Ntimama was a great man of letters

As the Maa speaking world looks to lay to rest its most celebrated icon in recent memory, it may sound as something of a contradiction in terms to say that William Ronkorua ole Ntimama was, in his own right, a man of letters.

After all, many would remember the ebullient Maasai politician for his oral skills than for the written word. When it came to the turn of phrase, spawned on his feet and at the heat of the moment, Ntimama was without peers.

Once when he was speaking on the floor of Parliament about the threat to Maasai land by encroachers, it will be remembered how he waxed lyrical when he said that the land of the Maasai was threatened by “modern day gladiators and their glorious Memsahibs”! Such a turn of phrase could only come from an avid reader and one for whom words mattered. And few people would have thought that Ntimama was the reader that he was. But yes, he was.

I often thought that when the novelist Henry Ole Kulet wrote his widely acclaimed novel Is It Possible?  and posed the rhetorical question whether it was possible for a pastoralist boy to wield the spear on one hand and the pen on the other, he probably had Ntimama in mind: A fiercely traditional figure with the impulses and inclinations of a Maasai warrior, but who found the time and appetite not just to pursue western education by all means possible, but even took to reading with enviable gusto.

I recall when I wrote my children’s novella, The Hero and The Dream, which was inspired by the death of the late Mpeti ole Surum, I took a copy to Ntimama and it took him only a few hours to read it and come back to me with his written comments. I was impressed that a Cabinet minister then would have the time, the interest and the courtesy to read my book and revert to me with very well considered comments.

The reading tastes of Ntimama were varied too. As a boy born and bred into the colonial literary firmament, it was inevitable that he should have interacted with Victorian and Elizabethan fiction, which would have been the literary menu of the day. So yes, he read Oliver Twist by Mark Twain and that unforgettable poetic diction of Emily Bronte in her famous novel Wuthering Heights.

As his politics became thematically focused on the preservation of Maasai culture and territorial integrity, Ntimama also took to reading along those lines in order to deepen his understanding of the subject and to appreciate the historical context of Maasai land alienation.

LOVE HATE RELATIONSHIP

The late Judge of the High Court of Kenya, Justice Moijo ole Keiwua, became his soul mate and most reliable supplier of rare books touching on the land question and the love hate relationship between the West and the Maasai. And so he would read Joseph Thompson’s Through Masailand, as well as A.H. Wilson’s, The Marveling Maasai, both of which books delineate the eventual tragic consequences of the encounter between the West and the Maasai.

Even as the end tiptoed towards him, Ntimama kept reading, and he kept reading subjects consistent with the cause he had made his own. Family sources availed to me the last book he read. It is a book titled This House has Fallen: Nigeria In Crisis.

Published in 2000, this book by Karl Maier is a portrayal of the predicament facing the minority Ogoni tribe of the Niger delta in Nigeria.

One is tempted to imagine the parallels Ntimama must have drawn between the Ogoni land losses and resources theft by multinational oil companies, and the alienation of swathes of Maasai indigenous lands, a subject which became synonymous with his politics.

From the underlining he made in red ink and the notes he scribbled on the margins are clear testimony to the purposeful intensity with which he read this book. He was not reading for pleasure but for purpose. One such underline is a quote of the son of the Ogoni land rights martyr, Ken Saro Wiwa Jr: “The Ogonis were like slaves in their own land”. The reader is free to hazard a guess as to what may have been streaming through the mind of this latter day warrior politician.

In any case, with this depth and breadth of reading, it is easy to see how William ole Ntimama, sharpened his grasp of the English language, invented his inimitable Shakespearean cadences, and acquired the fiery, memorable speaking acumen comparable only to wartime British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill who, to all intents and purposes, was his hero and beacon.

Sadly, though, at the time of his death, Ntimama had only read 195 pages of this book and will never know what lay in the pages ahead; perhaps a fitting parallel to the unfinished business he left on earth and more so in his beloved Maasiland, a gauntlet which hopefully the next generation will pick up and advance the quest for justice and equity.

Andrew Leteipa Ole Sunkuli is an author and publisher.