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Charles Onyango-Obbo
WHAT OTHERS SAY
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After a year running around making all the wrong headlines, good-girl-gone-bad Esther Arunga now says she wants to get back to what made her famous – television”, the entertainment website izvipi.com reported a few days ago.
The story, inspired by an iReport posting on CNN, says the former KTN presenter, who has a three-week-old baby, is planning a comeback to TV with her husband, the eye-brow raising Sinclair Timberlake as soon as she has weaned her baby. About a year ago Ms Arunga, who reportedly fired many men’s imaginations, became a big story when her TV career unravelled, and she got entangled with jazz musician Joseph Hellon’s bizarre “Finger of God” church.
The story got too complicated for my simple brain from that point on, with Arunga running away, then allegedly being recaptured by her family and being put in a home for the psychologically troubled.
From hence she tried to escape, claimed she was a prisoner. Then Hellon got into trouble with the police, with people he owed money, became the laughing stock of Nairobi as his life went into free fall.
Because part of my day involves dabbling in online news, what I know for sure is that the Arunga-Hellon-Timberlake-Finger-of-God drama became the most widely read on the Daily Nation website for years. Now if you consider that the Nation site is by far the most read site in Kenya, you begin to get a sense of how big this story was.
We wait for Arunga’s comeback story.
Meanwhile, Hellon has dusted off his troubles and returned to do what he does best – play jazz music. I had just collected Hellon’s CD when his troubles befell him. I thought they were fabulous, and his latest offerings are even better. Maybe God’s real message to Hellon is that he should stick to the saxophone and leave the pulpit alone.
I found the story of Arunga rising from the ashes and Hellon rediscovering his mojo were quite inspiring in these hard times.
Then my daughter got me to watch a video of a Sudanese musician called Bangs. The video, Let Me Take You To Da Movies is really bad, I thought. My daughter agreed.But here is the surprise of surprises. On the video-sharing website YouTube it is soon grossing a record 7,000,000 views!
If you compare it one of the most written and reported about African videos of recent, Makmende by Kenya’s edgy Just a Band group, Let Me Take You To Da Movies is like something from a cave. Bangs, who sings about taking a girl to the movies against a forest backdrop, is nothing like the swaggering, head-band-adorning Makmende who cleans up the neighbourhood of bad guys.
Yet, Makmende has not yet made one million hits on YouTube. Remarkable, considering that Let Me Take You To The Movies had not got even half the press Makmende did.In fact, the one African who clearly beats Bangs on YouTube is former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi; the video when he was being murdered. I then thought we might be in the age of second chances in Africa, and of the anti-hero. Bangs is the ultimate anti-hero. And Hellon (hopefully Arunga too) could become one of Kenya’s greatest comeback stories of recent years.
You feel the same way when you go to the technology innovation community iHub. The chaps there are the ones who have put Kenya on the global map as a leading innovation nation, and earned Nairobi the moniker “Silicon Savannah”.
However, most of them are so scruffy, you wouldn’t hire many of them even as your dogcatcher if you didn’t know better.But perhaps the Kenyan who might have the biggest second bite at the cherry is President Mwai Kibaki. Going into the 2007 election and after it ended in disaster, Kibaki was so toast that it seemed the only thing left was to stick a steak knife in him.
Then he did the power-sharing thing with Prime Minister Raila Odinga; plunged into Kenya’s most ambitious infrastructure build of over a generation; pushed through a remarkably liberal constitution; and did other things like accepting the appointment of left-leaning radical ear-stud wearing lawyer Willy Mutunga as Chief Justice.The techies at iHub are brilliant anti-heroes, and Hellon has risen from a bad career collapse. Kibaki did better. The man all but rose from the dead.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is the Executive Editor of the Nation Media Group’s Africa and Digital Media Division
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