Historian who didn’t believe in any religion

When Dr Benjamin Edgar Kipkorir passed away on May 20, 2015, I was in the thick of organising a second public lecture by him at Moi University. His would-have-been principal host, Dr Prisca Tanui, phoned me to help her dispel the ‘lie’ that her fellow historian had died.

Why me and not anyone else to handle such a complex assignment, one may ask?

It was not because I was a historian like him and Dr Tanui. It was because I had known and interacted with him much longer. More than that, I had, in 2010, persuaded him to give the 11th public lecture at Moi University. That year, on September 17, he blamed the ‘hypocrisy’ of Kenyans in holding a referendum on devolution and other issues nearly half a century after ‘shamelessly’ dismantling a similar political arrangement.

On May 20, 2015 we had hoped to try harder to have him give another such straight talk. But now we can only get consolation in nostalgia because he cannot.

Autocratic government

In the 2010 talk entitled ‘Devolution, State and Church in Kenya: Personal Reflections,’ he bemoaned the possibility of history repeating itself: Kenyans would accept the referendum (as they did) and thereafter do exactly what the Jomo Kenyatta government did in the early 1960s: Accept devolution and then kill it by recreating an autocratic central government. The current push-and-pull between county and national governments sadly attests to this fear, of a historical farce in Kenya.

My take on his standpoints was that he loved telling the truth without unnecessary verbiage. At the Institute of African Studies, University of Nairobi, where he was the director from the late 1970s to early 1980s, he did not disguise the fact that religion and belief constricted free thinking and creativity. He told me, not to call him an atheist or anything, not even a non-believer, when I questioned why he was making me work on Saturday, a sacred Seventh-Day-Adventist day.

In his words, “SDA was perhaps the most parochial” of Christian denominations.

He did not believe in any religion.

I can’t reproduce all he said and did as my first immediate boss at the Institute of African Studies. I can only give a quick summary. As a graduate assistant, he arbitrarily converted me into his personal assistant and recorder of proceedings of meetings because his administrative assistant “could not write and speak presentable English.”

Even my English was not good enough for him, and many readings were prescribed to improve it. More often than not, he summoned me to his office to correct the minutes I thought I had couched in the best BBC expression. “You are either handling the English language properly or you try your own language,” was a typical Kipkorir rebuke.

My attempt to register for a PhD at the University of Nairobi was thwarted before I could write the first word.

Back to the parochialism of all religions, Kipkorir told me that two degrees from the same university was bad for a young mind that should go ‘exploring’ all over the world.

He went all the way to the vice-chancellor’s office to ensure I went to the University of California, Los Angeles. That was after failing to get a scholarship for Oxford University.

Yet a man who had no time for religion and the order it imposed on humanity seemed unaware of the many contradictions his views embodied. When he once tried to be a professor of history at Kenyatta University, he quickly withdrew his application on realising that Professor Bethwell Ogot was seeking the same position. Ogot was his elder and mentor and it would have been abominable to compete with him because it would have seemed like father and son wrestling over the same bride. I told him that was a very religious stance but he said good manners required that the young respect the old. “Ethics and religion are not the same,” he insisted.

Despite the inherent contradictions in his postulations, Kipkorir disliked ideologues. My leftist undergraduate training in Literature was thoroughly ‘unintellectual’ to him because it ‘disabled’ interaction with other world-views.

When Ngugi wa Thiongo, the renowned Kenyan novelist and essayist, was released from detention by President Daniel arap Moi, (the same man who had signed the detention papers), Kipkorir tried and failed to lure him to the Institute of African Studies.

I was excited that my teacher would join me and make literary and cultural studies more exciting, but that was not to be.

There was a lot of shouting in Dr Kipkorir’s office before Ngugi stormed out. I recall that also as the last occasion I talked to Ngugi as he walked away and told me he would not join the institute, and therefore the University of Nairobi, on anybody’s terms. Kipkorir told me that my teacher, with whom he went to Alliance High School and Makerere University, was too ‘intolerant’ and ideologically unfit for a free research agency he headed.

I almost told him that he, too, was being intolerant. But the truth is that the government of Kenya did not allow Ngugi to rejoin the University of Nairobi.

If Kipkorir had come to give another lecture, he would have aired views on oral traditions and the study of history in Kenya. He would have told Kenyans what he wants to do with them in historical research until he hits 90 years. For that is what he told me the last time we met last month at Kitale Club.

Peter Amuka is a professor of literature and the director, Kitale Campus of Moi University.