Mapped
Going Down River Road
Meja Mwangi
Mwangi's gritty novel of post-independence Nairobi follows Ben, a cashiered ex-soldier drifting through casual labour, cheap drink and cheaper rooms in the raw underside of the booming city. The real Nairobi is its stage: the bars and flophouses of the notorious River Road, the high-rise construction site where Ben sweats to raise a tower he will never enter, the shanty rooms of the poor, and the gleaming modern centre going up on their backs.
5 places →
Out of Africa
Karen Blixen
Blixen's memoir of the years she ran a coffee farm in colonial Kenya opens with the line that fixes the place forever: she had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The map holds that real country outside Nairobi, the farmhouse that is now a museum, the ridge of the Ngong Hills, the town and the settlers' club, and the coast at Mombasa where the journey began. It brings Kenya and the East African highlands into the atlas.
5 places →