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

New Reads

You can't get away from Barack Obama in this American election season. Asked for her favourite writers, Tsitsi Dangarembga (author of 'Nervous Conditions' & 'The Book of Not) lists Obama among. Read her interview in the new issue of Per Contra. Among the fiction fare in the edition is 'Through the Looking Glass', taken from Dangarembga's forthcoming novel, Bira. High jinks on the bus queue...

Excerpt
"But women!" Now it was a young man chuckling. “What is it with these women! Some of them just walk just like that! With everything in the open!" Some age mates of his standing nearby grinned. They slitted their eyes in speculation and let their observation, like a single gaze, meander over the young women. "Ah, they want to inflame us!" The speaker sighed, and continued with amused indignation. "Now, isn’t it known that when it’s like that it can’t be stopped! So what if we don't want to begin and be inflamed! And get a gaol sentence? We don't want! Now these hussies want to put us in gaol! People, isn’t that why! Isn't that what makes people stone them!

• Read Through the Looking Glass
  

Also in the fiction is something from a forthcoming novel by another favourite writer of Dangarembga's, Sefi Atta. In Grief Mongers (from the novel 'Swallow', soon to be published by Farafina), a young woman comes to her overcrowded building and finds a drama of grieving unfolding. A young boy may have drowned in the septic tank...

Excerpt

The day my father’s body was found, I came home from school. A group of women were holding my mother down in her room. They were the women of her former esusu group. They saved money together and my mother had for a while been in charge of taking and keeping their contributions. "Your father is gone," one of them said, before I had a chance to walk into my mother’s room. She was my uncle’s wife called Sister Kunbi. I could tell she expected me to be sad and instead she made me furious. "I know," I said to her. "He has gone to Lagos." She seemed offended that I wasn’t crying. She reached for my shoulder. "This world is a marketplace," she said. "The other is home. Your father has gone home." "This is my father’s home," I said.

• Read Grief Mongers

And don't miss Silver Leaves for Judah Jones by Vanessa Gebbie - newly unveiled winner of the Per Contra Annual Fiction Prize. Her collection of short stories, Words from a Glass Bubble, has just been published.

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Per Contra's non fiction this time round focuses on the theme of 'Chaos, Terror and the Rise of the Police State' - and there are two pieces on the recent turmoil in Kenya.

• What is his name, the child whose death you spoke about, Kiraithe? by Ayo Bole; and
• Rigging is Just Rigging (Or, A Nation Held Hostage) by Muthoni Garland.

Letter from Nairobi

I am safe and my immediate family is safe. We were holed at a house on the coast, an idyllic place, far from the mayhem - the only inconveniences being a shortage of phone credit, fuel and tonic water. I even managed to use the internet at a hotel at the end of our strip of beach. It was the horrific images on TV that had us glued to the screen and distressing phone calls that enjoined us in what was happening. We kept saying this is not happening, this is not Kenya. We reeled from disbelief to horror and back again. Distant relatives fleeing the mayhem in the northern Rift are still camping at my brother's house in Nakuru. For four days, my best friend was holed up like a prisoner at her mother's house in Kisumu - site of some of the worst rioting, fearful to step outside for the sound of screaming and gunfire. I heard the fear in her voice, the disjointed background noises. Two days ago, she said it had quietened but that she could not leave as there was no fuel available. I myself had tried to return to Nairobi last Thursday, but the road to the airport in Mombasa was closed. I made it back to Nairobi yesterday and 'enjoyed' the fastest drive ever to the city centre on an eerily empty highway. On that one street, I saw more police than I have ever seen my whole life.

These have been the most traumatic times in Kenyan history. We've put together a coalition of writers to try and put words to it. But I suspect it is too recent for us to truly grapple with the nature of the beast unleashed.

Muthoni Garland

Nairobi, Saturday 5 January 2008

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• At times like this, nations are forged - Binyavanga Wainaina
• Kenya on the BBC

New Reads

In Muthoni Garland's Of Love and Insects, published in the current issue of Per Contra, Doreen needs extra time off work in order to deal with the challenges of a family devastated by AIDS. And she struggles with a crippling preoccupation with insects and contagion.

Here's an extract
The black dots on the carpet reminded her of long-ago helicopter beetles. When she and her brother, Caleb, had caught the fat black lazy fliers, they tied the legs with string. And raising skinny arms, they twirled the beetles around and round buzzing like helicopters. Caleb and Doreen stared up at the blur of insect and string until it seemed the sky was closing in, and God, the God of Sunday school – oh be careful little hands what you do - would knock them on the head. And laughing for all of Africa, they’d fall to the ground, onto that worn dusty clearing, dizzy and uncaring that Mama would scold about their filthy clothes, especially her, the eldest daughter – Yawa nyamama!, and make them scrub their bodies with loofah.
- Read Of Love and Insects in full.

Muthoni Garland, a Kenyan writer shortlisted for the 2006 Caine prize, has strong Nigerian connections. You can also read another short story by her - The Obituary Man - in Kwani?