Nyashinski went to America twice in two quite different capacities. On one journey he was a member of Kleptomaniax, the Kenyan group whose first album took them to stages as far away as Europe and the United States. When his family moved to America, he found work driving trucks. In the first version, people in the building had come specifically to see him. In the second, what mattered was whether the delivery had arrived.

Three schoolboys and one useful telephone number

Nyamari Ongegu, Collins Majale and Robert Manyasa formed Kleptomaniax while they were students at Nairobi School. Fans would know Majale as Collo and Manyasa as Roba. The boys wanted a session with Ogopa DJs, producers whose backing could get their music out of school and onto the air. Having obtained the number, they called from a school phone booth. Nyashinski told Business Daily they kept trying through a long stretch of unanswered calls before somebody finally invited them in.

Their first single, “Freak It”, appeared in 2002. Listen to what followed, especially “Swing Swing” and “Tuendelee”, and you can hear why the trio travelled. Somebody who couldn’t keep up with the rapping could still join in with the tune. Nyashinski supplied much of that melodic character. Years later people would express surprise that the rapper could sing. His old group had been broadcasting the evidence for years.

In America, the useful skill was staying at the wheel. In an interview with Johnson Sakaja, Nyashinski described stretches on the road lasting weeks. His parents worried about where he slept and whether he might get into an accident. He worried about the isolation he saw taking a toll on older drivers and their relationships. It was a specific and unglamorous education in emigration. Moving to a country where your band has played does not mean arriving in a country where anybody at work has heard of your band.

The comeback single before the comeback single

Ask which record brought him back and “Now You Know” is a perfectly good answer to a slightly different question. It announced him as a solo act in May 2016. Three months earlier, Kenyan listeners could already hear him alongside Nameless on “Letigo”. According to Nyashinski’s Business Daily profile, the two old friends met during a visit home in December 2015. Nameless persuaded him to record. The supposed overnight return had a guest appearance sitting in plain sight.

That sequence offered him two very different introductions. On a Nameless track, an old fan had the pleasure of recognising a familiar voice before having to decide what to make of it. “Now You Know” gave him the record to himself. Then came songs such as “Malaika”, on which a listener could fall for his singing without knowing the first thing about Roba, Collo or who used to answer the telephone at Ogopa.

The usual version of this story gives a decade to the absence and a sentence to the return. The records tell it better. First came a friend willing to make a song with him. Then came a song bearing his own name. Finally came an audience young enough to need the news broken gently: that singer they liked had once been in a rather good rap group. Their older siblings had been waiting years for this conversation.