Kill Me Quick

Initially unsuccessful, the pair live in dumpsters, eating rotten fruit and stale cakes, unable to return home as failures.

Disillusionment with Independence Ayo Kenhinde remarks that Kill Me Quick' "presents a harsh account of urban life in postcolonial Kenya."

The novel opens with the lines: Kenhinde remarks that this is what Mwangi sees every day, and that "he has a vision of life as hell."

Within the novel, the protagonists are "Frustrated again and again by a hypocritical society that pays lip service to the value of formal education, but fails to reward those who believe it promises."

Smiley uses them as a teaching tool for students, believing that these fictional accounts are accurate representations of real urban experiences.

Passages are selected and used to create a geography for a Kenyan urban center, which is then used to teach students the similarities between other cities.