Kenya’s new anti-heroes and other citizens who are rising from the dead

After a year running around making all the wrong headlines, good-girl-gone-bad Esther Arunga now says she wants to get back to what made her famous – television – the entertainment website, izvipi.com, reported a few days ago.

The story, inspired by an iReport posting on CNN, says the former KTN presenter, who has a three-week-old baby, is planning a comeback to TV with her husband, the eye-brow raising Timberlake, soon as she has weaned her baby.

About a year ago Ms Arunga, who reportedly fired many men’s imagination, became a big story when her TV career unravelled, and she got entangled with jazz musician Joseph Hellon’s bizarre “Finger of God” church.

The story got too complicated for my simple brain from that point on, with Arunga running away, then allegedly being recaptured by her family and being put in a home for the psychologically troubled.

From hence she tried to escape, claiming she was a prisoner. Then Hellon got into trouble with the police, with people he owed money, and became the laughing-stock of Nairobi as his life went into free-fall.

Because part of my day involves dabbling in online news, what I know for sure is that the Arunga-Hellon-Timberlake-Finger-of-God drama became the most widely read on the Daily Nation website for years. Now if you consider that the Nation site is by far the most read in Kenya, you begin to get a sense of how big this story was.

We wait for Arunga’s comeback story.

Meanwhile, Hellon has returned to do what he does best – play jazz music. I had just collected Hellon’s CDs when his troubles befell him.

I thought they were fabulous, and his latest offerings are even better. Maybe God’s real message to Hellon is that he should stick to the saxophone and leave the pulpit alone.

I found the story of Arunga rising from the ashes and Hellon rediscovering his mojo quite inspiring in these hard times.

Then my daughter got me to watch a video of a Sudanese musician called Bangs. The video, Let Me Take You To Da Movies is really bad, I thought. My daughter agreed.

But here is the surprise of surprises. On the video-sharing website YouTube, it is soon grossing a record 7,000,000 views!

If you compare it to one of the most written and reported about African videos of recent times, Makmende by Kenya’s edgy Just a Band group, Let Me Take You To Da Movies is like something from a cave.

Bangs, who sings about taking a girl to the movies against a forest backdrop, is nothing like the swaggering, head-band-adorning Makmende who cleans up the neighbourhood of bad guys.

Yet, “Makmende” has not yet made one million hits on YouTube. Remarkable, considering that Let Me Take You To The Movies had not got even half the press Makmende did.

In fact, the one African who clearly beats Bangs on YouTube is former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in the video when he was being executed.

I then thought we might be in the age of second chances in Africa, and of the anti-hero. Bangs is the ultimate anti-hero.

And Hellon (hopefully Arunga too) could become one of Kenya’s greatest comeback stories of recent years. You feel the same way when you go to the technology innovation community iHub.