Nye tekster om svik: Notes From a Country Trying to Move On // Wanjiru Koinange
Publiseringsdato:
26.01.2026
I det andre essayet, publisert i samarbeid med LitFestBergen og det chilenske tidsskriftet Revista Abismo, skriver Wanjiru Koinange om restaureringen av gamle koloniale bibliotek i hjemlandet Nairobi og politisk vold. Les den norske oversettelsen her.
Den kommende uka publiserer vi alle tre essayene på originalspråket på LitFests hjemmeside. For å lese norske versjoner, se vinduet.no. Og for essayene på spansk, se revistaabismo.com
Notes From a Country Trying to Move On
An essay by Wanjiru Koinange
When betrayal shows up in my life it is usually a slow, unraveling pattern. A discrete and cumulative erosion rather than an abrupt rapture. I often feel betrayed by the fact that so little is still known about women’s reproductive systems. I feel betrayed by my country that imposes taxes on knowledge; essentially making the pursuit of wisdom a privilege to be paid for. I feel betrayed when art, culture and public spaces are treated as luxury rather than as something fundamental for our lives. Betrayal shows up for me when care is quietly pulled away. When a deliberate step is taken away from responsibility, truth and relationship and towards silence, abandonment and convenience. Simply put, I often feel betrayed.
Writing this essay offered the space and time to reflect about the form, function, and texture of betrayal and how it shows up in my life and work. And to explore how distinctly different it’s close relative: disappointment. Disappointment is often universal and visible, while betrayal is more intimate and personal. You might be disappointed to phone a friend and reach their voicemail - but this will start to curdle into betrayal when you later discover that they saw your call and opted not to answer. Even when we are all betrayed by the same incident or event, we’ll wear it in different ways: as anger, apathy or as withdrawal from civic or social life.
I think what I’ve realized is this: Disappointment can be soothed by a conversation or apology. But when betrayal happens, something fundamental shifts and repair is a must. If not, the feeling will sit on your shoulders unevenly.
2
In my novel The Havoc of Choice the story is set in my hometown of Nairobi in 2007 and revolves around an election that changed the core of my country forever. Through the lens of a political family the book explores the events of that election, and the violence and killing that ensued thereafter. It’s a story about one of the biggest political betrayals in Kenya’s history – and about the deceptions that creep into our private lives.
Kavata is the middle-aged daughter of a legacy politician. She has grown up in silent resentment of her father’s corrupt political career and the way it seems to spread like rust onto every aspect of her life. She falls in love with Ngugi because he is nothing like her father. He is raised by a good, hardworking middle-class family. He does everything as he is expected to, and has ethics and enthusiasm that lures Kavata into believing that a life far away from politics is finally possible for her. When they start to build a life together the only thing Kavata asks of Ngugi is that he never ventures into politics.
Two decades into their marriage, Ngugi gets chewed up and spat out by the public housing system that he has built his career upon. When he realises that he is both unemployed and unemployable he is eventually seduced into doing the one thing he promised his wife he would never do. He decides to run for political office under her father's political party.
The domino effect of this decision is a path peppered with betrayals. Kavata walks away from Ngugi and her entire family in the moment when Kenya is on the cusp of war. Their daughter, Wanja, disappointed by her father’s choice, slights both him and her grandfather by getting herself a job at the opposing party campaign - essentially turning her father into the laughingstock of the entire election.
The repercussions of these choices extend beyond the immediate Ngugi family. Before she leaves, Kavata asks Thuo, the family’s driver, not to tell anyone that he dropped her off at the airport on the day she was reported missing. He agrees and holds on to her secret even when it means getting arrested for suspected kidnapping. Thuo is still in police custody when the post-election violence erupts and is consequently unable to care for his family or shield them from the tribal killings happening all over the country.
Schola, the family’s housekeeper, travels to her home in Western Kenya to vote, and to check on the small business she had built over years of sending her wages home. In the height of the political violence, her community targets her business for destruction claiming that she betrayed them by opening a business funded by wages earned from working for the enemy tribe.
Kenyans are a very politically active people. We go hard for our elections. The violence of 2007-2008 essentially broke out because a very many were let down by the results of the polls. Elections have been fraught with irregularities for decades, but this is the one that scarred us. What does it mean to keep living, loving, and working in a country led by a government you cannot trust?
Moments after the winning presidential candidate was announced, the country erupted into spontaneous violence. Kenya became unrecognisable. Neighbours attacked each other, friends drew lines in the sand and suddenly based on what part of the country you were in your surname became either saving grace or scarlet letter. The violence carried on through the rushed inauguration of the incumbent president, and for about two weeks after.
Then, the United Nations Secretary General at the time, the late Kofi Annan travelled to Kenya to midwife the negotiation of a power sharing agreement that essentially ended the violence. The image of the late Mwai Kibaki and the late Raila Odinga shaking hands was broadcast onto our screens along with the instructions to ‘accept and move on’.
This is a phrase that comes to mind anytime I think about this period in our history. It was the thing we were told to do, by the very people who betrayed us. To accept that we had become the kind of people who could allow our pain to be manipulated into violence – and then move on without healing. And we did. We didn’t pause to tend to our wound; to allow the scar to settle and for healing to begin. We just moved on.
I wrote this novel because I had questions about how we could move on so quickly. When I revisited the post-election violence, I wondered where the victims of this collective trauma went when they needed to grieve collectively. I questioned where the violence came from, or if it was always there inside us.
My local readers often ask me what I suggest we do instead of moving on. The truth is - I don’t know. But what I do know is that every five years, Kenyans truly believe that we are rebuilding our country, and I don’t know how many times we can attempt to start again without repair.
3
Two days before I started writing this essay, Raila Odinga – who was one of Kenya’s most influential political voices, passed away. In the days following his passing, my country mourned in a manner that I have never witnessed before. It was as predictable and unexpected as the icon we had lost.
Raila was the son of independence leader Oginga Odinga and his entry into politics was synonymous with the struggle against one-party rule. He was detailed in the 1980s and this earned and cemented his reputation as a symbol of resistance and champion for democracy. He ran for president and lost five times. Each of his campaigns carried the weight of public expectation for liberation. Each time he lost, this expectation remained cradled in the arms of his supporters, many of them unsure where to take it.
Not Gen Z, though. Last year, this generation carried their unmet expectations into the public square via the nationwide protests that started in June 2024 and are quickly morphing into a way of life. The protests were decentralized, leaderless uprisings against corruption, economic inequality, and political complacency. Mobilized online and enacted in the streets, the activists called out traditional ethnic and party loyalties. Gen Z rejected the entire political class - but inherited Raila. His was the only endorsement they seemed to care about because they revered him as someone who has built a legacy from resisting the state, not protecting it.
So, when he stepped into dialogue with the government, appeared alongside the very leadership the youth were protesting; when he spoke of compromise while young protesters were being beaten, arrested, and killed, it felt like a crossing of moral lines. They called out his betrayal immediately and continue to do so even in the weeks following his state funeral. I sense that for Kenya’s Gen Z and his other supporters – the scar of Raila’s betrayal will serve to reinforce their belief that every liberation leader eventually becomes a part of the system they are trying to oppose.
4
When betrayal shows up in our institutions it takes the form of neglect. Care is withdrawn from public spaces. This is the reason that Angela Wachuka and I started Book Bunk – to rehabilitate and re-imagine Nairobi’s public libraries. We adopted three of the city's oldest libraries: The McMillan Memorial Library, Eastlands Library and Kaloleni Library.
The McMillan, which turns 95 years old next year, is the city's oldest library and the inspiration for our mission. This particular library was shaped by the colonial logic of exclusion – built in 1931 and intended for the sole use of the British settler communities. This remained the case until 1958 when, in the lead up to independence, the building was handed over to the Nairobi City Council and opened up for use by Kenyans.
I still remember what walking into the McMillan for the first time felt like fifteen years ago. The library seemed to be frozen in time, a fascinating sight within a city that demands innovation daily. The temperature dips as soon as you get to the marble landing at the top of the 15 steps flanked by our pet lions. I was delighted to discover catalogue cabinets filled with lending cards, but heartbroken that this was the library’s only cataloguing system. I was puzzled by the collections and wondered how the books I would write could ever sit alongside these racist ones.
The neglect of this library is evident in the ceiling high stack of broken furniture that lived in the children section of the library. In the outdated catalogue, the leaking roof and the toilets that had been out of order for so long that library users were forced to visit nearby restaurants for their facilities. We’ve cleaned up the library a lot since then, but there’s still millions of dollars of construction work, and decades of perspective shifting yet to be done.
The Kaloleni and Eastlands Libraries were built later – in the late 1960’s and were vibrant and well maintained until the late 80’s & 90’s, but after neglect crept in and continued for decades. This disregard of our libraries quietly reinforces the message that our culture, memory and identity are ornamental rather than essential. Book Bunk’s work is an ambitious attempt to reverse that logic. Our work rests on the belief that libraries remain one of the only spaces that can repair the relationship between a city and its memory. We’re leading the re-imagination of libraries as dignified spaces for people to gather, learn and heal, which is urgent care work in a country with so many fractured narratives about our past constantly influencing our futures.
We learned very quickly that it is not just about the books. In our context, to restore a library and prioritise the book collection over physical gatherings, would be a betrayal of the fact that African libraries mostly lived in our elders and our story tellers, not in written form. Our story tellers gathered, nurtured and provided access to knowledge systems passed down through rituals and via oral traditions. So, it has become critical that our libraries become spaces for these intergenerational connections to happen where people gather, chat, and just be.
When we adopt a library, we start with questions. We spend a lot of time getting to know the communities that are already connected to the library, especially in their dilapidated state. Then we translate their insights and desires into the physical redesign of the library spaces. We curate collections that reflect the library community, as well as design and deliver the programmes that respond directly to their interests. This is where the magic happens – in the blend of these three crucial strands: space, collections and programmes.
The work of rebuilding trust isn’t a linear prosess and can often feel often abstract or overbearing. In these moments I’ve found such richness and clarity in time spent with children. Observe them in libraries, classrooms and on playgrounds, in their interactions with each other most critically with adults. They have no patience for performance and recognize care only in what is consistently present. They offer trust first, regardless of how easily it can be harmed. And when their trust gets broken, they reel, they grieve and then they embrace a new reality without allowing it to alter what they know to be true. They continue to show up, rinse and repeat. Sometimes the answers we need do not always lie in the halls of power. Often, they are in small rooms filled with little people who still have some faith to spare.
5
My novel offers no resolution. Kavata and Ngugi never get any closure. There has never been any meaningful reconciliation for the victims of the violence that the story chronicles. We’re yet to see what shape the Gen Z led movement will take without the presence of the icon that rooted their pursuit for better governance. And Book Bunk has only scratched the surface of its challenging mission to repair our country's relationship with public libraries.
Betrayal resists neat endings because there can never really be a consensus between the betrayed and their betrayer. There will be threads left hanging, words left unexpressed and wounds that reject the tidy arc of injury-then-healing. It will linger. What I have learned from novels, from being a Kenyan and from the daily labour of restoration is to treat betrayal like a pendulum. It swings us towards re-imagination and the stubborn impetus to fight for a country encourages us to remember and repair.