A few months back, I submitted this story to a Kwani! sponsored writing competition but they have never bothered to announce the winners or write back. They later announced a similar competition with same prices but with minor changes to it including a new deadline. I was pissed because common courtesy requires one to take just a few minutes to type an email and cc it to those of who bothered to submit our pieces prior to the first deadline. I have since written to them to express my disappointment especially because I looked up to them a lot and they have not gotten back to me yet. Because I will not allow my work to go to waste in some inbox called “mykenyakwani@gmail.com,” I have decided to post it here but in parts because it was quite long.
I hope you enjoy it and look forward to your thoughts on it and its content…
When we were kids, we had this belief that our fathers were superheroes. This was apparent in the number of times we invoked their names as a defense mechanism. Whenever we felt threatened, we would bring into play these then magic words, “nitaambia baba yangu” which would always ensure our safety from would be perpetrators. We lived in a cocoon whose sheath was the illusion that our fathers were invincible. But part of growing up, for those of us that did, meant acknowledging that these fairy tale stories held no water. When the western kids on TV were crying themselves to sleep on realizing that Santa was not real, we were also coming to terms with the consequences of realizing that our fathers were just human, no more fallible than the next man, woman, or even us. After our fathers suddenly became obsolete, invoking their names in our defense became a sign of weakness and those who did became the subject of ridicule and were even dared to go tell. To survive this new phenomenon, we had to learn fast that the farther we could isolate our fathers from our brawls and start fending for ourselves, the greater our odds became. This meant we had to get into fist fights, arguments, competitions, and so on to establish hierarchy both within us and with other rival kids. The illusion was over and the reality harsh but especially so for those who were late in dispensing away with these illusions.
During my teenage years, I realized that these illusions were not restricted to children alone but extended to our parents too. Illusions were a national pandemic and whereas our parents already knew the limitations of being human, they still held on to some false belief that having some prominent personalities in government would augur well for their tribe in the same way our fathers did before we saw the light. It was tantamount to being rehabilitated of a cigarette addiction only to take up cocaine or opium; a new high. I remember how in our childish games we would recite how patriotic we were. This unconditional love for our country was rarely invoked unless it had the name of some prominent personality attached to it. “Be a patriot like Kenyatta” or “Be a patriot like Moi”, we were told and likewise we recited with a sense of pride that only children would have. In the eyes of our parents and teachers, these were the men to whom we owed our independence and democratic rights and to who we should be forever grateful. They were passed as selfless leaders, heroes who sacrificed to fight for our independence, the embodiment of righteous men who deserved to lead this country. For us kids that had just grown up from one fantasy, our parents were doing a good job ushering us into the next one; the delusion of tribal politics.
And so it came to be in school. The compulsory history lessons were filled with sound bytes of Kenyatta this, Moi that, Odinga this, Mboya that and so on and so forth. But something in me was not buying it. I was one of those kids who thought that my father was unconquerable but I grew up and was not going to fall prey to the same script with a political cast. At that young age, I remember hearing my dad angrily curse a man when we were driving to his workplace and I was shocked. Parents weren’t supposed to curse. Then over the years, I saw that his coming home late was because he was struggling to make ends meet. I was shocked that he was not the boss where he worked and the full scale of this hit me when he was retrenched and we had to move from the company staff houses. He now had to struggle on a whole new level for his family and the strain this had on him was now more evident than ever. Though we never lacked, to see my father in that vulnerable position where he was just another man with his faults, fears, and who everyday struggled like every other man with a wife and kids to do right by them was an eye-opener for me. Informed by this, I treated our GHC (Geography, History, and Civics) lessons with great skepticism. It was all too neat.
Later in life when I had developed a good enough brain to interrogate issues, I realized that our history lessons had hitherto read like storybooks in the cliché sense of the word. I began to notice the discrepancies in the text and sense the words that rung so hollow they echoed. But the beauty of vacuums is that they are in a constant lookout for something to fill them. That was how I came to notice the conversations taking place around me. These conversations were so markedly different that I wished our history classes would have comprised people simply talking, asking questions, giving opinions, sharing, agreeing, disagreeing and engaging as opposed to the bird’s eye view kind of history that we were taught in class. Soon after noticing them, these conversations began taking over every space; each choosing its own topic and recounting its own version and understanding of issues. From talk shows on TV, chitchats while playing cards, high profile panel discussions to street corner deliberations, conversations were taking place. Reservations were cast aside as debates were raging, feelings were expressed, rumours were exchanged, facts articulated, opinions conveyed, and questions posed. From all the above came new understanding, greater insight, renewed doubt, more questions, a couple of answers, and death to delusions.
So what began as whispers in bedrooms, at street corners, and in university hostels had now grown into…
