Brain rot and how life went literary last year

Let’s talk about eight moments from the just ended year where our national life resembled literature.

Impeachment of Kenyan Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua

It had all the hubris, theatrics, tragicomedy, farce and even ‘déjà vu’ of past vice/deputy presidents in Kenya’s history, cast from political heights and down to the pits, after the roll call of parliament and drum roll of the Senate.

There is always a ‘Brutus’ in these affairs: Jaramogi Odinga had his wily Tom Mboya as his political assassin, Dr Josphat Karanja was hooted out of office by the rambunctious Embakasi MP David Mwenje, and President Moi just ordered his VP George Saitoti to “kimya, Profesa, kimya! (shut up, professor, shut up!)”

But this wasn’t a Shakespearian moment but a saga straight out of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, a political treatise written by the Italian philosopher and diplomat, and published in 1532 AD as a guide to power.

492 years later in Kenya, the Deputy President may have ignored its first four tenets – never outshine the master, never put too much trust in friends (Mount Kenya MPs mostly deserted him when shove came to vote), conceal your intentions (to be King of the Mountain) and ‘always say less than is necessary’ (the talk of ‘shareholders’ was the oil that fried his political goose, among other loose talk).

Read:  DP impeachment confirms hypocrisy of Kenyan leaders

Street revolution of Gen Zs

Like the second coming of Christ, no one saw the Gen Z uprising coming. No political pundits or “prophecy” pastors predicted these strange protests, that took over the streets for certain days, for weeks, beginning mid-June in Nairobi – and then the whole of Kenya, especially as the traditional “Maandamano” led by Raila Odinga seemed to have quietly petered away, earlier in the year.

Then these young adults of Gen Z, born beginning 1997 (they go all the way to 2012), “intelligent, exposed, wildly gifted, undergraduates, unemployed, grossly underpaid, the real sufferers and hustlers” as per writer Silas Nyanchwani, hit the streets with a vengeance – first in colourful and rosy formation, with earbuds and sneakers, and inevitably with police brutality at play, they actually ‘Occupied Parliament’ for a short while, as others got shot down in hot blood.

It was a pivotal moment in our history, that had first begun with a demand that the Finance Bill 2024 be withdrawn. In reality, it was a protest against huge youth unemployment and the high cost of living.

This moment resembled William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” where a bunch of boys stuck in a remote island rebel against the controlling nature of “Civilisation” after going through an irreversible loss of innocence; and we see the savagery of Man revealed in this English classic – with the ‘Lord of the Flies’ being a Pig’s Head that attracts all sorts of fetid corruption, and represents ‘Beelzebub.’

Adani and the airport deal that didn’t take off

When we were young, KBC – then Voice of Kenya – had an entertaining weekly sci-fi action-adventure programme called “The Six Million Dollar Man” on TV.

One episode called ‘The Thunderbird Connection’ had the Six Million Dollar Man (Steve Austin) flying into an airport into the Middle East to save a fictional prince.

Sometime in September, Kenyans became acutely aware of the Sixty Billion Dollar Man from India called Gautam Adani, a man with the big moustache, to whom the Kenyan government was to lease out the airport for 30 years (in return for a two-billion-dollar runway and passenger terminal), and to give another three quarter billion dollars to the Adani Group to build power transmission to save our ‘princes’ through public-private partnerships.

As airport workers went on protest, Adani got indicted in America for fraud, and Kenyan President William Ruto was eventually forced to cancel the Adani deals.

Read: Kenya’s Ruto orders cancellation of Adani deals

Balthasar Ebang Engonga

When your name is “Ebang Engonga,” there is almost a poetic flavour of promiscuity to your name. The man from Equatorial Guinea became infamous throughout the continent for his sex videos that went viral.

There is an 1893 play by the immortal George Bernard Shaw called ‘The Philanderer’ that features a chap called Leon Charteris, who is having a long-term affair with a Julia Craven, while cravenly seducing young widows, married women and London shopgirls. His excuse being: “It’s not my fault that half the women I speak to fall in love with me …” The play, due to censors, wasn’t acted in public until 1902, after the death of the great prude Queen Victoria, which is where we get the phrase ‘Victorian morality’.

Kasongo yeeyeeh…

It started with a few political memes accompanying the 1977 Lingala song ‘Kasongo’ by the Congolese band of the time Super Mazembe, whose lyrics were turned into the ‘literature’ of social media memes and a pop caricature.

An illustrator, Gideon Kibet aka Kibet Bull, with a literal stroke of genius, created an online character called “Kasongo” (who has a distant relationship with Truth and most of her close relatives), and the caricature quickly went viral, letting hard-pressed Kenyans have a laugh; knowing one can fight the poison of toxic politics with the pen(cil).

On New Year’s Eve, President Ruto was on video taking the sting out of the scorpion by dancing to the song as he transitioned into 2025 at the Kisii State Lodge.

Then ‘Kibet Bull,’ abducted around Christmas after a meeting with Busia Senator, (and PEN International Kenya Chair of ‘Writers in Prison’) Okoiti Omtatah, who has also declared his intention to vie for presidency in 2027, was freed in Luanda, in Vihiga County, by his abductors, about a week later.

Beyond a shadow of doubt, when you are afraid of your own shadow, one may end up chasing one’s own shadow.

Read: ​​​​​​​State of the Nation Address: Ruto outlines his economic record

Donald ‘Comeback’ Trump

Meg Whitman resigned as the US ambassador to Kenya, to the glee of Kenyans, after the electoral victory of Donald Trump. Ambassador Whitman, in an exclusive interview with the ‘Sunday Nation,’ admitted being perplexed by Kenyans’ antipathy towards her.

But Trump was also seen, especially by many Kenyan males, as “yule msee (The Man).”

Facing a possible four years in prison for criminal fraud, he instead bounced back to get four more years in the White House, his fortune soaring from $2.5 billion to $6 billion in 2024.

There is a movie called ‘The Comeback Kid’ from 1980 that stars one Bubba Newman, who quits baseball because he is “down and out” as a player, but makes an unlikely comeback as a coach, taking underprivileged kids to a minor league win. But it is highly unlikely that Trump, although a ‘Comeback Kid’ at 78 years, will ever be accused of coming to office to ‘work for underprivileged US children.’

Malaika Queen Janet Wanja

She burst into the sport and social scene in the super-optimistic Kenya of 2004; a gorgeous 20-year-old volleyball star in the summer Olympics of Greece, and we all “crushed” on Wanja, with her angelic looks and pulsating flair that made her the ultimate “pin-up” lass.

Three years later, she was part of the triumphant team that beat Algeria in a final to become the continental African volleyball queens, with Wanja the undoubted “princess” of that team.

Just past thirty, a more mature Wanja would be the national deputy captain in Canberra at the Volleyball Grand Prix, but leading a pay dispute against Federation officials led to her Summer Games exclusion in 2016.

She bounced back in 2017, leading the line with Kenya Pipeline in club championships in Cairo (her long club career also had her with KCB).

Then, in the tail-end of 2024, she lost her long battle with cancer of the gallbladder. Life ended for this social and volleyball star at only forty!

It is reminiscent of Ammu in Arundhathi Roy’s fantastic literary classic (1997) ‘The God of Small Things’ who dies in a “grimy room in the Bharat Lodge in Alleppey, with a noisy ceiling fan for company, at forty-one. Not old, not young, but a viable, die-able age …”

Wanja, though, will be forever young in our memory; a malaika with a volleyball in her hand, under the halo of some glorious hairstyle-and-short-skirt – her story unsullied by the volleys of time.