Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Black Star Nairobi
Author: Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Publisher: Melville House
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2013-06-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1612192114
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Two cops—one American, one Kenyan—team up to track down a deadly terrorist. It’s December 2007. The Kenyan presidential elections have gotten off to a troubled start, with threats of ethnic violence in the air, and the reports about Barack Obama on the campaign trail in the United States are the subject of newspaper editorials and barstool debates. And Ishmael and O have just gotten their first big break for their new detective agency, Black Star. A mysterious death they’re investigating appears to be linked to the recent bombing of a downtown Nairobi hotel. But local forces start to come down on them to back off the case, and then a startling act of violence tips the scales, setting them off on a round-the-globe pursuit of the shadowy forces behind it all. A thrilling, hard-hitting novel, from the author of Nairobi Heat, a major new crime talent.

Nairobi Heat

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Nairobi Heat
Author: Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Publisher: Melville House
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2011-09-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1612190073
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A cop from Wisconsin pursues a killer through the terrifying slums of Nairobi and the memories of genocide IN MADISON, WISCONSIN, it’s a big deal when African peace activist Joshua Hakizimana—who saved hundreds of people from the Rwandan genocide—accepts a position at the university to teach about “genocide and testimony.” Then a young woman is found murdered on his doorstep. Local police Detective Ishmael—an African-American in an “extremely white” town—suspects the crime is racially motivated; the Ku Klux Klan still holds rallies there, after all. But then he gets a mysterious phone call: “If you want the truth, you must go to its source. The truth is in the past. Come to Nairobi.” It’s the beginning of a journey that will take him to a place still vibrating from the genocide that happened around its borders, where violence is a part of everyday life, where big-oil money rules and where the local cops shoot first and ask questions later—a place, in short, where knowing the truth about history can get you killed.

The Perfect Nine

by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
The Perfect Nine
Author: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1620975262
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A dazzling, genre-defying novel in verse from the author Delia Owens says “tackles the absurdities, injustices, and corruption of a continent” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novels and memoirs have received glowing praise from the likes of President Barack Obama, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and NPR; he has been a finalist for the Man International Booker Prize and is annually tipped to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; and his books have sold tens of thousands of copies around the world. In his first attempt at the epic form, Ngũgĩ tells the story of the founding of the Gĩkũyũ people of Kenya, from a strongly feminist perspective. A verse narrative, blending folklore, mythology, adventure, and allegory, The Perfect Nine chronicles the efforts the Gĩkũyũ founders make to find partners for their ten beautiful daughters—called “The Perfect Nine” —and the challenges they set for the 99 suitors who seek their hands in marriage. The epic has all the elements of adventure, with suspense, danger, humor, and sacrifice. Ngũgĩ’s epic is a quest for the beautiful as an ideal of living, as the motive force behind migrations of African peoples. He notes, “The epic came to me one night as a revelation of ideals of quest, courage, perseverance, unity, family; and the sense of the divine, in human struggles with nature and nurture.”

The Rise of the African Novel

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi
The Rise of the African Novel
Author: Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2018-03-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 047205368X
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Engaging questions of language, identity, and reception to restore South African and diaspora writing to the African literary tradition

Unbury Our Dead with Song

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Unbury Our Dead with Song
Author: Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781911115984
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Unbury our Dead With Song is a novel about four talented Ethiopian musicians - The Diva, The Corporal, the Taliban Man and Miriam, who are competing to see who can sing the best Tizita (popularly referred to as Ethiopian blues). Taking place in an illegal boxing hall in Nairobi, Kenya, the competition is covered by a US educated Kenyan journalist, John Thandi Manfredi, who writes for a popular tabloid, The National Inquisitor. He follows the musicians back to Ethiopia in order to learn more about the Tizita and their lives. As he learns more about the Tizita and the multiple meanings of beauty, he uncovers that behind each of the musicians, there are layered lives and secrets. A love letter to African music, beauty and imagination.

Logotherapy

by Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ
Logotherapy
Author: Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 91
Release: 2016
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0803295308
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Written as a tribute to family, place, and bodily awareness, Mukoma Wa Ngugi's poems speak of love, war, violence, language, immigration, and exile. From a baby girl's penchant for her parents' keys to a warrior's hunt for words, Wa Ngugi's poems move back and forth between the personal and the political. In the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, the biting winds of Boston, and the heat of Nairobi, Wa Ngugi is always mindful of his physical experience of the environment. Ultimately it is among multiple homes, nations, and identities that he finds an uneasy peace.

Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900–1955

by Katherine Luongo
Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900–1955
Author: Katherine Luongo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2011-09-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139503456
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Focusing on colonial Kenya, this book shows how conflicts between state authorities and Africans over witchcraft-related crimes provided an important space in which the meanings of justice, law and order in the empire were debated. Katherine Luongo discusses the emergence of imperial networks of knowledge about witchcraft. She then demonstrates how colonial concerns about witchcraft produced an elaborate body of jurisprudence about capital crimes. The book analyzes the legal wrangling that produced the Witchcraft Ordinances in the 1910s, the birth of an anthro-administrative complex surrounding witchcraft in the 1920s, the hotly contested Wakamba Witch Trials of the 1930s, the explosive growth of legal opinion on witch-murder in the 1940s, and the unprecedented state-sponsored cleansings of witches and Mau Mau adherents during the 1950s. A work of anthropological history, this book develops an ethnography of Kamba witchcraft or uoi.

Mrs. Shaw

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Mrs. Shaw
Author: Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2015-06-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0821445154
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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 island. Brought together by a history of violence and betrayals, all three are seeking a way of regaining their humanity, connecting with each other, and learning to make a life in a new land. Kalumba and Mrs. Shaw, in particular, are linked by a past rooted in colonial and postcolonial violence, yet they are separated by their differing accounts of what really happened. The memory of each is subject to certain lapses, whether selective or genuine. Even when they agree on the facts—be they acts of love, of betrayal, or of violence—each narrator shapes the story in his or her own way, by what is left in and what is left out, by what is remembered and what is forgotten.

Nairobi Noir

by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Nairobi Noir
Author: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Publisher: Akashic Books
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2020-02-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1617757756
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In this anthology, fourteen authors explore dark mysteries in the concrete jungle capital of Kenya, dealing with topics of race, religion, and corruption. Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Brand-new stories by: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Stanley Gazemba, Ngumi Kibera, Peter Kimani, Winfred Kiunga, Kinyanjui Kombani, Caroline Mose, Kevin Mwachiro, Wanjiku wa Ngugi, Faith Oneya, Makena Onjerika, Troy Onyango, J.E. Sibi-Okumu, and Rasna Warah. Praise for Nairobi Noir “Nairobi Noir takes readers into the enigmas that haunt Kenya’s most populous city through the deft storytelling of a stellar cast of writers, which includes Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Stanley Gazemba, Makena Onjerika, Troy Onyango, and others.” —Brittle Paper, One of 50 Notable African Books of 2020 “Nairobi is a city of 3 million souls, so it makes sense as a setting Akashic Books’ famed noir series. 14 new stories fill a collection with Nairobi old and new; authors range in age from 24 to 81, and many layers of the city and its complex subcultures will be revealed as the reader makes their way through. Perfect for the armchair traveler!” —CrimeReads, included in CrimeReads’ Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2020 “Crime fiction fans have much to savor.” —Publishers Weekly