A wreath for Abrahams and thoughts of  friends

Machakos was a defining moment in my life. Have I said this before? Defining moments are those events, big or small, brief or prolonged, which get so embedded in our consciousness that we relate the rest of our life experiences to them. Falling in love is a familiar type of defining moment.

Maybe my “falling” into Machakos in early May 1977 was also a falling in love of sorts. After all, I was quite young then, only 33, as compared to the 73 that I am approaching now. We will not go into all the details today. But the fact that I am still talking about that relocation to the foothills of the Iveti (woman) Ridge 40 years later betrays the depth and tenderness, the indelibility of the experience.

Anyway, so it was that when I heard of the departure of Peter Abrahams, the grand old man of African letters, my first thoughts went to Machakos. I remembered the exuberant readings of Mine Boy I had with my 3H class at Machakos Girls.

We learnt to identify with the lead character, Xuma “from the North”, the hapless migrant miner whose neurotic girlfriend was “the devil in his blood”. We also had a fearful respect for Leah, the tough “shebeen” (bar) owner, who smiled with only a half of her face.

I was excited at the young women’s joy of literary discovery and growing critical technique, although I was of course familiar with Peter Abrahams from my earlier literary career. At Makerere we loved teaching his A Wreath for Udomo, and I had read This Island Now and some of his short stories.

Indeed, we had quite a rich variety of South African works at the “Hill”, ranging from Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country through Alex la Guma’s A Walk in the Night to Dennis Brutus’ poetry. I remember my teacher Pio Zirimu’s favourite Brutus poem was “Somehow We Survive”, from the slim volume Sirens, Knuckles, Boots, a title that was itself an image of the brutality of the apartheid police raids on African townships.

During the nightmare days of Idi Amin, Zirimu frequently quoted the South African poet’s lines: “but somehow we survive… all our land is scarred with terror… but somehow tenderness survives.” Unfortunately, gentle Zirimu, the Black Aesthetics messenger, did not survive the Amin terror. But tenderness for him certainly survives in the hearts of those who loved him, perhaps not least in that of his Makerere and Leeds contemporary, Ngugi was Thiong’o.

INDEFATIGABLE OUTPUT

Speaking of South Africans, we also had several of them among our teachers. In Dar es Salaam, I particularly remember Joe Bulane and the voluble dramatist, Bob Leshoai. I got quite close to Bob, especially after we reconnected in Makerere. He, in fact, was in the process of inviting me to teach in Botswana, in the 80s, where he was head of department. But then he was suddenly deported for leading a staff demonstration!

At UoN we had the endearing Jim Stewart, whom I mentioned the other day, and the poet, Keroapetse Kgotsisile, who was visiting just about the time I started frequenting the campus in the late 1970s. Among the Makerere dons, my friend Tim Wangusa remembers particularly a Jim Whittaker, who created absolute magic with his dramatization of Dr Faustus’s last moments when Mephistopheles, the devil, comes for his soul.

Do you remember Dr Faustus, the scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge and discovery for a fixed period of time? It is a famous European story and it has been treated by many writers, including the German writer and statesman, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. But the version with which Whittaker immortalised at Makerere is by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe.

One of the most memorable scenes from Marlowe’s Dr Faustus is where Faustus has a vision of Helen, a queen of Troy, one of the most beautiful women in creation, whose elopement with a philandering prince led to the destruction of her home city. In his rapture, Faustus exclaims: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of proud Ilium (Troy)? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.”

Incidentally, the selling of our souls to the devil in exchange for academic, political, business, pastoral or marital gain is not as far-fetched as we might imagine. Some of the things that people do in pursuit of riches, rank or recognition are nothing short of pacts with the devil. The snag, however, as with Dr Faustus, is in the paying, when the day of reckoning dawns.

Anyway, my favourite South African teacher at Makerere was the incredibly understated Murray Carlin. With his shock of almost uniformly white hair, this lanky don had the reputation of never looking up from his lecture notes when he was on the podium.

Yet he managed somehow to communicate effectively with his audiences. His specialty was not only Alex la Guma but also the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. Carlin always brought the house down with his laconic comments on incidents like Gulliver’s putting out a city fire by peeing on it in the land of Lilliput, in Gulliver’s Travels.

But Murray Carlin was also a dramatist in his own right. While at Makerere in the early 1970s, he published two beautifully crafted plays, The Thousand and Not Now Sweet Desdemona. The first is a reflection on a Congo-like republic with a host of intractable political problems.

The second, whose title is a quote from Shakespeare’s Othello, lampoons the apartheid regime’s then-prevailing law banning intimacy across racial lines. The play sets up a hypothetical situation where the segregationist South African Prime Minister suddenly turns black in the middle of an intimate moment with his wife. OUP, who published Carlin’s plays, should consider re-issuing them.

I salute Peter Abrahams for his indefatigable literary output over more than three quarters of a century. I should also thank him for releasing, in his departure, this my stream of consciousness.