This has been a year of heavy losses for Kenyan literature.

A year in which the culture of this country seems to have lost entire constellations, as if someone up there had decided to turn off, one after another, the brightest lights in the narrative firmament: Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a giant among giants; David Mulwa, who breathed theatre like air, and the indomitable Ruo Kimani Ruo, guardian of the Swahili word.

But then there is the loss that, for me, hurts more than the others.
The one that doesn't just squeeze my heart: it turns it upside down, grabs it by the shoulder and asks why on earth I thought I was ready.
I am talking about Meja Mwangi, author, crime writer, investigator, ironic neorealist and bard of the modern country that today Kenya is.

Seventy-six years old, a quiet house in Malindi, that ocean breeze that comforts you and deludes you into thinking that certain things are infinite. But no: he left us the day before Jamhuri Day, as if to reiterate, for the umpteenth time, that he was always one step ahead. Even at the moment of farewell.

Meja was like that: he was ahead of his time. He was ahead of collective trajectories, fashions, generational anxieties and social stumbling blocks. He was ahead of his time and he told stories. He told stories and he lived. He lived and conveyed on the page all the impact and whisper of what he had seen.

When I read Kill Me Quick for the first time, I thought it wasn't literature: it was a fire engine siren placed on top of a matatu and set off in the middle of the night, a sudden jolt from the slums that makes you look up and reminds you that Kenya is not a neutral place, it never has been. With Going Down River Road, I realised that his talent was not a flash in the pan, but a whole storm. And then the others: Carcasses for Hounds about the Mau Mau, The Cockroach Dance, The Last Plague... each one a gap, a crack in the skin of the country.

Nuria Books, his last publisher, called him a “silent revolutionary”.

It's true. He was. Because there are loud revolutions, and then there are others that make less noise but dig deeper, where dignity and despair shake hands and do not judge each other.

But I want to remember the Meja who laughed. Yes, him: the narrator of the slums who laughed with the wisdom of survivors. The first time we sat down together in Malindi, he chose a Balozi. ‘Too much sugar in Tusker now,’ he told me in the same tone he might have used to criticise a constitutional reform. And to think that he had even written a booklet about Tusker.

We talked about everything: geopolitics, society, how Kenya had managed to become a chronic adolescent, always torn between the temptation to grow up and the temptation to stay in the den. Every meeting was a lesson. Not so much in literature, but in humanity. An improvised evening school, with the rustling of casuarina trees instead of a bell.

At one point, while writing Nairobi, la città visibile (Nairobi, the visible city), I realised that I couldn't avoid including him in the book. You can't talk about Nairobi without at least a shadow of Meja, an echo of him. I also mentioned him when I went to collect the “Narrare il mondo” (Narrating the world) award at the Turin Book Fair in 2023. It wasn't a courtesy: it was a debt. 
And how many young writers or aspiring writers of Gen Z have I met in Nairobi who consider him a master, if not an idol?

His story, then, already seems like a novel: born in December 1948 in Nanyuki, shaped by the harshness of the streets and the vastness of the plateau; educated at Nanyuki Secondary, Kenyatta College, a stint in Leeds, another in Iowa; he worked for French radio, the British Council, and on film sets, where he learned to synthesise everything into a single perfect image.
And all this travelled within him like a karst river: it re-emerged in his books, in his dialogues, in his silences.
He found a second home in the United States, but he never really stopped being Kenyan to the core. You could tell by the way he looked at things: sideways, with irony, with that kind of longing that comes to those who have loved a place too much to really escape it.

I will miss his short, dry emails, with their almost disarming kindness. I will miss knowing that somewhere in Malindi he was working on a new chapter and would have wanted me to read it before anyone else. I will miss hearing him reflect on the contradictions of Kenya as if he were proofreading a novel still in draft form.

And I will do everything I can to fulfil the promise I made: to translate your works into Italian. Because, as we used to say, even if only twenty people read you, there is a chance that at least one of those readers will end up chatting with you over a beer.
The truth is that life took a long time to kill him.
And luckily so: because in that “long time” there were books, laughter, dirt roads, shared beers, and his way of being in the world that resembled a well-written sentence. One of those that are not forgotten.

Thank you, Meja.
Not for what you did — which is enormous — but for how you lived.
And for how you taught us to read Kenya: not as an enigma, but as a luminous wound that is always worth looking at.
Rest where you want, old friend.
Every time we open one of your books, we'll know where to find you.

(To Carola and her family, my deepest condolences and those of Leni)