Confessions Of Nairobi Men by Joan Thatiah

Confessions of Nairobi Men is a compilation of true stories told to Joan Thatiah by Nairobi men. It’s a wilting catalogue of the importunity of human suffering, human frailty, hope springing eternal, and the tyranny of fate.

Joan doesn’t build up tension and ease the reader into the stories. None of that namby-pamby, preliminary hand-holding, warm-up stuff. She just opens fire from page one. If you were chewing something, you stop chewing and only realize you were eating several hours later when she allows you to come up for air.

The first story starts with a woman found by her husband hanging from the rafters in an unfinished house in Syokimau. No time wasted. The police come and throw him in Jail. That’s when Joan fills you in on the build-up to that opening scene. You see a couple’s marriage unraveling like a tragedy between the pages leaving you dumbstruck.

Joan continues to grab your attention by the scruff of the collar and drags it to the next story, which involves a teenager who pushed his father over a balcony to his death because he could no longer stand seeing his mother being beaten to a pulp. He was promptly jailed. Joan patiently takes you through how his life became undone after that. It is like watching an open wound cleaned and then sewn up without anesthesia.

Before you have recovered, Joan drags you into deeper waters, walking you through the darkest paths men walk in Nairobi and beyond. Fifteen times. In the end, you’re yourself damaged and overcome with emotion about the suffering that some men go through in Nairobi.

The stories, fifteen of them, all packed with harrowing narrations of cuckoldry, fatherlessness, sexual abuse, brutal female hypergamy, poor decisions, poverty, separation, degeneracy, and crime, shed light onto the kinds of backgrounds and experiences that shape many men in Nairobi. Indeed, Nairobi itself, the concrete jungle, comes off as an incorporeal spirit that can accept you or reject you. It can chew you and spit you out.

Joan does an excellent job of excavating the formative experiences that shape many men and the choices they make later on in life.
The most striking thing for me is the depth of the stories. All of them are profound and you can see how childhood experiences and family inexorably shape people’s characters, fortunes, and ultimately, their fate.

Some of the stories, like one in which a poor man falls in love with a poor woman they work with in a roadside kibanda, remind us about something Chogozie Obioma wrote in Orchestra of Minorities: The mind of a man in despair can produce a fruit which, although it may appear shiny on the surface, is filled to bursting with worms.

Joan’s portrayal of how parenting and childhood experiences impact us is masterful and thought-provoking.

This is a book that should be read by every man and every parent.

You get to appreciate firsthand how fatherlessness impacts children and shapes them later on in life. You get to behold, up close, how a weak or violent father affects boys. How your household is a far-reaching character-influencing force. Joan does a good job handling how sexual abuse shapes men’s sexual experiences and the influence of childhood trauma on us.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.