Rubadiri on family and long career

Despite his advanced age, he stands proudly tall and straight-backed, his poise radiating dignity, with a sardonic smile.

When he opens his mouth to speak, a strong, slow baritone courses out, evoking power and mystery, perhaps befitting a man of his stature.

For David Rubadiri is one of Africa’s foremost poets, a Malawian double exile and a diplomat, all rolled into one to form an eclectic mix of wit, charisma and measured words.

After months of trying to interview him to no avail, Saturday Nation last week met him briefly outside a private clinic in Nairobi, where he spoke of his life in exile, his connections with Kenya and the pain of living with dictators.

The poet has been ailing in recent years and had come to Nairobi for medical attention, in addition to touching base with his progeny based in Kenya.

“I have spent most of my time in Kenya mourning an old friend and a colleague,” he said of the death, three weeks ago, of Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe.

Prof Rubadiri, 83, complained that too many writers of his generation had died, naming John Ruganda, the Ugandan playwright known for The Burdens, Black Mamba and The Floods; Cyprian Ekwensi, the popular children literature writer, and Cameroonian Ferdinad Oyono, another writer-diplomat who was a colleague of Rubadiri’s during his stint at the United Nations.

“When I come to East Africa, and especially Kenya and Uganda, where some of my people still live, I feel as if I am at home again,” said the author known for such memorable poems as Stanley Meets Mutesa and An African Thunderstorm in Poems from East Africa, an Anthology of Poetry he co-edited with David Cook.

Recalling his days at Makerere University College in Uganda, where he studied between 1952 and 1956, Rubadiri has the hint of a twinkle in his eyes as he nostalgically relates how he found many of his former schoolmates at King’s College, Budo, Uganda where he went for his primary and secondary education, at the higher institution.

The conversation with the doyen of the African literary scene proved to be a reliving of Africa’s history. His classmates’ list reads like a who-is-who on the African continent.

“Studying economics at Makerere was Kenya’s future president Mwai Kibaki; he was a year-mate of mine and we were great buddies and very close. Tanzanian former president Benjamin Mkapa was also to join Makerere, albeit much later than us.”

One of the most widely anthologised poets from Africa, Rubadiri is credited with making poetry, considered by some to be a hard nut to crack, enjoyable.

“What I like most about his poetry is the accessibility of his style. He is simple yet so complex. He made poetry to be sung and enjoyed,” says Prof Peter Amuka of Moi University.

“He communed with nature and perhaps the most beautiful epitaph ever written for Christopher Okigbo was done by Rubadiri. He made Okigbo look so ordinary. It made me love the poet who, on his own admission, wrote for poets by bringing him down and making him human. This is as opposed to Ali Mazrui, for instance, who thought Okigbo was abstract.”

Twice exiled — first from Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi and later from Idi Amin’s Uganda — Rubadiri has had the best of both the academic and the diplomatic worlds, holding the distinction of being twice appointed Malawi’s ambassador to the United Nations.

In 2000, he was appointed the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malawi. But this was a culmination of an academic career spanning half a century.

On graduating from Makerere, Rubadiri headed back home to Malawi and began work at Dedza Secondary School, a new institution south of Lilongwe where he was to remain for five years teaching Literature, History and Geography, his majors at Makerere.

It was while there that he married Gertrude, his first wife, in 1957. Her original youthful beauty still perceptible many years later, the now elderly and rather spare-bodied Gertrude — a former secondary school teacher — was seated nearby during the interview with Rubadiri.

Alert and vivacious despite her advanced years, she was readily providing much needed comic relief and general cheer.

Watching the two, it became clear that they were still very close decades after their marriage. That is despite the fact that Rubadiri, the quintessential African, was in 1955 to take a second wife, Janet, a Ugandan nurse of Rwandese origin who has worked at the famous Mulago hospital, and who still lives in Kampala.

She was to bear Rubadiri four children: son Desiré and daughters Natasha, an interior decorator, Inga, an accountant, and Linka, a consultant in herbal medicine and cosmetology whose name — according to step-brother Kwame — means “Are you a cow?” in Rwandese, her mum’s tongue.

As for first wife Gertrude, she had earlier borne Rubadiri four sons and a last-born daughter. All the Rubadiri older children, who in descending order bear the names Kwame, Sékou, Tengo, Lunga and Lindiwe, were named after renowned African personalities.

According to Kwame, the entire Rubadiri clan of daddy, two mamas, nine children and innumerable grandchildren that include Victoria Rubadiri, Kwame’s daughter and a newscaster for NTV, is today famously close-knit, with none of the legendary setbacks of polygamous marriages. That is despite having been scattered to different corners of the globe over the years.

Whatever other influences there have been in his richly varied life, there is little doubt that much of it was coloured by the fact that at Malawi’s independence in 1964 Rubadiri was appointed the country’s first ambassador to the United States and to the United Nations, serving in that capacity until 1965.

Still deeply etched in his memory today is the occasion, on Tuesday August 18, 1964, when he presented his credentials to US president Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House.

Ironically, considering Rubadiri’s later views about Africa’s mendicant culture and pervasive panhandling tendencies before the richer nations of the world, the youthful and rather green diplomat at the time reportedly “expressed the hope that his newly independent country would get more aid from the United States.”

In a stance whose memory probably makes him wince today, the avid Ambassador Rubadiri also added that his native Malawi needed help to build its democratic institutions.

With some of his early poems published in the 1963 landmark anthology, Modern Poetry of Africa, the floodgate of his fecund creativity would later burst open and see more poetry from his pen being showcased in such prestigious international publications as Transition, Black Orpheus and Présence Africaine.

Born in 1930, Rubadiri had left his home in Malawi early, and after crossing numerous borders and pitching his tent wherever destiny led him, he braved the ravages of exile for decades, only returning home to a more auspicious atmosphere after Banda’s death, by which time he himself was well into his old age.

Today, he explains, he lives in quiet retirement on a small two-acre plot located five hours by bus from Lilongwe, the Malawian capital. There, with dedicated first wife Gertrude, he shares what he describes as a simple house with a nice garden and a thriving orchard replete with such tropical fruits as mangoes and guavas.

“It’s a fairly new place that he bought in 2005 from the municipality of the equally new provincial city of Mzuzu,” explains his eldest son Kwame, today a full-time Nairobi-based pastor who is present during the interview and keeping a close eye on his ageing dad, who is, despite his studious demeanour, showing the effects of drugs taken for his ailments.

As it happens, Rubadiri’s current abode is not far from his ancestral home of Likoma Island, located on the northern extremes of Lake Malawi near Nkata Bay. Accessible by steamer, the island is where he was born more than eight decades ago to a father who served as a District Officer in the colonial civil service when Malawi — then known as Nyasalaand — was still a British protectorate.

As for Rubadiri’s mother, she was, according to him, a barely literate homemaker who spent long years with her children while her husband was working across the border in Tanzania, where he had been posted by the colonial authorities. The couple shared Christian values and an unshakeable belief in the advantages of quality education, the pursuit of which they doggedly set their children on.

It was the adamant belief in quality education for their children that saw the couple sending their son David off to Uganda, where education facilities were better than those in Malawi. It was, therefore, in Uganda that Rubadiri for a whole decade, from 1941 to 1950, attended both primary and secondary education at the renowned King’s College, Budo, near the capital, Kampala.

At Budo, he met the late poet Okot p’Bitek of Song of Lawino fame and Prof Timothy Wangusa, another renowned Ugandan author, poet and literature scholar. It was here that the creative bug first bit him after his African and British teachers planted the seed of love for literature. “I was writing right from primary school and loved literature,” he said a day before he flew back home to Malawi.

Rubadiri would later in life embark on a scholarly stint at Makerere that lasted between 1965 and 1975, during which period he served in many capacities, including as a Senior Lecturer in 1968. During that period, he also became a Visiting Professor of English Literature at Northwestern University, USA, in 1972.

At Makerere, then a constituent college of the University of London, Rubadiri had studied for a BA in Literature, History and Geography, and graduated with a first class honours degree in 1955. While there he was a college mate to the creative couple of Pio and Elvania Zirimu, who were however behind him.

From Bristol University in England, where he studied from 1956, he earned a post-graduate diploma in Education and was the recipient of the poetry prize. Between 1960 and 1962 he was at King’s College, Cambridge, where he earned an MA in English Literature.

Now waiting to celebrate his 83rd birthday next July 19, the man known simply as David or Doctor to those closest to him has evidently been aging gracefully. And despite having lived a busy and often chaotic life as a modern day African troubadour constantly roaming the globe and braving the vicissitudes of exile, he has adapted well to his octogenarian status.