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Dira Ebook Publishing publishes future-facing Kenyan narratives that allow readers to feel comfortable and knowledgeable about "New Tech" within a distinctly Kenyan context, which we term "NaiNuTech."

The Colour of Still WaterExcerpt from Chapter 3: The Appointed Times "That first Thursday, Eusebius had been at the coun...
18/06/2026

The Colour of Still Water
Excerpt from Chapter 3: The Appointed Times

"That first Thursday, Eusebius had been at the counter for his ten o’clock cup, talking to Kamau wa Kamau. Tobias had come up behind him, ordered tea without sugar, and stood two metres away with the cup held at his sternum in both hands, both thumbs on the rim, undecided between listening and talking.
Tobias had said, “Father Eusebius.”
“Just Eusebius.” He had turned on the stool enough to see the young priest’s collar, the cup, the thumbs.
“I know.” His thumbs stroked the rim of the cup. “I wanted to say it once.”"

The story continues in our next post.

Publication Specifications:
Title: The Colour of Still Water (Padre Nyekundu Book 1)
Author: C. Kamau Waweru
Series: Padre Nyekundu
Imprint: Dira Prime, a division of Dira Ebook Publishing
Genre: Mystery / Speculative Fiction / African Futurism
Word Count: ~79,000 words | 45 Chapters
Format: A6 PDF e-book (Optimised specifically for cell phone reading)
Read For Free:
📩 DM or WhatsApp us to get Chapter 1 for FREE.
🔗 Download 3 FREE chapters instantly from our catalogue: DM for link/click on link in bio
📲 Join our WhatsApp Channel to receive 6 FREE chapters over 6 weeks
💬 Join our WhatsApp Community for an instant FREE 10-chapter excerpt
Note: Audio & Visuals are AI-generated to accompany the text.
Keywords: Kenyan Fiction, Nairobi Stories, Ebooks, Cell Phone Optimised, Padre Nyekundu, C.K. Waweru

16/06/2026

The Colour of Still Water
Excerpt from Chp. 3: The Appointed Times
"Dusk at the Pumwani stage was a colour that did not exist anywhere else in the city. The sky-rail overhead threw a shadow across the stage and the tarmac darkened and the potholes looked less like mirrors and more like night, and the kiosks along the kerb lit themselves one by one as the first geothermal-powered inductive strips in the compound behind them flickered into life. Eusebius sat on his machine. The engine was off and his feet were flat on the tarmac. He had been back from the funeral for nine hours and had been unable to eat."

The story continues in our next post.

Publication Specifications:
Title: The Colour of Still Water (Padre Nyekundu Book 1)
Author: C. Kamau Waweru
Series: Padre Nyekundu
Imprint: Dira Prime, a division of Dira Ebook Publishing
Genre: Mystery / Speculative Fiction / African Futurism
Word Count: ~79,000 words | 45 Chapters
Format: A6 PDF e-book (Fully optimised for cell phone reading)

Read For Free:
📩 DM or WhatsApp us to get Chapter 1 for FREE.
🔗 Download 3 FREE chapters instantly from our catalogue: DM for link/click on link in bio
📲 Join our WhatsApp Channel to receive 6 FREE chapters over 6 weeks
💬 Join our WhatsApp Community for an instant FREE 10-chapter excerpt
Note: Audio & Visuals are AI-generated to accompany the text.
Keywords: Kenyan ebooks, African mystery, Afro-futurism, digital publishing, Nairobi fiction.

THE COLOUR OF STILL WATERA Padre Nyekundu MysteryChp. 2: Three Measures (...cont’d)Nairobi 2055Eusebius caught the trace...
14/06/2026

THE COLOUR OF STILL WATER
A Padre Nyekundu Mystery
Chp. 2: Three Measures (...cont’d)
Nairobi 2055

Eusebius caught the trace of one word. The trace was two syllables. The first was a consonant, the second was a vowel with a soft close. He did not catch the middle. The middle was where the information was. The men parted. The older man returned to his pew. The younger man adjusted his jacket and went back to his place on the south side.
The third of three. Years in a parish full of informers and a confessional full of self-accusers had taught him to hear without looking. He did not turn his head. The mass ended, but still he stood at the back with his shoulder against the pillar, the bench cracked beside him, and let the column of mourners pass. He looked at their backs and their shoes and the angles of their heads on their necks and the mother pulling the child along by the wrist.
Outside, in the churchyard, he gave his condolences to Tobias’ mother and accepted four directed to him. A woman whose name he had once known pressed his hand. A young man he could not place greeted him by name and then looked at the ground. The man who had been carrying the wreath and crying pressed his hand, started crying again, and turned away to re-negotiate the broken truce between his feelings and his face. Finally, Dominic put both hands on his shoulders, looked him in the face, and held the look for three full seconds without arriving at a single useful sentence to say. The hands lifted off.
(To Be Continued…)
Free Full Chapters Available on our WhatsApp Channel, Catalogue & Community. DM for links.
Excerpt Text: C. Kamau Waweru

Dira Prime⎹Science Fiction ⎹Mystery ⎹Dira Ebook Publishing⎹Nairobi ⎹2026
Synthetic Visuals

12/06/2026

THE COLOUR OF STILL WATER
A Padre Nyekundu Mystery
Chp 2: Three Measures (...cont’d)
Nairobi, 2055

In the third pew, a woman flinched. She flinched as if she had braced against a word and the word’s arrival still broke through. Her shoulders, already held tight, moved fractionally forward and then back. Her hand, which had rested loosely on her knee, closed and clutched the fabric like a claw. She looked at the printed order of service on her lap, which was what she had been doing before the flinch and what she resumed doing after, but she had been keeping up with Dominic and was now on the wrong page. She adjusted, and the adjustment was visible because Eusebius had been looking.
He knew the dress, not the woman. It was a funeral dress from a parish she had evidently once served and no longer did. The white trim was the clue. The diocese had dissolved the parish auxiliary with that white trim in 2048. A woman wearing the dress to a 2055 funeral was a woman answering a question that nobody had asked.
The third came at the sign of peace. He stayed at the back and did not shake hands with the people in his row. He made the small motion of the head that released him from the ritual, and the woman next to him, who had been crying through the Sanctus, made the same motion and turned to the woman on her other side, and the row functioned.
Behind the south pillar, two men exchanged the sign of peace and then did not stop. They stood too close. One was fifty, maybe fifty-five, in a grey suit cut like it had been expensively made in 2044 and re-tailored some years later to look less conspicuously costly and more ordinary. A disguise, then.
The other was younger, thirty-eight to forty, in a black suit that did not belong to him, the shoulders a quarter-size too large. They exchanged the handshake and then the older man said something to the younger man that was not ritual and that the younger man answered with a compression of the mouth that was not ritual either.
(To Be Continued…)
Text: C.K. Waweru

Free full chapters available on our WhatsApp Channel, Catalogues and Community.
Synthetic Audiovisuals.

The Colour of Still WaterA Padre Nyekundu MysteryChapter 2: Three Measures DOMINIC PREACHED for eleven minutes, which wa...
10/06/2026

The Colour of Still Water
A Padre Nyekundu Mystery
Chapter 2: Three Measures

DOMINIC PREACHED for eleven minutes, which was three minutes longer than his usual time. The homily was smooth. The sentences connected and the metaphors were decorous. He spoke about the servant who does not know his master’s plan and does the work nonetheless. He said the work is the service and that the servant is known by his work.
Eusebius was listening in two layers as he had since he was eighteen. In the upper layer, the theology. The theology was sound. In the lower layer, the man preaching the theology. The man was what he was listening for.
What he caught, in the lower layer, was the gap between a sentence and the breath before it. Dominic held himself slightly back from every noun and paused fractionally before every verb. The single folded sheet of paper he had placed on the ambo carried the sentences, but the voice releasing them kept one joint of one finger on the brake, a drag so slight that a person who had never written sermons would not catch it. Eusebius had written many sermons: he caught it.
The phrasing came a quarter-beat late. The consonants at the start of the key words arrived with over-precision compensating for a deficit of conviction, or for a conviction from a week ago, which is not the same thing as holding it now, in the mouth, at the ambo, under the weight of this coffin, in this nave, on this day.
Eusebius had stood on the other side of that distance. At a Westlands vestry, early in his parish years, he had delivered a sermon for his bishop that was not quite the sermon his bishop would have wanted and not quite his own sermon either. He recognised the texture of the space between, the sign of a man preaching at a careful length from his own words. First of three.
(To Be Continued…)
Free full chapters available on our WhatsApp Channel, Catalogues and Community. DM for links.

Dira Prime⎹Speculative Fiction⎹ Mystery⎹Dira Ebook Publishing⎹ Nairobi Creatives⎹2026⎹
Synthetic Visuals
Excerpted Text by C.K. Waweru

08/06/2026

The Colour of Still Water
Chp. 1: RED (...cont’d)
Nairobi 2055

Eusebius passed the parish, saw the stairwell, and stopped. He had told himself he would not stop. Here he was, stopping and staring at the stairwell, counting.
Fourteen steps.
He let the machine idle for three seconds. Then he parked fifty metres from the gate, which had been repainted a cheap grey-green that the diocese bought in forty-litre drums and sent to parishes across the district. The colour did not age well. He walked towards the church, the soles of his red shoes making small whispers on the tarmac.
Fifteen plastic chairs stood outside the gate for the overflow that was yet to arrive. A woman stood by the first chair with a printed order of service in her hand, holding it at an angle, the paper soft at the corner where her thumb kept working the edge. She was sixty or sixty-five. Her headscarf was a maroon printed cotton. She looked at Eusebius, her eyes dropping to his shoes before returning to his face. She folded the order of service in half and stepped aside to let him in.
Someone had freshly retouched the mural on the east wall. The woman in the mural was the Virgin, if the Virgin had been Meru and thirty-five and had come from the brush of a parishioner who did not work from Vatican-approved images. The painter had recently deepened the blue of her cloak, and the brushwork was still showing.
Two men carried a wreath toward the door. One was crying without sound, his jaw set against it, tears moving down the cheekbones seemingly without the consent of his face. The other watched the ground, watched his own feet, watched the wreath’s lower edge where it brushed his trouser leg, watched his own hand gripping the wreath. The man who was crying saw Eusebius and his face changed expression to something sharper than recognition. He looked away, at the wreath, at the church and back at Eusebius. Eusebius nodded. The man nodded back. The wreath moved on.
(to be continued…)
Full text chapters available: WhatsApp Channel, Catalogue & Community
Text: C.K. Waweru

Dira Prime⎹Speculative Fiction⎹ Ebook⎹2026
Synthetic Audiovisuals

THE COLOUR OF STILL WATERA Padre Nyekundu MysteryCHP 1: RED (...cont’d)The city was assembling itself. A woman in an ora...
06/06/2026

THE COLOUR OF STILL WATER
A Padre Nyekundu Mystery
CHP 1: RED (...cont’d)

The city was assembling itself. A woman in an orange reflective vest swept the service lane outside the shuttered Diamond Trust. Two men unloaded a pickup of cabbages onto a pallet outside a kiosk that would open in an hour. A security guard at the sky-rail pillar sat with his back to the concrete, his face illuminated by the pale blue glow of his link-buds’ haptic interface as he scrolled through a Baraza feed.
It was six-fifteen, six-thirty. The light had brightened and lost its privacy. Matatus were beginning to fill the main roads, their touts hanging from the doors, shouting destinations into air that was no longer empty enough to transmit them cleanly. A child in school uniform was running along the verge with a backpack bouncing on both shoulders. He circled, spiralling closer to his destination without letting himself arrive.
He stopped once, near a water kiosk on the Mathare boundary road, and bought mandazi from a woman who was frying them in a blackened sufuria over an old biogas jiko. The oil crackled. She wrapped two in a square of newspaper without asking how many he wanted and held out her hand.
The mandazi were too hot to eat. He balanced them on the fuel tank and rode on, the grease from the newspaper leaving a small transparent continent-shaped mark on the metal. The mandazi cooled. He ate one, steering with his left hand, the dough dense and sweet and crisp at the edge. He ate the other at a junction while a mkokoteni loaded with scrap metal crossed in front of him, the man pulling it stoic, the wheels complaining.
By eight the city had awoken. The roads belonged to everyone now and Eusebius belonged to the funeral he did not want to attend.
(to be continued…)
Free full chapters available on our website, WhatsApp catalogue, Channel and Community. DM for links or click on link in bio.

Dira Prime⎹ African Futurism⎹ Mystery ⎹Nairobi Futures⎹ Dira Ebook Publishing⎹ 2026
Synthesised visuals and audio.
Text: C. Kamau Waweru

04/06/2026

The Colour of Still Water
Chapter 1: RED
Nairobi 2055
(...cont’d)
He thought about simply skipping the event. He could not. He thought about going back to his room, and his bed. But the same room had already deported him into the day, sending him out to the city that had stolen his friend. He looped all the way back to find the resolve he seemed to have dropped somewhere between Mama Rahel’s gate and the road to Mathare.
Eastleigh arrived through scent before it arrived through sight. Cardamom and engine grease and bananas stacked in crates along the shopfronts. A cat, skinny and yet imperious, sat on the bonnet of a parked lorry and watched him pass. Two women were already arranging bales of cloth outside a wholesale shop. One called to the other in rapid Somali. The other laughed. Neither looked up.
He rode through Huruma. A dog crossed the road ahead of him gripping something in its jaw he chose not to identify. The sky-rail pillars here were newer than the ones near Juja Road, the concrete still pale, and someone had painted a phone number on the base of the nearest one in red aerosol. Below the number, in smaller letters: Fundi wa maji. Saa yoyote. The morning quickened around him.
He cut through Kiamaiko. The smell changed to hides and tallow and the mineral edge of fresh blood from the slaughterhouses that worked through the night. A man in gumboots was hosing down a concrete slab, the water running pink into the channel along the kerb. Past Kiamaiko the road opened and the bougainvillea along the compound walls thickened, magenta and papery against the corrugated iron behind it. A rooster announced something from a rooftop. Three others answered from three separate directions, competitive, overlapping, none of them correct about the time.
(To be continued…)
Free full text chapters available on our WhatsApp Channel, Catalogues and Community. DM for links.

Synthesised visuals
Text: C.K. Waweru
Dira Prime ⎸ Speculative Fiction ⎸ Dira Ebook Publishing

Chapter 1: RedNAIROBI 2055EUSEBIUS ODONGO rolled the boda boda out of the compound gate. The machine under him was warm ...
02/06/2026

Chapter 1: Red
NAIROBI 2055

EUSEBIUS ODONGO rolled the boda boda out of the compound gate. The machine under him was warm from the ignition and cold from the night and Pumwani was indifferent to the contradiction. Mama Rahel had already watered the jasmine by the gate-post. He smelled it before he saw the wet pavement. She was not on the step but her trace was, in the jasmine and in the angle of the bucket she had set down and forgotten to pick up.
The departing night at five-fifteen was strangely private, as if it belonged only to those awake to claim it. Eusebius Odongo claimed it. He had been awake since three from the habit his body had formed around the Tobias Thursdays that refused to fade. The thin strap of Fajr was in the air somewhere east, a man’s voice carrying from a mosque near Kokoto Road. The Level 0 tarmac was quiet, the Silent City Acoustic Renovation Project of 2045 dampening the hum of the distant sky-rail above him. Its shadow cut a geometric line through the fading night, a silent artery connecting the CBD to the far nodes.
His shoes were red.
He had stopped noticing them except on mornings when the light picked out the seam along the inside of the right foot and he remembered that time he had stumbled and fallen on the kerb outside Zawadi three years ago. He rode out of Pumwani toward Juja Road, and then headed for Mathare.
He had started out too early. There was nowhere to be yet: the funeral was at nine. Between him and the funeral was the whole thickness of the morning and he intended to use it simply to move through the hours at a speed he could bear.

To Be Continued (next post)…
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Full text of Chp. 1: WhatsApp Channel
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Imprint: Dira Prime
Publisher: Dira Ebook Publishing, Nairobi
Genre: Mystery / Speculative Fiction / Fiction
Setting: Nairobi, 2055
Format: PDF A6 phone-screen optimised e-book
Word Count: Approximately 79,000 words


Synthetic visuals
Text by C.K. Waweru

01/06/2026

Nairobi 2055: He Is Already on the Road
Somewhere in Pumwani at a boda boda stage next to a chai kiosk, a man in red shoes is waiting for the next fare. There’s a crow in the Nandi Flame tree. The city is organising itself for another day: the sky-rail overhead, a pothole in the Level 0 road beneath his feet, the Baraza feed murmuring in someone's bone-conduction earpiece about Level 1 congestion near Westlands and the riders arguing with the matatu drivers about everything.
Someone is about to sit beside him and begin to tell him the truth.
He will listen. He always does. The city is already talking.
— The Colour of Still Water · Dira Prime · 2 June 2026


Synthetic audio and visuals

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