The novelist with a phobia for publicity

Nicholas Muraguri

What you need to know:

  • He was later transferred to the Curriculum Development Centre (later Kenya Institute of Education) before ending up at the Government Chemist’s in 1964.

“I don’t really want to talk about literature.” That is how one of Kenya’s oldest surviving popular writers answered us when we approached him for an interview this week.

Nicholas Muraguri, aka Mwangi Ruheni, an extremely private and reticent man who is averse to giving interviews, has left an indelible mark on Kenya’s literary scene. His novels, The Minister’s Daughter (1975) and Future Leaders, were received with huge acclaim, making it to the coveted African Writers Series.

“Those are things that happened a long time ago, and at any rate my last published title that appeared three or four years ago had nothing to do with fiction,” he added before hanging up.

Why would a man who so captured and enthralled young readers across many generations be so disillusioned and disinterested?

Yet this disillusionment is apparent in some of his non-fictional works, particularly Random Thoughts Book 1, a rather voluminous collection of his musings over the years published in 1995.

That was the same year when he finally revealed, during an interview with this writer, that he was the man behind the pen-name ‘Mwangi Ruheni,’ under which he had for years published an impressive collection of titles mostly during the 1970s.

Incidentally, The Future Leaders, the 224-page novel published in 1973, entered the African Writers Series long before Meja Mwangi’s Kill Me Quick and Carcase for Hounds, as well as Secret Lives, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s collection of short stories.

To further illustrate his early prominence on the Kenyan literary map, Muraguri’s seminal title and its follower, The Minister’s Daughter (1975) also preceded Ngugi’s  Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross, Detained and Ngahika Ndeenda in the famous series. Both titles were also far ahead of Rebeka Njau’s Ripples in the Pool and Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road.

The amazing thing about Muraguri’s fictional works is that, like his compatriot Meja Mwangi, he wrote them enthusiastically despite being a professional scientist with no serious literary background, and his books were never hits in serious academic circles.

Still in print

It is on the popular front that he ruled the roost, with his titles doing remarkably well on the market, which explains why, according to his publishers, many of them are still in print decades after their first publication.

The two novels published in the African Writers Series aside, Muraguri had also in the course of time published other titles that were no less popular.

Still in print today, they included such titles as What a Life! (1972) and What a Husband! Both published by Longman, the two titles were followed in 1973 by In Search of their Parents, a children’s book that dealt with the vagaries of urban life, including crime.

That title was followed in quick succession by The Mystery Smugglers (1975) and The Love Root (1976), both fast-paced sizzlers published by the then Heinemann Kenya under their popular Spear Books easy reading series.

Having first become an author in the early 1970s when aged around 40, Muraguri had his heydays as a writer upto mid-1970s. Then he had a lengthy hiatus until 1995, when he produced the self-published Random Thoughts, which he intended to follow up with a second volume after three or four years.

“Self-publishing was expensive, yes, but after dealing for many years with commercial publishers, I decided to go into it,” he said in an earlier interview.

Pointedly, he wrote anonymously — courtesy of his senior civil service position — and generally avoided the media.

A scholar, eminent scientist and senior civil servant, Muraguri only revealed his identity as the man behind the Mwangi Ruheni pen-name during an interview with this writer in October 1995, the only interview he ever gave in his creative career.

By then retired from his post as the Chief Government Chemist, in which he had served for 22 years, Muraguri was already in his 60s and had avowedly hung up his creative writing tools. Clearly, he was no longer prepared to deal with publishers, who he considered fraudulent to a fault.

That was apparently why he had instead decided to go into self-publishing, and had just issued the non-fiction tome titled Random Thoughts, a compilation of his musings over the years.

Today, already in his twilight years, Muraguri can proudly look back at a lengthy writing career during which he left his footprints on the Kenyan writing scene, albeit under a pen-name, whatever critics thought of his decision to produce popular literature.

Tracing his illustrious career, it becomes clear that he was capable of writing more serious stuff.

Young writers

“One reason why we have very few writers of serious issues is because we have very few readers of such books,” he argued in Random Thoughts. “One does not require extensive research to know what our people prefer to read. Novels that rotate on love, sex, violence and drugs are entertaining, but they should be balanced with the reading of the less sensational but interesting issues.”

In the same book, Muraguri berates publishers for not encouraging young writers, while at the same time ‘reciting’, how they, the publishers, fund the entire book production operation by “paying the artists, the proof readers, the printers, the advertisers, the distributors, and finally, giving a generous discount to the bookseller.”

According to the veteran author, the way most publishers explain it, “you almost end up believing that they are really publishing your manuscript as a favour, to keep up your good spirits and to develop the country generally by setting a good example.”

“If all this is glibly recited to you the author, you end up almost getting convinced that the 10 per cent they give you is more than you deserve,” Muraguri writes and laments: “Young authors are often disillusioned by the paltry royalties they get for their writing simply because they find themselves in a rut. They want to write. But it is the publisher who sets the rules of the game in which he is one of the players. The royalties often remain fixed irrespective of soaring sales.”

Was he himself totally disillusioned after publishing his first fairly successful lot of titles? There is a suggestion that he was, which explains why he took a long break from publishing, only re-embarking on it in his old age.

Whatever the veracity of his views about the publishing world, Muraguri is a strong campaigner for fairness in the treatment of authors. As for his own relatively short-lived prolific period, he suggests that his motivation was equally short-lived.

“Most of the books came out in a spurt in the 1970s,” he explained during the earlier interview. “For a long time after that, I totally kept off fiction writing.”

Unlikely career

His very first book was a successful school text titled Practical Certificate Chemistry. In his younger years, he was a scientist, a teacher, and a university don in Kenya and Uganda. In the civil service, he rose to become the Chief Government Chemist.

By all accounts, then, a future for him as a writer of fiction would have appeared unlikely.

The writing bug had bitten him early, though. While at Makerere, he was the editor of St Augustine’s Newsletter, a creative writing journal produced by the Catholic students there.

Educated at Mang’u High School and Makerere College in Uganda, where he studied Botany, Zoology and Chemistry, Muraguri graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1956.

He then embarked on a Master’s degree in Chemistry between 1957 and 1959. He later did a one-year MSc course in forensic science at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, after which he returned to Kenya and was appointed the Chief Government Chemist, a post from which he retired in 1990.

Among his collegemates at Makerere was former President Mwai Kibaki, who had also been a schoolmate at Mang’u, and Malawian poet-writer David Rubadiri.

Both were ahead of him, while veteran writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the late poet Jonathan Kariara were behind him.

Other collegemates there included Kenneth Matiba, Philip Gachoka, Daniel Gachukia and artist Elimo Njau, who was at the famous college together with his future wife, writer Rebeka Njau.

On leaving Makerere, Muraguri was posted to his old school, Mang’u, between 1959 and 1963, to teach chemistry and biology.

He was later transferred to the Curriculum Development Centre (later Kenya Institute of Education) before ending up at the Government Chemist’s in 1964.

Those he counted among his students at Mang’u included former vice-president George Saitoti (now deceased), former Nation Media Group chief executive Wilfred Kiboro and former Nairobi PC Francis Lekolool.

In the ensuing years, ‘Mwangi Ruheni’ became a household name in Kenya and elsewhere while the man behind it continued with his duties in the civil service.

His perennial dogfights with publishers aside, self-publishing turned out not to be as easy for him, and Muraguri’s penultimate title was to be The Diamond Lady, which was published 10 years after he had first ventured into self-publication, in 2005.

The title was issued by Mvule Africa Publishers.

Not one to hang up his boots too fast, the elderly author continued writing, albeit at a slower pace, even in his late seventies.

In 2008, a non-literary and non-fictional title, Survival in Excess, was published by East African Educational Publishers, with whom he had had a long association.