Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ

Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) is a Kenyan American poet, author, and academic. He is associate professor of literatures in English at Cornell University and co-founder of the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Writing.

Black Star Nairobi (2013)
In Kenya, if someone with enough credibility told you that he or she was going to send you to Ngong, you had better back down unless you could get them there first.
 * It was around midday but it might as well have been midnight, with us canvassing for clues in the light of a full moon — the canopy of the ancient trees let in an annoying in-between light, too low to see well in, yet too bright for flashlights.


 * In Kenya, if someone with enough credibility told you that he or she was going to send you to Ngong, you had better back down unless you could get them there first.


 * It was always a herd boy, venturing into the depths of the forest, who found the dead body. In our instance, he happened to have a cell phone and so we were able to get to the body in a matter of hours.


 * More than just being flat broke, you could say we were like boxers who, having slugged through predictable wins, were ready to finally fight a worthy opponent. We were ready for a case like the one that nearly broke us, our first case together...


 * Whoever killed him took the casing.


 * There was nothing more to do but get the body to the pathologist. We didn’t have any body bags and the Administrative Police, or APs as we called them for short, had to carefully roll him onto a woolen blanket.


 * DNA was useful only with a large criminal database — Kenya’s was in its infancy, and unless we were extremely lucky, there would be no match. And dental records? Forget about it. We just had to hope that the body would yield some secrets.


 * This place, it reminds me how lucky I am — just to be alive, to be walking out of here.


 * In the United States, there’s the Nevada desert — and football stadiums, if you count Jimmy Hoffa.