Zukiswa Wanner

Ah  but for absolutes. There was a time I would tell all and sundry with a semblance of pride that I do NOT read crime fiction. In retrospect, I do not recall why I said that with pride. Perhaps it was because my idea of crime fiction up until then was James Hadley Chase who I could not relate to. Enter the new phase of African crime fiction and I cannot get enough of it. Angela Makholwa’s Red Ink, Margie Orford’s Clare Hart trilogy, My Brother’s Keeper by Jassy Mackenzie and now I have just finished reading Mukoma wa Ngugi’s Nairobi Heat and I am a convert and not ashamed to yell it on the mountains.  African crime fiction rocks. And it is of the last book that I blog about today.

Meet black American detective Ishmael, a man stuck between a rock and a hard place as he has to investigate the death of an unknown girl found on the steps of an African professor in a wealthy neighbourhood of Madison, Wisconsin.  In the white world that Ishmael inhabits, the perpetrator of the crime must be brought to book, and soon. Because, this is not just a death. It’s the death of a white girl. Those poor whites of America, the Ku Klux Klan, have already started making a noise and they want answers just as much as the white liberals.  As Ishmael says of the quandary he finds himself in, ‘if I was to give advice to black criminals I would tell them this:  do not commit crimes against white people because the state will not rest until you are caught.’ He knows he is racing against time as the heat is on for his boss, the first black police chief in the county.   And yet the professor seems clean. He is, after all, revered the world over for having rescued many people from the Rwandese atrocities and for being a founder of an NGO that now looks after the victims’ interests. Time is running out. How will Ishmael solve this one?

And then a phone call from some mysterious person telling him to go to the root of the problem – Africa. And it is no longer just a crime. It is now a story spawning two continents and leading political and NGO characters. Finding himself in Nairobi partnered with crazy fellow detective David Odhiambo ‘O’ who metes out a justice of his own kind, Ishmael must dig deep to find the truth while trying to avoid the obvious pitfalls surrounding him (the fact that he does not speak Swahili and, even on a continent of fellow black people, that he stands out through his mannerisms and looks).

It is while in Nairobi, that he encounters that breed of person known in Kenya as a KC (Kenyan Cowboy), Lord Thompson, a strange old man and a nemesis  of O. Lord Thompson invites them for tea and later leads them to a place where they almost get killed. The question now is, how much does Lord Thompson know and who is he trying to protect? And where does the beautiful spoken word poet (I hear the pc term is Live Literary Artist now) Muddy fit in all this?  And is Joshua Hakizimana, the professor that Ishmael left behind, as heroic as the world believes he is?

To answer any of the above questions or to tell more would be to give the story away. What I can give away though is Nairobi Heat has a fast-pace that will leave you breathless but never wanting to put the book down until the very last page. As I raced through the book, I found myself cheering on O and Ishmael, I tasted the Tusker on my tongue, and I nodded my head in agreement at the wonderful insights Ngugi brings on the NGO business of ‘saving Africa.’

When you buy books to give away this Christmas, make sure Nairobi Heat is one of them – buy two copies though as you will not want to part with it if you are a bibliophile like me. This book is yet more proof that Africa is, as Siphiwo Mahala would like to say, ‘writing itself out of oppression,’ now if only our politicians would read and discover the secrets hidden between the covers of books, we could catch up in other spheres!