Like a bullet train bustling forward, and inexplicably even turning corners with fascinating coordination, comes the first season of Kenya’s finest thriller series yet, Igiza, a Showmax Original. Igiza, which premiered in May 2022, is a triumph of Kenyan television. It could very well be Kenya’s finest series, period. What works in this show is most of it; and any elements that don’t, hardly seem to matter, if they exist at all in the first place.
Igiza follows a fashion designer, Linda (Serah Ndanu), whose identical twin sister serving time, Nicole (also Ndanu), orchestrates and carries out a plan to break out of prison, switch places with her, assume her identity and rob her. The visceral prison scenes make it seem like The Parent Trap in hell. The prison has a sexual harasser for a warden (played by Ainea Ojiambo); the worst part being that he’s funny, and you flinch every time he makes you laugh. Quite unsettling. All of this transpires and is communicated within the first episode, and sets in motion the rhythm to follow. As Nicole fits her hand into Linda’s glove of a life, the show conveys to us a giddy excitement of being privy to an act of no-good. We become accomplices. How the show does this is subtle yet must have been laboured over for hours by the filmmakers. The quirky attitude the show displays towards Nicole after breaking out of prison is obtained through the use of music, and genre conventions belonging not to a thriller. You’d be pleasantly surprised to laugh as much as you do while watching Igiza.
‘Linda’ has to drop her son to school, she always does, but Nicole doesn’t know the way. What’s she to do? Sometimes it’s such a bad spot the viewer is convinced she’ll be ousted this time. But no, she always has a clever, very plausible way of getting out of jams. She tells the kid to play a game in which he directs her to school; things of that nature. It’s fundamentally thrilling, taking the hand of a viewer and going one step further, and further; and the further it goes the more dangerous the game becomes.
Igiza is an ensemble show, with myriad characters, some of whom only come in vague contact towards the end. They’re all so fully developed and that aspect, in itself, is exciting. There’s Dom, played by that threateningly handsome Blessing Lung’aho, who helps break Nicole out of prison; and also has a big-pin of a mother (Sheila Ndanu) locked up in there as well. Of course, in the background lingers a will-they-won’t-they tension between Dom and Nicole. We’re all quite familiar with the tropes by now, so I’ll just go on and say it: when they do, it doesn’t make you feel like a pervert for wanting it to happen. It instead, releases whatever sympathy you had for the possibility of love in the lives of characters as far gone as this. The relationship between those two characters; that part, that part worked.
There’s also Linda’s withdrawn husband, Reggie, played by Kevin Samuel; but just how withdrawn? He doesn’t even care that his wife, before and after the switch (all unbeknownst to him for a good while), is carrying on with other men. He’s too involved and caught up in his shady business dealings. In 2021, there was an exposé on Kenya’s booming wash wash business (money laundering) and here is a show that touches on it; the operative word being touch.
The gist of it is this: Reggie’s entire existence seems to be keeping his wife happy by letting her run her very own high-end fashion line. Said fashion line is also a front for Reggie and his associates to ‘wash’ money for some rather deliciously unsavoury characters. Which brings us to Chris, played by Eddie Mbugua, the psychopathic criminal underworld boss who heads the laundering operation. He’s a doozy of a character. The script and effort of Mbugua’s performance have imbued Chris with a quality akin to characters like The Joker, and Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men. Whenever he walks into a room, or is spoken about in a room, the mood changes. He’s dread in the walking flesh. We see him early on taking care of a pinching subordinate by chopping off a hand, very biblically. But before he doing so, he gives his big villain speech: ‘he’s not to be fucked with, blah blah blah’ (uninterrupted!) and then finally kills the man. The screams which highlight that scene linger in the mind throughout every one of his subsequent appearances, which could have been joyously more.
The problem with the whole wash wash angle, one of the few things that, while I wouldn’t say didn’t work for Igiza, could have worked better, is that the drama that surrounds that local phenomena is only played as the drama that surrounds these characters. We know virtually nothing about Linda’s fashion business (except that she really needs this specific fabric for some reason or other). We also know very little about how the money is actually cleaned. We only get wind of Chris wiring funds to the business and expecting it back via phone calls made up by quarter servings of pleasantry and double servings of threats. If Igiza had gone just a little further in depth, about how that money is actually cleaned, it would’ve been entertaining, and informative. Reggie surfaces every so often looking more tired than he was in his previous appearance, complaining of the stress; if the show could’ve placed a stronger magnifying glass on wash wash, we could’ve had a clearer picture of Reggie’s mind.
Socio-economically, I noticed a rhetoric Igiza may or may not have intentionally reiterated. There are two distinct worlds in Igiza’s Kenya: the rich, privileged ‘help me with a small 80 k‘ world, and the seedy criminal circuit of the underprivileged and the desperate. Serah Ndanu plays a character in each, extremely well I say, with very clear differences in the twins. Nicole, who just escaped prison, speaks more comfortably in Swahili with a demeanour that is volatile and angry. Linda on the other hand, is faux sophistication. Presumably raised in the same background as her sister, they fell out just a few years prior to the events of the show. She speaks in uptown English, and has the body language of a Princess Diary; taught and acquired, but not innate. This is all made quite clear towards the end of the season, when a lot of the backstory explaining the deep hatred between the two is revealed. Nicole from the get go is the one who has our sympathies. It isn’t an inclination the audience just arbitrarily makes, but the show itself leads one down this path, before everything gets revealed, which begs one to wonder how we feel about the wealthy in this country. Do we trust them? Watching Igiza may contain the suggestion that we don’t.
The scenes in which Linda and Nicole play off each other are marvellous. It is always an impressive feat of acting to do a coherent double performance, but to sustain it for a whole season of television, in which the majority of screen time is dedicated to one or the other of your characters. And to consistently be the soul of the show. And to keep it so under control one only thinks about it when, say, writing a review; this is a perfect performance(s). Absolutely virtuoso. Bravo, Serah Ndanu. The next season of Igiza (if it does come) promises a completely different template from the first, which I’m noticing is becoming a trend among series, like bottled anthology seasons. I’d wholeheartedly recommend this to anybody and their pet, my cat loved it.
Igiza is available to stream on Showmax.
