Ethnic memoirs and ‘votobiographies’ in the Kenyan scene

By ABENEA NDAGO

I have been reading some Kenyan autobiographies of late, and I’m still of the opinion that we need to tell a bit more. No, this does not mean you become like Nelson Mandela (God rest his soul) and surprise us with the humbling news that you once stole pigs (in Long Walk to Freedom). We only urge that your fallible, human simplicity tempt you into revealing a few ordinary mistakes in your long life, especially if yours was lived in a country as rich in gory history as ours.

That would be a miracle in Kenya. Here, personal writing (biographies and memoirs) reads like original copies of the document written by Angel Gabriel himself, and then sent to every former Cabinet minister/politician in this country.

It is why — even though her complaints elsewhere last year were a shrill siren from someone once privately wronged by that particular community — Dr Joyce Nyairo may have been right about the subject of Sarah Elderkin’s The Flame of Freedom (2013).

There are books that every serious Kenyan ought to read. Most of us are aware of Maina Wanjigi: A Shepherd Boy in Pursuit of Virtue, a book launched on December 9, 2013. This subject should be familiar to those who keep special notes on the long path of Kenya’s history. The author drank cabinet soup in the regimes of both former presidents Moi and Kenyatta, and so he must surely know a lot about the evolution of Kenya as an African state in the past 50 years, and which information is important to us for national coexistence.

That is why I chose to read Wanjigi’s book, even though its title was already as shallow and predictable as the many such Kenyan books I had read in the past (but none has ever beaten James Shimanyula’s Wycliffe Mudavadi: Man with a Vision for Kenya (2013)). I hope any future readers will make up their own minds on whether the author did a good or bad job.

If you find a book genuine, honest, and worthwhile, please call it a ‘patriotic memoir’. If the bar is so low as to hit your nose, then call Wanjigi’s book an ‘ethnic memoir,’ pieces meant either to glorify one’s tribe, or to hide wealthy footprints.

Had Wanjigi’s book surfaced overnight and only a hair’s breadth away from a major election where he had a direct interest, I would have called it a ‘votobiography.’ The term should be self-explanatory. Again, Shimanyula takes the trophy for nyalhodia (haphazard) — unopposed.

The sudden glut of biographies in today’s Kenya offers this country a unique air-hole through which to breathe in and resuscitate itself. The only major weakness is that former politicians/ministers hide too much. But such writers gravely belittle their readers’ intelligence because you can only conceal so much.

EMPOWERMENT

In Kenya, you cannot claim not to belong to your community. That is often the first sign that you are willing to eat your own people. This country is full to bursting with people who successfully sought state assignments on the basis of not caring a minute about their own ethnicity. We leave that argument to cannibal intellectuals who first draw an imaginary distance between themselves and their communities, before they are recruited by the state to self-ingest those same tribes.

You cannot also blindly support your people. For communities that lag behind — and Kenya is replete with them — there is more value in using your personal writing to rally your people towards economic empowerment than in entertaining them with bare tales about your political conquests. You may be a politician, but, somewhere along the way, it must have dawned on you that politics smiles at those with air in their pockets in exactly the same way a spider smiles at a fly.

The redemption is that your people have always followed you. So, they must surely also listen to your message on economic self-reliance. This is where Nyairo may have been right in her analysis after all.