Going Down River Road by Meja Mwangi

About Meja Mwangi

Going Down River Road by Meja Mwangi

Ben is a man on the move — in bars, in night clubs and in seedy pubs down Nairobi's River Road. On one of these occasions he meets Wini, a single mother trying to make it in the big city. They live hard, as man and wife, for a while, surviving at the very edge of squalor, until Wini escapes abroad with her boss leaving her baby son with Ben. When Ben joins up with Ocholla, his bar-crawling, construction-site friend, life goes from strange to bizarre. The novel is celebrated for the stunning vividness of its Nairobi street scenes — the noise, the smells, the desperation and dark humour of men living paycheck to paycheck with no safety net. Critics have said nobody else has captured the vital, volatile underground culture of Nairobi with as much understanding and empathy as Mwangi does here. It won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 1977 and is considered one of the defining novels of urban African fiction.