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.

Here is something you need to know: blessings are served in single shots, troubles come in doubles, and tragedy is a straight-up triple tot. I was not surprised at all, on the Sunday of Jamhuri Day, to be served with a notice to evict.Later on 20 December at the Karibuni Villas in Mambrui—a mere half-hour drive from the airport where I’d just landed—I was sitting beside an infinity pool seeking advice from the outgoing governor of Machakos and my good long-term friend, Dr. Alfred Mutua. A blue sky stretched above me, and a blue sea reached out into the distance.

One day she woke up in the middle of the night and sat alone under the flickering lights of a July moon. She didn’t want anyone around her. Ma brought her water first and she pushed it away with the anger of two paranoid men. Her curly hair sat lazily over her beautiful eyes and she shot eyes around warning anyone who wanted to draw close that they weren’t welcome. Then Bihija started talking in a muted voice, at first to herself then to some imaginary person only she could see. 

Central to this ethical inquiry is Ben’s father, a Maasai warrior, who died protecting a film crew during a lion attack. Clay avoids mythologising him. His bravery is acknowledged, but so is its cost. He exists in the narrative as both presence and absence: a figure of pride, but also of unresolved expectation. In one of the novel’s most affecting moments, Ben studies a photograph of his father in traditional Maasai dress, framed in olive wood from his village. The image becomes a powerful symbol of inherited masculinity and imagined strength. For Ben, this photograph is both an anchor and a burden. It represents an ideal he feels unable to live up to—a warriorhood defined by physical courage and sacrifice. Clay excels here in illustrating how children internalise narratives long before they understand them. Ben’s fear of returning to Kenya is not framed as weakness, but as grief: a fear of exposure, of being measured against an identity he never chose yet feels bound to honour.