Billy Kahora engrosses the mind with The Gorilla’s Apprentice

This twelve-page spread delves into the world of Jimmy Gikonyo, a soon to be eighteen-year-old man exploring his life and that of Sebastian the Gorilla during the 2007 post-election violence. But what sets this story apart from most works about the plague that hit Kenya and what proves Kahora an inimitable mind is its focal point. Sebastian the Gorilla is the key feature that carries this story to its conclusion and through him we get to understand what is going on. Sebastian, rescued from Rwanda during the genocide, however provides a direct correlation with what went on in Rwanda and what is happening in Kenya at that time.

Escapism to Jimmy comes in the form of visiting the zoo which he has gone to since he was younger, “It took him away from real life…Real life was his mother telling him that he needed to face Real Life.” His life is somewhat anodyne and Sebastian and the other animals at the zoo create an impermeable world where Jimmy can go and not think about his father who left him or his overprotective floosy of a mother.

“These times became the fulcrum of his weeks, defining his priorities and spirit more than his mother’s war with the doors of the small Kileleshwa flat they now lived in; her daily conflicts with the cheap dishes which she had to wash herself as they could no longer afford a maid; their strange and sometimes psychotic neighbours; her boyfriends.”

However this escapism does come with its contradictions as Jimmy remembers that his old house where he lived with both his mother and father ponged of the zoo. In the undercurrent of this revelation, Kahora conveys that his comfort and happiness in the zoo may be due to the familiarity created with it through his old house. The readers may assume that the zoo takes him to a time and place when his father and mother were present in his life, however transient that time was.

“Jimmy had been born not far from State House where the President lived. The house he remembered smelled like the Animal Orphanage.”

Kahora advances the plot and creates a new pivotal feature to the story with the introduction of a new character, Professor Charles Semambo. With Semambo, the reader enters an unimaginable world where Gorillas and humans can confabulate. Although Jimmy’s father introduced him to the world of animals, Semambo brings him in further with the prospect of speaking to his dying friend Sebastian.

Although Jimmy has experience loss in his life with his father having abandoned him, his relations with Sebastian suggest that loss in the form of death may be a new emotion to Jimmy, “Their interaction was now defined by that strange sense of inevitable nostalgia that death brings, even when the present has not yet slipped into the past.”

With Semambo, Kahora brings the audience back to the realisation that there is turmoil in the country however he still elucidates that the central topic is Sebastian. ‘‘While some fuss about whether to eat chicken or beef tonight, many won’t see tomorrow morning. We are in the abyss and the abyss is in us.’’

The theme of death is quickly re-introduced with Sebastian’s rushed exit from the world. However through this we see the deep connection shared with the Gorilla and Semambo. Semambo too escaped Rwanda to come to Kenya and is now too in the midst of turmoil to which he had thought he abandoned. The fact that he can speak to Sebastian further solidifies their bond. Sebastian’s death only makes his connection with Semambo even more illuminated to Jimmy.

“His glasses fell off, and his light eyes turned darker as the two figures became one.”