My Exile to the Village

Dear Otero:

July 17^th of every year always casts a dark cloud in my life. This is a day that marks a memorial of the death of a great friend and mentor, Mwalimu Daniel Munyoki. Very little is known of the late Mwalimu Munyoki outside the small village of Kamusiliu where I was born some quarter of a century ago, but he played a crucial role in my life. This Sunday marked the fifth anniversary of his death. As usual, nothing much was done, not even laying wreath on the grave, as a memorial of the greatest intellectual to have ever lived in my village.

You must be wondering why I have gone into reminiscing over the life of a little known teacher in a village that boasts of having produced great people like ambassadors, presidential assistants among other notable high ranking officials in our country. It is worth your information that the likes of the ambassadors, P.As and lawyers like me mingle and identify themselves with the highly placed people in the society, but the late Mwalimu Munyoki associated himself with the poor and the down trodden in my society. He was a mwalimu to all regardless of the social class. To me he was an icon and a legend.

The fifth anniversary of his death coincided with my flight to the village of my birth. During my long and tiring journey to the village, I had some mysterious revelation that reminded me of a dream I had as standard four pupil at Kamusiliu Primary School.  This is a dream that has always reminded me the life and times of the great Mwalimu Munyoki and leaves me asking, did we really know who Mwalimu Munyoki was? This is the question that formed the basis of that dream long ago. In my dream I had met Munyoki, smartly dressed and carrying a black leather briefcase. He was drunk and a little bit incoherent, but he called out to me, “Gregory, who do people in this village say I am? Look here Gregory,” he said thrusting his briefcase to me, “This is my thesis”. I didn’t, at the time have an idea what a thesis was but I pretended to have understood what he was telling me. Munyoki made me sit under a shade and started narrating to me a story of the life of a man I couldn’t understand.

No one knew his real name, he told me, and they just called him Munyoki-a name he had been given by the villagers some days upon his arrival in the village. Very little was known of him but the villagers adopted him as one of their own. The young trailed behind him, always wanting to hear his numerous and captivating tales. During the day he would be found seated among the older folks of the village drinking the traditional brew, and at the small shanty where he lived at the edge of the village, children overcrowded, evening after evening, listening to him speak about the great history of our country, pausing only for a moment to sip his drink. He was ever drank; in the mornings, during the day and in the evenings. And so, they had given him the name Munyoki; a name he so much liked.

Many years were to pass by before the villagers came to discover who this Munyoki was. He had told them a version of his story that he had been displaced during the war, which war no one bothered to ask, and thus had found himself in the village, a village far way from the civilization of this country. A village where the local dailies never got a chance to penetrate and if they so did, it was only when a trader came from the big town which of course was quite rare. Thus the village provided a perfect haven and a hideout for the socially displaced persons; those people the civilized society had chosen to reject could find a home in this village. Munyoki was such a person. He was a professor who had fallen out with the system in the civilized world and thus he had to flee from his pursuers in the city. 

I don’t know whether what Mwalimu Munyoki was telling me was true or was a fictitious episode in a past life, but when time came for me to flee to the village, this tale came to my mind. Time had come for me to identify with my people and have a taste of the abject conditions they live in. I might as well be called the village lawyer because this is where I will be operating from. My interaction with Mwalimu Munyoki will come in handy as I try to understand and fit in a society that has been neglected for decades!

The poor and the hungry this country cannot be fooled

Dear Otero; 

On Monday, May 16 2011, Dr Mulera a Ugandan consultant pediatrician and neonatologist living and working in Canada wrote a column in the Daily Monitor, a leading newspaper in Uganda, which left me surprised at how similar our fate is to that of our brothers across the border. Dr. Mulera’s article, ‘Dregs and wretches of this country cannot be silenced’ outlined the attitude of the ruling class in Uganda toward its citizens. This followed a senior Ugandan government official’s description of the demonstrators in the streets of Kampala as ‘the dregs of society, the stone and rock hurlers, the great unwashed of the slums’  

According to Dr. Mulera, when a government views humans as dregs and abandoned wretches, it has no qualms about setting upon these sub-humans with clubs and truncheons and tear gas and bullets as though they were dangerous beasts in the wild. This is what happened when the Ugandan soldiers descended upon some innocent and broke citizens of their country with clubs and ‘kibokos’ in the streets of Kampala. Their only offence; walking to work!

The  events of this year’s ‘Saba Saba’ day anniversary left me thinking if my good friend and mentor, Dr, Mulera, had Kenya too in mind when he posited that ‘these so-called dregs of the land have children for whom they desire better lives and opportunities than they have had’. The scenes of this day were similar to the scenes in Kampala some few months ago. We may not have been called dregs and wretches or the great unwashed of the slums but the zeal with which the police tear gassed demonstrators in the streets of Nairobi left me convinced that it was a matter of time before the government came out in the open to insult us.

The cause of the ‘Saba Saba riots was simple, the increased cost of basic foodstuffs. Our ordinary demonstrators were asking for an ordinary thing; reduce the price of unga to a manageable level. There was nothing wrong with this; they wanted the government to do something about the raising cost of living and the price of unga, just like that of any other foodstuff, having gone up again and again since this government took over.

The police action exposed us as the poor and the hungry people in this country, a people who can be fooled and trampled upon to satisfy the whims of our great politicians. Time and again we have been reduced to scratch the dry earth to feed ourselves and sustain the insatiable whims of our leaders. We have been paying taxes, without exemption, since the birth of this country and have never been heard to complain, or walk with pomp to the offices of the tax payer to show whoever cares to see that we have met out legal obligation.  

But the poor have their voices too, the poor have their power, the starving poor have an inalienable right to demonstrate and overthrow the government! They have brains with which they see and analyze the internal and external factors that have relegated them to nothingness in a land they presume to be theirs as much as it is their rulers’

When I see the unemployed and under-employed citizens taking to the streets in spite of the guaranteed beatings and tear gas by the police, I am as humbled as I am saddened. Humbled because there is no reason why I should not be among the ‘abandoned wretches’ were it not that I had an opportunity to go to school at the right time to prepare myself for gainful employment in the world beyond the slums of Kibera.

Saddened because their cries are directed at men without ears, people who view the majority of citizens as extras in the long running show called ‘The Kenya We Want.’ Those who dare to demand their rights and freedoms, and a place at the dining table, must be treated as intruders who must be kept off the stage with clubs and tear gas even when they have committed no crime.

Our leaders can pretend that they do not feel the pain of the poor, the hungry and great unwashed of the slums. How can they, when they never have to worry about their next meals or their children’s hospital bills. No wonder they cannot see why these people are going on and on about the stratospheric prices of food and fuel. 

They may wish them away. They may beat them, gas them and even kill some of them. But here is an inconvenient truth. The poor, the hungry and abandoned wretches are here, they are poor, they cannot be fooled and they are not going to go away!

Gone, but not forgotten

Dear Otero;

I have taken time off the politics of this country to relive my love life. I have always asked myself what my chances have been with this thing called love. I won’t dwell on my ability to love, or on the love I have for my mother Lucia, or my father, Daniel Kasela. I won’t in any way question the love I have for my siblings, Fred, Justus or Grace or even my grandma. But I still have issues with my love life and the people I have rubbed shoulders with in the name of love, a love that we all believe transcends parental love.

My first encounter with this kind of love came about some years ago, eight years ago to be exact. Back then, when I come to think of it, it wasn’t really hard to fall in love since I, and many of my peers, never knew how it felt to be in love. We just joined in the bandwagon and proclaimed ourselves to be seriously in love! All you needed back then was a fine tongue and a conviction that you were mature enough to win a girl to occasionally steal kisses at. All my relationships at, and before, that time were purely platonic. I can’t remember a single time when I got intimate with any of those I claimed to be in love with.

So when I got to campus two years later, I was grappling with a discovery that love extended beyond those platonic kisses and hugs behind the church during ‘keshas’. I discovered that to win a woman who was considerably mature and at her natural threshold of losing her virginity was quite a tall order.  However I came to realize that I was gifted with a natural charm, a gift that coupled with my theories about relationships came in handy. This is what led me to this one lady I would live to remember. She is the lady who taught me that the best one can get out of love is a broken heart.

I can’t quite well remember how we met but I can vividly recall the place of our meeting. It was at the registration arena at the university where we had gathered as new students for some sort of orientation. Afterwards I began to pursue her, in my imaginations and dreams.  It was about two months later that I picked enough courage to approach her about my feelings. I didn’t get the shock of being rejected but still I didn’t get the relief that comes with being accepted.

When I sit back and recall that period in my love life, I am left wondering what I could have done to fully and correctly understand womenfolk. What followed was a string of false hope, and love. It was a period when I felt loved but still unwanted. There existed a large vacuum in my heart and could feel the emptiness it brought. I never understood any bit of it until that night I got myself drunk enough at Columbano Bar and confronted myself in front of a large mirror at the washrooms. I stood before the large mirrors and spoke to myself…”you still don’t understand it boy, do you? Throw the emptiness in your arms out into that space we breath; maybe birds will feel the air thinning as they fly deeper into themselves…” I sobered up and went home that night and wrote, ‘Parting is just but, nothing’ in my diary.

I could not, at that time, comprehend what really came over me at the washrooms. Perhaps it was the effect of the beer, but, looking at it much later, I came to realize that something was working me up in my sub-consciousness, something that enabled me to gather the remaining bits of my love and move on without necessarily having to wait for my walking papers to be signed. For once I was gone, but not forgotten. That experience had laid a foundation block for something else, some strong bond of love that I could only compare with the way I felt toward my siblings.