Nandi Bear: Reclaiming the forgotten heroes in Kenya's freedom struggle

An illustration of a woman reading a book. [iStockphoto]

Shortlisted for the 2025 Iskanchi Book Prize for African Literature, Abenea Ndago’s novel, Nandi Bear (2025), clearly decentres Kenya’s narrative regarding the struggle for independence. This decision in the novel is as potent as it is political, especially if we consider that political narratives are at the centre of our country’s struggle with nationhood.

The novel blends fictional characters with real historical figures, that span pre-colonial and colonial periods. The spirit of Lwanda Magere pervades the plot, and this plot spills into the struggle against colonisation in Kenya through the experiences of the protagonist, a warriors’ band leader by the name Kwong’utiet. This results in a cyclic and multi-layered narrative with multiple subplots, each foregrounding unique political and socio-cultural issues. These combine with the human experiences in the Kenyan society at the time.

Myths, totems and oral traditions form the canvass upon which the story of the Nandi Bear is told. The novel is couched in the ordered traditional African cosmos, where the supernatural interact with the human and control human life.  Just like Edgar Mittelholzer’s novel, My Bones and My Flute (1955), Ndago blends European spirits, represented by Mr. Perry, with a mysterious local spirit, the chemosit, to expose colonial evils and critique the lasting impact of Arab and European activities in the country. These evils include slavery, colonialism, and the imposition of new religions.  Through Kwong’utiet, the narrative focaliser, Ndago shows the excruciating disruption and trauma that Africans underwent during pre-colonial and colonial penetration of their lands by Arabs and Europeans via slavery and the building of the railway line from Mombasa to Port Florence (Kisumu) between 1896 and 1901.

Kenyan literature has always ignored the effects of the rinderpest plague that decimated livestock in Eastern Africa around 1897. Ndago’s novel confronts this decisive historical occurrence by showing how the rinderpest plague and the subsequent poor harvest in Kipsisin serve as precursors to the tough times that Africans would endure at the hands of the European colonisers. This becomes apparent with the shooting dead of Boiyot at Ketbarak, near present-day Nandi Hills, and the eventual banishment of the character’s entire community from Kipsisin in the then Kavirondo (Nyanza and Western Kenya) to Gwassi in today’s Homa Bay County.

Symbolically, Ndago references the beheading of Koitalel Arap Samoei and the banishment of the Kenyan hero’s family to Gwassi by the British in the very early twentieth century. The author beautifully brings this home by weaving the novel through the experiences of Boiyot’s clan as they move from Kipsisin to Gwassi. 

Nandi Bear is an important decentring act in the sense that it goes against the grain of the official Kenyan narrative about the struggle for independence. If the official narrative leans heavily towards the Mau Mau and Dedan.