Love Marry Kill: In Conversation with Zukiswa Wanner

When Zukiswa Wanner joins a room, she brings with her a kind of kinetic warmth—an energy that gathers in corners and makes the air feel charged. That presence was palpable when she sat down with Nairobi Book Love’s host, Kui Kabala, for a long, generous conversation about writing, politics, womanhood, and her latest novel, Love, Mary, Kill.

Kui opened the episode with characteristic exuberance: “We have only ever had spectacular guests, but today we have someone super spectacular.” It set the tone for an exchange that was equal parts intimate, incisive, and mischievously funny.

The pair first met months earlier at the Nairobi International Book Fair, during the Kenyan launch of Love, Mary, Kill. Their onstage chemistry was immediate—so much so that they vowed to record a longer conversation. This episode, in many ways, is the fulfilment of that promise.

The discussion begins where many critics have stumbled: how to categorise Love, Mary, Kill. Is it romance? Crime? Suspense? Domestic drama?

Wanner shrugs off such boundaries. She calls the book “genre non-binary”, a term that captures its refusal to be contained.

There is seduction and tenderness, yes, but also danger, secrets, and the slow unravelling of lives shaped by history and silence. It is romance filtered through an unmistakably African sensibility—one in which love is always entwined with culture, expectation, and the aftershocks of generational wounds.

Kui reflects on the scarcity of African romance novels, at least in their unabashed, swooning form. “We have love stories,” she says, “but not enough romance novels.” Wanner agrees, though she admits her own tastes skew toward unusual romance, the ones that feel messy, unpredictable, and a little perilous.

A Two-Decade Career, Told Lightly

At one point, Kui brings up the oft-repeated claim that Wanner began writing at the age of five. Wanner laughs and clarifies that this is simply her long-running joke. “Everyone asks when you started writing,” she notes, “but technically, we all started in first grade.”

She recalls, with dry humour, how her mother reacted when she quit her day job after publishing her debut novel, The Madams. “Zoo, we all learned to write. Why can’t you aspire to something better?”

Nearly two decades later, that same mother is her most devoted supporter.

Across her career—spanning novels, non-fiction, children’s books, translation, and literary activism—Wanner says she is proudest of the relationships she has cultivated across the Global South: in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Brazil, Mozambique, Barbados, Martinique. A literary life lived in motion, tracing the connective threads of a wider Black world.

Returning the Goethe Medal

Then comes the moment in Wanner’s public life that has attracted both admiration and controversy: her decision to return the 2020 Goethe Medal.

She explains it plainly on the podcast. She could not, in good conscience, accept a cultural honour from a nation whose political stance contradicted her values. The repercussions were immediate—lost gigs, reduced income, months where even routine bills felt uncertain.

But she remains unwavering. “I would do it again a million times over,” she says. Over time, support emerged from elsewhere: invitations from the larger Global South, a reminder of where her literary home truly lies.

The conversation returns to Love, Mary, Kill —a book Kui read in two days, propelled by its tightly coiled suspense. Two couples stand at the centre of the plot, one planning the assassination of the other. But the intrigue is secondary to the psychological excavation that unfolds.

Kui describes her reading experience with blunt affection: some characters she wanted to embrace, some to shake, some to punch, and a few—those particularly vile—she longed to drag to the nearest police station.

The novel unfolds in 1990s South Africa, a period Wanner chose deliberately, rich with political contradiction. Kui, reading from a non-South African perspective, remarks on how differently Nelson Mandela is perceived from within the country—less saint, more human, more complicated than the icon seen across the continent.

The Quiet Brutalities of Marriage and Motherhood

A central strand of the novel-and of the conversation-is the silence that often surrounds marriage. The protagonist, Owami, laments repeatedly that no one told her the truth of what marriage could become. Not her mother. Not her aunties. Not the women tasked with preparing her for adulthood.

Wanner says she wanted to explore how a woman arrives at choices that appear unthinkable from the outside. The slow journey from naivety to resentment, then anger, then clarity; and, in some cases, to violence.

Kui brings up a particularly painful motif: mothers who prioritise respectability over their daughters’ safety. The type who respond to “He wants to kill me” with “Go back to your husband.”Wanner nods. It is tragic, she says, but pervasive.

Throughout the conversation, Kui returns to the novel’s ensemble cast: the unexpectedly likeable hitman, the flawed lovers, the estranged husband, the formidable mothers, the frenemies. And then there is Uncle P, an archetype many listeners recognised instantly.

Every African community has its version of Uncle P: whispered about, known for his predatory behaviour, yet seldom confronted. The danger is displaced onto children, who are told to keep away rather than being protected. Wanner captures this bleak truth with quiet precision.

When pressed to play a “love, marry, kill” game using her own characters, Wanner responds with characteristic levity: she would love Akani, marry Akani’s mother, and do away with the estranged husband, with perhaps a second body for good measure. Kui, without pause, elects to finish off Mrs Ambassador.

One of the most surprising revelations is that Wanner drafted the novel in only two or three weeks, during a fellowship in Eldoret. The town, she says, offers clarity: the altitude, the quiet, the concentration. She sent the manuscript to beta readers while travelling to Nigeria, read from it publicly in Abuja, and found herself committed to the book before she had time to reconsider.

Wanner is now deep into a sprawling historical novel set between 1900 and 1990, inspired in part by the little-known Afro-Boer histories embedded in the landscape around Eldoret.

There are also international tours pending, including launches of the Portuguese editions of The Madams and Love, Mary, Kill in Brazil, a literary home that continues to embrace her work.

Toward the end of the episode, Wanner reads an excerpt from a tender scene between Akani and his mother—a moment infused with confession, complexity and hard-won tenderness. When she finishes, the room falls quiet for a beat.

“That’s beautiful,” Kui finally says.

And it is.

This article captures only a sliver of the wit, candour and emotional clarity of the full conversation. To hear the exchange in all its warmth and incisiveness, listen to the Nairobi Book Love podcast episode wherever you stream your audio. Some conversations linger long after they are over. This is one of them.

About the Author

Zukiswa Wanner is an award winning South African author, curator, editor, and publisher. She is the author of the novels

• The Madams (Oshun, 2006);
• Behind Every Successful Man (Kwela, 2008),
• Men of the South (Kwela 2010),
• London Cape Town Joburg (Kwela, 2014) and
• Love, Marry, Kill (Masobe, 2024).

She has also written two works of nonfiction,

• Maid in SA (Jacana, 2013) and
• Hardly Working (Black Letter Media, 2018).

She authored four children’s books

• Jama Loves Bananas (Jacana, 2011),
• Refilwe (Jacana, 2013),
• The Seven Continents: Africa (Scholastic, 2019) and
• Black Pimpernel: Nelson Mandela on the Run (Pushkin Press, 2022).