What would you give up to become young, rich and famous?

By Jennifer Muchiri

Kenyan youth waste a lot of valuable time thinking of how they too can make it to the coveted list of ‘celebrities’.

 Musicians and comedians have become the new role models for young Kenyans. School going children will be seen or heard imitating their favourite entertainers, sometimes at the expense of their school work.

 A few years ago, a young girl committed suicide allegedly because her parents denied her permission to attend a concert by a world renowned musician at Carnivore.

The glamourous clothes, cars, houses and other symbols of wealth often attract young people to the entertainers. What our young ones do not know is that the life of glamour these famous entertainers exhibit is sometimes a façade and that the success they seem to have does not always make them happy.

They do not know that fame comes with a very high price.

Argwings Otieno’s A Taste of Fame (2013) tells just the kind of story young people need to read about the cost of fame and ‘celebrity’ status.

Told in the first person narrative voice by a 14-year-old school boy called Rando, this book is an interesting reflection of the kind of dreams that young people harbour. Rando’s hero is a musician called Dickson Zago aka Dee Zasta.  Rando is so obsessed with him that he decides to do everything that the ‘star’ does.

Strange accents

He skips lunch to save money to buy VCDs of Dee Zasta’s concerts and ends up fainting in school because of hunger.  After watching the VCDs over and over again, Rando begins to speak, sing and dance like the musician.

His imitation of Dee Zasta is so serious that his teachers get concerned about his new way of pronouncing words and inform his parents who warn him against using what they call “strange accents”.

Rando’s big break comes when, after a school singing contest in which he performs one of Dee Zasta’s songs, the ‘star,’ who is one of the invited guests, is so impressed that he asks the young Rando to become his partner.

The young man cannot believe that he has got a chance to perform alongside his star and his joy is priceless. He is on his way to becoming a super star and is the envy of many of his friends. 

Rando’s father warns him against believing in the supposed glamourous lives that stars like but he thinks his father is just being paranoid and unsupportive of his new ‘career.’ He immerses himself into the preparation for an upcoming concert in which he and Dee Zasta will perform and begins spending a lot of time with the musician.

Rando’s close association with Dee Zasta gives him the opportunity to discover that indeed, the star does not lead so rosy a life as he had previously imagined. The musician confesses that he has to spend a lot of money  — which he does not have — to buy flashy clothes because in his business he has to protect his image. Indeed, he tells Rando that in the world of entertainment, the mantra is “fake it till you make it.”

Rando gets to see Dee swindled by a fake fashion designer, embarrassed by a woman in public in a case of mistaken identity, and blackmailed with a rape charge by another woman who wants money from him.

 Fake life

The biggest disappointment for Rando comes when Dee Zasta, in an effort to raise money to hire a helicopter to take them to the concert, withdraws the money he had paid to a hospital for his mother’s treatment.

Rando and Dee Zasta do arrive at the concert in style as they had planned and even win the top prize in the contest but the performance ends in an anticlimax when Dee receives a call informing him that his mother has died.

Dee’s manager does not know that he had withdrawn the money for the mother’s treatment tries to console him by saying that it is not his fault that the mother died. Rando knows the truth and is in a dilemma because he cannot betray his ‘friend.’

Rando may have become an instant celebrity especially among his schoolmates but he has learnt that being famous does not necessarily bring happiness. He decides that even if he is to become an entertainer, he will do so as Rando and not lead a fake life to impress other people.

A Taste of Fame won the 2013 Burt Award for African Literature. It is a must read for young Kenyans.

Dr Muchiri teaches Literature at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]