The Boy They Could Not Kill

Born in a year of locusts on the shores of a great African lake, Owiny Amoth Onyango comes into the world with his fists closed tight around something the midwife cannot pry loose. His mother calls it a gift. His country will spend the next eighty years trying to take it from him. Son of the first vice-president of a newly independent republic, Owiny grows up watching his father pace the verandah of a house arrest, asking questions no one dares answer. At sixteen he is sent to East Germany to study engineering. He returns a decade later with a degree, a plan, and a factory. He finds a wife named Ida who will prove tougher than the regime. He builds a life. And then the soldiers come. What follows is nine years across three prison cells, a water cell in a government basement, a garden in a maximum-security block, and the long education of a man who refuses to confess. He runs for president five times. He is robbed twice by numbers that do not add up. He swears himself in before a million people when the government turns off the television. He makes peace with the man who stole his victory because the country is burning and somebody has to stop the fire. The people give him names: Agwambo, the unpredictable. Tinga, the tractor that will not stop. Baba, father of the nation.He does not stop.The lake remembers him.