I could drink my royalties in one week, says Mangua

Sitting in a dimly lit room in his house in Nairobi’s South C estate, 74-year-old Charles Mangua cuts the image of a man who has seen it all.

Surrounded by books on every subject under the sun, and with bottles of wine gleaming quaintly at him in the dimness of the room, Mr Mangua exudes great coolness and composure, sort of like a king in his castle.

His long legs stretch well into the centre of the room, and when he stands, you realise that, height aside, the years have been gentle to him. For a man who has been around this long, such steady and assured gait is rare.

But he has every reason to rule that castle. Who wouldn’t? For even though he remains one of the most unrecognised faces outside the metallic gate of his home, this, after all, is the man who wrote the coquettish tome Son of Woman, which was extremely popular with readers in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

His motivation for writing the book, notorious for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality, remains hazy up to this day, even though, like every writer on these subjects, the explanation that the book was a social commentary on the state of love and affection in the country would wash.

But prodded further, he reveals that the first book, which he wrote as a post-graduate student at Oxford, was a total failure, with publishers dismissing its protagonist as a Jesus-like fellow who was too good.

“They told me the main character was too good for reality and that he was like a football player who could not kick the ball, but was instead touched by it,” says Mr Mangua with a chuckle as he cuts waves in the air with his large hands, a manner of speaking he maintains throughout the afternoon.

This dismissal stung him to write about a character that was not only real but also the opposite of the Son of Man portrayal of his failed debut work, hence the title Son of Woman.

He adds that the first generation of African writers were too serious, penning lamentations of the colonial situation and the disillusionment with the new post-independence governments, which further sharpened his bent for popular, feel-good stories.

“Everywhere you turned in East, West or South Africa, you read about suffering and I said we need a break. I would henceforth write to amuse myself. To date, when I read Son of Woman, which is the mother of my creative works, I laugh a lot…”

But it made others laugh as well. The book that was read by market women, secretaries and taxi drivers was so popular and controversial that some lost their jobs for reading it while some changed their faiths.

Another was sacked

“A Canadian Catholic nun in Mombasa left the nunnery after reading the novel, while another was sacked for reading it. Young people were reading the book in secret while their parents were reading it in public,” Mr Mangua tells us, relishing the memory of it.

To stress that he did not write for any didactic role or “higher purpose”, Mr Mangua says: “I cannot teach anybody anything.” 

Newly arrived in Kenya and recuperating from the humiliation of rejection by London publishers, Mr Mangua wrote the new novel in seven months even as he led a busy office life as the Coast Provincial Planning Officer. 
He had joined the Civil Service from Shell where he was sacked for beating up an Irish man while still on probation.

“You see, I had a girlfriend at the Uplands Bacon Factory and on the last day of the Nairobi Show, I went to pick her up at their stand. But the manager, who apparently had interest in her, called a colleague and they both attacked me. But I deployed my judo skills, in which I had excelled at Makerere, and the man was hospitalised.”

Needless to say, when he reported at the office the following Monday, he learnt that he had been sacked. It was only two weeks to the end of his probation. His combatant Irishman was also sacked and deported.

But Mr Mangua would later get back at what he termed his oppressors when, in the ultimate comeuppance, he made Dodge Kiunyu, the philandering protagonist of Son of Woman, to sleep with the daughter of a white man.

“I wrote Son of Woman and left for a new posting in Abidjan. Six months later, I received the good news that it was a good book and would they enter it in an award?”

It won the Jomo Kenyatta Award for Literature.

“But it was a mixed bag as I at the same time received the sad news that my minister, the venerable Tom Mboya, had been assassinated,” says the author, who went on to stay at the African Development Bank for 27 years.
An instant success and best-seller in Kenya, which ran into six reprints, Son of Woman marked the beginning of popular literature in Kenya.

A fictional, autobiographical account of the son of a prostitute, the narrator — Dodge Kiunyu — describes his life as an orphan in the slums of Nairobi — a young man frequenting bars and brothels, a student, corrupt civil servant and serial convict.

It is a humorous and cynical account revealing much about the unsavoury aspects of a world experiencing rapid social change.

He would write two other books — A Tail in the Mouth and Son of Woman in Mombasa — which was a sequel of his pioneering work, on the beaches of Abidjan.

After he left the AfDB in 1996, he embarked on an ill-fated flower farming project, which sank his Sh40 million savings.

“I started in a very bad year — El Niño — as a novice, with not much experience in farming. It was on a 100-acre farm. Kenya was beginning to have problems with IMF, which was unhappy with the policies of retired President Daniel Moi and had stopped disbursements. Other banks like AfDB followed suit, and that is how my funding was delayed.”

“There is nothing as bad as a half-funded project. By the time funding was resumed and the bank begged me to take their money, I flatly refused as it was too late.

“I should have gone back to Abidjan, except for Laurent Gbagbo, who was terrorising the West African nation at the time.”

Yet despite Mr Mangua’s books, which were read everywhere including in buses, he says he never got much financial gain out of it.

“Indeed, I could drink my royalties within a week,” was his way of telling us that he has never received more than Sh30,000 of pay cheque.

“People who would have read for amusement buy unga with the little money they get, not books. I believe my fourth book, Kanina and I, should have been a setbook, but my publishers did not submit it. But at some point, we decided to change the title to Kenyatta’s Jiggers, even though it does not seem to be selling much.

“Well, I have been told Son of Woman appears to need a sequel, why don’t you write it? And I said well, maybe I can write Son of a Woman in Parliament, but I have no motivation,” says the author, who is more at home in Abidjan than Nairobi.

He says the writing bug might bite him again in the New Year when he completes and moves into a new farmhouse at Makutano, near Sagana in Nyeri county.

“I need water. Nothing comes out here,” he says referring to a small room at the back of his three-bedroom house.

“In my sojourn between Abidjan and Nyeri, I decided to put up a garage here, but over time I decided to turn the servant’s quarters into my house when I am in Kenya.”

Need dictators

The house is one of his real estate properties dotting the capital. So what does he think about the present generation of writers?

“No I don’t read any novels now.”

A man with a penchant for the eccentric, Mr Mangua’s library includes such works as Freakonomics.

“People like us now read books on such things as prostate etc, but I read them for prevention, not for cure.

“If you live outside Kenya, you would love it but here we fight about foolish politics and small things. With a sustained peace and democracy, this can be a good country.

“I go to the lab and I have spent considerable amount of money on research. Sometimes doctors cheat you and you should be able to take care of yourself. If you can prevent as long as possible, then you don’t have to think about cure.”

He believes Kenya and other African countries need benevolent dictators if they are to take off.

“You see, President Kibaki is benevolent alright, but we did not make it because he is not a dictator.”

While Mr Mangua’s education is in the sciences, he has a long-standing interest in the arts, going as far back as his Makerere days, where he acted in The Black Hermit, written by Ngugi wa Thiong’o — his age mate.

“I also read a lot in my young days and I told myself: These people who write, didn’t they go to school like I did?”

“We wrote what we wrote because that is our childhood experience. Brains work better when you remember the youth. Even though it is fiction, it is still like history.

“I have never been to Eastleigh even now, but I wrote by imagination. One can even live in the US, but still write more about our situation here if he is creative enough. Kenyatta’s Jiggers is partly autobiographical.”

Some critics have faulted Mr Mangua for what they called slavish and ignominious aping of the White man, applying his jargon, rhythm and cadences.

The author does not defend himself, insisting he was not writing literature in terms of literature and language.

“I think the problem at the time is that the language was very civilised… the language of Achebe and Ngugi, but that was literature for the highly educated. But then I asked myself who will write for the ordinary peasant?”

And he, together with David G. Maillu, of the After 4.30 and My Dear Bottle fame went on the sprawl and wrote for the peasant and mama mboga as one literary scholar put it.

“While his writing can be placed in the popular genre, he made serious contribution to the growth of East African literature at a time when there was a dearth of reading,” says Prof Egara Kabaji of Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology.

He says the author appeals more to the heart than the head.

“He was a serious player in the first generation of Kenyan writers — Maillu, Kenneth Watene, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Muthoni Likimani and Grace Ogot, among others.

Mr Mangua has seven children, but none has taken after him. 

“There is no way you can copy me because I was a full-time director of a bank, but the kids admired me only because I knew how to mix serious work with easy life.

“My first son, Koinange, lives in Tigoni in Limuru.”

His second-born, Henry Ndegwa, works with the Federal Reserve Bank in the US.

His daughter, Lucy Wanjiru, is a London-based journalist, while Fred Wachira lives in Melbourne, Australia.

The fifth-born, Eric Mbari, lives in Mauritius, while the last born, Andie Mutahi Mangua, lives in France.

His wife also a banker is in Abidjan.