A dream deferred: Youth, disillusionment, and the postcolonial city in Meja Mwangi’s urban fictions

Abstract

This paper re-examines Meja Mwangi’s early urban trilogy—Kill Me Quick (1973), Going Down River Road (1976), and The Cockroach Dance (1979)—as a literary intervention into the structural failures of postcolonial Kenya and the exclusions of the African literary canon. Despite his early prominence, Mwangi has often been marginalised in favour of canonical figures such as Achebe, Ngũgĩ, and Soyinka, whose works have shaped dominant expectations of African literature through allegory, resistance, and symbolic density. Mwangi’s fiction, by contrast, blends social realism with Kafkaesque absurdity to depict the psychic and material toll of postcolonial disenchantment. Framed through postcolonial theory and Marxist social analysis, this study argues that Mwangi critiques the unfulfilled promises of independence by portraying a cycle of exclusion, bureaucratic inertia, and deferred development. His protagonists—unemployed youth, informal labourers, and urban tenants—embody the systemic disenfranchisement of a generation. Rather than offering redemptive closure, Mwangi constructs a fictional cartography of alienation and absurdity, in which survival becomes the only form of resistance. His trilogy not only anticipates contemporary youth precarity, but also challenges the aesthetic hierarchies that have shaped African literary value. Reclaiming Mwangi’s work thus compels a rethinking of the canon’s boundaries and the politics of literary recognition.