Men only: When my father would have turned 75 years old

My first cousin Gina Kellie, who lives in Atlanta now, recently mentioned my father in a comment.

‘Your Dad, growing up, could be insanely cruel and incredibly generous. He confused us to hell...’

She was reminiscing on Kenya, as Kenyans in the Diaspora often do, remembering a Nairobi Show in the ‘80s when she was barely ten, and my Dad slipped her Sh2,000 at the show ground after her mum had said she had no extra money to give her!

Older folks will gasp, because two thao then was like giving a 10-year-old twenty thao today to blow at the fair. But that was my old man.

He had no qualms throwing rounds of beer there at Birongo Square in Nairobi West shopping centre. Then coming home at 2am with a quarter of kilo of meat (and bones for our mongrel, Shiver) and insisting that our domestic help Nandwa cook it. Then specifically waking me up, as first born, to chew it with him in the sitting room. ‘Thorny,’ he’d whisper, ‘wake up we eat meat.’

Till today, I still auto-wake at 3am.

My little boy, Leo Mawira, who turns 4 in April (and who loves school so much, he finishes his homework and starts making up more patterns, numbers, words for himself) recently asked me to go and ‘beat Hassan’ at his school because “Hassan eats my snacks at break and doesn’t say, ‘please, Leo, gimme biscuit...’’

It reminded me of a defining incident when I was a geeky kid in Standard 3, getting picked on by a boy called Ray Ochieng.

My father, when I finally moaned to him about Ray, simply packed a small spanner in my cartoon lunch box. ‘Hit Ochieng on the head with it when he disturbs you.’ Which is exactly what I did.

Ray bled. I got into a whole load of trouble at Catholic Parochial School, with headmistress Sister Sinead saying: ‘You’ve been such a good boy, Anthony, how could you?’

‘Raymond was bullying me every time,’ I said. But I never gave my Dad up – not even to my Mum, who was called to school, and said my behaviour was both ‘inexcusable and inexplicable.’ (My mom was a big fan of English words, and I had my Learner’s Oxford Dictionary, John Mwazemba will be happy to know, where I always looked up her words).

Four years earlier, when I was five, my sister three, and my late kid brother one, my mom had gotten a debilitating stroke that half paralysed her. She was only 34.

My old man at the time was a civil servant in Kisumu. He stayed away from Nairobi, from her, from us, for six months. That’s the closest he ever came, I believe, to deserting us.

Eventually, he reconciled himself to his bride’s life-changing fate and came back home. But he coped with this tragedy by drinking, in itself a tragedy.

But he always accompanied mom to Nairobi West Hospital, then a small facility run by the warm, indefatigueable and super visionary Doctor Saini, every other weekend for her exercises and check-ups.

My old man had been a champion boxer, and mediocre Campus student, in Makerere in the early 1970s.

Even as a much older man, I believe he craved the adrenaline and immediacy of mano-e-mano combat.

The fear, the blood lust, the pain, the skill, to punch and dodge and try to outlast a foe that wants to bring you crashing down on canvas. Like many things he liked, I absolutely abhor physical violence.

But I do like battle! Being knocked and counted out – but arising, whether there or elsewhere – to shock all. If you cannot reinvent oneself in this life, often full of implacable, and often ‘inexplicable’ foes, to use my late mother’s word, then you are done for.

My father died of liver cirrhosis, two years after his retirement, at 57. Invert that number, you get 75.

If he were alive, Dad would have turned 75 today – and we’d be in Ngong, celebrating his birthday.

There’s a picture of our family of one Christmas in Swaziland, where he was briefly Post Master General.

We all were alive.

And so happy.

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