Calling a spade a spade: Kenyan literary authors are inherently ethnic

Ngugi wa Thiong'o  in Kisumu addressing readers on his book Weep Not Child. {PHOTO: FILE/STANDARD]

NAIROBI, KENYA: I have recently read that the population of the Kenyan middle-class has hit the 6.8 million mark, and that because of it, ethnic thinking is likely to reduce. I grant our political scientists their freedom to project, but they too should give me my freedom to doubt.

I should know it because some good poets have urged us to see ‘inter-textuality’ in our Literature –not a bad idea but, as usual, ‘something’ prevented them from naming the exact ties that bind Kenyan writing.

How Kenyan writers treat the question of ethnicity interests me because it is common sense that all Kenyans have a stake there. How rewarding, then, to investigate our authors’ successes or failings in handling the issue. You may object, but I consider Out of Africa, a Kenyan novel because it is about Kenya and, with the benefit of hindsight, some of the most honest observations on Kenya’s ethnic behaviour were made by colonial scribes such as Karen Blixen and Elspeth Huxley.

Muddy waters

That’s why, in fighting ethnic simple-mindedness, I am likely to value the Kenyan author who arrived from outside the African continent than the indigene. You know the forthrightness in how Coming to Birth, breaks the decayed skeletons of the Luo, and how Eye of The Storm, advocates ethnic inclusivity. I suspect that Marjorie Oludhe and Yusuf Dawood have no equal – don’t even try to mention Ngugi wa Thiong’o. From the older generation, perhaps only Ole Kulet plays in the duo’s league, if the boldness with which Kulet urges his Maa people to liberate their thinking – in Vanishing Herds – is anything to go by. From the days of Is It Possible?, Kulet has grown from pampering his people to outrightly thrashing them with his pen.

I’m convinced that solutions to Kenya’s ethnic problems will come even from hell – but never from the younger “ethnic barons and baronesses” comprising Yvonne Owuor and Binyavanga Wainaina. I could even add the imposter jingo-prince called Mukoma. While Owuor learnt nothing from Marjorie Oludhe in way of expanding ethnic awareness, Binyavanga imbibed everything from Ngugi in way of ethnic bigotry. Binyavanga’s ethnic lens is as narrow as the eye of a needle. I have written in the past, that Owuor’s Dust feeds on the mangy motif of ethnic ‘victimhood’ which has been spread ever since independence. The book ignores the other truth that, even in Bondo itself, there was always a certain vulturine cabal of ethnic profiteers planted to muddy the waters for even the noblest attempt at triggering economic empowerment.

Simply read Odinge Odera’s My Journey with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and you will see how RADET –a probable communal economic empowerment project – was painfully brought down by the Luo themselves. Indeed, if Kisumu, Kajiado, Mombasa and Garissa gnash their teeth that they have been marginalised over the years, they have a valid point. But another point more valid than that is that there were respective Luo, Maasai, Giriama and Somali ministers in the successive regimes of those same over the years –even now as we speak.

Ethnic bigot

I dread and denounce all genocides. They make me shudder. But Gerard Prunier’s The Rwanda Crisis revealed to me some years ago that apart from other land-holding agreements which were completely unfair on the Hutu, the kalinga royal drum – for whole centuries a preserve of the Tutsi king – was eternally decorated with the scrotum of the vanquished, dead Hutu. The politician will dare not point out ‘the weakness inside’; but the writer can, and without losing any vote.

In gauging a writer’s honest views, I trust their autobiographies more than their fiction, because writing the self is a public confession. So when Binyavanga tells me – in his One Day I Will Write About This Place – that former president Daniel arap Moi prevented him from going to the best school because he was a Kikuyu, I know at once that I’m dealing with the most red-livered ethnic bigot Kenya has ever seen. Did Moi even know Binyavanga? Did you see Moi sit down with a tooth-comb, deleting every Kikuyu name, one by one, till none entered the coveted school in all the 24 years of his rule?

Of course I have never taken seriously Moi’s assertion that he was the driver of a bus whose passengers he could not tell. But listening to the chorus of cries often directed at the former president, I’m these days convinced that half of them are purely a cocktail of private weaknesses and ethnic projections.

I think I know where it all began. If you read Ngugi’s Detained, you clearly see that a whole Lake Victoria of venom is directed at Moi (the person who released Ngugi from detention on December 12, 1978) but not at Kenyatta (the one who detained Ngugi for one year from December 31, 1977).

Of course Ngugi’s usual reason is that Moi was the Minister for Home Affairs, but that is another Kilimanjaro of a lie. Reason: ministers are answerable to presidents. With all the powers he wielded, why didn’t your ‘mundu wa nyumba’ order your immediate release from Kamiti the way Moi did?

I have never agreed with those who assert that Ngugi wa Thiong’o is not an intellectual. They are lying. My only problem is that, characteristically, true intellectuals trace events to their exact origins. So it was odd, in 2003, that Ngugi blamed the existence of ‘Moism’ in Kenya without even mentioning that Moi only followed the ‘nyayo’ of ‘Kenyattaism’. How ironic that Ngugi’s longest work of 766 pages – The Wizard of The Crow – was devoted to ridiculing not the person who detained the author, but the very one who released him from detention!

That’s the inter-textuality of Kenya’s ethnic writing which extremely few Kenyan poets will dare not tell you because, historically, they have been its single biggest beneficiary.