A reflection on family, responsibility, the exhausting business of caring for others, and discovering that becoming your father’s son doesn’t mean becoming your father. My father had an extraordinary ability. He could bring relatives together, educate other people’s children, listen to everyone’s problems, offer counsel, and somehow still find the energy to invite half the village for Christmas. I watched him do this for years. Then he died, and someone, somewhere, apparently decided that I was his replacement. Now, I was barely figuring out how to raise my own toddlers. Suddenly, I was expected to become the chairman of an extended family whose membership could comfortably fill a small conference centre. Nobody offered training. There was no induction programme, not even a handover document. Just expectations. I tried. I failed. I ran away. And somewhere between writing a book to understand myself, trying to organise nearly a hundred cousins, building a men’s community, and disc...
Albert was an intelligent man. He could investigate financial fraud, uncover corporate conspiracies and identify people who were trying to manipulate a multimillion-shilling business deal. Give him a dishonest director, a suspicious transaction and a complicated set of accounts, and he could probably tell you who was lying before lunchtime. Give him a woman who hadn’t returned his calls for two days, however, and suddenly this highly accomplished investigator became a man conducting a forensic examination of WhatsApp’s last-seen feature. Three missed calls. Two messages. No response. Meanwhile, Cynthia, his brilliant colleague from Legal, could identify a dishonest business partner with remarkable precision. Unfortunately, she was dating one. And Samantha, the woman Albert was desperately trying to reach, had decided that his concern was precisely the reason she needed to disappear. Four intelligent adults. Several university degrees. Absolutely no consensus on how love was...