Desperate Child

The story of "Desperate Child" by Silvester Njoroge Wa Mwangi, revolves around a boy and the struggles and pains he goes through after the death of his mother at the time of Liberation War, between the MauMau Freedom Fighters and the Colonial government. Mbau belongs to a family of five children and their mother, Wanjiku. Mburu who is her husband and father of her children, has not been living in their lives for a long time, after the day he mysteriously disappeared. Brought up singlehandedly by their mother, Mbau and his siblings grow up realizing that they are poor, but they also know that they have all the love their mother can afford to give. This makes them feel that their life is good. Things change suddenly for the worse when Wanjiku dies, leaving younger Mbau orphaned at tender age. Mbau is aware of the miserable and lonely life of the orphans, and it is the kind of process he does not want to go through; but now that the only parent he has known in his life is no longer there, he finds himself walking down the painful path of life. As an Adage applies in his Gikuyu Language that an orphan child does not cease to shed tears it turns out to be true in Mbau's case. The years that follow the death of his mother are full of suffering ordeals, and harsh experience Mbau went through over the years during the struggles between the MauMau and colonial government made him to become a bitter man with negative of life. The life he had known as an orphan in his childhood during the MauMau struggle had become miserable.