Kinyanjui Kombani finds Colombia with latest continental award

“GINIWASEKAO!!! (We have won this thing!!!)” Kinyanjui Kombani declared on his Facebook page on the night of August 31, shortly after he was announced this year’s winner of the Burt Award for African Young Adult Literature, trumping competition from Tanzania, Ghana and Ethiopia.

Although it was close to midnight, congratulatory messages started flowing in, and by the morning of September 1, the rest of the country had woken up to news of his becoming the first Kenyan to win the prize at a continent level.

“And the trophy is home,” chimed Betty Karanja, a senior manager at Oxford University Press, publishers of the award-winning novella, Finding Colombia.

Everything in this 122-page book is in the right place. Like a pristine river bubbling its way through rocky highlands, the story flows rapidly as the reader is immersed in the turbulent world of Alex — or Lex to those who know him. The plot is a rollercoaster ride, from the moment a bullet misses Lex’s head in a dark alley at the start of the story, to when he helps anti-narcotics detectives arrest a most wanted drug dealer who, ironically, happens to be hiding in a rehabilitation centre.

Told simply and fluently, Finding Colombia reminds one of the Hardy Boys series by Franklin W. Dixon, only that in Kombani’s book, there is one amateur detective.

However, unlike Chet Morton, who comes from a middle class background and goes chasing after the bad guys in a convertible, Lex is a street urchin, who find himself in the seedier side of life in the capital after the death of his mother. It is in the mean streets, curiously named Canaan, that he gets hooked to Jet Lee, a dangerous drug inhaled through the nose, and which packs enough power to knock one out in seconds.

However, detectives believe that Lex is the person who will help them find the elusive Colombia, the young drug dealer who has inherited his/her father’s narcotics network.

PLOT TWISTS AND TURNS

Despite a false start, Lex helps to track down the suspect in a series of twists that will leave young and old readers alike gasping for breath as the story comes to a dramatic, if unexpected, denouement reminiscent of the detective novels by Agatha Christie in which everyone behaves like a suspect and everyone else looks innocent until the very last minute when the truth outs with the roll of thunder.

Although Kombani’s book is passing an important message about the need to protect the youth from drugs and how to set them on a journey of recovery if they are addicted, Finding Colombia carefully avoids being didactic.

The message emerges from the medium surreptitiously, rising to the surface without the author forcing it down the reader’s throat as so often happen in young adult fiction, especially from Africa.

What is more, this is a story of hope. Lex is not very well educated. He is not from a stable family. He has nothing going for him but in the end, he helps society before eventually coming to a point at which he decides to also help himself.

Besides Finding Colombia, one other story, To Kiss a Girl, by Ghana’s Ruby Yayra Goka, won the Burt Honour Award. The finalists were The Lion’s Whisper by Elizabeth-Irene Baitie of Ghana, Vera Akumiah’s Ebony Girl and Somebody’s Daughter by Hiwot Walelign of Ethiopia.

“This is a great honour,” Kombani said of his win. “I would like to thank my publisher for believing in me.”

Incidentally, two of his other works, Do or Do, also by published by Oxford, and Eve’s Intention, by Queenex Publishers, have been shortlisted alongside three other novellas for the Burt national prize honours, whose winner will be unveiled later this month.

“Oxford University Press East Africa is proud of Mr Kinyanjui Kombani’s achievement,” said the publishing house’s General Manager in a statement to the Saturday Nation. “We believe in supporting authors in order to contribute to the literary wealth of African literature.”