Makena Onjerika takes us through the streets of Nairobi, and it is not to show us the majestic structure of the city, but the human decay, the infuriating poverty and violence.

Makena writes in near broken English, about the women on the streets of Nairobi. Victims of violence, they roam the streets from when they were totos (children), up until blood started coming from between their legs.

Even Meri, the beautiful lucky one amongst them, who had been the centre of attraction and envy, couldn’t escape the cruelty.

Makena lays out finely, not just the story of Meri, but the story of women, of a people, a city, paying directly for the sins of violence and neglect.

We see women sniffing glue, a substance capable of causing torrential damage to the body system. We see girls, women, sleeping in street corners without shelter, exposed to every danger therein.

We see girls, women, who should be in school learning the ways of the world and how to be human beings; lying in street corners, learning the ways of the street, selling their bodies for a meal, for clothing and maybe a room in the slum. Even worse, they have unprotected sex with total strangers, oblivious of the health implications.

Meri soon becomes pregnant and doesn’t even know who got her pregnant. Customers do not want to have sex with pregnant women, so Meri would have to look for some other means to survive and this she did.

Her ingenuity in the art of extortion, soon lands her the enmity of the street big wigs. An attack not only takes out her pregnancy, but perhaps even her mind.

“Fanta Blackcurrant,” won the 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing.

Writer’s note: Makena is as skillful as any writer I have read. Her ability to engage one’s emotions and evoke imageries that keeps one bound in the stream of the story, is magnificent. One cannot help but read and re-read this story. It resonates with humour, but the sadness hovers, piercingly so, like a pair of sad eyes.

By: Emeka Nwakobi