I'm back in Nairobi after a brief holiday with some good news for lovers of free speech. It's Our Turn To Eat, an excellent new book on corruption and tribalism in Kenya, is busting through an unofficial government boycott and making it into the hands of ordinary Kenyans.

You might remember that this was the book that was "too hot" to sell in Nairobi bookshops, an unsparing glimpse at one man's doomed fight against Kenyan sleaze. I bought my copy in South Africa and my colleague Eric beamed when his copy, couriered by a friend returning from the UK, arrived last week.

Now several thousand copies are being made available for free or at reduced prices thanks to an innovative -- and surprising -- collaboration by Kenyan church groups, media houses, the international PEN writers' association, George Soros's Open Society Institute and the U.S. Agency for International Development. (The USAID part is what surprises me. A mid-level aid administrator taking a principled stand? Or more of the new administration's tough-love approach to the Obama paternal homeland?)

Author Michela Wrong writes that 5,100 copies will eventually be sold and distributed in Kenya, but shakes her head at the shenanigans required to get the year's most important book about Kenya into the country:

Yesterday, at a packed reading and discussion called "It's Our Turn to Read," a theater packed with writers, activists and ordinary Kenyans heard excerpts of the book. The discussion went on for more than four hours, and there are hopes of holding similar events in other Kenyan cities.

I was traveling and couldn't make it, but my friend Bec Hamilton has audio of the event on her blog  (including an index by subject!). The guerrilla-style marketing tactics are impressive -- especially as they target low- and middle-income folks -- but ought to be unneccessary. Most Kenyans are clear about the kind of government they want. Too bad the people who can give it to them won't bother reading this book.