In April 2013, as the Nairobi jacaranda blossoms fell like slow purple rain, Tony Mochama’s younger brother (Benji) turned 34. But he was terminally ill. With death approaching fast, as Tony celebrated his brother’s birthday before he was scheduled to fly for a writing workshop in Venice, he thought sadly, “Benji may never have another birthday.” He told his brother, “Benji just hang in there, and next year let’s go to an exotic city in Germany.” Benji laughed. Then he said, “Yeah, bro, maybe next year in Yerevan (the capital of Armenia). Next year in Yerevan.”

Benji died shortly after Tony returned from Venice. Tony still remembers the season when Benji was still alive, when his laughter filled the corridor. That season passed. And he has not yet found the one season in which he no longer hears him saying, “Next year in Yerevan.” It reminds one of the saying Jews say under persecution in other people’s countries: “This year we are slaves... next year may we be free in Jerusalem.”

When I interviewed him on June 2, 2026, seated in his study in South B, surrounded by books and as his dreadlocks danced in momentary jigs, Tony Mochama — poet, novelist, journalist, and the man Nairobi knows as “Smitta Smitten” — spoke about how his works hold both laughter and grief.

“I always say,” he explained, “deliver heavy messages in light doses. Tears should be hidden in laughter.”

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He conjures old places — the old Baricho Road bars, the Park Crescent estate, the stretch of Mombasa Road down which the rally drivers — Mike Kirkland, Shekhar Mehta, Jonginder Singh (the Flying Sikh), Michèle Mouton (the Flying French woman children called ‘Mchele Moto’), Patrick Njiru, Juha Kankkunen (the Flying Finn) and Björn Waldegård (the Flying Dutchman) — once came screaming down on Easter Saturday mornings.

Some of his books include: A Jacket for Ahmet, 2063: Last Mile Bet, Meet the Omtitas and others. He has two books he has just written that will be released soon: How to Be an MCA (Mvua Press), a non-fiction account of his 2022 campaign for the Nairobi West ward seat, and A History of Kenyan Music from 1965 to the Present (Narrative Landscape, Nigeria).

When I asked him about how his writing started, his answer almost paralleled that of the Brontë sisters. Early in their childhood, the three Brontë sisters—Charlotte (later known for writing Jane Eyre), Emily (Wuthering Heights), and Anne (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) — began writing as children because their interior lives demanded an outlet. They filled tiny handmade notebooks with imaginary stories. Their childhood was shaped by early death — their mother gone when the youngest was barely two, their older sisters taken by tuberculosis.

Likewise, Tony’s childhood in Nairobi West had almost the same grief. His mother was a melancholy woman, Tony says. “Even her eyes: she always had this air of sadness.” Then on May 7, 1980 — two days before Tony’s fifth birthday — his mother suffered a stroke. She was only 34. She lay in Kenyatta National Hospital for six months. At that time, Tony wanted to express himself in art. Though he is a terrible artist, he drew stick figures of a reunion with his mother. He started making up stories in which his mother comes back from the hospital and his writing started.

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Tony’s works are also humorous. He credits his father for this, though he was also terrifying. In his novella, Meet the Omtitas (fictitious but almost autobiographical), the father is a figure of almost Dickensian extremity. And that is how he was in real life: a man who got a job as a district commissioner and lost it by fighting someone at a political rally; who showed up drunk to his boss’s mother’s funeral — a small, private, polite British burial that had been attended by exactly four people, into which this large, weeping African man inserted himself as the fifth, sobbing over a casket belonging to someone he had never met, startling everyone. A man who remembered from his childhood how to brew chang’aa in his Nairobi West backyard — in a middle-class estate, in plain view of baffled neighbours.

He also appeared drunk at Tony’s university expulsion Senate hearing and woke from what may have been a stupor to shout at the assembled Senate: “Hobe! Hobe! Gaaki! You want to chase away my very clever boy from campus? This boy’s mother has died. He has suffered a lot. Even I have suffered. And now you want to make him illiterate!” He burst into loud sobs. Security came. The Senate, moved, arranged for therapy for Tony instead of expulsion.

I asked him why he thinks his works, though sometimes breezy with joyful nostalgia, have something much heavier. He said that some of his childhood memories were traumatic and embarrassing (like being sent to buy and therefore carry a giant Nile perch fish across the estate in his teenage to the bewilderment of his peers) and the deaths of his mother at 48, his father at 59, and his younger brother at 34. He says he tries to make sense of the helplessness, so he recasts it in a happy way.

Also, the old Nairobi of his childhood has vanished; it’s now a strange city of expressways, flyovers, megamalls, and renumbered matatu routes. And so, he struggles, through writing, to put his old world back together again, and in the process catches only glimpses of an adjacent, undisclosed Nairobi. His mind is full of memories. But he still looks forward to the future with hope. This year we are slaves... Next year may we be free in Jerusalem. Or maybe next year in Yerevan?

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

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