Crime and the City: Nairobi

Nearly five million people live in what was a city of the British East Africa Protectorate before Kenyan independence. Nowadays the city is emerging as the technology and AI hub of East Africa, often dubbed the “Silicon Savannah”. And Kenya’s capital city just happens to have the Nairobi National Park – a massive game reserve known for breeding endangered black rhinos and home to giraffes, zebras and lions – right on its doorstep. So, crime runs from urban, brazen, armed robberies and assaults by organized gangs operating in groups and on boda bodas (motorcycles), to white-collar scams being run in Silicon Savannah through to the horrors of poaching out in  the National Park. So fertile territory for crime writing right?

A great place to start is, as so often when encountering a new town, Akashic Noir’s Nairobi Noir (2020), edited by Peter Kimani, a Kenyan author the acclaimed novel of Kenyan independence, Dance of the Jakaranda (2018), a founding faculty member at Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications in Nairobi and a Visiting Writer at Amherst College. As usual in the series each tale explores the city’s diverse neighbourhoods, shedding light on its local crimes from a host of local authors, many with no translations or profile in the West and so wonderfully accessible here in Noir’s Nairobi Noir. 

Internationally it has been Kenyan American writer and associate professor of English at Cornell, Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s Nairobi Heat (2010) who has set the tone for “Nairobi Noir”. It’s big news when African peace activist Joshua Hakizimana – famous for saving hundreds of people from the Rwandan genocide – accepts a position at the University in Madison, Wisconsin. Then a young girl is found murdered on his doorstep. For local police detective Ishmael – an African American in a white town, it seems like the kind of crime that happens in an area where the Ku Klux Klan still holds rallies. But then he gets a mysterious phone call relaying that the truth is in Nairobi. The call starts a journey through the slums of Nairobi with local detective “O”, where oil money rules. A really gritty ride through the backstreets of Kenya’s capital. 

Nairobi Heat has a follow up – Black Star Nairobi (2013, and thank you Melville International Crime for publishing) set in a politically volatile Nairobi during the disputed 2007 presidential elections. Ishmael and “O” team up to track down a shadowy terrorist after a downtown hotel bombing.

The English novelist Julian Rathbone (who died in 2008) wrote all sorts of books, fiction and non-fiction, including two novels featuring British private investigator, Chris Shovelin (‘reformed alcoholic, aging hippy, victim of a dysfunctional marriage) tramping around the slightly down-at-hell English seaside town of Bournemouth. But in As Bad As It Gets (2004) Shovelin is in Mombasa (Kenya’s second city) where he has been checking out the death of a millionaire’s son in a scuba accident. He decides to take his fee and treat himself to a safari. But he becomes embroiled in a scam around GM foods, corrupt police and a mugging in Nairobi. It’s a change of pace to Rathbone’s first, first Shovelin novel, Homage (2001) set in Britain and California, and a racy ride through both Mombasa and Nairobi. 

A good whodunnit series from Richard Crompton, a former BBC journalist who lives in Nairobi, starts with Hour of the Red God (2014 – and also called The Honey Guide in some territories). All the books feature Detective Mollel, a former Maasai warrior in Nairobi. In Hour of the Red God Mollel is investigating the brutal murder of a prostitute and suspects the killing is part of a far more extensive plot associated with the infamously turbulent elections of 2007. In book two, Hells Gate (2014), Mollel has been stationed in a beaten-up town on the edge of Hell’s Gate National Park. When a body is found in the nearby lake, he realises the local police could be involved in more than just extortion and bribery. Finally in book three, Night Runners (2018), Mollel is put on duty in Dandora, a Nairobi slum infamous for its teeming rubbish dump and organised crime gangs. He is approached by a young girl called Miriam who is refusing to speak to anyone other than the ‘Maasai cop’ to find a  missing girl, a journey and investigation natty takes Mollel to Nairobi rap clubs and voodoo healers. 

A few more Nairobi and Kenyan set novels:

• Nitin Nanji’s Lalji’s Nairobi (2023) is set during the colonial period and, in part, follows the Indian migrants to British East Africa, many of whom settled and entered business in Nairobi, often working on the construction of the East African Railway in the late 1890s. Along comes World War One and British East Africa finds itself in conflict with German East Africa (if you know nothing about this obscure aspect of the Great War do read William Boyd’s An Ice-Cream War (1982)). But treachery lies within Lalji’s own family.
  
• Charles Mangua (who sadly died in 2021) often wrote of Mombasa, but Son of Woman (1990), a bestseller in Kenya, describes life as the orphan of a prostitute in the Nairobi slums, a young man frequenting bars and brothels, a student, corrupt civil servant and a convict. Despite the serious subject matter Mangua is often irreverent and often humorous. His 1972 novel A Tail in the Mouth won the prestigious Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature. 

• And we should mention Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s classic Petals of Blood (1977). Often described as East Africa’s leading novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel describes life on post-independence Kenya where after decades of British rule Kenya has declared its independence. However, drought and poor harvests still govern the village of Ilmorog. Undeterred, Munira, Karega, Wanja and Abdulla each move to Ilmorog in search of a more provincial life, only to find themselves suspects in a crime that signals a dark turning of the times. Petals of Blood became a  classic of modern African literature, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s damning satire of politics and corruption in Kenya would prove the catalyst for his imprisonment by the Kenyan government.

And finally John Kiriamiti’s My Life in Crime (1980). Kiriamiti (born 1950) is the real deal, a former Kenyan former bank robber turned writer. He spent years inside Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, Nairobi’s most notorious jail and where many executions were carried out. Now Kiriamiti owns and edits a newspaper (The Sharpener), writers novels and is a philanthropist working with Nairobi’s vulnerable street kids. My Life in Crime is semi-autobiographical, based on Kiriamiti’s own experiences robbing banks in the 1960s and 1970s when he was still a teenager. It offers a raw, street-level look at Nairobi’s bustling and dangerous criminal underworld and became a cult classic read among the city’s youth in the 1980s and 1990s.