Writing is more than passion, it is a calling

Among my earliest boyhood memories is a very treasured one of my elder brother, Leonard Kibera, and I waylaying the morning train heading east, from Kisumu to Nairobi in the early 1950s.

Leonard, who was older than me by five years, may have done this sort of thing before and got to the white man’s town called Nairobi, 10 miles from our Uthiru mud huts.

This, however, was not a planned trip but something done by two adventurous peasant boys on the spur of the moment.

All I can remember, really, for that was about 60 years ago, was Leonard leaving whatever we were doing near the faraway railway line and running like a hound towards the approaching train.

With amazing timing so as not to land head first into a white compartment, he dived into the train.

What surprises me now is how on earth, at the age of six or seven, I managed to dive in after him, like a true kahiga thrown from one of those catapults little boys of the time would never think of leaving behind.

CASSAVA FAMINE

As colonial British subjects, not citizens, all of us were always in danger of starving to death as many had done in 1943 during the cassava famine.

My sister, Jane Kivinge, had been born inside the small rectangular mud hut we called home about three years ahead of me.

That ‘Famine of the Cassava’ as it is still called in folklore, was in full blare when she landed on earth, head-first, like all babies.

All of us were born at home, not in some distant dust-blown missionary clinic, returning from which, on foot, the precious baby might easily die of heat stroke.

The whites of the colonial government, evil as they were supposed to be, tried really hard to save African lives during famine.

They certainly couldn’t survive without us for in the Land of the Sun (not the Dark Continent), whites really felt each of them had to have a decent household of not less than five servants.

We still know them by heart — the house-boy, the shamba-boy, the kitchen-boy, the toto-jiko and steward, the head-boy.

Without them, for there was irony in almost everything colonial house, he would have been greatly disturbed by hordes of African, mainly hungry thieves, perhaps, clamouring for jobs, for a white man’s home was also a precious place of employment.

How else could one ever get some rupees, mbeca, money, if not working for some white man?

During the ‘Famine of the Cassava’, the whites worked hard — through African agents — to try and see we were all sufficiently fed. Even in America, the slaves had to be very well-fed.

TOUGH KIDS

The famine is keenly remembered as a very bad one in which some hungry African somewhere ate a dying donkey while another ate a dog, which was all right, considering there was talk of a desperate woman who cooked one of her children for the other children to eat.

The story was credible, for rumours of cannibals were very rife then. The different war-like tribes finally met under the colonial banner they called the Union Jack. Our ‘national anthem’ was, of course, ‘God Save the Queen’.

Whenever there was great hunger (for climate change is not such a new thing), whites would be kind enough to make sure the few smoky vans, lorries and trains running then and polluting the sky, delivered unga made from dried, ground cassava, a useful crop in times of hunger and drought.

As siblings, we were all very tough boys and a girl, used to terrible battles of stones, sticks, fists and, of course, teeth.

Leonard and I must have been battle-scarred, like small veteran soldiers as we surprised Nairobi city that morning, disembarking with dignity at Nairobi Station.

The conductors in the train never bothered with asking small African boys for tickets. They knew we never carried rupecha.

We took in Nairobi town quickly, trying to run through every street, which were almost always half-empty.

I remember us shocking the whites when we slipped into one of their churches, probably St Andrew’s, and sitting at the back mumbling as they sang in English.

There was great fascination with whites then, for all of them tried to hide away from Africans as much as possible, knowing familiarity bred contempt. Children always liked to run to wherever a white person had been sighted.

They were always hidden away in trains first class sections and even buses, behind high hedges, in dark offices far up in the air, anywhere they could avoid being seen too easily by Africans .

There was a graver reason, though, which few African could ever guess. These people from dark, snowy Europe had skins that were not very sun-friendly.

CANCER RISK

A white person coming by ship, air and train always risked cancer of the skin if he exposed his skin to the harsh African sun for more than just a few minutes.

He had to be acclimatised for a long while before venturing from his ‘whites only’ hotel to stare at the strange people called Africans — or dare make a trip to the game park to finally stroll around watching animals like giraffes and elephants, which were much more interesting than the hungry natives staring at him and his memsahib in the streets.

So, my first stolen trip to the big town was very important in my gradual formation into what they call an African writer, not disparagingly.

Leonard was also evolving separately as a writer. We both were. In high school, I wrote The Last Breath, Father Comes Back, Esther and several other stories, some of which appeared in an old colonial magazine called Kenya Weekly News.

Whites were now eager to hear what even African schoolboys had to say, Independence bells having been rang when I was in Thika High School.

The very tall mugumo tree that we all used to see just by the road as you turned right into Thika Bus Station close to our school was suddenly felled one day before we reported to school for our fourth form.

Oh… that ancient seer had been right when he had said the mugumo tree at Thika would fall and we would attain Independence — and it did.
Blacks and whites had been watching it closely.

So, as in my stories in Flight to Juba, I always feel fairly adept in handling characters, no matter what race they are, having been very close to them from my formative days when we could only see cars owned by whites and Indians passing our home.

You could never see a car owned by an African, even if you sat counting them all afternoon till the cows came home.

INDEPENDENCE BELLS

Quite a number of us, both black and white, have had a go at writing stories on freedom fighters, as I did in Dedan Kimathi, the Real Story, and even in some parts of Paradise Farm.

Meanwhile, I had been writing various columns for newspapers, like Norman the Nomad, Kuku’s Nest, Bwana Shida, Kasisi’s World, Zimba the Wise and heaven knows what else, all in the attempt to sharpen my pen for what I felt I was really born for — writing novels.

Writing, for me is much more than a passion; it’s a calling, a very punishing calling that can keep you awake right through a whole night and day.

The longest I have done, before almost collapsing, in despair, and throwing away the pen has been a straight 48 hours, writing through two whole days and loving every moment of the punishment, if you call it that.

My younger brother, Ngumi, once wryly remarked to me that re-reading his own long novel, Beyond Darkness, really made him feel like a small god for having created characters so real.

My novel on the first World War in East Africa will be out shortly to celebrate the 100th anniversary since that horrid war started, tying up the whites and blacks in a mad dance that went on and on through Tanganyika, Mozambique and up again through Tanganyika, the African porters carrying heavy war loads on bare feet and dying like flies.

Everybody died, including the battalions of the Indian expeditionary army.

I have tried my best also to be like a young god, making every character real, which, to me, is the true mark of a good fiction writer.

Quite often, it is not even the theme that matters. Even the message can take a back-seat.