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.