REFLECTIONS OF A SCHOLAR: In sorrow, I own up to my South Coast love affair

In moments of deep sorrow and profound loss, we often recall the dearest experiences of our lives. So it was with me earlier this week when I heard of the horrendous gun attack on the Technical University of Mombasa students and their staff on the way to their Ukunda campus.

“You cannot have made this up,” was one of my friends’ first responses to my story, The Mermaid of Msambweni, when it was first published in 2007. Well, I protested, as “creative” writers routinely do, that it was all fiction, but many of my colleagues were adamant that the whole thing was too close to reality to pass for a mere story.

So, I might as well join my readers and agree that my Mermaid of Msambweni (also Nguva wa Msambweni in Kiswahili), a love story of sorts, is actually closer to reality, if not factuality, than its author would care to admit. The undeniable fact about this narrative is that its geographical setting, all the way from Mombasa, through Likoni, Kwale, Ukunda, Kinondo and Msambweni, down to Shimoni, is minutely realistic.

Again I notice that even the name of one of the leading characters, the mysterious Swahili girl, Bahati, derives from a real-life person, one of the waitresses at my favourite café in Ukunda, the Little Waikiki. But I should not sabotage your reading pleasure by over-narrating the story for you.

The point is that the Kenyan South Coast is a region of deep, dear and intimate experiences and memories for me, and they were all that I could fall back on in the wake of this recent tragedy. They date mainly from 1997 and 1998, when I and my team of research assistants, Zana Juma, Mwanahamisi Bilashaka, Pius Kithu, Akram Qureishi, Job Nyanje and Janet Fundi, traversed the region in search of field data for an orature project.

But I had been visiting the area even before that, dating back almost to my earliest days of residence in Kenya. I remember, for example, spending a magical night at a Ukunda luxury beach hotel with my fellow members of the KU Know Kenya Club, back in the late 1980s. The subsidised stay was probably by courtesy of Bwana Kenneth Matiba, who had an interest in the elegant establishment.

Also around that time, my KU colleagues and I had led a group of our oral literature students on a night visit to a location around Matuga, to witness an “exorcism” ritual. The young man who guided us on that adventure also surfaces as one of the characters in my mermaid story. Strange are the tricks of the imagination.
I also once held a particularly enjoyable seminar for drama teachers, with my friend and academic son, Dr Evans Mugarizi, at a guest house in Likoni. The nights there were particularly invigorating, with the sea breeze through the neem trees nostalgically evocative of my youthful days in Dar es Salaam.

But the 1997-98 spell had a particularly deep impact on me. To begin with, the participatory “embedding” methodology that I adopted afforded me a unique opportunity to get close to the residents, not only as informants but also as hosts and, eventually, friends. The cooperation of my assistants, scholars in their own right but also local residents themselves, was instrumental in the process.
Our research trips turned out to be mostly friendly home visits during which we not only collected the data we needed but also informally chatted about a host of other topics of interest to our hosts.

Thus did I find myself seated on a giant log in Shimoni, chatting about Southern Digo origins with Ma’ Juma, who told me she was actually a “Msegeju”. The only other person I had heard designate himself, proudly, as a Msegeju was the famous poet, Mwalimu Salim Mbega. Fascinating stuff, but we will leave it for another day. Nor shall I tell you about how excitingly close, in Shimoni, I felt to the Vumba Waswahili, endeared to us by my friend, poet Boukheit Amana, ‘Malenga wa Vumba’.

In Kwale, the intricacies of the Sengenya dance, as well as some subtle insights into local occult arts, were revealed to me over a delicious chicken and ugali meal, to which the dance master had invited me at his house. Talking about learning and eating, one of my sessions in Kinondo was over a basketful of freshly picked mangoes, placed before us by Ma’Zana, a member of the famous Zani family of leaders, educationists and writers.

The other session, on the beach, was spiced with slices of grilled octopus (pweza) that my informants-hosts hoisted over the charcoal fire as soon as they got it out of the water. The banter (gumzo) here was uniquely good-natured. How could one fail to fall for such gracefulness and sweetness?

But also beneath all this liveliness, one could not help perceiving a deep sense of anxiety, sorrow and even anger among the locals at what they saw as denied opportunities and increasing threats to their heritage and their future. They would speak frankly about the brazen grabbing of their land by rich “developers”, the desecration of their cultural shrines, like the kayas and the centuries-old mosques, threatened with demolition to give way to luxuries like golf courses.

They also grumbled about the many “development projects”, like the cashew nuts factory or the “rangi”-growing shambas, which invariably fizzled out after the wananchi had invested lots of their energies and hopes in them. I have not been back to the area in a long time, and I would not know how the newer investments, like the wolfram mine, are doing.

But I certainly feel that the setting up of a university campus in Ukunda is a positive gesture of investment in Kwale County’s human capital and its improvement. So, what demented monsters are these firing at our students and their minders? What cause can they plead for their senseless violence?

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and Literature. [email protected]