My name is Mbelenzi Zasusthra Nzinga. I’m walking down River Road now, and all I can see are the women lined along the sidewalks. There are also other kinds of people, but they are invisible. Perhaps only God knows what kind of existential situation this is. There’s a whirlpool of superimposed issues; each striving to reach the surface of my […]
I’m reaching out again. Dear Dad, Here I am again, trying to recapture a lost past. I am writing to go back to that time at Impala Park, when it was just you and me and M, and we went to Impala Park, where at lunch times, as a treat, the wardens would throw a goat into the lion cages […]
When he woke up that morning, Lempei knew it was going to be an interesting day; but how exactly, he still did not know. First, he had woken up earlier than usual and when he got to the school bus park, he was the first student there — something that had never happened before. In fact, when the other students […]
Jamila turned into a dream on that rainy night – the night it rained so much that the earth was a spectre beneath the water’s fervour. The lights had gone off, and Jamila and I stood there, facing each other, her words suspended in the still room, dropping heavily to the ground when she asked if we could go to […]
Museums are my second favourite place to cry. With the slightest provocation from a dusty glass casing, I will unloose the ever elegant single tear; if encouraged by a pithy exhibition text, more fortifying variants follow: a bit of light sniveling all through to the blabbering lament, complete with ash and sackcloth. Our bodies are the most insightful docent in every museum tour.
“Dreams have no meaning, is how you should phrase that if you want to have a serious conversation with me.”
I’d really like to just tell her to fuck off; instead I say: “You should not be smoking.”
“You’ve lost weight again,” she replies.
This is her way of telling me I’ve been drinking again. And although I’ve brought her packets of Marlboros as a kind of apology for staying away for too long, for a flash second I’m not sorry she finds herself here.
Nairobi wasn’t built for walking. Outer Ring Road in the morning is a nightmare, all the construction—good luck not falling into a ditch at six in the morning. Jogoo Road is a rhapsody of vehicles, and people—people walking and running and shouting and crying and yelling and driving and steering and hooting and vehicling and nuisancing and listening to Maina […]
