Lite Reads Selection: ‘Fanta Blackcurrant’ by Makena Onjerika

Welcome to The Feminist Bibliothecary’s Lite Reads, where we will read a different short story every week, and discuss it here and on social media. This week’s Lite Reads selection is Fanta Blackcurrant by Makena Onjerika.

Fanta Blackcurrant was published in 2017 in Wasafiri Magazine. In 2018, the story won the Caine Prize, awarded to a new African short story on an annual basis, providing new funds and prestige to one individual African writer every year. Fanta Blackcurrant uses a unique writing structure to weave a one of a kind story about a group of people living on the streets of Nairobi. The story makes use of the occasional Swahili word or phrase that helps bring it to life (with the phrases being easy to deduce from context, but also easy to find exact translations of through Google Translate). The story is uniquely Kenyan, but also universal in its own way.

Makena Onjerika is a Kenyan author from Nairobi, who received her creative writing degree at NYU. She is the fourth Kenyan author to have won the Caine Prize since its inception in 2000. I am not aware of any other published work from her at this time, but Onjerika is currently writing a fantasy novel.

Fanta Blackcurrant is available to read for free as a PDF, either in browser or downloaded. If you prefer audio over visual reading, the story is also available for free on Soundcloud as read by the author.

Join us in the comments section here, or on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, to participate in discussions throughout the week. You can also join in on the discussion at Litsy by following @elizabethlk.