Columbia Global Centers | Nairobi invites you to our virtual book talk series, featuring African Authors! With this series, we hope to offer a platform where African writers can engage a global audience, offering not just their work, but exciting perspectives on how personal, political, and cultural experiences drive their storytelling.
Our third book in this series is "The Havoc of Choice" by Wanjiru Koinange, which is a story about family, politics, and journeying through a fractured country in a delicate time. Based on events around the Kenyan election of 2007, the story follows the lives of Kavata, the daughter of a corrupt politician, her husband Ngugi who decides to run for office with the support of his father in laws endorsement, their two children, extended family, and their household during the weeks and before and after an election that will change their lives and scar Kenya for a long, long time. This book is one of the first pieces of long fiction from Kenya that explore its 2007 post-election violence (PEV) in such detail, hopefully the first of many. When the violence breaks out, each of the characters in the book is in a different part of the country, and through their attempts to travel back to Nairobi - the reader is exposed to all the ways that PEV affected different parts of the country. The Havoc of Choice is a delicate and deeply personal attempt to understand the root of this spontaneous yet organized conflict and to figure out what healing looks like for the people of Kenya.