Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: book review

Dust (2014) is set in Kenya in 2007, during post-election violence. The dust is the Kalacha dust on the edge of the Chalbi desert where ‘wind flings dust.’

Englishman Isaiah William Bolton arrives in Kenya looking for his estranged father, Hugh, who went to Kenya in 1950 with his wife and Isaiah’s mother Selene. Selene left, Hugh stayed. Now Selene has died of cancer in England.

Three times a year, every year for the past five years, Isaiah has posted a request for information in East African newspapers to find his father. He received a parcel – it was a book with his father’s signature. It led Isaiah to the Wuoth Ogik in his search for the sender, 43-year-old Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda. Wuoth Ogik, the home once owned by Bolton’s father is now the home of the Oganda family.

But Moses is dead, shot by police in the streets of Nairobi. Bolton meets his grief-stricken sister, Arabel Ajany Oganda, and father, Aggrey Nyipir Oganda.

A sister wants answers about her brother’s death. A son wants answers about his father’s life. The answers take Isaiah and Arabel to the 1950s and a time of political turmoil and a nation moving swiftly towards independence: a time of seismic shifts between Kenyans and British rule.

How is Moses Oganda connected to Isaiah Bolton? What do gangs, disenfranchised youth and heroic idealism have to do with Oganda? And what does Bolton’s father’s paintings reveal? Will Nyipir answer Bolton’s questions?

This is an interesting story, but difficult to follow initially, due to the fragmented, clipped style and predominant use of wails, screams, and other gutteral utterances. But persevere and by 75% into the novel, the threads weave together to create an intricate textile of Kenyan politics, life, and ambitions – some expected, and others not.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).