2023 READS: BOOK 1

I almost forgot how beautifully lost one can get in words and a world carefully curated and gently hidden in a book by an independent mind, in this case Omwa Ombara! In making attempts to not be that ‘black person’ referred to when they mention that ‘easily, secrets can be hidden from a black person if kept inside a book’, I assembled components of my intellectual being and beseeched them to go on this journey, Omwa’s journey - God’s Child on the Run.

The 2007 PEV & skirmishes are stories some of us only get to hear retold as while they happened we were struck by the luck light and safely kept away from the warring front back in the cities. It’s in 2007 that I got to deeply appreciate the fact that my upcountry, as interior as it is, was the safest place we could be at the time. We’d occasionally only gather round the radio to listen to updates on the evenings the said Radio ‘accepted’ to work.

Omwa on the other hand got served a different plate in comparison to people like me. She, a journalist that covered most of the happenings of this horrid period, was in the thick of it. The trajectory of her life took an extremely sour turn few years after the PEV, initiated by one fateful call she received from Donata* from The Hague, a call that in her words ruined her life!

Her testimony, which is one of resilience of the human spirit against great odds, draws the reader (in this case, me) into a journalist’s world during that politically heated period. She introduces us to life in Safe Houses and how it comes to be that one gets to be called “a witness under government protection’. Political books haven’t always been my cup of tea and I thought this was it initially but it proved not to be.

I was awed.

The morale to read it was largely brought about by the fact that it was a carefully thought through & intentional Anniversary gift but had I not been a lover of a well written story, I’d not have moved past the Foreword, right? I’ve also read this during a pretty interesting phase of my life and I feel I deserve props for getting to page 170/170!

 

10/10, I would definitely recommend!