The Boy They Could Not Kill

In the lake country of the Republic of Mahari, when a boy refuses to die seven times, the people stop calling him by the name his mother gave him and begin to call him by the names the country gives him. This is the story of Owiny Amoth Onyango: the second son of the man who almost became the first president of a young nation and the woman from Alego who held a household of five children together while her husband was placed under house arrest by the very government he had helped to build. Owiny is born on the seventh day of a year of locusts, in a mission hospital at the edge of the Great Lake, and the midwife who pulls him into the world tells his mother that this boy has come with something extra in his hands. The mother, who has buried two infants already, only says: Let him keep it, whatever it is. The boy keeps it. He grows up between two worlds: the Anglican mission school, where they want to baptise him with the name of a saint, and the homestead of his father Jaramogi, where the elders still know the songs that brought rain. At sixteen, his father puts him on a ship and sends him north, to a Germany still cut in half by a wall, where he is to study engineering in a language he does not yet speak. He learns Marx and welding in the same winter. He learns that loneliness has a temperature. He builds a small factory making gas cylinders. He marries a schoolteacher named Ida who will, in the years to come, walk into more courtrooms than most lawyers. He raises four children. And then, in August of his thirty-seventh year, a group of young soldiers tries to overthrow the president, and the police come for Owiny in the cold hour before dawn, and the rest of his life becomes the answer to a question the regime keeps asking him in a basement: Will you confess? He will not confess. They begin to call him Agwambo, the one who cannot be predicted. They begin to call him Tinga, the tractor that will not stop. They begin to call him Nyundo, the hammer. They begin to call him Baba, father. He runs for the presidency. He loses. He runs again. He loses again. He is robbed of two elections that he won. He swears himself in at a great park in front of a million people while the government switches off the national television. He shakes hands with the man who stole his country from him because the country is on fire and somebody has to put it out. And on a morning in his eighty-first year, in a quiet town by a different ocean, his great old heart finally puts down its work and stops. The country goes silent for a week. The lake, the elders say, rose a foot the night he died. The Boy They Could Not Kill is a novel about a man, but it is also a novel about a country and about every country like it: every place where independence came easier than freedom, where mothers stood at prison gates with smuggled letters in their stockings, where a single old man with a hoarse voice could fill a stadium just by walking onto the grass. It asks the question every great nation has to answer: What do you do with the man who would not die for you, when you cannot quite bring yourself to let him win?