‘AMKA’ and a pack of amazing Alliance Girls

It may be difficult to imagine people with a blood relationship with dogs. But in Uganda, where everyone is a relative of one bird, insect, plant, animal or another, the human brothers and sisters of dogs are alive and well. They belong to the Dog Lineage and their head is the Elder Mutasingwa (the Unsurpassable).

Recently, when we escorted Sekawungu, an in-law from the lineage, on a bride-collecting mission, an uncle of his told the bride-to-be: “We are a great hunting lineage and you, my dear, are just about to become a member of the pack.”

I don’t know if the uncle meant that as a jocular threat or a hearty welcome, but the young woman seemed to accept it with a charming smile (that c-word again, pace, my “feminist” sister).

I, too, am about to accept an invitation to join a pack. This is the AMKA young women writers’ group that assembles regularly every last Saturday of the month at the Goethe Institut at the Maendeleo ya Wanawake Building in Nairobi.

When they meet, they do literature or writing. They may discuss the work of a prominent writer or they may workshop each other’s work in progress. Apparently, over the months, the participation has opened up to all young writers, regardless of gender.

NEW AWAKENING

You, of course, know that the Goethe Institut, where they meet, is the German version of cultural centres, like their neighbours, the Alliance Francaise, the British Council in Upper Hill and the Italian Cultural Centre in Chiromo. It is, obviously, not the kind of outfit that would take any shenzi street outfit under its umbrella, and the AMKA young people’s group is far from such.

In fact, it is a kind of outreach mentoring service of the main AMKA organization, an awareness, advocacy and activist (I rather like the three “A’s”) assembly of women targeting their sisters in the mwamko mpya (new awakening) era. Indeed, the name AMKA means just that: arise or awake. It was started by women of vision, like Wanjiku Matenjwa, a former student of mine at Makerere and later a colleague at Kenyatta University about whom I told you some time back, and Lydia Gaitirira.

Lydia is the lady I recently kissed in public, at Tom Odhiambo’s Book Fair seminars at the Sarit. My public and thoroughly enjoyable kiss was underlining my insistence that, regardless of how fiery a feminist or masculinist you may be, nothing should stop you from finding a person beautiful, handsome or attractive, and telling them so. I think Lydia enjoyed the moment too, because she later took me to a sumptuous dinner at the Nairobi Club and we had a thoroughly delightful evening.

But for me, there is more to Lydia Gaitirira than delightful kisses and sumptuous dinners. For nearly 20 years, she was a colleague of mine at KU, a seasoned administrator regularly issuing orders and instructions that significantly affected us bumbling and blundering academics.

In those days, female administrators in public universities were few and far between. At Kenyatta, Lydia was one of only four whom I can remember, the others being Grace Gicohi, a recent graduate from Makerere, Mary Muli, the spouse of the writer Muli wa Kyendo, and, a little later, my former MA student at UoN, Joyce Njoki Murango.

Later, I was to learn that Lydia Gaitirira was actually a baby sister of my tragically revolutionary lecturer at Dar es Salaam, the late Grant Kamenju. I might have mentioned somewhere that I first met Kamenju and Ngugi wa Thiong’o in 1966, in Leeds, where they shared “digs” while they pursued graduate studies at the University of Leeds.

I was doing my Shakespeare summer term at the York, some 40 kilometres away, and David Cook and Pio Zirimu, the Makerereans, offered to connect me and Joshua Angatia to Ngugi and Kamenju.

call Kamenju tragic because his absorption of the revolutionary socialist ideology dominating Leeds seems to have infected him more incurably than it did his colleagues.

Tutored by such luminaries as Arnold Kettle, a former secretary general of the British Communist Party and later my Professor at Dar es Salaam, Kamenju was totally sold on to “scientific materialism” and all the socialist paraphernalia of the times. When he joined the Literature Department at Dar es Salaam, he was already leaning heavily towards the Chinese Maoist brand of the ideology, and his impatience with what he called counter-revolutionary compromises was getting quite strident.

CONSTANT TOUCH

Tanzania, out of necessity, backpedalled on its “Ujamaa” policies. Grant Kamenju’s contemporaries, like Ngugi and Micere Mugo, grudgingly accepted the realities of the times and settled down to live and work in the “seats of bourgeois, capitalist imperialism”. But for Kamenju, such a proposition was unimaginable, and the shrugs of the rapidly “desocialising” world led to his academic and eventual physical demise.

But back to Lydia, she wanted me to mentor her AMKA writing group at the end of March this year but could not trace me. So, she turned to our mutual friend, Wanjiku Mwotia, with whom she knew I was in constant touch. This, then, revealed another side of Lydia to me. She was part of that amazing bevy of super-brained women that dazzled Alliance Girls School in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and continue to have a major impact on Kenya’s public life today.

They included the late Jane Nandwa and Elizabeth Masiga (the Anaminyi sisters) and Kavetsa Adagala, and my dear friend, “Umukhana” Helen Sironga Aswani, now Prof Mwanzi. Several of them were later joined by their counterparts from Gayaza High School, the Uganda equivalent of Alliance, like the Princess Dorothy Nassolo, Sir Edward Mutesa’s first-born, and Esther Womulabira, in Taban lo Liyong’s first oral literature class at UoN.

The aristocratic Esther eventually became Kantai, following her marriage to Ben Kantai, the historian who dazzled Academia with his provocative articulateness in the mid-1960s.

It was out of these ladies’ research work that Lo Liyong developed his seminal work, Popular Culture of East Africa.