“When It Comes to Crime, I’m a Nationalist”: National Integrity, Neocolonialism, and the Kenyan Detective Thriller

Abstract

OR HIS RECENT CRITICS, M ŨKOMA WA NG ŨG Ĩ'S TWO DETECTIVE NOVels, Nairobi Heat (2009) and Black Star Nairobi (2013), signal a break with the familiar forms and commitments of postcolonial African writing. The studied application of hardboiled genre conventions to an East African setting, so the argument goes, sets these texts apart from the various social realisms that dominated African literary exports of an earlier era. 1 Just as, for example, Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Buekes, Tade Thompson, and others have sparked a twenty-firstcentury "explosion" (O'Connell 687) of African science fiction, so too, perhaps, do Nairobi Heat and Black Star Nairobi mark the arrival of African crime fiction on the world stage. 2 At the same time, as John Marx writes, Mũkoma's novels also "depart from earlier postcolonial fiction, in which the sense of geopolitical possibility remained tethered to the promise and limitations of nation-states" (409). Attuned to the shifting geographies of late capitalist globalization and, specifically, to the expansion of "global cities" like Lagos and Nairobi, which "exceed the administrative purview of any given state," Mũkoma and other Anglophone African writers of his generation have apparently been "freed from an obligation to represent the nation" (Marx 409). His labyrinthine plots unfold, rather, in what Miriam Pahl describes as "postnational" space, a contested territory where the Kenyan state is merely one institutional actor struggling for sovereignty with an array of subnational and supranational rivals,