Lupita Nyong’o (right) and Selema Masekela. Photo: Lupita Nyong’o/Instagram
Great South African saxophonist Hugh Masekela’s son has blown out a candle of love, and with it potentially massive celebrations in two nations.
News of Selema Masekela’s breakup with Kenyan Oscar award-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o has been trending online, generating an animated discussion on what could have happened and whether it could have been avoided. She had accused her man, a United States-based TV presenter, of deception.
The 40-year-old Lupita is the daughter of Prof Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, the governor of the lakeside county of Kisumu, a city that would have relished even a traditional celebration of her marriage. Though they have ended their affair after a year, there was no mention of them having gone through her Luo community’s traditional ayie (introduction ceremony) and wedding, after the payment of bride price, which would have been a big ceremony at her family’s rural home in Seme, Kisumu County.
Announcing on Instagram that she had parted ways with her lover, Lupita rather eloquently wrote: “I find myself in a season of heartbreak because of a love suddenly and devastatingly extinguished by deception.”
She added in the same message: “I am reminded that the magnitude of the pain I am feeling is equal to the measure of my capacity for love. And so, I am choosing to face the pain, cultivating the courage to meet my life exactly as it is, and trusting that this too shall pass.”
She also seized the opportunity to encourage her fans to confront their own pain instead of trying to evade it.
It was only last December that Lupita and Selema confirmed that something had been blossoming between them.
And celebrating her South African lover’s 52nd birthday, she, again on her favourite Instagram account in August, described him in glowing terms as a “Sunshine human”, and he quickly responded that he was “the luckiest man alive”. Now, the luck seems to have run out in only a year.
The Kenyan star won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2014 in her big-screen debut, after mesmerising Hollywood with her searing portrayal of an abused servant in the movie, 12 Years A Slave. Thus, Lupita, a Yale School of Drama graduate, rose from obscurity, winning accolades for her screen performance and spectacular fashion.
She picked up the Screen Actors Guild and Critics’ Choice award for the Best Supporting Actress for her role as Patsey, a slave brutalised by her sadistic owner. That evil character was played by Michael Fassbender.
Lupita got a standing ovation on receiving the award, when she made her most notable quote ever. She said then:
“It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s. When I look down at this golden statuette, may it remind me and every little child that no matter where you’re from, your dreams are valid.”
Though she was born in Mexico, where her father taught political science at university, after going into exile following his arrest and persecution for standing up against then President Daniel arap Moi’s single-party Kanu dictatorship in the early 1980s, Lupita, the second of six children, grew up in Kenya before going to study in the US.
Her father was also a former political science lecturer at the University of Nairobi, and one of the victims of the oppression of intellectuals. He would later return home and be elected to Parliament before running for governor on an ODM party ticket. He is now serving his second and final five-year term.
Prof Nyong’o says his family has always supported Lupita’s dreams. Her mother Dorothy Nyong’o, nee Buyu, was a broadcaster on the voice of Kenya English Service, specialising in business news.
Selema, who was born in 1971, is the son of legendary South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela. His father was one of the most prominent musicians who fled apartheid South Africa in 1960, when he was 21, and lived in exile for 30 years.
Responding to the news of Lupita’s breakup with Selema on X (formerly Twitter), on October 20, most Kenyans supported her decision. Ezra Murgor posted one word: “Congratulations.”
Michael Mutinda wrote: “Deception also means crafty, fraudulent, bluff, hoodwinked etcetera.”
Mdiza remarked: “No marriage nowadays.”
Cyril Kemboi wrote: “Good, South Africans are never good.”
But Meg remarked: “Relationship huwa ngumu (is difficult).I can’t blame either of them.”
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