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The Girl of Red Beauty
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Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed by Olivier van Beemen
KShs4,300.00 KShs3,900.00
The Forbidden Fruit
KShs1,000.00 KShs800.00
Devolution of governance and management of public services came as a blessing to many at the grassroots. It generated hope and raised expectations for the many that wallowed in poverty for years on end. With twists and turns, Tumbocracy etches out Democracy and, inevitably, things take the wrong-turn! Is doom the ultimate destination for the many a citizen at the grassroots? Forbidden Fruit is a fast-paced drama that raises important questions about the legitimacy of the many flagship initiatives of devolved units!
What Others Say
“The play captures happenings in devolved units in Kenya. Poor governance, mass corruption, and leaders’ amassing of wealth for themselves, is evident. The playwright creates the content anew and makes it sensitive to the society again as these issues have been taken as obvious and normal.” – Rose Keya Kong’ani, Editor
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The Untold Story:Gusii Survival Techniques and Resistance to the Establishment of British Colonial Rule
The Untold Story, Gusii Survival Techniques and Resistance to the Establishment of British Colonial
Rule. There is little written about the resistance to the establishment of the British colonial rule in Gusii.
The scant knowledge available on this historical phenomenon in Kenya is inaccurate and intentionally
distorted in favour of the colonial master. The truth, contrary to the incorrect histories presented by the
British, is that the Kings African Rival soldiers suffered humiliating defeat in their initial encounter with
Gusii warriors. It was a landmark historical event. Otenyo Nyamaterere is incorrectly portrayed as a
frustrated and deranged lone-ranger who was high on narcotics when he attacked with a spear and
injured the first District Commissioner of Kisii, Geoffrey Northcote. In a fierce rebuttal to this falsehood
existing in colonial narratives, this book attempts to correct this erroneousness portrayal of a lead
warrior who valiantly came out in defense of community and its lands.
And there is context to this resistance. Over many years, the Gusii had honed their fighting skills and
survival strategies from the many years of struggle against the hostile and warlike neighbours – the
Maasai, the Kipsigis and the Luo. These skills and strategies that came in handy when later the Gusii
faced a more formidable external aggressor – the Kings African Rival soldiers. The Gusii warriors fought
with valour, demonstrating great fighting skills in their encounter with these forces of conquest even as
the latter were better armed. Inevitably the warriors lost, defeated due to the British superior
weaponry. The Gusii weapons and hand to hand combat fighting could not match the British gun power.
Mines and Mind Fields: The Spoken Word
"These poems especially speak to a number of related realities in Kenya and other countries in the African continent; they speak about a people with ingenuity and yet forced to make tough choices because of hard economic and political conditions; they speak of an evolving culture, shaped by everyday realities of life and the ingenuities of survival. The mixture of languages and slang also give the poems an interesting immediacy and life."
- Mwenda Ntarangwi, Sociology Professor
"She is one of the most respected female poets in Nairobi today". The Sunday Nation writer Joseph Ngunjiri says of Njeri, "Njeri Wangari has a powerful voice, and she knows how to put it to good use. Whenever she takes to the podium to recite a poem, she has her enthusiastic audience applauding all the way. "
-Sunday Nation 8 February 2009. - Kenya's Leading newspaper.
"The poems bring a lot into perspective; and give me a thing or two to think about. ... Very nice ..."
- - Cee- A Kenyan Blogger
"I have had a hearty laugh reading Maisha Ya Hawker, got the tears to prove it :-) You just topped Women Behaving Badry and I love it! Your expression is amazing Njeri. I can't wait to see you perform this one."
- Ndanu - Performance Poet
"I must admit these are lovely poems. I have been following your blog for a while and it is very inspiring and informing. I am a poet and run the blog Two Hours Before. Your blog actually inspired me to do it also and I must tell you that your work is excellent. I will keep tuned and hopefully will get an opportunity to meet you and may be attend your performances."
- Simon Mwangi Muthiora - Blogger and Poet
Beyond the Blackboard: A Testimonial
Beyond the Blackboard – A Testimonial is more than a teacher’s tale. It is the odyssey of a dream that refused to be silenced, carried across the Gusii highlands, the valleys, chalks and blackboards that became windows of opportunity for many Kenyans. Born in colonial Kenya to a family that did not have much, Mwalimu Nyong’a Obuba’s first classroom door opened only when he was ten. Though late, he was armed with grit, faith, and the unwavering support of his uncle, Meshack Nyanchama, rising to become a high school principal who shaped the future of many.
After serving as primary and high school teacher, Nyong’a was elevated to the principalship of a nascent Kiabonyoru High School. For two decades at the helm, he transformed challenges into triumphs, nurturing students who later went on to stride into boardrooms, science laboratories, classrooms, and other positions of power and influence. Beyond being an educator, his students regarded him as a compass, mentor, and a father as the school became a powerhouse in academic and extracurricular activities.
Now in retirement, Nyong’a looks back with gratitude. He bears witness to the quiet, world-changing power of teaching. This book is a tribute to resilience. It is an anthem to the nobility of education, and a reminder that the truest legacy is not inscribed in stone, but in the lives of others.
What Others Say
“This inspirational autobiography offers a deeply personal and motivating account of his teaching and life experiences. The author’s engaging writing style makes one feel as if one were hearing the story firsthand, leaving one inspired and motivated.” – Sylvia Okweba, Editor.
“Mwalimu’s life as lived and documented reveals the outcomes of compassion, diplomacy, and fairness. His lessons in kindness and firmness will inspire the readers and change the mindset of others.” – James Maganda, Regional Manager, Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) - Kisii Cluster.
Orchids in Taiwan
I was deeply moved by Okemwa’s deep affection for Taiwan, and constantly amazed by his paradoxical expression techniques utilized in his poems to guide readers into the trap designed by his measure of insinuations. This ironic statement manner strengthens the positive and affirmative attitude, and produces unexpected and surprising effects.
- Prof. Lee Kuei-shien, Taiwanese Poet, Translator & Vice President of Movimiento Poetas del Mundo.
我被歐肯姆瓦對台灣的深情感動不已，對他詩中運用的逆說表達技巧，以旁敲側擊的手段，引導讀者墜入他設計的圈套中，更是不斷驚嘆，這種以反諷的陳述方式，加強正面肯定的態度，產生令人意料不到的驚奇效果。
— 李魁賢教授，台灣詩人、翻譯家、世界詩人運動組織副會長
Christopher Okemwa's Orchids in Taiwan is a surprising poetry book about life and love, painting Taiwan like you would paint an African woman.
-Prof. Marta Eloy Cichocka, Polish poet and photographer, Iberian Studies scholar and a Francophile literary investigator and translator.
克利斯多福．歐肯姆瓦的《台灣蘭花》是寫生活和愛，令人驚嘆的詩集，描繪台灣就像你在描繪非洲女人一樣。
— Marta Eloy Cichocka 教授，波蘭詩人、攝影師、伊比利亞研究學者、親法文學研究者和翻譯家。
Nandi Bear
KRAFT
Through a meeting with Wendy, they form a bond and together, they embark on life's journey. Life turns wonderful, until disasters knock at the door, one after the other…
Meanwhile, detective Tom Mbuke is running out of time to solve a series of bizarre happenings that befall the Teluves. He blames himself for a prank that caused so much pain as a 10-year-old and vowed to leave no stone unturned to find out what really happened. But nothing could prepare him to handle the truth that emerges.
Kraft is a story about deceit, love, sex, power, betrayal, crime, money and anything in between, set in colonial Kenya and spanning two generations to present day Kenya and around several continents…
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This novel is by the author of the celebrated My Life in Crime and is his first. The life of the 'Son of Fate' is a grim struggle for survival, after his release from prison.
He tries his luck at farming, and odd jobs in the city, but everything fails, and he finds himself on the wrong side of the law again. But a glimmer of hope comes when he rescues a tycoon.
Digital Democracy Analogue Politics How the Internet Is Transforming Politics in Africa by Nanjala Nyabola
From the upheavals of recent national elections to the success of the #MyDressMyChoice feminist movement, digital platforms have already had a dramatic impact on political life in Kenya – one of the most electronically advanced countries in Africa.
While the impact of the Digital Age on Western politics has been extensively debated, there is still little appreciation of how it has been felt in developing countries such as Kenya, where Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and other online platforms are increasingly a part of everyday life.
Written by a respected Kenyan activist and researcher at the forefront of political online struggles, this book presents a unique contribution to the debate on digital democracy. For traditionally marginalised groups, particularly women and people with disabilities, digital spaces have allowed Kenyans to build new communities which transcend old ethnic and gender divisions. But the picture is far from wholly positive.
Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics explores the drastic efforts being made by elites to contain online activism, as well as how ‘fake news’, a failed digital vote-counting system and the incumbent president's recruitment of Cambridge Analytica contributed to tensions around the 2017 elections.
Reframing digital democracy from the African perspective, Nyabola’s ground-breaking work opens up new ways of understanding our current global online era.
One Life too Many by Yusuf Dawood
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Sydney Walker, young and carefree, came to Kenya in search of adventure, fell in love with the country and decided to make it his home.
This is the story of the joys and sorrows of a man who worked hard and loved even harder. A magnificent account of expatriate life, set in the awe- inspiring beauty of Kenya, it confirms Yusuf K. Dawood as one of the greatest storytellers of our time.
Travelling While Black By Nanjala Nyabola
Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move.
What does it feel like to move through a world designed to limit and exclude you? What are the joys and pains of holidays for people of colour, when guidebooks are never written with them in mind? How are black lives today impacted by the othering legacy of colonial cultures and policies? What can travel tell us about our sense of self, of home, of belonging and identity? Why has the world order become hostile to human mobility, as old as humanity itself, when more people are on the move than ever?
Nanjala Nyabola is constantly exploring the world, working with migrants and confronting complex realities challenging common assumptions - both hers and others'. From Nepal to Botswana, Sicily to Haiti, New York to Nairobi, her sharp, humane essays ask tough questions and offer surprising, deeply shocking and sometimes funny answers. It is time we saw the world through her eyes.
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Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
From a breathtaking new voice, a novel about a splintered family in Kenya—a story of power and deceit, unrequited love, survival and sacrifice.
Odidi Oganda, running for his life, is gunned down in the streets of Nairobi. His grief-stricken sister, Ajany, just returned from Brazil, and their father bring his body back to their crumbling home in the Kenyan dry lands, seeking some comfort and peace.
But the murder has stirred memories long left untouched and unleashed a series of unexpected events: Odidi and Ajany’s mercurial mother flees in a fit of rage; a young Englishman arrives at the Ogandas’ house, seeking his missing father; a hardened policeman who has borne witness to unspeakable acts reopens a cold case; and an all-seeing Trader with a murky identity plots an overdue revenge.
In scenes stretching from the violent upheaval of contemporary Kenya back through a shocking political assassination in 1969 and the Mau Mau uprisings against British colonial rule in the 1950s, we come to learn the secrets held by this parched landscape, buried deep within the shared past of the family and of a conflicted nation.
Here is a spellbinding novel about a brother and sister who have lost their way; about how myths come to pass, history is written, and war stains us forever.
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Every day, the populace wakes before dawn to head to the blast furnaces of Nairobi’s Industrial Area leaving behind another bustling economy of daily subsistence carried on by the not so lucky. The drinking dens gobble up what they so work hard for and the cycle continues.
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His aim in Wizard of the Crow is, in his own words, nothing less than "to sum up Africa of the twentieth century in the context of two thousand years of world history.” Commencing in "our times” and set in the "Free Republic of Aburiria,” the novel dramatizes with corrosive humor and keenness of observation a battle for control of the souls of the Aburirian people. Among the contenders: His High Mighty Excellency; the eponymous Wizard, an avatar of folklore and wisdom; the corrupt Christian Ministry; and the nefarious Global Bank.
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On the island of Pate, off the coast of Kenya, lives solitary, stubborn Ayaana and her mother, Munira. When a sailor named Muhidin, also an outsider, enters their lives, Ayaana finds something she has never had before: a father. But as Ayaana grows into adulthood, forces of nature and history begin to reshape her life and the island itself--from a taciturn visitor with a murky past to a sanctuary-seeking religious extremist, from dragonflies to a tsunami, from black-clad kidnappers to cultural emissaries from China.
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Of pawns and players by Kinyanjui Kombani
Kinyanjui Kombani’s newest novel Of Pawns and Players is now available for pre-order. This is the third novel from the Nairobi, Kenya based author popularly known as the "banker who writes”.
Kinyanjui Kombani is a Kenyan novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, and literature activist. He burst onto the scene in 2004 with his debut novel The Last Villains of Molo one of the few pieces of art that have been produced about Kenya’s first post-election crisis in 1991. We loved it.
He followed in 2013 with Den of Inequities a book that follows a killer gang in Nairobi that we also loved.
Apart from fiction for adults, he wrote two books for children in 2007 Wangari Maathai: Mother of Trees a biography of Kenya’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai and We Can Be Friends: Theme, Spread of HIV/AIDS. He also wrote a Young Adult book called Finding Columbia which won the Burt Award for Young Adult Literature in Accra, Ghana last year.
The author’s new novel Of Pawns and Players tackles the underground world of betting in the simple and humorous narrative style that has made him a household name in contemporary fiction.
One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina
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In this vivid and compelling debut, Wainaina takes us through his school days, his failed attempt to study in South Africa, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya.
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Long held captive by her father’s shadow of corruption, Kavata has spent her life suffocated by political machinations. When her husband decides to run in the next election, these shadows threaten to consume her home. Unable to bear this darkness, Kavata plots to escape.
As her family falls apart, so too does her country. In the wake of Kenya‘s post-election turmoil, Kavata and her family must find their way back to each other across a landscape of nation-wide confusion, desperation, and heart-rending loss.
Koinange explores the long reach and effects of colonization and corruption within the context of a singular household and the disparate experiences of class and clan they encapsulate.
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South Bs Finest by Makena Maganjo
Nairobi in the 1990s.
Three families.
Their lives interweave as the find themselves living across from each other in an idyllic middle-class neighbourhood, Malaba Estate, South B.
As the decade charges on, their lives begin to show similarities in the secrets they keep and the mistakes they make.
Funny. Thought-provoking. Surprising. Endearing.
This is a coming of age story about friendship in all of its varied shades and intrigues. It is the kind of story that you try to savour only to gallop through the pages -- enchanted by characters, gripped by the authors enticing style.
Makena Maganjo is definitely a worthy addition to the corpus of African writers, and South B?s Finest is a fine work of art!
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