Of Cyrus Jirongo, Meja Mwangi and Nairobi’s Urban Poor

Meja Mwangi receives the Jomo Kenyatta Award for Kill Me Quick from Jomo Kenyatta in 1972.

Meja Mwangi, the celebrated Kenyan novelist and filmmaker, held Nairobi’s backstreets up like a diamond, revealing each facet through meticulous and surprisingly raw detail—the clang of construction sites, the neon shimmer of Nairobi’s River Road bars, the weary shuffle of men chasing day wages—startling social insights, and prose so clean it’s incandescent.

For him, Nairobi possessed a certain shimmer around the edges; when we read his works, we enter that shimmer and emerge with a new way of seeing, a certain shared crystallization of truth, his truth. In beautiful and oblique writing, he paints in his trademark haunting style, the gritty urban setting—harsh and desolate—a place where the beautiful halo of Nairobi dematerialises in the detritus of  lost dreams of suburbia—characters drifting past dingy kiosks and bright city lights, a mirage that dissolves even as they walk through it.

As Meja Mwangi died on Thursday, December 11, 2025, at the age of 78, he left several works of literature. Some of his most renown works are his two searing novels—Kill Me Quick and Going Down River Road—both circling back to Nairobi, to that formative, fractured cityscape of casual labour and survival, shadowed with exploitation and despair, told against the larger backdrop of Kenya.

The closest personal encounter with Meja Mwangi was when he wrote to me on April 3, 2021, thanking me for a review I had done in this paper for his novel, Kill Me Quick. He also attached a photo of him receiving the Jomo Kenyatta Award for Kill Me Quick from President Jomo Kenyatta in 1972.

As fate would have it, two days after Mwangi’s death, Cyrus Jirongo, once a towering tycoon and political powerbroker in Kenya, died in a tragic Naivasha road crash on December 13, 2025. His life arc—

through the panorama of squandered fortune—the towers of Nairobi real estate, the debts that swallowed his empire, the dirt of failed ventures, the stalls of promises unkept. Through the wet Saturdays of political despair, through the loneliness of Lugari’s fields, through the mystery of alliances broken, the confusion of political parties, of home, of learning, through the finding of money and drama, the marshalling of instinct, living through the politics of  Moi, Raila and Ruto.

The lives of Meja Mwangi and Cyrus Jirongo were sharply contrasted. If Jirongo was frontier nobility, Mwangi wanted to puncture that myth of a privileged section of Kenya that was a reserve of the few. Jirongo conjured the mystique Mwangi wanted to dispel. Through his prose, Mwangi seemingly warned, “this is air-conditioned bubble; the reality for the majority of Kenyans is harsher”.

There is a tension between the utopia of Jirongo’s world and the dystopia of Meja Mwangi’s characters. Mwangi flips the narrative of Jirongo’s world on its head so that the dream’s fatal flaw is exposed: many are starving in the same country others have plenty.

As the Jirongos of the world fly in choppers and eat in five-star hotels, Meja Mwangi’s characters are languishing in Nairobi streets. One of the most heartrending scene in Kill Me Quick is where Meja and Maina are eating food from the dustbins. Mwangi writes that, “Meja... sat in his ill-fitting suit with the stench of the backstreet in his nose, and worried. He had had been in the city three days. He was yet to find something that did not scare him. The busy people, the heavy traffic, and the tall buildings, filled him with awe. He had landed in a strange world where everyone was an adversary... It was not what they had said he would find in the city. This was not the place of his dreams...

Maina hopped out of the dumpster with a paper bag in each hand and joined him. ‘Food,’ he said, dropping the bags at their feet... One bag had fruit; squashed bananas, mouldy oranges, and a pawpaw that was just a mushy mess at the bottom. In the other bag were a dry loaf of bread, chocolate that looked like shoe polish and some hard scones. Maina broke the bread and gave Meja a piece. Meja had not eaten for some days, but the look of the food left him with no desire to eat”.

Meja realizes, too late, that Nairobi is not the fever dream he had, it is a nightmare: the braying capital has always has a certain brashness and abruptness of style; always hurried, breathless and cruel.

In the same city where the Jirongos, through whatever means, dispelled the ghosts of the city and claimed a space for themselves, Meja Mwangi’s characters couldn’t get as much as a toehold, not even necessary food—suffering the feelings of being in the diaspora and displacement—away from their rural areas where they grew up but now feel uprooted.

And there is a sadder reality. For the young men and women eating from the dustbins of Nairobi, where are their political leaders who are supposed to have come up with policies to alleviate this kind of poverty? There is therefore a further sense of abandonment, a form of political alienation, reflecting a generational loss of innocence—where political leaders are nonchalant about the struggles of the Mainas and Mejas until when the leaders need votes in the next election cycle.

In their passing, Mwangi and Jirongo remind us of the fragility of human power and the challenges of human suffering and resilience. Mwangi’s words will continue to dignify the poor, while Jirongo’s political legacy will remain part of Kenya’s history of rulers.

Thus, Kenya mourns two sons—one who wrote the cries of the ruled, another who lived the privileges of the ruling. Their lives, set against each other, form a tragic chorus that will echo in our collective memory.

The writer assists people in documenting their memoirs.

johnmwazemba@gmail.com