Meja Mwangi: Reclusive writer who gave common man a voice

Novelist Meja Mwangi.[Courtesy]

Meja Mwangi (real name David Dominic Mwangi), who died last Thursday aged 78, was no ordinary writer. He shunned publicity, choosing obscurity over the glare of the media spotlight and deliberately set himself apart from many of his literary contemporaries through a sustained commitment to “common man” stories.

His rich oeuvre, featuring works such as Kill Me Quick (1974), Going Down River Road (1976), The Cockroach Dance (1979), Weapons of Hunger (1989) and The Last Plague (2000), depicted life as lived by ordinary people in rural and urban Kenya. His narratives were rooted in the years following Independence in the early 1960s.

Bad governance, predatory post-Independence leadership, unequal access to opportunity, resource deprivation, corruption and poverty combined to defer the promise of Independence for many. Mwangi’s characters laid bare the daily struggles of the common man: finding work, paying for healthcare, affording life’s basics and turning dreams into liveable realities. 

Nearly 70 years since Ghana became Africa’s first independent state, many across the continent still grapple with food insecurity and limited access to affordable healthcare. Africa continues to be associated with poverty, disease and landlessness, conditions that once fuelled anti-colonial struggles.

Despite being resource-rich, the continent still witnesses its young people risking their lives as economic migrants on perilous Mediterranean journeys or ending up as cheap labour in the Arab world, often trafficked by cynical middlemen. While many of Mwangi’s contemporaries lamented the failure of liberator-rulers to live up to Independence ideals, he centred the common man, showing how betrayal and deferred dreams condemned millions to lives of penury. In doing so, he found both originality and moral clarity.

Mwangi’s keen social perceptiveness, perhaps honed during his youth in Nanyuki, enabled him to portray the common man as both casualty and hero of the struggle. For him, the life of the ordinary citizen ought to have been the true measure of progress.

Mwangi has rested. But his legacy as an unpretentious but steadfast friend of the common man endures, deserving enduring reverence and admiration. — The writer is a Nairobi-based novelist, short-story writer, satirist, playwright and historiographer