeing hostile environments in other parts of Africa, we still flee from droughts, floods and hunger instead of standing our ground to fight. The overcrowding we fled from in the 14th century has caught up with us in our cities.
In this conversation with Books in Africa host Tracy Ochieng, Kilonzo speaks candidly about beginning as a 12-year-old memoirist, learning the business of publishing through mentorship, protecting parts of her private life in the age of social media, and why she believes “writer’s block” is often just fear disguised as creative paralysis.
