Three Years on Nairobi's Streets, Then Comedy Fame

MCA Tricky, whose real name is Paul Kimani Njoroge, is a Kenyan comedian. He finished Class Eight in 2004, but his family did not have the money for secondary school. At 12 he was too young to get a job.

Friends persuaded him to go with them to Nairobi, and he went without telling his parents. City life turned out to be harder than he had imagined. At first he stayed with kind people who took him in, moving from house to house until they grew tired of hosting him.

After that, he lived on the streets of Saika Estate for about three years. To get by he worked as an errand boy at Gikomba market, and he said it was there that he met some of the angriest and hardest people in Nairobi.

The turning point came when he joined a drama group called Barikiwa Set Book Group, which helped him develop his comedy. His routines are spontaneous and draw on what he saw and went through on the streets. He wants audiences to look at street children differently, noting that no one wakes up and decides to become a street child. At first, he said, the audience seemed to pity him, but later he heard them laughing loudly. He says comedy pays well, and his goal for the next five years is to mentor disadvantaged young people and aspiring comedians.