In the fictional East African Kwatee Republic of the 1990s, the dictatorship is about to fall, and the nation’s exiles are preparing to return. One of these exiles, a young man named Kalumba, is a graduate student in the United States, where he encounters Mrs. Shaw, a professor emerita and former British settler who fled Kwatee’s postcolonial political and social turmoil. Kalumba’s girlfriend, too, is an exile: a Puerto Rican nationalist like her imprisoned father, she is an outcast from the...
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s Nairobi Heat was heralded as “the work of a genius craftsman and wordsmith” by New Africa Magazine. In Killing Sahara we once again join Ishmael Forfona – the world-weary US detective – and O – his irrepressible Kenyan counterpart – as they set up their sleuthing business together in Nairobi. When a body is discovered half-eaten by animals in Ngong Forest, Ishmael and O are called in as consultants by the Kenyan police. For this body is not any body. Not anybody at all, in...
