Every year on May 17, Kenyans celebrate one of the country’s classic Benga hits Stella Wangu, a 1992 single that was recorded by the Everest Kings Band.
And despite the singer Freshley Mwamburi insisting over the years that Stella is an actual person, his former band leader says she does not exist. She is a fictional character.
The song has gotten a life of its own, a craze that makes Kenyans on social media create hilarious memes as they question the return of Stella, the character driving the theme in the song.
In the song, the soloist Freshley narrates how he sacrificed everything to get Stella to Japan for her higher learning.
Come May 17, 1992, a proud Mwamburi asked his friends to accompany himself to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to welcome Stella back. To his anguish, Stella arrived with a baby in her hands and a Japanese husband.
Mwamburi has been vocal in media interviews asserting that ‘Stella’ was a song recorded out of a true story and that Stella herself was his lover.
“Initially my wife was not comfortable when she heard about Stella. I mean, which woman ever wants her husband to keep remembering his ex-lovers?,” he said.
Explaining, “Now, everything is okay with her. Our marriage is happy,” he said said in an interview with Kenyan Newspaper in 2021, insisting that the Stella in the song was his girlfriend back then.
During the interview, said that it had been eight years since he spoke to Stella whom he describes as a good person who in one way or another impacted his love life.
“She is married to a short man as my song says. If I would still talk to her she would remind me of things that are of the past. I took a break. I can’t dwell in the past. As I have always seen it, love is a very strange thing,” he said.
As told by The Standard
