Linda Musita’s Mtama Road launches at African Book Festival.

Linda Musita’sdebut short story collection Mtama Road launched at the African Book Festival in Nairobi, Kenya on Friday, August 4, 2023.

Nairobi-based lawyer Linda Musita came to the notice of the African writing scene when her name was on the famous Africa 39 list in 2014. That group of writers who were mostly under 39 with a longlist curated by Binyavanga Wainaina and a jury of Elechi Amadi, Tess Onwueme, and Margaret Busby were predicted to influence African writing in the future. Her short fiction has since been published by DRR (Down River Road), Bloomsbury UK, Goethe Institut, Jalada, and Lolwe among others.

Linda Musita’s debut short story collection Mtama Road is published by DRR and comes with the following blurb;

Mtama Road is Linda Musita’s debut collection of short stories. In these seven stories, all set along Nairobi’s Parklands Mtama Road neighborhood, we are introduced to snapshots, moments, and instances of characters, almost always teenagers, whose lives are connected by virtue of living so close to each other. While the stories are relatable, typical, and even universal childhoods, they have been rendered with such a grace and sense of place and belonging that they might have only happened in and around Mtama Road: City Park, the bowling alleys, Acorn Hall, Nairobi City Park Cemetery. In Boys, one of the longer stories, Iris swears she will not sleep with a boy at the cemetery, watched over by buried corpses and monkeys. The stories presented here are deceptively simple, thanks to Musita’s naturally fluid prose, but they examine characters who are beginning to question the complex worlds around them, teenagers who are becoming more and more aware of the politics of hair, of sex, class distinctions, bad parenting, etc. Stories in an amalgam of the unforgettable late twentieth century R&B, soukous and Kanda Bongoman, barutis and other mischief, pekeles, Patcos.

The book made its debut as the highlight event moderated by Frankline Sunday on Friday at the Soma Nami African Book Festival in Nairobi. The writer spoke about the motivations for the book, how the book is a love letter to the 1990s, why she shifted from the racier writing she did in her earlier years, her she incorporated artist Anne Kavochy and her son its production, and a lot more. You can get a copy of the book by clicking here.

Here is some video we recorded on our trusty cellphone;