For quite a while, “Kenyans don't read” was everywhere: newspaper columns, casual conversations, policy discussions on the news about education. It was — still is, if we're being honest — spoken with resignation, as fact. Like the entire nation failed a cultural test long ago and there will never be a do-over.
In the spaces where you find bookish people, though, you will get heckled for saying such a thing. We are moving away from this, and we are determined to take everyone along with us. Bookish people are like runners, or people who take their coffee black and without sugar, or people who shower with cold water by choice — in that evangelism is inevitable; they must try and try again to convert everyone they come across, never mind your own ideas about how you wish to live your life.
You will be booed because things are changing and you will not take that away from us. Was there a long minute there when it seemed we had all just accepted that there was no market for storytelling that has to be paid for? Well, yes. Is literary production still a hard road to walk? Yes. But a claim of outright absence of a reading culture feels intolerable because it flattens the complexity of how Kenyans interact with stories, text, and knowledge. And it ignores the strides we have made forward over the past couple of decades.
What does it mean to describe a country's reading culture?
First: How do we produce, propagate, and consume stories? How do our stories show up in daily life? How do we teach one another? How do we preserve our knowledge?
Then: the written word in particular.
A reading culture is a vast thing. It's not only about whether people read. It is also what they read, how they read, why they read, how they access texts to read. It is how society values and sustains literary life. And we observe how a society values literature in the infrastructure it develops to support literary production and dissemination.
My reading about how we read leads me to believe that, at least in part, the attitude that we are not a reading people came from the memory of post-independence glory days when the University of Nairobi's Literature Department was a big deal across the continent. I've read essays that describe a Nairobi in which what our writers were saying in their books and in the local papers was the thing everybody discussed in bars and on the streets. They say it was a time unlike any other for Kenyan literature. Books were relatively cheap, and reading them meant that you were part of a national conversation. (When I bought the latest edition of After 4:30 because I could not resist that new look — good job, whoever is responsible — my father said he got it at 12 shillings way back when. Mine cost me 1200 shillings. We then had a funny exchange where he exclaimed about how dirty the book is, and I asked why he bought a dirty book way back when, and we nodded in acknowledgement that if dirty books sell then it is probably because human beings like dirty books.)
And then the state began moving mad, turned on the writers, let the libraries begin to decay, and it was downhill from there. Reading became about literacy alone, not literature.
At least, that’s how I’ve heard it told.
“Golden ages” exist only in selective memory, though. This particular one reflects, primarily, the experiences of an educated, urban middle class. Nairobi, with its universities, publishers, and bookshops, was the stage on which this cultural vibrancy played out. Outside the capital, and for many who weren’t part of that intellectual class, access to books was still thin. Plus, much of the publishing of the time was tied to national education policy, in service of nation-building — literacy was always the main goal.
The nostalgia for this era is real, but it also risks distorting present realities. It tells us that reading once flourished everywhere and has since declined rather than that structural inequities have always limited literary access. What has changed is the conditions under which books are produced, distributed, and consumed. When conditions change, we typically just call that life.
Our public libraries are still too few and under-resourced, with the Kenya National Library Service managing just over 60 branches for the whole country. Even within cities, the libraries often struggle: old furniture, limited new acquisitions, slow adoption of digital resources. Bookshops are concentrated in these same places. In rural areas, the absence of both means that children may complete their education (if you could call it that) without ever experiencing the intimacy of choosing a book from a shelf and loving it.
Our school system, heavily exam-oriented, treats literature purely as an academic subject and a tool for moralising rather than a source of pleasure or an exercise in imagination. (Or, at least, our former school system. I don’t know if anyone is clear yet on what is going on now.) Students encounter novels as material to be analysed, summarised, and memorised for exams rather than invitations into new worlds. It is little wonder that many of us associate reading with obligation rather than joy. For this reason, publishing, too, leans heavily on textbooks and curriculum-adjacent children’s storybooks because leisure reading is not a big enough market to sustain the industry. Novels for an adult audience are therefore expensive to produce, and by the time they end up in the market, they are out of reach for many families.
This scarcity has shaped our reading culture, I cannot deny that. But it also shows that at least part of the issue is not disinterest but infrastructure. It is difficult to cultivate the habit of reading when books are expensive, when school syllabi emphasise rote memorisation over literary exploration, and when leisure time is consumed by the daily grind of survival. I would argue that reading in Kenya is structurally discouraged more than it is culturally dismissed.
And yet — and this is important — Kenyans are reading. Just not always in the ways we expect. Book clubs are buzzing and literary festivals are drawing crowds. People are swapping PDFs on WhatsApp (we will talk about piracy another day) and physical and online bookshops are opening all over the place. Inama Bookshops, the informal book vendors on the streets in the CBD, fill a critical gap, though I see that the street clean-ups by the county government is throwing a curveball their way.
The rise of e-libraries, often supported by NGOs, has allowed some schools to access thousands of titles on digital devices. While connectivity and electricity remain challenges, apps like BookSmart by Worldreader mean that local and international children’s literature is freely accessible. Parents are trying, in small ways, to make reading part of family life: I work at a small local library, and every weekend parents are there, reading to their little ones, and it is just as heartwarming as you’d expect — you know, before the screaming and snot start. The Kayole and Eastlands branches of McMillan Library are thriving after Book Bunk’s restoration project, and this adds to the number of small community-run libraries in low-income neighbourhoods in Nairobi. Writers are emerging every year in genres that haven’t always done well in our market. Women’s voices are more present than ever before: Joan Thatiah, of the Confessions of Nairobi Men and Women series, sits at the top of every local bestseller list I have seen.
I question also the need to separate literacy from literature. One of the best ways to get your novel read is to have it picked up for study in a high school or university classroom. Many novels become widely read, both today and in the good old days, because they become examinable, not necessarily because they have entered the bloodstream of everyday leisure reading. But why is that a bad thing? They were still read, no? And they still did in the readers’ minds what they needed to do. Stories are part of learning how to read, learning how to think. You gain literature and literacy together; two birds, one stone. In our disappointment when we hear someone say that the last book they read was a high school setbook, we miss the victory therein: many Kenyans are out here not reading books regularly, true, but the last book they read was The River Between, or Betrayal in the City, or Coming to Birth. If you look at it from a different angle, that’s a win!
Our publishing ecosystem favours children’s literature, which often sacrifices creativity for mass production and standardised learning that insists on religious perspectives. We often talk about this as bad for adult fiction and, in some ways, even for children’s fiction. But majority of the country holds a religious perspective and would rather that the state sanctions only the sort of literature that points children in this direction, and in this way, publishers are responding to the market. Our children’s books are conservative because Kenyans are conservative, and what we’re overlooking here is what a great job local publishers have done because locally produced children’s and young adult stories are abundant today and among the most affordable books in our market.
As for the effect of this publishing focus on possibilities for adult fiction, I would argue that a lot of the upset stems from an unwillingness to accept that the market is growing but is still small. And with interesting, valuable stories being told on TikTok, on TV shows and movies, on YouTube, on Substack, and in all manner of forms in all manner of online spaces, books are simply never going to be the biggest medium for knowledge sharing and storytelling again.
Perhaps the most urgent shift we need is conceptual, to broaden our definition of what counts as reading. Think of Bible or Quran reading, so central in many Kenyan households. For millions of us, scripture is the most consistently read text, and it shapes language, memory, and imagination. Think of WhatsApp groups, where news articles, motivational quotes, and serialised fiction circulate daily. Think of blogs and social media threads that attract thousands of readers nationally — political commentary, personal essays, gossip columns, microfiction. To insist that Kenyans don’t read is to ignore the many unconventional ways we engage with text.
A colleague remarked recently that Kenyan books sound like social media writing. I found that that makes sense to me because many contemporary Kenyan authors got their start writing online, building formidable platforms of dedicated local readers, and only then taking the opportunity to publish and sell books to these readers. (Jackson Biko, K. Kimuyu, Charles Chanchori, Sarah Haluwa, Silas Nyanchwani, to name a few whose books I have.) They worked with what they had, built trust with a cultivated readership, improved as they went, and even though it’s probably still not easy for them to sell books, it’s also probably a lot easier than if they showed up to a market that knows nothing about them with nothing but a single story. That’s how a writing career is supposed to happen. Why are you booing; they are right. And I would also ask: Do they sound like social media writers or do they sound like local writers writing for local readers in styles and forms those readers clearly value and appreciate? (The discord between the elite of high literature and the riff-raff of popular literature is not a new one.)
Even oral traditions play a role here. Storytelling remains embedded in Kenyan cultural life — the Nairobi theatre, spoken word, and songwriting scenes are relentless — and these oral forms often travel back into written text, transcribed, published, and circulated online. When you are reading the lyrics of the latest Watendawili song on Spotify, are you going to look me in the eye and tell me that’s not reading? That it doesn’t count?
We know Kenyans are reading books because we see that our booksellers are doing alright. But also, reading is happening all the time everywhere — outside the book. Reading today may look different from the frameworks recognised by the traditional institutions of publishing or academia because the world looks different, but it is no less vibrant in its energy. By acknowledging these forms, we move away from framing ourselves as a country of non-readers and toward understanding us as a country of differently-situated readers engaging in literary culture, even if the texts we read never sat on a bookstore shelf. From this vantage point, the task is not to generate interest where none exists, but to build structures that meet people where they already are: digital platforms, affordable texts, communal spaces.
The challenge, then, is not a lack of appetite but a mismatch between how reading is imagined and how it is lived. If policymakers, publishers, and educators continue to equate a “reading culture” solely with book sales and library visits, maybe they miss what already exists.
We can hear “Kenyans don’t read” now less as an absolute truth and more as an arrow pointing at what we have not yet built. The interest is there, the curiosity is there, the stories are certainly there. What might be lacking are the structures to connect readers and literary production more regularly and more reliably. If someone says Kenyans don’t read, sure, bully them a little, because to move forward, better to resist the temptation to dismiss ourselves and instead commit to investing in the physical, digital, and cultural infrastructures that will allow every Kenyan to encounter literature not by force or by accident but as ordinary parts of daily life.
Other interesting things to read:
The fact that River Road printers have networks all over the country selling everything from atomic habits to a romantasy you've never even heard of says everything you need to know.
A well thought out piece. Once I saw a chokoraa/homeless person (for lack of a better word) reading under a flyover and I was quite fascinated by that. Reading happens all the time. It happens every minute of the day. Online and offline. And I like how you have shown that it actually does. You know your shit.