Njambi McGrath
I guess, the seed of writing was first planted in my mind in reverie whilst lying on my back staring at the different shapes that clouds formed of their own accord, at my father’s coffee farm in rural Kenya. I wanted to capture my life from the clouds and shout to the world about it. The other time was when I read Jung Chang’s Wild Swans a few years ago. I thought to myself, ‘I want to educate the world on Kenya like she did with China’.
Although I had inclinations that I would be a writer at several junctures of my life, it was really the death of my father that kicked my backside into gear. I wanted the world to know my father’s narrative, indeed the narrative of my people. The portrayal of Africa by the Western media as a single narrative has also been a big motivator. Chinua Achebe lives in my mind, nagging me, ‘if you don’t like the narrative write your own’.