The Nairobi Castaways: Novelistic Representations of Slum Dwellers

This article is a critique of Nairobi city’s socio-political histories as portrayed in Kenyan literary works the 1970s, focusing on Mwangi Gicheru’s Across Bridge (1979), Charles Mangua’s Son Woman (1971), Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road (1976) and The Cockroach Dance (1979). conveys insights urban castaways by reading city canvas onto which novels reconfigure nation’s that feature through various characters who impress their hopes, aspirations, desires upon indifferent to them. It engages with castaways’ fictional realities but links them Nairobi’s social histories. focus slum demolitions, persistence colonial vagrancy laws, also informs state operatives’ insistence expelling from slums for return presumed ancestral homes rural areas. demolitions expulsions appear simplistic way navigate aesthetics, tackle congestion crime. advances argument plight persecution selected reality exacerbated government’s historically uncritical adoption neo-liberal capitalism, an offshoot capitalism. Indeed, reveals novelists’ critical assessment exposure underlying exploitations marginalised urbanites both local foreign neoliberal capitalists.