July 17th 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!
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