Author Ongoma Sakwah explores protest violence, political corruption in fresh works

Author Ongoma Sakwah is no stranger to literary and social media circles.

The celebrated writer has previously published The Campus Exile (2019) and Premium Tears (2020), and now returns with two new titles, Cowards Die Smiling and The Devil Was One of Us.

The Devil Was One of Us is a collection of short fiction drawn from the 2024 and 2025 anti-Finance Bill protests. Inspired by real events, the book interrogates themes of extrajudicial killings, political greed, oppression, and youth-led activism.

“The Gen Z protests are a vital part of contemporary history. I deeply felt responsible for documenting them in the form of literature,” he says.

Sakwah describes that the devils in this collection are the police officers who senselessly killed young people during the protests and the youth who took advantage of the protests to secretly negotiate with the government for personal gain.

The devil, he says, is also the politicians who oppress Kenyans and the young people they pay to vandalise people’s businesses, attack peaceful protesters, and sexually violate girls going back home from the protests.  

The collection opens with Trigger Happy, a piece that follows Wambua, a corrupt police officer, from his home to the streets of Nairobi on the morning of June 25, 2024. He was not taught peaceful ways of managing protests.

Sakwah depicts the events of the day with protestors carrying smartphones and displaying placards while filming TikTok videos. While their reasons for being in the streets were serious, they found moments of fun by dancing to songs such as Anguka Nayo, which became one of the popular protest anthems.

In another story, Audited Grief, the story reveals the ugly side of solidarity and how the unifying factor of social media was also used to weaponise and spread shame, fake screenshots, and government propaganda against activists as corrupt politicians stole billions.

In The Gates of Parliament, an eager protester enters a chaotic parliament for the first time. It explores how things can change so fast, as the happy protestors were killed by the police.

A piece, God Does Not Accept Donations, speaks about the grief that mothers carry through the story of Mama Maina, a vegetable seller in Thika, whose son is on the front page of a newspaper that details he went missing during a protest that she did not know he had attended. She fears what the government will do to her son.

Sakwah aims to have insiders write their own histories since what was taught in high school was distorted to protect the oppressors.

“The people who fought for our liberation were erased from history books by pretenders. I did not want that to happen with the Gen Z story. It was important to me that Kenyans write this chapter ourselves, with our own feelings, our own anger, our own happiness, our own voices, and our own tones,” he says.

Cowards Die Smiling is a debut detective crime thriller that revolves around Rahman, a successful lawyer who plans to take over Nairobi’s criminal underworld. It is also a thrilling political book about power, identity, impunity, tribalism, corruption, the grabbing of public funds, and injustice.

Sakwah says that he intended to counter the belief that serious African literature must be realistic, political, and derived from oral tradition. Though it has produced great books, it has also sidelined genre fiction such as thrillers and detective novels.

“I wanted to show that Kenyan writers can write page-turning crime fiction that is set on our own streets, built from our own realities, and speaks directly to our own times. We do not have to import that experience from James Patterson or John Grisham,” he says.

Sakwah’s entry into storytelling was in 2014 when he dropped out of the University of Nairobi after two years. He went back home and spent four years working as a shamba boy. In his free time, he would visit his cousin, a literature student from Moi University, with a stack of books that his late father, a high school literature teacher, once owned and Sakwah borrowed.

He shares that reading was his way of dealing with depression as a university dropout, which ended up stirring an idea of what it could be like if he became a writer too. He created a Facebook page and shared short stories about the comical life of a broke Nairobi bachelor, which included his time on campus as well as the lives of ordinary people in Nairobi.

These stories earned him over 35,000 Facebook followers on Facebook in one year, over 60,000 Twitter followers in the following year, and 100,000 readers before he published any book.

People enquired whether he had written a book, to which he replied that he lived with his cousin Dennis Wanyonyi, who provided tools for him to start writing. The Campus Exile, which centres on Elena, a tough orphan from Mathare Slum who is trapped in the lavish lifestyle of a drug lord, requires her boyfriend, Alvin, to fight through the criminal underworld to reach her.

“I shared chapter by chapter on Facebook, from beginning to end. When I finished, my followers told me to turn it into a proper book. That is how my writing journey truly began,” he recalls.

He continues: "The best writers of this generation will be those who can use social media's reach without surrendering to its shortcuts. Writers who can build a large audience and still have something meaningful to say to them.”

Sakwah’s favourite reads influence his writing. He has read crime and thriller fiction writers like James Patterson, John Grisham, Lee Child, and the Kenyan legend John Kiriamiti. He also deeply enjoys African fiction such as Meja Mwangi, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani.

“Although I have written across different genres, I believe crime fiction is where my heart is most at home, which is exactly what I also love reading the most,” he says.

Sakwah, who has also ghostwritten autobiographies for influential figures, says it is different from fiction writing because he gets to know the person behind the story well.