John
Kiriamiti’s
bestseller
Kiriamiti evaded the Kenyan police for
all the crimes he committed until he was
arrested in November 1970 on the eve
of his wedding. He was charged and
imprisoned on January 6, 1971 on multiple
counts of robbery. My Life in Crime was
written and published while Kiriamiti was
serving his jail term at Naivasha Maximum
Security Prison. He was released in 1984,
five months after the novel’s publication.
‘My Life in Crime’
made into
a movie
B y F rancis M uli
Do you remember My Life in
Crime novel by John Kiriamiti?
Well, AfreDev, a multimedia
production company, has
made the novel into a movie.
On the same vein, AfreDev is planning to
adapt the novel’s sequel My Life with a
Criminal: Milly’s Story, for a TV show set to
air locally from June 2018.
He is also the author of other books such
as My Life with a Criminal: Milly’s Story
(1984), Son of Fate (1994), The Sinister
Trophy (2000), My Life in Prison (2004),
The Abduction Squad and City Carjackers.
The actualisation of Kenyan historic events
(mostly criminal in nature) into movies is
taking pace with one of the award-winning
movies, Watu Wote, which gives account
of the Mandera bus attack by Al-Shabaab
militants taking the ce ntre stage this month
on its launch.
Another sensational movie, Too Early For
Birds, premiered at the Kenya National
Theatre on 13th and 14th of January, in
form of a storytelling session based on
factual Kenyan criminal history.
Kiriamiti is a former bank robber turned
writer who was born on 14 February 1950 in
Murang’a. He was one of the most dreaded
gangsters in Kenya and the wider East
African region.
F i l a m u K e n y a PA G E 7 n o w p l a y i n g