An author's tribute to his grandmother

By Ng’ang’a Mbugua

At the height of the struggle for freedom, my grandfather, Samuel Munyiri, was arrested by the colonial and detained at the Manyani Detention Camp. The following day, very early in the morning, my grandmother, Margaret Wambui, knocked on the door of the white district commissioner's residence in Nakuru.
When he answered the door, she said to him: "Since you have detained my husband, I have come to live with you".  Embarrassed, no doubt, about how to explain his predicament to his memsahib, the DC asked my grandmother to go back home and wait for her husband to be released from detention. Sure enough, my grandfather, who had been detained for supporting the Mau Mau, was released soon after.
To ensure that my grandmother did not put him in yet another spot of bother, the DC relocated the couple to Kiambu where my grandfather found a job as a milking man at the farm of a white settler that he only identified as Lord Gordon. My grandmother's recollection of his service there was that her family had plenty of milk. As a result, she used to encourage her children, my mother included, to drink a lot of milk with little blobs of Ugali (maize meal).
Years later, when my grandfather bought a one-acre piece of land near the present day Lanet Barracks, this mantra was to be turned on its head. Because my grandmother had to sell milk to her neighbours, she had to ask her children to drink little sips of milk with large blobs of Ugali because the family budget was tight. Wanyororo, by the way, was a nickname for the white settler who broke the virgin land with “nyororo-propelled” earth movers which glided on chains.
The luxuriance of the forest adjacent to the farm was to inspire my most recently published reader, The Bird Boy. Incidentally, the character of the grandmother in the story was inspired by my own grandmother. The destruction of the forest, occasioned by a decision to use the trees to provide polls for the Kenya Posts and Telecommunication Company, inspired my other reader, Susana The Brave. Thankfully, just as I had dreamed it in Susana The Brave, there have been concerted efforts to rehabilitate the forest in recent years. Other social and cultural influences that I imbibed at this time often show up in my other creative works, including some of the nostalgic passages in Terrorists of The Aberdare.
Growing up, my grandmother - a jovial, tall, energetic and slim woman with a ready smile and a hearty laugh - taught me many important cultural and historical lessons through her fireside stories. But I did not know that she was illiterate until one day when I gave her my math book and asked her to help me with a sum. I was a young boy then. When she told me "I don't know how to read", she made me wonder then and many times later how it felt to be unable to read and write. 

At some point, she enrolled in an adult education class and learnt to spell her maiden name.

And she would sing: "W na A, waaa; M na B, mbuu; U na E." It sounded like fun to her but she dropped after some time to take care of important stuff in her life, including her livestock and shambas.

Learning to read and write reminded her of her youthful days. Though her father did not allow her to attend school, she wanted to write love letters just like the girls who had some education. 

One day, she told me, she and her sister wrote letters to their boyfriends, put them in envelopes and walked a long distance to the nearest telephone pole. There, they dug a small hole, buried the envelopes and beseeched the telephone lines to dispatch their missives to their loved ones.

Interestingly, my grandfather, who was barely literate himself, would speak English "through the nose" as we used to say, on account of having spent countless hours with Lord Gordon. As to whether he could write as well, I never got to find out largely because in my formative years, he spent most of his time in Milili, near Narok town, renting land and growing potatoes. My eldest uncle would later join him in the trade whose fruits we only enjoyed when my grandfather returned him on Christmas eve every year carrying a kilo of beef and a loaf of bread.
Once, one of my uncles claimed, after having had a heavy evening meal that he would not eat anything else for the day "even if someone comes with meat". No sooner were the words out of his mouth than we heard a knock on the door. Grandfather had made a surprise visit. And he was carrying meat. Brethren, he ate some time despite his vow.
Anyway, I was telling you about my grandmother. To disguise her deficiency in English, my grandmother and some of her friends invented a language but was basically imitating English albeit light heartedly.
"Bos Gwas," she would call me.
"Wis mwes gas?" she would ask by way of greeting.
"Yes!" I would answer.
"Das this mus gus das. Nis gus kas." meaning she was going to the farm and would be back. Trouble was, I could not call her name, cucu, in kiuknglish because the 's' sounded odd if repeated.
But I loved it when other women her age would chat with her and call her "Nyis nas was Ngas is".

Hearing her say "Yeees!" one would have thought she knew the white man's language through and through.
In those days, I used to live with my mother in Bangladesh, a small estate in the outskirts of Nakuru town, and would go upcountry to live with my grandmother during school holidays. Then, she had a large family: My and uncles, all of who were in their early twenties or late teens and occasional distant relatives.
In the evening, we would sit around the hearth, telling folk tales, swapping riddles and other word games. I was always amazed that my grandmother knew so many stories. Hearing her rendering them as the fire crackled and sent ominous shadows into the dark night air that seeped through the cracks of her timber kitchen, I could imagine the villains lurking in the shadows. Invariably, all the heroes in her stories were young boys. This made me brave. It also made me want to become a story teller. Years later, when I would join Egerton University to study English and Literature, I always chuckled that I would get a degree that my grandmother so richly deserved. Indeed, one day, my maternal great grandmother, an equally gifted story teller whose two-room house was not too far from my grandmother's asked me what I was studying at the university.
"Story telling," I told her since I had no other way of explaining it. She too could not understand how the stories we told in the evenings could be the subject of a university degree. But when I wanted to do my oral literature "research" I could always count on their rich repertoire of stories. She was, in her own way, an oral artist, a repository of cultural, family and historical knowledge.
My grandmother was a strong and courageous woman. Once, when my grandfather was involved in a drunken brawl with two men in Banana Hill, he went him bleeding, if my recollection of the tale is correct. On learning who had bloodied my grandfather's nose, my grandmother set out to look for them. By the time she was done bloodying their noses with her knuckles, they had learnt the importance of keeping a safe distance between themselves and my grandfather.
Another time, when I was a teenager, a neighbour called "Macho" on account of his tendency to steal anything he set his eyes on, made away with all my grandmother's cookery and cutlery. Not long after, he pretended to be passing by. When my grandmother saw him, she started punching a banana stem as she chastised him for his thievery. Macho took to his heels when the banana tree keeled over and fell with a thud. You could see my grandmothers' molars as she laughed her head off retelling that tale. My father once faced her monumental wrath -never I - but the story, which my grandmother loved to retell, sounded like a comic adventure. And she embellished it every time she recalled the incident. 

Because I received nothing but favours from her for as long as I can remember, she became my closest friend, confidante, tutor, mentor and ally even when our family was rocked by stormy feuds. In later years, she became my neighbour when I bought a small parcel next to her. She became the manager, collecting rent, running the farm and keeping the accounts, modest as they were. In a strange twist, our relationship would become more complicated in her twilight years as she helped me navigate the curious world of cultural obligations.
In all the years that I have known her, I have never seen my grandmother taken ill. Sometimes I would complain of a headache and she would rub onion leaves on my forehead and the headache would go away. When I came down with a fever or some other condition, she would boil concoctions mixed with chicken soup and viola! I would be well again. But never once was she taken ill... until about two years ago.
One day, my grandfather's brother brought her some honey he had bought from some bee keepers in the neighbourhood. She shared the honey with her eldest son, my uncle. But as they were eating it, she complained that a bee sting had lodged itself in her tongue. My uncle tried to look for it but the poor light from the tin lamp and hearth flame was not enough. A week later, she went to see a doctor and repeated her tale.
"It is not a bee sting," the doctor said after examining her. She did not believe him. A few months later the pain was back and thus began her intermittent trips to hospitals, including admissions. She was later diagnosed with cancer of the throat area, the same condition that had led my grandfather to die of starvation over a decade earlier.  One doctor recommended that my grandmother's tongue be cut off. She refused. Her tongue was her life. She was talkative to the point of being garrulous. How could she live without it?
Desperate to heed the doctor's advice, my uncle called me.
"What do we do now and your grandmother is adamant?"
"Respect her wishes," I said. She kept her tongue but as the disease devoured it and throat, it became increasingly harder for her to eat or drink or even talk. When I saw her alive the last time, she looked nothing like the most favourite woman that she had been in my life. She managed a crooked smile but even lifting her hand to reach mine was a struggle. I held her calloused palm in mine.
"Be strong," I said to her but my words sounded hollow. How could she be strong in the face of such monumental pain and helplessness? A day before the world marked the World Cancer Day, she passed on.
If, by some miracle, I were to see her in less painful circumstances I would call out her name in Kiuknglish: "Shosh shosh."
And if she could speak she would answer in that singsong that was her voice all the years I have known her: "Yes, Bos gwas!"
And I would say to her: "Nis wes gas... Ngas is as kos ras this mes."
And she would say: "Yes!"

A book worth reading in the new year

By John Wafula

Fast-paced and fascinating, The Man in Green Dungarees is a story of grinding poverty and two young people’s efforts to escape it as they grapple with failure and alcoholism, love, rejection and hypocrisy. But it is also a story about crime and punishment; enterprise and success.

Ng’ang’a Mbugua, the author, weaves the plot around the rise of John Benjamin, also known as Kemau Wajoroge, a bright young man who fails to secure a university place by a single point. Like the entire Imenyi Village community, John Benjamin expects a lot of himself while his father, Kama Wakambo, expects even more of him.

John Benjamin, the book’s hero, is one of the best students at Imenyi High but that was not enough. As the narrator says: “Everyone expected John Benjamin to be the top student.’’ The unreasonably high communal and parental expectations and the simplistic definition of academic success, pile pressure on the young John Benjamin. Worse still Hilda, his opportunistic childhood sweetheart, dumps him after he fails to meet these expectations. He finds solace in traditional brews, often drinking himself into a stupor. Soon, alcohol enslaves him. John Benjamin sinks so low that the narrator, after rescuing him from a ditch, says: “Had he died by the roadside, even dogs would have needed courage to devour him.’’

But John Benjamin’s life takes an about-turn when he rescues a stray dog, Poppy, and builds a kennel for it. From that point on, he immerses his energy and passion in building kennels and marketing them, eventually stashing away a tidy sum of money. In about four years John Benjamin rises from a useless village alcoholic to the owner of a company, Dogs Reloaded, a farm in Thika, and is on his way to becoming a real estate magnate. All these from the humble background of hawking cockroach killer on the city’s streets with his childhood friend, the unnamed narrator whom John Benjamin only calls “Sir”.

The Man in Green Dungarees, which derives its title from the green overalls that John Benjamin buys after selling his first kennel and which become ubiquitous with him and his employees, is unique in many ways.

The informal and friendly conversational style which the narrator - John Benjamin’s childhood friend who is a failed farmer-turned-city hawker - adopts is captivating and infectious.

“Where were we before we were rudely interrupted?” the narrator asks as the storyline opens. The words create an aura of informality and friendship, hooking in the reader. Further, the use of phrases such as: Let me tell you something, my friends; By the way…; Are you listening… create familiarity that keeps the reader turning pages.

Another unique aspect of the book is that it is told by a hawker amid the hassle and bustle of the city’s streets and the hazards that come with the job. Fear of council askaris and police officers who harass them pervades the narrative. One hears the hawkers’ rhyming chants as they market their wares and feels their perpetual hunger, all of these providing a backdrop for the story.

The well-thought out names of places, institutions and people in The Man in Green Dungarees stand out in the reader’s memory long after reading the book. Characters such as Parmenus Marifoti, Sleeping Joram, and Kama Wakambo; institutions such as  Imenyi High and the Church of Jacob’s Ladder, and place names such as River Thabia and Emma’s Inama Boutique are laden with symbolism.

On John Benjamin’s rise from poverty to prosperity lie myriad obstacles. The author demonstrates that commitment to one’s innovative idea (building kennels), honing marketing skills and attracting customers are not enough ingredients for success - one needs support.

John Benjamin’s father introduces him to Sleeping Joram who loans him building materials; tycoon  Permenus  Marifoti buys his first kennels and introduces him to a huge urban market; his girlfriend Emma nominates him for a business incubation course which in turn leads to his TV appearance that exposes him to a huge market; a Thika farmer offers him land and introduces him to bank loans. Lesson? To prosper, an entrepreneur must build and nurture a supportive network.

Finally, the narrator is so inspired by John Benjamin’s rise from a wretched life to prosperity that he vows to return to the village and begin rebuilding his life afresh.

“Do I admire him? A great deal. Do I envy him? Maybe. Do I feel challenged by him? A whole lot,’’ he muses.

Read the book, be challenged, and act.

The book was published in September by Oxford University Press, Kenya. It costs Sh250 a copy.

Final curtain falls on Francis Imbuga

Francis Imbuga, whose play, Betrayal in the City, became one of Kenya's most iconic works of literature died on Sunday night after a stroke, the Daily Nation has reported via twitter.
Imbuga, who died at the age of 65, has had an illustrious writing career, emerging as one the most prolific playwrights in Kenya alongside the late Wahome Mutahi, who died after a botched surgery nine years ago.
As a literature lecturer, Prof Imbuga contributed to debates on culture and shaped a generation of scholars, teachers and writers who studied at Kenyatta University where he taught for many years.
Earlier this month, the Kenya Institute of Education (KIE) reselected Betrayal in the City as a literature set book for secondary schools. This was the third time that the play was being used as a study text for students sitting the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education. Also reselected a second time was The River and the Source, a novel by the late Dr Margaret Ogola.
Betrayal in the City was a popular book during the repressive years of the Moi administration, firing the imagination of young readers who yearned for change in governance. The play's conflict was resolved in a bloodless coup lead by a disgruntled university student, Jasper Wendo, whose brother had been shot dead during an earlier protest by students. The play had high resonance especially because, in the years of the Moi repression, university students were at the forefront of championing democracy, human rights and other freedoms. Some of them would later ascend to positions of political leadership nationally.
On November 9, 2012, in an interview with the Saturday Nation, Prof Imbuga said that he would have preferred to have his newest play, The Return of Mgofu, selected as a set book, arguing that it had more contemporary themes. However, the book published by Longhorn Publishers Kenya Ltd, was not among those submitted to KIE for consideration.
Among his other books are Aminata, Man of Kafira (a sequel to Betrayal in the City), Shrine of Tears and Miracle of Remera among others.
Prof Imbuga's widow, Prof Mabel Imbuga, is vice-chancellor of the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.

Writer shares session with Daystar University students

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon in a literary discussion with students from Daystar University's Athi River campus.
It was an enriching experience for me and I enjoyed sharing with the group at the invitation of their two lecturers, Dr Wandia Njoya and Mr Larry Ndivo.
Click here for a report on the discussion.
Thank you very much to the Daystar fraternity for their support and the students for the engaging interaction.

KIE Picks River and The Source as new KCSE set book

Out goes Prof Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between and in comes The River and the Source by Dr Margaret Ogola.
The Kenya Institute of Education has picked the late Ogola's family saga as the new Kenya Certificate for Secondary Education set book to be studied in schools for the next five years.
Also making a comeback to the secondary education curriculum is Prof Francis Imbuga's play, Betrayal in the City, which was a set book in the late 1980s.The play is a story about how a university student, Jasper Wendo, helped topple an African dictator in a bloodless coup following the killing of his brother, Jere.
This is the second time that the institute, which determines the national curriculum has used Dr Ogola's novel and the third that is using Prof Imbuga's play as set books. The first time that the novel was studied was between 1998 and 2001. The book, published by Focus Books in 1994, won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 1995 and the Commonwealth Writers' (Africa Region) Best First Book prize the same year.
The author died of cancer in September, 2011, the same month as the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laurette and fellow countrywoman Wangari Maathai.
The school edition of Prof Ngugi's book was published by East African Educational Publishers five years ago. The original novel by the same title was published by Heinemman in 1965 under the African Writers Series pioneered by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's whose ground-breaking novel, Things Fall Apart, has also been a set book twice in the Kenyan curriculum, the latest being between 1988 and 1991. The school edition was re-edited to make it conform with changing cultural and education realities, including re-writing the sections on female circumcision, also commonly referred to as female genital mutilation.

Dr Ogola's novel is a story of three generations of women from the same family and traces their journeys through life at different stages of Kenya's history and how they confronted the challenges of their time, from lack of education to living with HIV. Dr Ogola was a pediatrician at the Kenyatta National Hospital. 
Also picked by KIE this year is Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle to be studied under "Plays from the rest of the world category". The school edition of the book is published by Target Publications. Wikipedia describes the play as "a parable about a peasant girl who rescues a baby and becomes a better mother than its natural parents".
Brecht, who was born in Germany in 1898, wrote play in 1944 while he was living in the US. He died in August 1956.
Target is publishing the play under license from Penguin Books. The publisher's swahili book, Kidagaa Kimemwozea, by Prof Ken Walibora, was also picked in the Kiswahili category. Prof Walibora teaches in the US.
Kidagaa Kimemwozea replaces Utengano (authored by Prof Said Ahmed and published by Longhorn) while Caucasian Chalk Circle replaces EAEP's An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen.
Betrayal in the City, meanwhile, replaces John Ruganda's Shreds of Tenderness, which was published by the Oxford University Press, Kenya.
The new books will be taught and examined alongside Witi Ihimaera's novel, The Whale Rider, which was selected last year. Prof Ngugi's book was to have been replaced at the same time but the decision was deferred until this year.
According to the New Zealand Book Council, Ihimaera, 68, is the first Maori writer to publish short stories and a novel. His book has been described as "a magical, mythical work about a young girl whose relationship with a whale ensures the salvation of her village.

Haruki Murakami's 'A Wild Sheep Chase' creates magical world

Can a woman have such beautiful ears that she has to keep them hidden away to live a normal life? Can a sheep with a mark of the red star occupy the souls of men and spur them to reach great heights in their society? Can the search for this sheep change a man’s fortunes so much that he has to close down his business, lose his girlfriend and make so much money all in a space of a month? And what secret does a man simply known as “The Rat” hold that could unlock the mystery of the sheep?
These are the questions that jump to mind on reading Haruki Murakami’s novel, A Wild Sheep Chase.
Yet, the novel — first published in 1982 in Tokyo as Hitsujio Meguru Boken — is hard to place. Is it a mythology? There are flashes of mythology running throughout the otherwise modern urban narrative. Is it a detective story? But the unnamed protagonist is not a detective. He is just another bored, hard-smoking small-time PR executive until a mysterious man walks into his office and gives him the seemingly impossible assignment to go on a wild sheep chase in the hills of Hokaido, Japan. Is the book a romance? It cannot be because the main character is a self-obsessed man who is more contended chasing the wild thoughts coursing through his mind than he is in winning over the hearts of the women in his life, including the part-time call girl-cum-editor with the beautiful ears.
Some critics have described it as a comic and in the final analysis it is an engrossing book to read and may be that is all that matters.
It is interesting that the novel — despite having been written thirty years ago — has this year been occupying prominent display positions in European bookshelves. Is it because Murakami, the author, is enjoying a renaissance or is it because he also wrote the much-acclaimed IQ84, which was published in three volumes, the first of which came out in 2009 and the last in 2010?
In one of the blurbs on the cover, a reviewer from the Sunday Herald says: “Murakami is a true original and yet in many ways he is also like Franz Kafka’s successor because he seems to have the intelligence to know what Kafka truly was — a comic writer”.
Murakami originally writes in Japanese and his books have been translated into English, with A Wild Sheep Chase being first published in the UK in 2000 (by Havill Press) and later by Vintage in 2003.
According to Wikipedia, the first edition of IQ84 — a tome in its own right — was sold out on the first day and went on to sell a million copies in the first month of publication. This, then, vindicates the renewed interest in his earlier works, including A Wild Sheep Chase.
The New York Times Book review rightly notes that “there isn’t a kimono to be found in A Wild Sheep Chase. Its main characters, men and women, wear Levis.”
Indeed, were it not that the plot is set in Tokyo and a remote village Hokaido, this is a story that could have been set anywhere, even the windy hills of Mau where it is not uncommon to find sheep grazing in the undulating grasslands that were once forests. And this underlines Murakami’s reputation as an international writer.

Nairobi Book Fair coming up next week

It is that time of the year again!
Book lovers, book sellers and book buyers can mark their calenders because from Tuesday, September 25, the Sarit Centre mall in Nairobi will be hosting the 15th edition of the Nairobi International Book Fair. The theme for this year will be "Education and Peace" and it is not difficult to see why. Kenya is still feeling the bitter after-taste of the 2007 post-election violence in which hundreds of people were killed and over 650,000 displaced from their homes in three months of fighting after the results of the 2007 general election were disputed. Since then, there has been a concerted campaign to re-unite the divided nation through national healing and reconciliation campaigns while some of the leaders believed to have borne the greatest responsibility for the fighting have been taken to the International Criminal Court to stand trial. The case opens in April next year, just one month after the next general election.
What this means is that there is need to keep the peace campaigns going to ensure that violence does not recur next year and to foster national harmony even as the country enters a critical election campaign period. As such, the choice of the theme for this year's fair could not have been more appropriate.
Over the years, the stature of the fair has been growing considerable and if trends are anything to go by, soon it will be time for the organisers to find a bigger venue to accommodate the ever-growing number of visitors.
One of the highlights of the fair, of course, remains the awarding of the biennial Wahome Mutahi Literary Prize on the evening of September 29. This year, three books have been shortlisted for the fourth edition of the award named after satirist and columnist Wahome Mutahi who died nine years ago.
Ng'ang'a Mbugua's Different Colours is one of the shortlisted titles. The others are The Eye of the Storm by veteran columnist and surgeon Yusuf Dawood and David Mulwa's We Come in Peace.
Readers might remember that Ng'ang'a Mbugua's novella, Terrorists of the Aberdare, won the third edition of the prize and if he bags it this year, he will be the first Kenyan writer to bag the prize back to back.
Interestingly, though the award is meant for fiction from Kenya, authors from Tanzania have been submitting for the Kiswahili category of the Prize, an indication that the Kenya Publishers Association, which sponsors the award, might need to make the prize regional in coming years.
Tens of exhibitors, from Kenya and other countries from Africa and Asia are expected to showcase their books and other publications, e-readers and other technological gadgets that are transforming the way readers are interacting with books.
Of course, Big Books Ltd will be there too and the highlight of their stand will be its latest publication, The Wisdom of Steve Jobs, which gives readers congealed tips on business management and leadership that they can use to grow their own enterprises or excel in their careers. The publisher, whose titles are now available in e-book versions, will also be presenting e-readers to help potential readers familiarise themselves with the gadgets that will shape the future of reading.
See you at the fair. And spread the word.