On Friday, May 15 2026, I found myself walking in a Nairobi where almost everyone drifts — the office worker drifts, the night wanderer drifts, the tout leaning against a matatu drifts.
People meander and stray from the noise of River Road to the wide sweep of Kenyatta Avenue and the rush of quick feet on Kimathi Street with the Nation Media Group’s Twin Towers that rise above the street like a pair of curious giraffes.
Then there are the covered arcades of the Bazaar Plaza, over and across to the green world of Uhuru Park, then out towards the Indian restaurants of Westlands, the shops of Ngara, and finally, once again, back to the roundabouts and bougainvillea of Upper Hill and the long, exhaust-hazed corridor of Moi Avenue, at whose tributary is Monrovia Street that led me to the Goethe‑Institut.
Cover of the book ‘Issa’ by the German writer Mirrianne Mahn.
Photo credit: Pool
I was scheduled to interview Mirrianne Mahn, the German author, actress, and playwright who has been a member of the Frankfurt city council since March 2021.The previous day, Mahn had held a writing workshop for writers and journalists at the Goethe‑Institut on “what it means to be black in Germany today,” sharing nuggets with Kenyans who wish to relocate to Germany.
Mahn told me during the interview that she had visited Nyeri during her time in Kenya and hugged a tree that Prof. Wangari Maathai planted. It was Maathai who first “radicalised” her — a 12-year-old girl in rural Germany reading a German newspaper article about a Black woman fighting to plant a million trees. “That was the first time I saw a Black woman in a German newspaper,” she said, “and she was not a victim.”
Born in Cameroon but now a German citizen, Mahn highlights systemic racism and historical injustices. She worries about the conspiracy theories and imperial nostalgia of the old German Reich that have found an audience with the country’s far-right political factions.
However, Mahn is also a novelist. Her novel, entitled Issa is ribald, irreverent and cutting. It’s written in the German literary tradition of a person becoming themselves: the Bildungsroman, the novel of formation.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe invented it, more or less, with Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796), a coming-of-age novel about a young man who falls in love with a troupe of theatre performers and discovers, through misadventure and longing and error, the shape of his own soul. The Bildungsroman takes for granted that society is worth belonging to, that the protagonist’s rough edges will be smoothed by experience until she fits.
The novel Issa takes this Bildungsroman form and asks a harder question: what does it mean to seek formation within a society that formed itself, in part, by deciding you were different and didn’t fully belong?
The book’s most audacious move is to make Issa emphatically German. In Germany, there is a practice called Pfand: a refundable deposit you pay when buying many bottled or canned drinks.
You get this money back when you return the empty container to a supermarket or recycling point. That reflex to return the container — so German — belongs to Issa too. Mahn’s calculation is a clever one: by making her protagonist this conspicuously German, she forces the reader not to reject Issa.
Issa carries devastating history. The novel begins with a German colonial farmer sexually abusing a Cameroonian woman. The child born of that violence becomes, in time, a German citizen. Mahn reckons that Germany’s complicated history with racism needs to be addressed. The insistence is necessary because there is a lot of silence.
The feminism in Issa is intersectional — it does not treat race and gender as separate grievances. Mahn does not reserve her critique for white German society. She turns it on the Black community as well: on the patriarchal structures that oppress black women, and the corporal punishment of children that she traces not to African tradition but to colonial imposition.
One of the novel’s formal pleasures is its multilingualism. The text carries phrases in French, in Cameroonian pidgin, and in other tongues. Then there is the cover: a dark-skinned woman with full lips and a large natural afro, unapologetic, published by one of the oldest names in German literary culture. The reader knows what she is getting into from the cover.
For the many Kenyans considering moving to Germany, Mahn had some counsel: German punctuality is non-negotiable. The German word for this is Pünktlichkeit, a term used to describe their national expectation of being on time, respecting schedules, and treating time as a form of respect.
Even German trains are scheduled at precise, non‑rounded times. Trains depart at 10:32, not 10:30, not 10:35. One must be punctual. Mahn was shocked when a Kenyan arrived one and a half hours late for her 3-hour workshop in Nairobi. “In Germany, if you are late to a job interview,” she said, “don’t even show up". She also advises: learn the German language if you plan to relocate there because almost everything is done in the language.
What Kenyan writers can learn from Issa is that they should courageously tackle the tough issues we don’t want to talk about, especially tribalism — our biggest blight we should confront as a society, especially as we move towards the 2027 elections.
