On the fountain of Prof Wanjala’s season of harvest

My very first encounter with Prof Chris Wanjala was through his captivating epigraph, drawn from a modern folktale that gave his most cited book, The Season of Harvest, its title.

“Wachie wa Naumbwa told them not to panic. ‘The Season of Harvest comes along!’ He said, ‘And many will drink with their kinsmen and eat with strangers. Save your voices and wise counsel for the season of plenty.’

"He was not a dancer himself and he did not sing. But many listened to him because he was a whetstone, which put an edge on those who sang and danced. Many had come before him and shed tears about drought in the land. But since chameleon had come and danced and brought rain there was no drought in the land.”

This epigraph, I later learnt, was a reference to the then fashionable yet mistaken view that East Africa was a sterile patch devoid of literary and critical imagination.

In many ways, this concern was his singular scholarly preoccupation, which he subsequently pursued in his writings published locally and other critical contributions scattered in many academic journals in the world.

INTELLECTUAL ENTERPRISE

If I were to capture Wanjala’s most important contribution to the intellectual enterprise of knowledge creation, it is his early call on literary critics to formulate an appropriate literary theory that could be used to make sense of local experiences such as alienation, whose variants elsewhere had inspired widely studied ideas by the likes of Hegel and Marx.

Way back in the seventies, Wanjala had identified the crisis of self-inadequacy among local scholars who sought validation from the authoritative Western critical theoreticians, in a manner that seemed to justify the now scandalous pronouncements on the state of African literature, similar to the one attributed to Taban Lo Liyong.

For Wanjala, accepting locally generated interpretative tools for literature was the ultimate guarantee of the warmth that homeliness and its freedoms could give anyone.

And as he had done only two years earlier, he drew on ancient Bukusu philosophy, which he attributed to his grandfather, Kuuka Njibwakale okhwa Mulusombo, who told Prof Wanjala back in 1965: “‘Even if your mother has dirty nails, it is she who will give you something to eat that will be satisfying. In her maternal presence you will come home to the freedom that no other hand will bring you.’ I have since listened to wise men from the East and the West; they are all bound for home and freedom.”

Wanjala’s For Home and Freedom was his homage to the sagacity of old African – precisely Bukusu – worldview, which, yet again, reiterated the need for celebrating the authentic arts of a people.

Although I had known Prof Wanjala for long through his works and talk about him from my seniors, it would take my privileged presence at a conference in Johannesburg, in 2004, for me to eventually meet him in person.

My doctoral thesis supervisor, Prof James Ogude, had organised a conference at which Prof Wanjala was among the invited speakers.

It was a long way from home where I encountered Prof Wanjala’s human side; his joy in seeing young Kenyans pursuing higher studies in literature, and his hope that they would come back to Kenya to continue the work that his generation had begun.

He was particularly proud of one of his sons who had taken after him, and was then pursuing a PhD in Literature in France. He hoped that when the time came, we would walk together – a Bukusu idiom whose full resonance I cannot even begin to translate. This hope, which was also a wish and a prophecy, came to pass when I joined the Department of Literature at the University of Nairobi, where Dr Alex Wanjala, son to Prof Wanjala, was already teaching.

LIVING LEGEND

The nine years that have I worked with Prof Wanjala are, of course, nothing compared to other people who have known him for decades. But they are enough for me to know Prof Wanjala in his different forms; as a living legend in literary criticism, an advocate for writers’ rights, and as a father, all blended in one person.

I learnt this soon after I joined him at the department when, under Prof Peter Wasamba, colleagues embarked on a curriculum review that took a little longer than envisaged. In several consultative meetings, Prof Wanjala appealed to members to first formulate a philosophical standpoint that would guide and anchor the review.

For some reason, I forget how we resolved the question of the underpinning philosophy for our curriculum, but we ended up with the current one, which we have since implemented, and which Prof Wanjala had specialised in teaching Kiswahili and Southern African literatures.

HUMOROUS

At the department, his intellectual stimulation was almost always peppered by a sense of humour, and occasional mischief, which would be handy in diffusing those discomfiting situations that occasionally arise in staff meetings, or other collegial encounters that require Diplomacy 101, as one would expect of a huge team with some highly opinionated members.

This was also in other professional forums where I happened to work with him, including the Association of Kenya Non-Fiction Authors, which he chaired for the years when I was the treasurer, and at the UNESCO Kenya chapter where I understudied him as he ran a project on the preservation of literatures in Kenyan languages. In all these institutions, Wanjala was focused on the bigger picture of artistic production and preservation.

His contribution remains monumental, and will take time to be surpassed.

Yet as I try to come to terms with his demise, I know for sure that Wanjala, the celebrated scholar, was at his best as a human person and only secondarily as a scholar; he made me laugh on so many occasions out of nothing.

Like when he offered to sell me his Land Rover. 

I had congratulated him when he bought it and offered me a ride in it, during which he told me the purchase price. When he offered to sell it to me three years later at the same price he bought it, I asked him: “But Prof, isn’t that the same price you bought it at?” “Yes” he said, then added, “I am quoting the same price as I bought it because I don’t want to gain any profit for it.”

As I mourn my teacher and colleague, I thank heavens for meeting someone who started off life by sheer grit and focus, the person became a mythical legend that laid the foundations of literary criticism in the region, then the legend stooped low to humour us while enjoying his humanity. 

Dr Siundu teaches Literature at the University of Nairobi