My new book is out in book shops across Kenya, yet, I haven’t held a copy or touched a single page of it. My decision to print, Strength and Sorrow, in Nairobi was a deliberate choice to honor the people who helped me find my voice and as a gesture of gratitude, to place their access to my words before my own. As I wait for my copy to cross the world to my base in the Netherlands, I’ve reflected on why I wrote this book. The answer lies not in a single event, but in a lifetime of quiet preparation, and a deep-seated belief that writing, above all else, is a service to the public you serve. It has been a journey of 28 years to this point.

I learnt the art of public service from my father. My father was in my view fully realised as a man. He was a man who talked about the future and its possibilities and rarely did you hear him complain. When you come from a large family, different siblings will hold different versions of the man they call father. My three elder brothers talk of a harsh ‘fathe’. A man of few words who did not tolerate crap or sloppiness.

The difference between my eldest sibling and I was 13 years. By the time I was born, I guess fatherhood had mellowed the mzee and I had the privilege of a father who kept me in close company. I was a boy in training, an escort on his daily rounds. I would sit in the car while he talked with his friends, learning to spend a lot of time quietly and observing people willing time away. I realize now that this training was a preparation for a different life, one that would be defined by the quiet art of listening.

By age 12, I had learnt how to handle an oxen plough. It was quite an achievement for a city boy. To wake up at dawn and troop to the shamba to plough. My father never made me feel special. Work was simply work and everyone had to put in their fair share. I still enjoy farmwork but mostly because of the discipline it cultivates. 

When my father suddenly died in 1989, it left me adrift. He was my guiding star. Death was one thing that I had never factored in the equation. It was at his funeral that I really came to appreciate what kind of man my father was from people who showed up to pay their last respects. It was all a daze. People and more people sharing the impact he had on their lives. Where did he get the time to help all these people and raise 6 children? He never talked about it.

After the passing of my father, in my mid teens, I got fascinated by the mysteries of life, in my grappling with the phenomenon of death. I had read the Bible regularly as a story, much like a novel but I soon began to ask questions about the historical foundations of the text. I often wondered how a holy book that had entered into our cultural space a mere 100 years ago had obliterated indigenous African spirituality.

Still confused by the nature of death, I found myself questioning life’s purpose. One day as I was walking down a main street in Eldoret town, I noticed a pharmacy run by Asians and decided to just try my luck. I ventured into the pharmacy and asked the lady at the counter where I could locate any literature on their belief system. She handed me a magazine, titled Osho Times and I devoured the copy that same day. It was a door to a new world of esoteric mysteries. The philosophy that a person could master their suffering and forge a meaningful life was a truth I had been seeking.

My early love for reading led me to my father’s small library, a bookshelf in our village sitting room that held a few gems. In it was Peter Abrahams “Mine Boy”, Charles Dickens “A Tale of Two Cities”, Aldous Huxley, “Doors of Perception”, Philip Ochieng “The Kenyatta’s Succession” and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s “Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary planted the seed for a mental decolonization.

I would never have fathomed how influential those books would become. But what I truly enjoyed reading were newspaper columns, which became my favourite sections in newspapers and magazines. I was fascinated with how serious topics could be delivered with humour and insight.

Columnists have been a long standing favourite of my newspaper reading. Hilary Ngweno’s editorials in The Weekly Review were a masterclass in political analysis. I admired Philip Ochieng’s fidelity to language long before I could fully grasp the depth of his columns. I regularly read Kwendo Opanga and Mutahi Ngunyi who covered all the political power plays.  The celebrated Wahome Mutahi’s satire would catch on later and I started to feel smart when I developed the ability to read between the lines in his columns.

The story of how I became a columnist is a series of happy accidents. I never wrote much outside of my academic assignments until one day a colleague asked me to submit a piece for the AIESEC group in university that published a newsletter.  A few encouraging compliments would eventually set me off on my journey as a man of letters. To augment my survival at the University of Nairobi where I was on a bursary, I joined Nautilus gym as a fitness instructor. It was in this gym on Mombasa road in Nairobi that the true beginning came after a conversation with Billow Kerrow, who would become a prominent politician. 

He liked my perspective and challenged me to write about fitness, and with a name and a vague address, I set off for the Nation newspaper office. My contact wasn’t there, but while wandering around the building, I found Mundia Muchiri, the editor of a new pull-out Saturday magazine. He took a chance on my typed pieces, and a month later, my name was in the country’s biggest paper. It was a small section that I shared with a Reddy Kilowatt advert. My word count was under 350 but I was now getting paid for my words. 

I graduated to writing feature stories for the Saturday magazine when Mundia left to start the Eve magazine and Joy Mutero took over as editor. I always maintained a regular fitness column. The editor who really put me on the map was Rhoda Orengo. I had arrived to submit one of my regular fitness columns in the pre-email days when she challenged me to write something for the Mantalk column. I had an active college life and shenanigans were plenty. I picked up an incident and wrote about it. It got published and I was encouraged to write more. The column was held by three writers, Cylde Morvit (Allan Kopar RIP), Tony Mochama aka Smitta who would mature into a unique and prolific voice with an enviable stack of books to his name. 

By about 2000, I had inherited the column and my journey commenced. I thought I could write but I knew nothing about the craft. I was squeezing writing into my day, constantly chasing deadlines. I could never make proper time for writing and did not treat it with the respect it deserved. I had bought into the narrative that you cannot really make a living as a writer and precious writing time was lost in pursuit of side gigs. But, I finally got it. It was a discipline. Writers write all the time because that is the only way you can truly grow.

One subject that I kept  returning to in my columns was the subject of death, even then, I thought I was only writing public obituaries. My attraction to obituaries was more generational work. It was the death of Wahome Mutahi that triggered it. His Whispers column was  the epitome of column writing. The gold standard. I wanted to write for the public memory but I wrote as a detached, objective observer. I was documenting the lives of others, celebrating them, honoring them and learning from their journeys. But this public act was a shield. The more I wrote about others, the more I was drawn to my unresolved grief and the memories of those I had lost. My public mission to remember others was in essence a private mission to suppress my own pain. 

I grew up in a society that avoids discussing death, treating it as something to be endured, not understood. This cultural conditioning taught me to internalize my pain. Death was a “terror monster,” and my initial response to loss was to “suppress and carry on.” 

It wasn’t until a motorcycle accident that would happen the same year that I hung up my spurs after 11 years of writing The ManTalk column that I arrived at a critical turning point. It shattered my detached observer role and forced me to confront my own mortality. I could no longer pretend to be a passive writer; I was now a participant, a person who had felt the stealthy approach of sudden death. This moment compelled me to look inward and use my writing not as an escape from my grief, but as a way to engage with it directly.

I had found a tool I could use to reflect on the losses in my own family, alongside stories from my countrymen that I had collected over the years. In listening to their experiences, I realized that my story was not unique. I felt deeply connected to people I’ve never met, and I could empathise with their sorrow. The act of gathering their stories became an act of self-discovery, allowing me to find the courage to relive and process my own forgotten grief. 

This book is essentially a communal act of mourning, a collective ritual of remembrance. I return to my Kenyan public in humble service, after years of introspection. Writing about death and loss was not a choice; it was an inevitability. It was the only way for me to heal, and in doing so,I hope to create a space for others to find the strength to confront their own suppressed sorrows borne from loss. This book is not about giving answers, but about inviting my readers into a long overdue conversation, a public acknowledgment of our shared humanity in the face of death.

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Strength & Sorrow has landed in Nairobi! You can now grab your copy at 5 bookstores across the city.
📍- Text Book Centre
📍- Yaya Bookstop
📍- Nuria Book Store
📍- Half Priced Books
📍-Prestige Book Shop

Or simply place an order on my website https://oyungapala.com/

I hope you gain something of value from this read. Asante.