New Reads

Lily Mabura's story, How Shall We Kill the Bishop? - a finalist in the Glimmer Train Fiction contest - is published in Wasafiri Issue 53. Mabura, a Kenyan, has done well in Fish Publishing contests in the past...

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Keeping things Kenyan, Muthoni Garland has a new story up on Kwani?. Here's how The Remaining begins...

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Alfonse disappeared one Saturday, after a half-day’s work, after a generous helping of rice and meat stew at the late lunch at which he’d told off his son for a D grade (‘in English,’ he’d sneered), after giving his daughter money for a movie, and after - what now seemed to his wife - an unusually vigorous bout of sex with her. Alfonse had walked off into a cool Nairobi evening, and not come back.

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• Read The Remaining

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In Parselelo Kantai's The Cock Thief, Corporal Naiguran takes off for the Ugandan border with a golden cock. He rides through a Kenya from which everyone's leaving, and lying about it.

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Excerpt

There was something strange about her. It was as if she was there and not, existing in constituent parts but not as a whole. For one, she looked very different from her voice, a rough, rousing roar of four in the morning in those dark little hovels by the roadside, the ones run by fat round women called Rhoda and Francisca who serve cheap lethal brews to broken men in oversized jackets. Now she spat a gob of miraa suddenly into a polythene bag magically extracted from somewhere in the complicated folds of her clothes. Miraa. He hated it. It was undisciplined. Leave the leaves to the goats. And then she was unwrapping half of a Big G, chewing it, making rude, rhythmic clicks. She seemed to appreciate the sound more than the flavour. She stared at him the whole time, her large liquid eyes shining out of the khanga that covered her head and framed her face; the rest of it disappeared inside a fur-lined jacket, unzipped half-way down to reveal a T-shirt tucked tight into a pair of worn jeans. Limuru, he knew, got very cold. He wondered what she would do with her jacket in the heat of Kampala. But it was the sound of her walk that convinced him this was a malaya, a prostitute going west to seek new flesh markets. She had come down the aisle towards the seat, swaying slightly, her boots clicking loudly against the floor of the bus. There was something of an advertisement about the sound of her walk. There was nothing left in Kenya. Everybody was leaving, and lying about it.

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• Read The Cock Thief