From Nairobi to the places in between. Every story starts with noticing something. A matatu conductor doing three things at once. The way the jacaranda trees turn the streets purple in October. The questions you only ask over nyama choma at midnight.
What I write
Told from the estate up.
✦ Told from the estate up.
How I write
Notebooks before laptops.
✦ Notebooks before laptops.
Why I write
A lifetime of paying attention.
✦ A lifetime of paying attention.
Born in Eastlands, Nairobi
Third of five children. The noisy one.
First audience
Mrs. Odhiambo reads my composition about the rain to the whole class. First addiction.
The matatu notebooks
Start filling notebooks on the Number 33. Every morning, every evening. The passengers become characters.
First trip outside Kenya
Dar es Salaam. Write 40 pages in three days. Leaving home is the fastest way to understand it.
Why are you keeping these to yourself?
Mwangi reads a notebook over nyama choma in Rongai. No good answer.
This site is born
The notebooks become stories. The stories find readers.
Forty in Bali
Turn 40 far from home. Write about it. Still not brief.
When Nairobi’s CBD is sealed without warning, stranded commuters outside Archives invent a pavement Sacco of waiting stones, exact fare, and public urgency.
At a Nairobi school gate, a boy watches his mother turn love into paperwork at the fee-verification desk. A tender-wry story about school fees, dignity, and the purple stamp that lets a child back into class.
A Nairobi estate loses water and accidentally forms a government. At the edge of the courtyard, a salonist with hidden drums learns what a private reserve costs in public.
A proud boda rider tries to buy back his repossessed bike at auction, but the real debt is the story he made everyone carry for him.
When Kamau’s noisy balcony birds start repeating an estate’s secrets, everyone wants them gone — until silence reveals its own cost.
Most mechanics dismantle your car so you can't leave. Mzee Jamo doesn't do that.
When Nairobi’s CBD is sealed without warning, stranded commuters outside Archives invent a pavement Sacco of waiting stones, exact fare, and public urgency.
At a Nairobi school gate, a boy watches his mother turn love into paperwork at the fee-verification desk. A tender-wry story about school fees, dignity, and the purple stamp that lets a child back into class.
A Nairobi estate loses water and accidentally forms a government. At the edge of the courtyard, a salonist with hidden drums learns what a private reserve costs in public.
A proud boda rider tries to buy back his repossessed bike at auction, but the real debt is the story he made everyone carry for him.
When Kamau’s noisy balcony birds start repeating an estate’s secrets, everyone wants them gone — until silence reveals its own cost.
Most mechanics dismantle your car so you can't leave. Mzee Jamo doesn't do that.
Like a letter from a friend who notices too much.