Journeying through Nairobi: Mapping the City through Prize-Winning Stories

Abstract Nairobi as a city has been a prominent feature in many literary works set in Kenya from the pre-independence period, when the city started taking form, to the present. The city has also continued its presence in futuristic literary representations from Kenya. This article is concerned with Nairobi as a city and its representations within short stories in the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. It analyses selected prize-winning and shortlisted stories in a literary project that aims to map the Nairobi city space, exploring both its precarity as well as its stability as presented through literature. Through the characters in these prized stories, the article foregrounds the journey motif as a tool used by the writers to explore and present the postcolonial city though contemporary lenses, paying particular attention to the significance of the chaos and informality used to describe the city. The article seeks to read the postcolonial African city in its complexities outside of the conventional binary lenses of local versus global, rural versus urban, and modern versus traditional. It acknowledges the significance of an international literary prize not only in shaping creative narratives but also in capturing the ‘spirit of the moment’. Through an analysis of these short stories under the larger umbrella of an international literary prize, this article attempts a reading of the creative representations of a city exploring the multi-layered nature of both text and physical space.