Kombani Kinyanjui dreams big with love for writing

Author Kombani Kinyanjui. [Jenipher Wachie, Standard]

There are two things that Kombani Kinyanjui, 38, likes talking about: writing and banking. He is experienced in both. He calls them his two lives. His friends and associates wish he would broaden his topics and explore other areas.

Kombani is etched so deep in his passions that he rarely notices when he gets carried away and obsessively talks about his love for books, and his life as a banker.

“Kombani is so much more than books and banks. He should start talking about his other interests,” says his colleague Evans Munyori, head of HR at Standard Chartered Bank in East Africa.

Kombani says he loves the newspaper, but the love comes from a personal experience of what happened when he was a young man. His brother got into trouble with his employer and the brother’s photo, alongside his termination, was published in the newspaper.

“I remember my mother walking with that newspaper, looking for help. We were so poor, so she was trying to raise money to help my brother,” he says. The experience made him vow to be published.

Not interested

Kombani’s entry into writing was out of sheer luck. He was in university when he started writing, but fame came much later. When he wrote his first novel The Last Villains of Molo that talked of his experience during the 1992 post-election violence, he says he desperately sought for a publisher but nobody was interested.

The year was 2002, a time when Kenya was considered an island of peace, removed from the political turbulence that defined other African countries. Not many people associated with the turmoil his book projected.

“If you are an unknown writer in the industry, getting published is stressful. Kenyan publishers are more interested in textbooks,” he says.

His only desire at the time was for his books to be stocked in bookshops. Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine that there would be a time when his books would be studied in schools both in Kenya and abroad. When his book was produced in 2008, it became a massive hit, coming right after the 2007/08 post-election violence.

“I get surprised by what I have achieved. I do not know what drives me. Maybe it is the poverty I grew up in such that I keep telling myself that I never want to go back there, or the fact that I started when most of my peers were ahead of me and I had to work really hard to catch up,” he says.

Komabni’s second book, Den of Inequities, which talks of his life growing up in the slum, sold out in a week. Looking back, he says what spurred him into success was the fact that his books talk about real human experiences, and mention real places that people associate with.

“I was writing about Molo, Ngando slum and places they had heard about,” he says.

Burt award

Even though most of his books have been a hit, including Finding Columbia that won the Burt Award for Young Adult Literature in Accra, Ghana, last year, there are some he says he should have done better on.

He cites his book We Can be Friends as one of the most boring books he has ever read. It is a book on HIV, and he says when he was commissioned to do the story, the scourge was at its peak and most authors were using scare mongering to drill the agenda of behaviour change. Kombani’s greatest mentor is Meja Mwangi and he says he draws a lot of lessons from his writing style. Internationally, his inspiration is Sydney Sheldon.

His friends marvel at how he is able to balance his banking career with writing. He is the group’s Learning Program Manager at Standard Chartered Bank, and says he had to find the perfect balance between work and writing.

First novel

His publisher, Beatrice Nugi at the Oxford University Press East Africa, says from the day Kombani walked into her office looking for a home for his first novel, they have never looked back. “He is brilliant, inspiring, creative and dependable. He has mentored many local writers,” she says.

When pressed to talk about himself outside writing and banking, Kombani says one thing people do not know about him is that he has the power of premonition. He sees death. He is able to sense it around him when it is lurking about, ready to take someone close to him. “The night my mother died, I could sense it. It was 2am and I suddenly woke up with a feeling that things were not right. I was later told that my mother died around the same time,” he says. Kombani adds that he got the same feeling when his brother died, and it happened again when his favourite uncle passed away.

He is not afraid of many things, but says he tenses up when he is flying over the ocean, and it is when the plane is hovering over water that he starts thinking about his life.

The thing that scares him the most is the thought that a building might collapse on him. Kombani says one of the biggest mistakes that Kenyan authors make is waiting to be discovered. He says when he does an online check, very few authors are using social media.

“My book, Of Pawns and Players, sold out on Twitter before it hit the book stores,” he says.