‘Akinyi nyar Seme’ and my love for tennis

I have had a great week. Venus, the goddess of love, is out in full play, alongside her sister Serena, the spirit of powerful tranquillity. Love is in the air, and I can hardly take my eyes off Melbourne Park, where it’s all happening.

The happening, as my fellow fans know, is the Australian Open tennis tournament. But the real affair lies in those two legendary ladies, the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena.

Is it a love affair? Yes, I say without hesitation, for me as for millions of other lovers of sport and of solid human achievement.

It’s also particularly poignant for us in Kenya, where Serena has been a two-time visitor and a leading benefactor to underprivileged youth projects and enterprises.

Many of us still have tender memories of her visit to the country in November 2008, when she opened a school sponsored by her, and named after her, in Matooni near Sultan Hamud. That was a predecessor of “Serena” Wee School, also in Ukambani.

In Nairobi in 2010, she charmed us especially with her appearances at Dr Liz Odera’s Sadili Oval Sports Academy in Kibera, where she was renamed “Akinyi nyar Seme”.

Indeed, as Serena joyfully mingled, danced and “played tennis” with the young people, you could easily believe she had just arrived from Seme!

My own love affair with Akinyi’s game of tennis dates back to my junior school days in the late 1950s, when we played versions of it with wooden bats on the shores of Lake Victoria near Entebbe.

I never became a top-notch player, but that did not affect my love for the sport. Even at a casual glance, tennis is attractive and engaging to both spectators and players because of its combination of elegance, speed, power, precision and endurance.

The Williams sisters, who personify these qualities to the highest levels ever witnessed in women’s tennis, had not even been born when I went back to the courts in the late 1970s.

Maybe I would have become a better player if I had had the benefit of their inspiration then!

IN MY ELEMENT

Anyway, in order to remain close to tennis, I reinvented myself as a coach! But the coaches in those days were not self-appointed. We had to be duly trained, tested and certified by both the Kenya Lawn Tennis Association and the International Tennis Federation.

I took to coaching like a duck to water. To my modest playing abilities and teaching techniques, I added a dash of my theatrical skills, and the fun started on the courts. Joyfully, too, the players the Kenya tennis association assigned me were youngsters, aged between six and 12, and I felt entirely in my element.

Then the Williams sisters happened! Watching top-class tennis, on television and videotapes as we did then, was always part of our enjoyment of the sport.

But when Venus and Serena, barely in their teens, burst on to the international scene in the mid-1990s, the fans’ attention was irretrievably captivated. It still is.

Serena and Venus are fascinating for many reasons, the most obvious being their exceptional skill and success at their sport. They have won every major international competition many times over, including Olympic gold. They are still competing, and often winning, at 33 and 34, ages which are normally considered to be “advanced” for any sportsperson.

Equally importantly, the sisters were the first African-American women to seize and consistently retain the top ranks of world tennis, a sport largely presumed to be a preserve of rich middle-class White privileged folk.

The Williams sisters rose to the pinnacle of success not because of their social background, but mostly in spite of it. Indeed, their preparation and training for their phenomenal achievements raise serious questions about parenting.

DESIGNED FOR TENNIS

Fashionable society emphasizes freedom of choice for their children. “Expose them to a wide range of experiences,” we say, “and eventually they will choose what best suits them.”

But Mr Richard Williams, the father and lifelong coach of Venus and Serena, begs to differ. For him, her daughters were “designed” for tennis, practically before they were born.

He knew that, as black children from a poor background, his daughters would not receive adequate care and respect in the white-dominated public institutions.

So, he chose home schooling for them, and that mostly on tennis courts, almost immediately from the moment each of the girls could stand up and hold a racket.

In 2008, I made a “pilgrimage” to the park in the Compton area of Los Angeles, where the Williams sisters had most of their early coaching.

Residents in the neighbourhood still tell stunning stories of Mr Williams’ delicate negotiations for access to the tennis courts in the park, which some shady gangs regarded as their exclusive turf.

The one about gunfire sometimes rocking the park while the girls practised their strokes I only read somewhere. Anyway, the really tough question is whether Richard Williams was fair to his daughters by straightjacketing them into tennis professionalism.

The most sensible answer is that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. What would Venus and Serena be today if they hadn’t become tennis stars?

Richard Williams gambled boldly on his daughters’ careers and, luckily, the gamble paid off handsomely, even in a literal sense. The Williams sisters are among the richest athletes in the world.

Obviously we cannot have a uniform style of parenting. But we can learn two crucial lessons from the Williams experiment.

The first is that every parent has to make some choices for his or her child, in view of the prevailing realities in their environment.

Second and more challenging is the need for parents to resolutely support their children in their education and careers. Consider the four to six hours that Richard Williams had to train with Serena and Venus, every day, for more than a dozen years.

Meanwhile, to Serena Akinyi nyar Seme I say, as we Ugandan Luos put it, “Ber, dako, afwoyo matek”. Thank you for making my week.

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and literature in East Africa