Binyavanga Wainaina owed much to Nairobi, the Capital city of Sheng. He soaked himself in Sheng, a mixture of KiSwahili and English, and was transformed by it. Not that he was ever fluent in it. Rather his curiosity about the language, its style and its subculture, propelled him as the founding editor of Kwani? (a term borrowed from Sheng) to publish more than a few pieces of writing in Sheng. My point, here, is that owing to Nairobi’s sonic landscape (its song, and lyric), Wainaina embodied the poetic and the profane.