Before 2014, I used Facebook quite a lot. One of my favourite habits was writing posts addressed to an imaginary son. I wanted a specific audience in mind, a male figure to ground my thoughts, so I invented him. In those posts, I shared life stories, wise sayings, quotes, and hard-earned lessons drawn from my own experiences, those of my family and friends, and the lives of strangers.
Then something frustrating began to happen. People would read my posts, but instead of sharing them directly, they would lift the content. In academic circles, we call this plagiarism. They copied my exact words and pasted them onto their own social media handles.
I would stumble across my own sentences on someone else’s page and think, “Wait, this is word-for-word what I wrote.” Lacking any realistic recourse, I simply let it be. Eventually, I stopped posting on Facebook altogether.
I moved to Twitter (now X) and continued the practice, but the environment there was even harsher. Back in 2014 and 2015, accounts with verified blue badges held massive clout. We called them bigwigs. They could lift your words without credit, and because you were a small account (small wig) with limited reach, no one would ever believe you were the original author.
After fighting too many of these exhausting, meaningless battles, I reached a turning point. I would turn my words, teachings, and observations into a permanent book.
So, I started to write.
How the Book Began
When I began writing in 2014, the manuscript had no clear shape or structure. It was simply a raw collection of tough lessons drawn from traumatic experiences, my own, my peers’, and those of strangers.
In my formative years, I learned and experienced so much that I felt the lessons were worth sharing. Soon, I was offering my ‘wise counsel’ to friends, relatives, and siblings navigating difficult situations. I found myself being invited to reconcile drifting friends and lovers, and even mediate marital disputes.
I also noticed that many people, for reasons I still cannot fully explain, approached me to confide their secrets. Some simply wanted a listening ear, while others sought solid advice, which I was willing to give.
Originally, I intended it as an extended letter to my future children, tentatively titled Letter to My Son. Along the way, however, I realised I had to abandon the title after Joan Thatiah, another Kenyan author, published a book with an almost identical name.
I then pivoted to Parables of the Peasant.
When I shared the draft with a close friend who is also an editor, she found a million faults. Her immediate objection was taxonomy: what I had written were not parables, but proverbs.
We argued, disagreed, and debated for a long time. Eventually, I saw the logic in her critique, and we agreed to rename it Proverbs of the Peasant.
Yet another dilemma emerged. The text didn’t consist solely of short proverbs. It also contained longer prose reflections and extended teachings on specific subjects. Unlike a proverb, which is often a single sentence or a brief verse, these were detailed essays.
What was I to do with them?
That was when I settled on Proverbs of the Peasant and Other Teachings. I also realized these teachings needed a distinct framing device: a narrative voice bigger than my personal identity. To ground these reflections, I adopted the persona of Ayot Kayot, a fictional elder addressing the community.
Then came the issue of cultural association. The word proverbs is almost universally linked to King Solomon and the biblical Book of Proverbs. While every culture has its own rich treasury of proverbs, I needed a title that clearly marked my work as a distinct, modern creation.
That is how the word contemporary entered the frame, to signal the present day.
The title evolved into Contemporary Proverbs of the Peasant and Other Teachings.
The choice of the word peasant was deliberate. The book was conceived, in part, to speak to the ordinary citizen looking across the social divide at wealth they desire but cannot reach. It examines life from both vantage points: the peasant versus the rich man, the hoi polloi versus the hoity-toity.
Why It Took Me 12 Years
When people hear that a book took 12 years to complete, they naturally ask: How? And why so long?
The truth is, very few writers work on a single manuscript in isolation. Many of us juggle three or four projects simultaneously, and I am no exception.
As I continued working on the manuscript, new ideas surfaced and spawned competing projects. One of those manuscripts was time-sensitive; I began it in 2016, and it will soon see the light of day.
In 2014, I also launched a business. By 2018, corporate and professional commitments were consuming the lion’s share of my time.
Then came 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. As the world ground to a halt, life took an unexpected turn, compounded in 2023 by the painful loss of my father, closely followed by the death of one of my stepmothers just days later.
During the height of the lockdowns in 2020, I wrote an entirely different book, The Below Average Life of Baba Zoya, in just three weeks. It was the fastest book I have ever written, a story of a man caught in the chaotic currents of his time, though publishing delays meant it didn’t hit shelves until 2022.
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At one point, I had Contemporary Proverbs of the Peasant and Other Teachings, The Below Average Life of Baba Zoya, and two other draft manuscripts all competing for my mental energy and time.
I had planned to launch Contemporary Proverbs in 2024, but life-altering personal events intervened, forcing another postponement.
There is also an industry reality that many people rarely appreciate until they live it. Writing a book and publishing a book are two entirely different animals.
Once you hand a manuscript over to a publisher, the process assumes a life and pace of its own. Developmental editing, proofreading, ISBN registration, cover design, typesetting, layout and formatting, printing dummy copies, and proofing those physical copies all take time. A manuscript can easily sit with a publisher for months, or years, at any one of these stages.
This friction is why many writers eventually pull their manuscripts to self-publish, which comes with its own heavy demands, costs, and responsibilities.
So those 12 years were not spent sitting in a room writing the same pages over and over. They were 12 years of writing, rewriting, juggling projects, earning a living, navigating life’s unexpected turns, and enduring the slow grind of the publishing machine.
Writing a book is one thing; getting it published and into a reader’s hands is quite another.
Inside the Pages
Contemporary Proverbs of the Peasant and Other Teachings gathers more than 2,700 modern proverbs, reflections, poems, and practical life lessons. It addresses love, mortality, money, business, ethics, human behavior, and the consequences of our choices.
While inspired by the cadence of traditional proverbs, the book is firmly anchored in modern realities. It draws from everyday life. Ordinary people navigating extraordinary circumstances, and extraordinary people living humble lives.
These are not passive observations meant to be read once and forgotten. They are designed to be debated, questioned, and applied. They stem directly from my own journey and the journeys of many others. From birth to the present, the errors, the observations, and the quiet epiphanies along the way.
The book delves into the silent struggles of men, the unspoken dynamics of womanhood, the vulnerabilities of the boy child, family conflicts, and the broader human condition.
My goal is to provoke critical reflection. Sometimes we experience deep emotional states or complex social situations that are difficult to articulate; a well-crafted proverb or concise reflection can give voice to those exact feelings. These sayings are meant to counsel, console, guide, or reprimand, reminding us of what is honorable while guarding against moral naivety.
The Need for Modern Wisdom
I insisted on the word contemporary for a specific reason.
Our ancestors spoke, and their wisdom remains a foundational treasure. But the world has transformed. The social and economic realities that shaped their proverbs are vastly different from ours. Today, we navigate novel technologies, altered relationship dynamics, new economic pressures, and unprecedented social structures.
We cannot rely solely on ancient sayings to explain every modern dilemma. Every generation has a duty to interrogate its own experiences and forge its own vocabulary of wisdom.
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This is not to dismiss the Wahenga – the wise ones of old. Rather, it asserts that there is plenty of room alongside traditional heritage for new adages that speak directly to contemporary life.
Why I Chose the Voice of ‘Ayot Kayot’
A key structural decision I made was to write the book in the third person.
The narrative voice belongs to Ayot Kayot, a fictional persona who addresses the reader as an elder speaking to a community, sharing observations, anecdotes, and warnings.
I did not want the book to feel like a self-absorbed memoir. I wanted the wisdom to transcend my personal biography. The reader doesn’t need to know who I am to find value in the text; what matters is whether the words resonate with their lived reality, challenge their assumptions, or offer practical guidance. Ayot Kayot gives the teachings that independence.
Twelve Years Later
Now, 12 years after those initial Facebook posts, and after endless revisions alongside multiple editors, the book is finally out in the world.
Looking back, I realise the journey was about far more than assembling words on a page. It was about living, making mistakes, listening closely to others, maturing, and learning the discipline of patience.
There were plenty of moments when the manuscript could have been permanently shelved under the weight of competing priorities and life disruptions. But it survived.
Contemporary Proverbs of the Peasant and Other Teachings is written for anyone who appreciates practical philosophy, moral clarity, and honest reflections on how we live. Above all, it reminds us that wisdom is not the exclusive domain of the elite, the wealthy, or the highly credentialed. It grows out of ordinary life.
The book is available at Nuria Bookstore and selected outlets.
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