April Zhu is a freelance journalist and writer whose work in Nairobi focused on the geography of violence and the Chinese diaspora in Kenya. She is the producer of Until Everyone Is Free, a Sheng podcast on the life and work of Kenyan socialist and freedom fighter Pio Gama Pinto. She was a Senior Editor at Guernica Magazine, a 2023 Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow, and a 2020 Blakemore Freeman Foundation Fellow. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at the University of Iowa.

Selected works

Vanishing Line
Guernica (5 December 2023)

It is said that Al-Shabaab is why Kenya's largest infrastructure megaproject, in Lamu, north coast, cannot progress. But if we see Lamu less a battlefield than a frontier — LAPSSET an echo of a colonial railway with no raison d’être — we find a different story.

Bad Witness: What I Didn’t Say About Reporting on Chinese Christians in Kenya
Off Assignment (6 September 2023)

An essay about the thin line between longform journalist and native informant, about the piece I most regret writing.

The Look of a Nation
Triple Canopy (28 February 2022)

On the blindspots of a homogenizing “China in Africa” fiction, which fails to consider things like, even in an increasingly China-skeptical Kenya, the fabric that has become a visual shortcut for Africanness in Kenyan fashion has for years all come from China — virtually unnoticed.

A Climate Dispatch from Kenya
Drift Magazine (1 November 2022)

When the future arrives in Kenya, it often leaves people behind. Kenya’s renewable energy plans are mired by the haunting ways in which “sustainable development” often rhymes with the colonial exploitation that resulted in the underdevelopment of the country in the first place. 

Kenya Turns Its Covid-19 Crisis into a Human Rights Emergency
New York Review of Books Daily (22 July 2020)

Nairobi always grows in two directions at once. As it reaches for "modernity," its anti-city — slums where the Constitution doesn't work — follows. There, colonial violence is still inflicted and the war for independence still waged.

A Lost ‘Little Africa’
New York Review of Books Daily (5 May 2020)

Guangzhou's "Little Africa" was a window to a more complicated, ungovernable, shared future for Chinese and Africans. It called the bluff of Sino-African destiny; it was the opposite of inevitability. That window has closed.

It takes a village
Rest of World (7 July 2020)

Unlike fintech that uses social relationships to extract profit, this community (crypto)currency capitalizes on solidarity. It values essential work — like community health volunteers' — that is otherwise "unseen" by the economy.

A Death Penalty for the Poor
The Baffler Magazine (30 July 2020)

The physical toxicity of urban informal settlements is projected onto those who live there: they are criminal, immoral, non-citizen. This logic of disposability undergirds systematic police brutality against Kenya's poor.