Kinyanjui Kombani’s “Last Villains of Molo” twentieth anniversary

Kinyanjui Kombani is celebrating 20 years since the publication of his debut novel, The Last Villains of Molo, with a series of events, starting with a Twitter/X space on Friday, February 21, 2025.

In 2005, Kenyatta University graduate Kinyanjui Kombani published his debut novel The Last Villains of Molo. It followed characters caught up in the violence that led up to the election of 1992, who would make their way to the capital city of Nairobi a decade later. We loved that book, one of the few texts available that fictionalises the first major election flash points on record in 1991/1992. There wasn’t an immediate acknowledgement of the text’s potency for the young writer; that would come later as more locally and internationally realised just how important it was. You can read our glowing review from when this website started in 2013.

Following his debut, Kombani became a highly respected writer with novels like Den of Inequities (2013, our review), Finding Colombia (2018), Of Pawns and Players (2019), and short stories like in the anthology Nairobi Noir (2020). He has also written the children’s books Wangari Maathai: Mother of Trees, We can be Friends, Lost but Found, and the film Mizoga.

He has won numerous awards including the CODE Burt Award for African Young Adult Literature 2018, and the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 2019. The Kenya Publishers Association listed him as one of Kenya’s notable 25 authors in its 2024 honours.

Apart from writing, he has been at the centre of helping to build the writing and publishing ecosystem in Kenya as the driving force for initiatives like The Authors Buffet and the Daystar Creatives Academy.

The Singapore-based writer has organised activities to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the first text he published. One of these is a recording of the prologue by legendary thespian and writer John Sibi-Okumu which can be accessed on SoundCloud.

Another is a Twitter/X space, an important platform for Kenyans nowadays, where those who attend can engage the writer on his book and its influence on the local publishing/writing industry. The conversations start at 7 pm on Friday, February 21. To get a reminder for the event, we recommend that you click here.