I am Jaba Man. I live in Nairobi, where I write the things I see.

I grew up in a city that teaches you to pay attention. The matatu touts shouting routes like poetry. The way the jacaranda trees turn the streets purple in October. The neighbour who always has a story about the time they almost made it to the national team.

I write fiction and true stories about the things I see. Lately, mostly fiction: estate satire, water committees, saccos, the small governments of Nairobi life. The notebooks started with travel; the stories came home.

New here? Start with these five stories.

The writing life

I have been writing since I could hold a pen. Started with school compositions that my English teacher, Mrs. Odhiambo, would read aloud to the class. Not because they were the best, but because they were the longest. I have never learned to be brief.

In my twenties I filled notebooks. Observations from matatu rides, conversations overheard at barbershops, descriptions of sunsets that I thought were profound at the time. Most of them were not. But the practice of noticing things, of writing them down before they disappeared, became a habit I never broke.

I started sharing the writing in my late thirties. A friend read one of my notebooks and said, "Why are you keeping these to yourself?" I did not have a good answer.

Timeline

1986 — Born in Eastlands, Nairobi. Third of five children. The noisy one.

1998 — Mrs. Odhiambo reads my composition about the rain to the whole class. First audience. First addiction.

2004 — Start filling notebooks on the Number 33 matatu. Every morning, every evening. The passengers become characters.

2012 — First trip outside Kenya. Dar es Salaam. Write 40 pages in three days. Realise that leaving home is the fastest way to understand it.

2019 — Mwangi reads a notebook over nyama choma in Rongai. "Why are you keeping these to yourself?" No good answer.

2024 — Start this site. The notebooks become stories. The stories find readers.

2026 — Turn 40 in Bali. Write about it. Still not brief.

What I write about

Fiction. Short stories from the estates: landlords, water committees, saccos, and the WhatsApp politics of shared courtyards. Invented, but only slightly.

Travel. Not the Instagram kind. The kind where you get lost in a market in Seminyak and end up having a conversation about life with a stranger over spring rolls that taste like they are trying to be spring rolls.

Nairobi. The city I know best and understand least. Its mornings, its matatus, its rooftop sunsets, its impossible traffic, its relentless energy.

Life. The big questions you ask over nyama choma at 10pm with your oldest friend. Are we happy? Did we become what we wanted? Does it matter?

Food. Because every good story happens around a table.

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