With due respect to the author of the much-talked about Hard Tackle: The Life of Uhuru Kenyatta, many will agree the President’s life journey is much more than 200 pages.
Irungu Thatiah should take credit for business foresight of penning his subject’s only existing bio that leaves the reader hanging with many unanswered questions. For example, besides the obvious fact that Uhuru was a rugby player at St Mary’s School, letting us on his class grades would be illuminating, as would be his relationship with fellow students and what his tutors wrote on his report forms and the more revealing views of the headteacher on his school leaving certificate.
Uhuru’s years at America’s Amherst College would have interested many readers due to the dark rumours associated with his time there. But Thatiah only give these a cursory mention in this unauthorised biography.
In retrospect, Hard Tackle turned out to be a journey of soft literary disappointment. There is nothing radically revealing about Kenya’s fourth president. This bio simply reads like the author, a former journalist, camped in the library of a media house - with the librarian as research assistant- and exhumed anything touching on the life of Uhuru Kenyatta, with a few token visits to the President’s Ichaweri village to cobble up this rushed offering.
One gets the impression that Hard Tackle was written with eye on the cash till at a newspaper vendor where a copy goes for a pocket-friendly sum of just Sh300. It was not necessarily written to grace the literary scene for posterity, like Jeremy Murray-Brown’s, Kenyatta: A Life, the 1973 bio of Uhuru’s dad, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta; or JM Kariuki’s 1963 effort, Mau Mau in Detention.
Listen to Amol Awuor from his Facebook page: “I just finished reading Hard Tackle: The Life of Uhuru Kenyatta by Irungu Thatiah ... It is propaganda being promoted as a biography,” he lamented, adding, “The writer engages in absurd boot-licking instead of offering a balanced and well-researched account of Uhuru Kenyatta’s life. It’s like a damage control job. Don’t waste your money on the book.”
Amol is an English and Literature student of Kenyatta University.
Besides fleshing out press cuttings and reported speech, the biography uses huge fonts-hence the 200 pages- to give the impression it’s a ‘big book.’
The author would have done the reader a favour with an ardous leg work to engage the President’s siblings, wife, children, childhood friends, school and college mates, teachers, business associates, employees, assorted blood relations, neighbours and contemporaries in politics for a comprehensive portrait of Uhuru Kenyatta - who should also have been interviewed, but is not.
Instead, Thatiah casually glosses over these issues, speeding the reader towards obvious events like the launch of The National Alliance (TNA) party and the President’s inauguration.
Hard Tackle: The Life of Uhuru Kenyatta is a study in how not to write a biography.
The book would have greatly profited from the services of a level-headed editor in taming the author’s clouded grammatical moments, literary license and excitement. Besides, he should first take a scholarly pilgrimage and thoroughly read Mark Gevisser’s 2007 work, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, or Duncan Ndegwa’s, Walking in Kenyatta Struggles: My Story, his 2009 memoir, before subjecting Kenyans to half-baked armchair hyperbole masquerading as ‘the life of Uhuru Kenyatta.’
Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred is acclaimed by many critics as one of Africa’s best written presidential biographies.
Mark Gevisser took eight years to compile the 800-page tome after numerous trips to the subject’s village, alma mater in Moscow and England, as well as engaging people who interacted with the former South African president. The bio is an epic journey through apartheid struggle in South Africa. No such thing can be said about Thatiah’s book, which is unfortunate considering Uhuru’s life mirrors that of Kenya’s post-colonial history since he was born two years before our independence in 1963.
The book’s other shortcomings (that can fill a library) are the author’s obvious subjective observations, despite claiming in the bio’s introduction that his political views are “very passive and liberal, preferring to remain a fundamentalist journalist who has no business getting himself emotionally involved.” Yet, on the chapter dealing with The Hague, he condemns International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda using a line that betrays his political leanings.
However, the author should be commended for stringing together events in Uhuru Kenyatta’s public life to reveal some key aspects of his character.
Unlike his siblings who avoided the limelight, Uhuru is portrayed as a man of the people from childhood: “He (Uhuru) was at home with the crowds often dancing where the people were dancing. He didn’t mind joining ululating village women for a noisy jig at the market place...exactly the kind of thing that made his siblings cringe with horror.”
The author also reveals that Uhuru started his politics opposing retired President Moi’s Kanu rule at the height of the clamour for multi-party politics in the early 1990s, until the government of the day coerced him by threatening his business interests.
Thatiah is given to flamboyant language on most pages, bordering on the reckless. He lets his personal opinion get in the way of a book one feels like returning for a resale at half the price to the vendor.
This comes out especially when he is describing people. For example he notes that: “Uhuru Kenyatta met another young man from Eldoret at this time. His name was William Ruto. A rather emotionally volatile young fellow with a less than rosy past, he was also as religious as a cardinal but also as vicious as a honey badger,” is how he describes the deputy president. “Ruto was also very cogent, articulate and ambitious. This specimen of psychosomatic studies was the perfect political gladiator Kenyatta needed as a longtime partner.”
Thatiah gets carried away, hurling unkind words at people he has interacted with at one point or the other.
He describes The Standard Online Editor David Ohito as “a verbose man who would have made a better propagandist.” Dennis Onyango, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s personal assistant, is “a skinny and non-controversial fellow who had the deepest Luo accent in any newsroom in the city.” Munyori Buku, Director of Public Communication at The Presidency, is the “archetypical trickster” given to dressing so horribly that “when on the streets it was easy to mistake him for a cabbage dealer from Wanyee.”
Dennis Itumbi, Presidential Director of Digital, New Media and the Diaspora, is described as “a pretty quarrelsome fellow who had special talents in social media and internet hacking.”
In his other life, Irungu Thatiah was Peter Thatiah, who corresponded for the Daily Nation (that serialised parts of Hard Tackle) and The Standard, where he worked alongside Ohito, Onyango and Buku. Itumbi comes from his Embu backyard. It is up to the reader to decide whether these withering descriptions of colleagues is a product of a kindred spirit or pure peer bile from a writer who could profit from the annual short biography writing courses offered at The University of Nairobi.
