The Campus Exile by Collins Sakwah Ongoma
Life in a Kenyan University is a far cry from the fantasy that lodges in the minds of high-schoolers or the regular lecture hall – hostel routine that parents imagine. It is a real boot camp and can be worse than the dreaded military drills. Danger, despair, euphoria, and sometimes death, all lurk within the walls of the campus. Life’s toughest lessons are not taught in lecturer halls, laboratories, and libraries as parents think, but within university corridors, between the decks of the iron-squeaky-beds in hostels and the streets when the students seek the night city bliss. Life’s greatest lessons are learned during weekends when drugs, alcohol, and sex are freely available and house parties are ticketless.
A first-year student embarked on a dangerous mission to expose a ‘career student’ working with a prominent Nairobi drug lord to sell drugs to the comrades. When Alvin threatened Otiato that he was going to report him to the police for selling drugs to students, selling rooms to non-students, and killing any student that stood on his way, he did not anticipate the horror that he encountered. Enjoying protection from the police and the school administration, Otiato found immense joy in torturing Alvin with the help of his brutal goons. However, without relenting in his mission, Alvin’s quest to liberate the comrades from the oppressive University administration, greedy student leaders, and peddlers like Otiato was amplified after the comrades implore him earnestly to lead them into the streets to fight for their rights.
Drawn in a fictitious setting around The University of Nairobi, The Campus Exile spares nothing while taking the reader inside the world of drug addiction, drug peddling, sex, prostitution, crime and the illegal art of making money to survive within the campus which in most cases is ravaged by brokenness and destitute.