Kill Me Quick

Set in postcolonial Nairobi, Kenya, the novel follows two educated young men, Meja and Maina, as they struggle to survive in a city that has no use for their school certificates. Their story traces a downward spiral from hopeful job-seekers to backstreet scavengers, farm laborers, gang members, and prison inmates, exposing the brutal gap between the promise of education and the reality of urban poverty.

Meja, a recent arrival holding a First Division School Certificate, a high-level secondary school qualification, sits by a ditch behind a supermarket watching beggars and executives pass. His friend Maina, who holds a Second Division certificate and has lived in the backstreets for about a year, emerges from the supermarket's back gate carrying parcels of rotting fruit and stale bread scavenged from the bins. Maina recounts his own arrival: he came expecting to earn hundreds of shillings a month, but every employer dismissed his qualifications. He refuses to return home because, after more than twelve years of schooling and fees, going back empty-handed would mean humiliation before family and friends who never attended school.

Meja spends an entire day going from office to office. At one firm, a messenger leads him downstairs only to show him a sign: "NO VACANCY. HAKUNA KAZI" (5). At an Arab-owned restaurant, he pleads for any work, offering to cook posho, a staple maize-meal dish, or sweep and wash dishes. The manager demands experience, not academic credentials, and has Meja thrown out. That evening, Maina counsels him to accept reality: by city standards, they have only enough education to spell their first names. The two climb into the largest supermarket bin to sleep, snuggling for warmth amid the smell of rotten vegetables. Meja abandons his job search. He tucks memories of home away and follows Maina's lead, learning to scavenge from bins and avoid police. They venture into the suburbs for odd jobs, chopping wood and collecting scrap to sell at exploitative prices. Everything they earn is swallowed by the effort of staying alive.

An old man named Boi, a cook who has served the same white employer for forty years, offers the boys gardening jobs on his master's farm twenty miles from the city. Maina resists, but Meja is desperate to escape, and Maina reluctantly follows. The farm is large and flat, with a farmhouse surrounded by cedar trees and a creaking windmill. The boys rotate through every job: cattle herding, pig feeding, orchard work, and finally the farmhouse gardens. The 250-pound boss catches Meja sleeping by a stream, kicks him into the water, and puts both boys on half-ration and later half-pay. Maina, promoted to kitchen helper because Boi fears him, begins pilfering food and pinning blame on Meja, though he always shares the stolen goods. Conflict with Boi escalates after he visits their hut uninvited, bursts through the door, and accidentally sits on hot coals. Boi retaliates with petty cruelties; Maina responds with sabotage. When clothing and a camera disappear from the farmhouse, a search reveals the items in the boys' hut. Maina accuses Boi of planting the evidence, but the farmer dismisses them immediately. They collect their meager savings and are driven back to the city.

Two years older, Meja sits by the same ditch, having failed again to find work. One day Maina bursts through the supermarket gates and hurls a newspaper-wrapped parcel at Meja. A chase ensues. Panicking, Meja turns into a mainstreet, violating Maina's cardinal rule about staying in the backstreets. A car strikes him. The torn wrapping reveals two rotten apples. He loses consciousness as an ambulance arrives.

While Meja spends six months in the hospital, Maina encounters a man called the Razor, who claims to be a former classmate and invites Maina to join his gang in Shanty Land, a sprawling settlement of paper, tin, and mud shacks. Inside the Razor's hut, Maina meets the gang: the one-eyed Crasher, the nearly bald Professor, the thick-set Sweeper, and Sara, the Razor's woman. Everyone smokes thick bhang (cannabis) cigars. After weeks of training in pickpocketing and burglary, Maina completes his initiation by following a mark into the suburbs, grabbing the man's coat from inside his house, and leaping through a thorn hedge to escape. He becomes a skilled solo operator and begins a relationship with Delilah, a barmaid from Shanty Land who asks him to marry her, though Maina has nothing to offer beyond love.

When the gang's resources dwindle, Maina devises a scheme. Posing as a milkman, he collects advance payments from housewives on Cedar Avenue, a suburb neglected by city dairies, then steals bottles from neighboring doorsteps each morning and redistributes them. After a week, the Central Dairies Board calls the police. Two detectives corner Maina at a doorstep. He tries the bluff, "Central Dairy, can I help you?" (87), but the detectives are unmoved. He hurls a bottle at them, slips, and is handcuffed. He is sentenced to a year in prison.

After discharge from the hospital, a nurse gives Meja fare money. He rides a bus to his home village and stops at the fork in the path, paralyzed. His twelve-year-old sister Wambui appears, tiny and malnourished, dressed in a dirty calico sheet. She asks if he brought the blue necklace he promised years ago. She proudly writes her name in the dust, misspelling it; Meja corrects it with his scarred hand, and the girl stares at his damaged fingers. She tells him their father has gone to beg money for her school fees and that father said if she reads well, she too can go to the city and get a job. Tears flood Meja's eyes. He can see his father's house through the banana and maize plants, yet he cannot face his family. He collapses on the grass, and when Wambui runs to fetch their mother, Meja flees, leaving behind the inscriptions in the dust and one dirty old shilling, all the money he brought back from years in the city.

Meja gets a lift to a rock quarry, where the foreman refuses to hire his skeletal frame. A quarryman named Ngigi advocates for him, and the foreman grants probation: Meja must hew nine cubic feet from the cliff. Meja can barely lift the mallet, but at lunch Ngigi advises him to follow the line of weakness in the rock. That afternoon, Meja finds two faint cracks, drives wedges into them, and twists the pick with all his remaining strength. Nearly a ton of rock cascades down. The astonished foreman awards him the job.

When the quarry's rock is exhausted, Meja drifts back to the city, joins gangs, and robs a house. During the trial, the owner identifies every stitch of clothing Meja wears as stolen, stripping him to a borrowed blanket. A green van delivers him to a hilltop prison, where the Chief Warder issues him a white uniform. Inside the compound, someone shouts his name: Maina, also an inmate. The two embrace. Maina leads him to Cell Number Nine, reserved for the hardest cases, where Meja fills the vacant ninth spot of a recently hanged cellmate. That night the cellmates introduce themselves, each cheerfully announcing his crime and sentence. Meja and Maina recount their separate journeys since the supermarket chase, their stories finally converging in this locked room.

After their respective releases, the gang disintegrates. The Razor dies from alcohol poisoning. The Sweeper kills a gang member and is hanged. The Professor has a mental health crisis and is committed to an asylum. The gang scatters. Maina searches for Delilah but learns she married two years earlier. Devastated, he returns to the Razor's old hut and attempts to hang himself. The gang cuts him down alive. Meja intervenes with deliberate cruelty, throwing the rope back and telling Maina to do it properly outside, insisting this is Maina's private battle. Stung by the challenge, Maina walks to his home village, where a stranger at his father's old house tells him the family is gone: During a drought, his father sent the remaining sons to the city to find Maina, and they never returned. His mother fell ill, and his father sold the property and left. Maina will not enter the hut he was born in. He staggers into a storm, collapses, and crawls to a nearby hut begging for shelter. When the occupant begins closing the door, hunger and the will to live possess him. He throws himself inside, and a desperate fight erupts.

The green van delivers Meja to prison once more, the arrival scene repeating almost word for word to underscore the cycle. Settling into his bed, Meja notices Maina's sleeping place is empty. When the cellmates joke about Maina's absence, Meja tells them the truth: Maina killed the man and his wife that night. He was caught the next morning, still running, covered in blood. He has lost his memory and his voice and cannot speak to the police. Meja stares at the empty space, haunted by the possibility that his challenge drove Maina to murder. He hears Maina's voice: "Somehow we have to live!" (150). On the highway half a mile away, a car honks and speeds toward the sleeping city with its tall buildings, blinking neon lights, and unfathomable backstreets.