Writers in search of a nation

Kopecky, a Canadian writer who worked at the Nation and later helped produce these editions of Kwani?, perches himself on the candidate’s shoulder and tracks him everywhere.

The story weaves through the muddy alleys of Dagoretti, into the candidate’s turbulent childhood and family life and his rather dodgy business dealings.

He leaves out nothing. We meet the voters, mamas and wasee wa mtaa, ex-street kids now grown up, with their palms permanently outstretched for the politician’s money.

Ultimately, it is a heartbreaking story of personal ambition checked by political corruption, but one that also subtly asks whether this young streetwise man with his big talk and bigger heart would have ended up any different than the grimy older politicians that he was up against.

“Mwas” Mahugu is a rapper, musician and writer from Dandora. A few years ago, he started writing in Sheng. His story “Habari” is set in Nyahururu, where Mwas had gone to report the elections. What he has achieved is a compelling tale consciously set against the unspoken backdrop of the violence that followed.

He has an eye and an ear for the street and a wicked sense of humour, which gives the story such a familiarity that it becomes a revelation of what a writer with a facility for language can achieve.

Throughout the story, Mwas is translating from Kikuyu to Sheng and coming up with gems.

But Mwas’ biggest strength is his inner eye, a weird private vision that he allows to run across his reportage in streams of consciousness.

In the end, as KICC turns ugly and violence spreads across the country, Mwas at sunset is staring across a valley filled with sheep without a shepherd. “Just like Kenyans”.

In Kenya, fact may always be stranger than fiction, but it is the work of two “outsiders” that lends these Kwani? volumes added weight.

Kalundi Serumaga’s essay “Unsettled” could not have explained Kenya better if it were written by a mwenyeji.

The real violence in Kenya, he says, is the poverty and inequality that has always produced madness and invisibility.

Having lived in Kenya during his teenage years, he mixes memoir and political commentary to construct an argument whose real genius, I realised, lay in the fact that it was staring at me all the time.

Similarly, David Kaiza’s travelogue into the Luo of Kenya and Uganda seems to me to have produced a new kind of writing, combining history, anthropology and truly exquisite writing to construct a new world.

For me, the real value of these Kwanis will be better understood in later years.