The Goat called Harvard

The Goat Called Harvard

A comic novel of ambition, amnesia, and bad influence.

Njoroge is the boy every village dreams of producing: bright, hungry for more, and bound for Harvard on a wave of goodwill funded by his neighbours' goats, chickens, and reluctantly surrendered church offerings. But success, once achieved, has a way of editing its own origin story — and an American wife with strong opinions about "sharing the cheese" doesn't help.

Years later, Dr. Njoroge is thriving in a Karen mansion full of pedigree cattle and empty bedrooms, his village a memory he's filed carefully away. Then an old classmate lets slip where he's been hiding — and his ageing parents, ailing and broke, decide to see the truth for themselves.

What follows is a riotous, razor-sharp comedy of gatemen, guard dogs, cattle sheds, and one memorably ill-advised midnight milking attempt — building to a reckoning Njoroge never saw coming, and a debt no fundraiser can settle.

Equal parts satire and cautionary tale, The Goat Called Harvard is a story about success, forgetting where you came from, and the very long memory of the people who paid for your ticket out.