When Meja Mwangi was awarded the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for literature in 1974 for Kill Me Quick (1973), he was hailed as the most significant and exciting figure to emerge on the East African literary scene since the publication of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Weep Not, Child in 1964. Mwangi was received enthusiastically by the reading public and the local literary establishment. Both groups seemed eager to confirm that East Africa was no longer the literary wilderness it had been assumed to be by certain influential sectors of the Afro-Saxon literati. In the next six years, during which Mwangi published five more novels (including his adaptation The Bushtrackers , 1979), the reading public continued to receive him avidly, but the literary establishment was having doubts. In fact Mwangi's image has since been transformed from that of a wunderkind of East African literature to that of a persistent enigma; his career is one no critic...