Books

He is back for some unfinished business in the city that made him. Kisumu. Guitarist Otis Dinos is back in Kisumu, the addictive and possessive lakeside town. Back in the ‘80s, he was the Urban Benga guitar legend. His commercially potent mix of hard benga and lofty rumba was loud with a culture surrounding it, and a cult-like following. It ignited an entire generation of music fans. It made him rich and famous. When he left Kisumu twenty years ago, it was a sudden unpleasant event. Everything ended in tragedy. He was twenty-nine years and at his peak. Today he still is the artsy man: the musician, the guitarist. People have died fast; the men and women who helped him make music… they have all died or wasted away. Is he about to go too? What is left? The past has unfulfilled dreams, good life, nice cars, easy money, expensive perfumes, glamorous women, living on the road and on stage and in the studios. And conniving bandmates, thieving promoters, and clever pirates. The present is bearable but holds no promise: he is forty-seven. If he has to accept his forced retirement, he has to learn to be a local Kisumuan, not the famous name. He reminisces about the romantic encounters of the ‘70s. The future is uncertain. He is searching for sanity and happiness. Happiness? In Kisumu lives the woman whose unfulfilled love still dwells in his heart. But his mind is too bamboozled to even think.

She ran away to find freedom only to find herself trapped. After the death of her fiance, Wanjiru separates herself from her young son and escapes the suffocation of her life in Nairobi, boards a bus to Mombasa. Waiting to host her is Barack, an engineer who is returning to Nairobi after many years in Mombasa, to escape the memories of his complex relationship with a Muslim woman who died tragically in his hands. In Barack’s Nyali penthouse, Wanjiru finds herself trapped by her affection for the razor-sharp, complex, egotistical man who is obsessed only with maintaining the tight social rigours of his Bohemian lifestyle, working hard by the day and partying hard by the night. His only dream in life is to leave Mombasa in his own physical or emotional ways to escape the anxiety of growing old. They begin to form an emotional bond that teeters on the edge of being called love, both of them knowing that if they ever choose to do so, it will break the idyll in which they're living. For Wanjiru, Mombasa means everything. Mombasa is a dream-come true and the future. Here she makes friends and starts to build a life she loves. When Wanjiru begs and pleads and dangles the prospect of becoming more than a housemate, Barack finds himself powerless as ever to resist her siren song. The New Girl In Mombasa is a portrait of two people running from a troubled past and moving towards an uncertain future. Set in Mombasa, Kenya’s famed coastal city of rich historical heritage and Swahili culture, it is a haunting look at loneliness, the struggle for love, belonging and independence. Its beauty lies in its subtlety, its emotional nuances. And Mombasa is glamorous, seductive, magical, always looped around by the sensuous, unrelenting rhythm of night clubs, and steeped in hookups, revelry, barhopping, and the pleasures of the beach parties.