My beloved Kenyatta and its former vice-chancellor

What you need to know:

  • Did I say I would not eulogise him? That’s right. The Greek etymology of “eulogise”, eu logos (good speech), suggests saying good things about a departed acquaintance.

  • But Eshiwani would almost certainly have sneered at that with his cavalier sense of humour, possibly remarking, “Bukenya, what we want is precision, not niceties.”
  • Moreover, during his tenure at Kenyatta, Eshiwani seems to have elicited as much animosity as admiration among those who had time for such emotions.

George Eshiwani was the vice-chancellor under whom I served longest. But I will not eulogise him.

First, however, I should make these two apologies. The first is to Dr Yusuf Dawood and all the doctors. The words I was looking for last week were “oculectomy”, if you were Latin-inclined, or “opthalmectomy” in the Greek mode. They both have something to do with surgical removal of the eyes.

This brings me to the literati. As often happens when I quote from memory, I got the names confused and ended up attributing the teacher’s poem to his student. John Skelton, whom I mentioned, was an admirer of William Dunbar (1459-1520), who actually wrote the poem Lament for the Makaris (Poets), with the famous refrain.

Of the learning of new names, and new words, there’s no end, “and too much study wearies the mind.”

Prof Eshiwani, the mercurial mathematician, educationist, politician and breezy man of the world, collapsed and died earlier this month. I was luxuriating in the joy of my long-awaited reunion with my Bakoki (age-mate), Chris Wanjala, and on his birthday, too, when the phone call came.

Chris took it, and when he told me and our literary friend, Dr Shiundu Barasa, that the Prof Eshiwani was gone, we could hardly believe our ears. Eshiwani was such a get-up-and-go presence it was almost impossible to imagine him dead!

We had mentioned him earlier in our conversation, when Shiundu reminded me of his student days under my tutorship at Kenyatta in the 1990s.

And it was impossible to speak of Kenyatta University in those days without speaking of George Eshiwani. In the 11 years of his stewardship, the man stamped the institution with an indelible mark of his searing vision and intense personality.

Did I say I would not eulogise him? That’s right. The Greek etymology of “eulogise”, eu logos (good speech), suggests saying good things about a departed acquaintance.

'WHAT WE WANT IS PRECISION'

But Eshiwani would almost certainly have sneered at that with his cavalier sense of humour, possibly remarking, “Bukenya, what we want is precision, not niceties.”

Moreover, during his tenure at Kenyatta, Eshiwani seems to have elicited as much animosity as admiration among those who had time for such emotions. For him, however, and those who wanted to work with him, there was no time for such trivialities. There was work to be done, and you either did it with him or you were side-lined, or worse.

Carved off the famous Templar (Kahawa) Barracks and given as a present to Mzee Jomo Kenyatta by the departing British in the early 1960s, Kenyatta College went through several decades of development.

From its status as an A-level and teacher-training college, Kenyatta eventually became a college of the University of Nairobi.

It would have become the second public university in the 1980s, but regional politics of the time did not particularly like the idea of having both the first and the second university in the Nairobi-Central Province region.

So, Kenyatta had to wait until 1985, to become the third public university, a year after Moi.

The university inherited an antiquated system, built on a small school model, with ad hoc operations, apparently improvised around personal acquaintances and cliques of “cronies”.

This problem made it extremely difficult for the administrators who preceded Eshiwani to run the university at all.

Aware of these problems, Eshiwani seems to have come into Kenyatta with a steamroller determination to make the system work, even if it meant stepping on a few toes.

As of the “Kenyatta College, Main Campus” mentality, that was to be a thing of the past.

Kenyatta was to be the university to be noticed and talked about. I am not qualified to comment on Eshiwani’s close connections with the ruling powers of the time. But I know that he astutely tapped those connections.

A good example I had of this is his promotion of the performing arts, especially during the years David Mulwa and I served at the Performing and Creative Arts Centre.

The Cultural Week, with which the good professor has been credited as the founder, actually predates his arrival at the university. But before his time, it was a purely student affair.

But Eshiwani, aware of the attention-grabbing power of showbiz, decided to take it out to downtown Nairobi and, by eventually soliciting and obtaining presidential attendance at some of the performances, raised it to the level of a state function.

What better way to boost the KU image?

But it was not cake and candy staging those shows! Heaps of times, my colleagues, like Prof Senoga-Zake, the choir director, and I were warned by Eshiwani, right in front of our students, about the dire consequences of inadequacy.

“Bukenya, professor,” he would say with a deadpan face, “if everything in this show is not in place tomorrow, you have no jobs.”

The fact that we were able to retire reasonably unscathed from his service probably suggests that we either delivered, or that his bark was worse than his bite! RIP.

 

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and literature in East Africa