Roy Gachuhi has added a new feather to his cap. He is now a novelist.
From the pages of our daily newspapers, we know Roy as a seasoned sports journalist, an adroit sports historian, a military history buff, a documentary film-maker and a social commentator.
In these old roles, Roy has always delighted us with the depth of his knowledge about the technical aspects of boxing, motor sports, archery, athletics, football, and the mechanics of staging of (inter) national competitions.
The breadth of his experiential and archival knowledge on the performance and management of Kenyan sports teams is unparalleled.
His quirky details on fighter jets, and endearing observations of military personnel, are pleasant surprises. In all his feature stories, Roy wins us over with the dexterity of his language; his sense of place; his passion; his wit; his salty impatience with ineptitude; his incisiveness assessment of character and situation.
Of his three novels to date, I am not sure which one Roy wrote first — Ebalu Superstar, Goalposts for Champions or How Ajele Got Her Smartphone. These last two titles will undoubtedly fall in the category of children’s literature, while Ebalu Superstar aims for an older audience, but it will likely be categorised as Young Adult Fiction (YA).
For the record, the category YA covers those aged 14 years+. New-adult Fiction captures the 18-30 bracket. Teen fiction aims for readers between 12 and 14 years and children’s literature is for under 12s.
This categorisation matters because literary content and language ought to be age appropriate.
One is unlikely to find swear words in YA, never mind that in the real world, young people are famous for trying out curse words.
In YA weighty matters such as sex and violence, are frank, but not graphic and the complexities of adult relationships are handled fairly exhaustively.
The hallmark of YA, though, is an adolescent protagonist. Today, many governing bodies, such World Health Organisation (WHO), cap off adolescence — the transition between childhood and adulthood — at 24 years.
This extension from the old one of 19 years is not meant to infantilise young people, but to acknowledge the contemporary socio-economic complexities which make it so much harder for young people to gain independence from their guardians.
It is precisely the sociocultural problematics in this search for independence, and the need for self-determination, that Roy explores through a very simple plot and a 17-year old protagonist, Timo Ebalu.
Ebalu’s response to parental pressure is contrasted against that of his sweetheart, Khadijah.
Roy settles on a first-person narrator so that Ebalu can speak in his own voice and tell us what he wants for his future and most importantly, what he doesn’t want and why.
To avoid shutting out the perspectives of other characters, Roy manipulates that point of view with the speeches that Ebalu listens to and the social media posts and newspaper features that Ebalu reads.
This is how we get to know the life-story of “The Iron Man”, Richard Jamwela, “one of Kenya’s most gifted boxers”.
Jamwela is the father-figure that young Ebalu leans on. They say that “it takes a village to raise a child” and this doesn’t change just because people are living in town! Ebalu achieves his dreams despite his parents, not on account of them.
There is a description I encountered in Makena Maganjo’s debut novel, South B’s Finest, that has remained with me because of the completeness with which it captures the dilemma of many African women — fictional and non-fictional:
“ … the kind of industrious woman born to lead a nation but saddled with a large gregarious family instead.” A perfect description of Ebalu’s mother!
Mama Ebalu might have all the energy and intellect to run 100 dynamic schemes outside her home but once within it, her abilities evaporate.
She just yields to her domineering husband. Ebalu says he seems “convinced that the rough treatment was what I needed to engage my stalled academic gears”.
The dysfunction of this family repeatedly throws Ebalu — a child who yearns for approval in the path of a sympathetic uncle, a capable aunt, a proprietary headmaster, an understanding coach, a brotherly team captain, a magnanimous sports icon.
All of these characters come alive in sharp detail. The most colourfully painted is the vivacious Aunt Stella, whose lifestyle, and stock phrase “that’s sorted”, borders on the contemporary urban legend known as “Aunty wa Harrier”.
Beside the Kenyan staples that we recognise in this novel lie many useful fictions that Roy generates in order to drive the point home that Kenya can be better than it is today.
Ebalu grows up in the 2000s in a Nairobi residential estate where city council workers collect garbage, mow lawns, clean and disinfect drains to rid them of mosquitos!
In this fictional world, the country has a fully functioning football association that pays players promptly.
Roy’s Kenya also has a functioning barometer of decency — the justice system punishes the elite, and ethical social mores ensure these lawbreakers are turned into social pariahs.
Roy’s defamiliarisation of the reality we know creates a valuable dystopia. It is his kind way of critiquing a society that long lost the radar of social amenities and every notion of public good.
The technical aspects of this novel are similarly defamiliarised from everything we expect in the typesetting of fiction.
This hinders one’s reading. Dialogue, diary entries, speeches, WhatsApp messages and letters do not always stand out.
The optics are similarly blurred when newspaper reports, and a caption that accompanies a photo of Ebalu’s high school exploits in The Daily Thunderer, drown in standard font and haphazard paragraphing.
Poor lay-out is the price Roy has paid for the old-school self-publishing model he settled for.
His narrative structure also flounders. Roy relied on his journalistic skills to report an Olympics outing and, in the process, he has squandered surprise and suspense.
He makes his big reveals — the scoreline — too early. Whether in film, graphic novel (comic book), or as a Twitter thread, all narrative holds our interest by allowing us to raise questions in our minds about what will happen next, and somehow delaying the answers.
The language of this novel is, however, a clever authenticating device. It is the dialect we now call Kenyan English or Kenglish.
We hear it in Ebalu’s habitually jumbled prepositions in phrases like, “I dreamt with Khadijah”; “ … I walked on the first row behind Faeza …”; “ … travelling with an aeroplane …” and many others.
You know you are reading a post-Moi Kenyan novel when characters say “adopt” instead of “adapt”, and when they use “literary” in place of “literally”!
Roy augments this linguistic typifying of place and time with an infusion of contemporary popular culture — lengthy prayers, gospel music, reggae, rumba, Papa Shirandula.
These sounds compete to dominate the sonic space in ten by ten stalls filled with the same merchandise repeated over and over again from stall to stall, from one end of the street to the other.
I recommend this book for adult readers too. Guardians need to know what young adults are reading and they should reflect on failed parenting.
Additionally, this book explores so much that will resonate with anyone who has ever been at the crossroads of career choices, torn between the pursuit of happiness and the promise of assured income.
In the years that I have followed Roy Gachuhi, the sports historian — including his tear-jerking 2015 documentary The Last Fight — I have been moved by his unwavering love for Kenya.
He always demands more of and for his countrymen and women. He told me that he wrote this book because we must never stop hoping that Kenya will one day produce a national football team that will compete for a global trophy.
Roy’s activism is multipronged, and his hope is contagious. We need active hope now more than ever.
