I am bored with big learning and legalism that does not respect public

Barrack Muluka

I am troubled. I am no longer free to dream as I wish. I have landed myself in good trouble with six Kenyans. My late friend Wahome Mutahi, otherwise known as Whispers, the son of the soil, would have called them six skirt wearers, although some of them wore skirts that were the size of a handkerchief.

Now the six have got permanent court orders, barring me from dreaming about them, or about their handkerchief size skirts. It is not that I am so much mesmerised by the skirts, or the little that they leave to imagination. It is just that the skirt wearers happen to be occupants of high public office. In my dreams, I often stray into their milky way. Of course I dream about their skirts, too. But mostly I dream about their big offices and sundry big things that go with them, including big mistakes. In the morning, I wake up to tell the world about the skirt wearers, their skirts and all. And so the six owners of skirts got very livid with me, Joe the dreamer of dreams.

They went to powerful corridors, where people claim that they are learned, while the rest of us are philistine. Never mind that theirs is the kind of learning that a dreamer known as Sir Francis Bacon dismissed as long ago as in the 16th century, for its drift towards regurgitation. Sir Francis said of these learned ones that they were prisoners of the idols of the mind. This is to say that their learning was corrupted by the idols of the tribe, the market place and the theatre. Said Sir Francis: "These idols are false phantoms and distortions of the mind, like beams of light reflected from an uneven mirror."

That is why the learned friends can allow six skirt wearers permanent orders to bar Joe the dreamer of dreams from dreaming about six skirts, despite the fact that the six occupy public space. So now I may dream my dreams all right, but I must dream selectively. This earth my brother! Like Albert Camus’ God dialoguing with his Soul, I am in the end bored. I am bored with big learning the way Thomas Hobbes was bored with Aristotle’s logic. I am bored of legalism that does not respect public good. That is why I am now going to keep the company of ordinary people like Meja Mwangi, the storyteller, instead of wasting my time around skirts that are the size of handkerchiefs.

You have probably heard of the yearn he spun about dancing cockroaches, Meja Mwangi? He called the story The Cockroach Dance. Now the most memorable thing about the dance was a character called the Meters’ Superintendent. Now this Meters’ Superintendent worked for the City Council of Nairobi in the days when they still had parking meters for private cars in the city centre. Trouble was that the meters kept disappearing from the parking bays, one after the other. Now you saw it, now you didn’t. The Superintendent understood that somebody was after his job at City Hall. The public demanded that he investigates what was happening to the meters. He understood this to be the clearest sign that it was his job the public were after, not the meters.

The louder the demand for an explanation of what was happening to the meters grew, the more uptight the Superintendent became. He told all and sundry that he knew they wanted his job, but that he would never allow them to have it. He began spending long hours in the office, protecting his space. He listened to everyone very carefully to determine whether they belonged to the enemy camp, for there was an envious enemy camp trying to fix him. He scrutinised faces for signs and eavesdropped to conversations, just in case.

Then he had got an even better idea. He would literally stay in the office permanently. One weekend, when they were all away, he shifted his entire wardrobe to the office. He brought enough food to last the rest of his contract period – which is to say several years. And he also brought a couple of dozen buckets, for some private biological functions. Then he locked himself up in the office. Come what may, he swore never to open the door to anyone, ever again.

On Monday morning, the place was already starting to get foul with the smell of biology. But the man would not open the door, leave alone step out of the office. By mid week, the whole place was full of biology. The only option left was to break the door and drag him out by force. As they began breaking the door, his worst fears were confirmed. Yes, they wanted his job. They hit the door from outside; he banged it from inside, shouting that they should go away. Amidst damning smell of biology, they dragged him away kicking and screaming, his worst fears confirmed. Had he not known all along that they wanted his job? The meters were only a pretext.

Now such are the kind of things I am going to spend my time reading about, instead of dreaming about skirt wearers who imagine that they have the last word on everything, including my dreams. I am fed up with what Sir Francis calls the distempers of learning and distortion of knowledge. Let me stay with absurd men like Soren Kierkegaard, Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre and of course Meja Mwangi and sundry dancing cockroaches. As our people say, let them hear who have ears.

The writer is a publishing editor and media consultant with Mvule Publishers.

okwaromuluka@yahoo.com