While in Wajir, Nairobi existed only as a fantasy — photoshopped, airbrushed, and far, far away — until after high school. He had heard a few things about the city: the loud matatus, the traffic at rush hour, and the way brash Nairobians stepped on the heels of people walking slowly.

But he was yet to experience the city’s particular cruelties — the city's genius for making a man feel that his hunger is his own fault. He wondered if Nairobi's capricious emotional tides would eventually make room for a boy from the hostile north of Kenya...or just terminate him in a terrifying urban erasure — absorb him the way dry ground takes rain and shows no trace of it by afternoon.

He was mesmerised by the always humming footsteps, echoing voices, and the restless pulse of downtown Nairobi — a stream of light, motion, and energy.

This is the story of Abdullahi Bulle, the founder of Nuria Bookstore, the bookshop that has revolutionised the selling of books and encouraged writers in Kenya.

I interviewed him on Monday, June 8, 2026, at his brightly lit bookshop on Moi Avenue, Nairobi. The books on the shelves appeared like a city’s lighted windows, seductive glimpses of the lives of other people.

Growing up in Wajir, he says the school "never had enough books,” and one textbook was shared by six students, where some pages were missing and whole subjects went untaught because teachers were doubling up across classes.

“We were disadvantaged,” he says.

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He came to Nairobi in 2005 and waited two years to join university while washing cars at his brother’s small car wash in Eastleigh, earning Sh400 a day.

He studied Bachelor of Commerce (accounting option) at Nazarene University, interned at a bank, was given a job, and rose to credit manager. But he has always been a restless soul. In between, he sold camel milk, tires, and rims, then tried to build an online spare parts shop that collapsed.

The turn towards books was unlike him.

“I never liked reading,” he says.

However, he says, frustrated by his business failures, "Between 2014 and 2015, I read over 50 books."

He carried them to the office and began sharing them with colleagues. A colleague asked why he was giving the books away for free.

“Sell them,” she advised. And that is how the bookshop idea was born.

He did his research and found that there was no bookshop selling books online in Kenya. And many bookshops were mainly selling school textbooks and not general books, fiction, memoirs, or biography.

Self-published authors were not even a consideration. Several had taken their books to bookshops only to be turned away. Bulle opened a Facebook page in December 2015. By early 2016 he had a website. He was posting content — 10, 15, or 20 items a day — across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In 2018 Bulle decided to leave the bank, accessed part of his pension, and went fully into business. He opened a physical shop in October 2018, but there were no sales. He sold his car, but things were still tough. He defaulted on his rent, and the landlord sent auctioneers. A friend bailed him out. But his trouble had just started. He pitched to several Kenyan investors between 2016 and 2021; all said no.

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I asked him about his highs and lows. He thought about it for a moment.

“I have no highs yet,” he said. But “I have many lows.”

He said that in December 2016, his six-year-old son and his wife had gone to Wajir. He was alone in Nairobi, and he had not eaten that day. His shop had made no sales. In his pocket was only 20 shillings.

I imagine him sitting with the 20 shillings in a city that did not know his name yet, in a shop stacked with books that no one was buying, unable to reach his wife and newborn son across the distance, unable to call anyone. It doesn’t get lonelier than that.

The next day, he received an online order for two books. The customer was a woman in Westlands. He delivered the books on foot. The client did not know that she had just fed a hungry man who was building one of the most important bookshops in Kenya.

The years that followed were harsh. In 2019, facing financial pressure, Bulle put his piece of land on the market. He sold it in February 2020 — one month before the country went into COVID lockdown. He paid off his debts, invested the remainder into the business, and watched as a pandemic turned into an unlikely blessing: people indoors, people ordering online, people suddenly with time and a deep need to read. The business, for the first time, began to breathe.

Nuria Bookstore is currently supporting about 1,800 self‑published authors and is behind a revival in reading and writing in Kenya. Sometimes Bulle seems to be a whole Shakespeare play all by himself — one moment the boy in Wajir reading the desert for what it withholds; the next the young man washing cars in Nairobi for Sh400 a day; then the banker giving out loans he would one day desperately need himself; then the stubborn outsider selling self-published books that every other bookshop has turned away; and finally — though he would insist the play is nowhere near its final act — the man who sold his car and his property and poured his last shilling into a dream.

At Nuria, the door is still open. The light is still on. The boy from Wajir dreams on.

The writer assists people in documenting their memoirs. johnmwazemba@gmail.com

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