Dust

“Dust is a story of both Kenya and of Odidi and his family told in a rich, colorful narrative and numerous shifts from past to present in the lives of all the characters.”

When young Odidi Oganda is gunned down on the streets of Nairobi, Kenya, his murder not only unleashes specific actions, but revives memories long hidden and emotions denied.

Odidi’s story of a splintered, dysfunctional family whose silence hides betrayal, deceit, and murder mirrors Kenya’s own history of dysfunctional government, corruption, bloody violence, and a terrible oath of silence denying the existence of those murdered during political upheaval by never speaking their names. “The others—unknown ‘disappeared citizens.’ National doors had slammed over vaults of secrets; threats loomed, and the wise chose cowardice as a way life—not hearing, not seeing, never asking—because sound, like dreams, could cause death.”

Odidi’s father, Nyipir Oganda, is silent about many secrets, both his private ones and ones that Kenya’s many governments have mandated. But Nyipir remembers even if he never speaks. “Some of the now unseen and unheard found a way into Nyipir’s sleep.” 

Odidi’s younger sister Ajany returns home from to Kenya from her several years living in Brazil to accompany Nyipir to the mortuary to identify her brother, then to return to the Kenyan drylands, to the family home of Wuoth Ogik, to bury his body. Ajany is also the holder of a secret, one she shared with Odidi, one that terrifies her still.

Akai, Odidi’s mother denies that Odidi is dead even though she has cradled his body in her arms. She hugs Ajany, then pushes her away. “She drops her arms; her eyes dart left, up, and right. She groans, ‘Where’s your brother?’”

Akai leaves Wuoth Ogik to look for Odidi, rejecting Ajany as she always has, and a stranger arrives, an Englishman named Isaiah William Bolton who says he is to meet Odidi.

Isaiah is seeking a ghost of his own, his father Hugh Bolton, who emigrated to Kenya with his wife Selene after the Second World War. Selene returned to England years later where she gave birth to Isaiah, but Hugh became a missing person, a cold case investigated by Ali Dida Hada, a high-ranking policeman in Nairobi.

Another man is interested in Odidi: Petrus Keah, as senior policeman past the age of retirement, who knows, literarily, where many of the bodies are buried. He and Nyipir share a history together, a brutal one that like numerous other secrets in Kenya is buried in silence.

All these characters—sister, mother, father, policemen, a Trader who has changed his name many times, and Isaiah—collide as each faces the uncertainties that are Kenya and the secret of Hugh Bolton.

Dust is a story of both Kenya and of Odidi and his family told in a rich, colorful narrative with numerous shifts from past to present in the lives of all the characters. It is not an easy novel to read as the story is not told in linear fashion, but in the ever-shifting memories of the characters. Beautifully written, but not a novel for the general reader looking for a story easy to grasp.