CONFESSIONS OF A POETIC DUNDERHEAD.

WHY DOES reading Poetry have to be such a tiresome exercise? Do you have to get a Pound-ing headache just by going through a poem(if so then it is easier for me to bang my head on the wall, its faster, gives a more thorough headache) Do you have to spend hours trying to figure out what each dialogized word means, as it can mean 150 thousand things? (what a Wasteland of brains, filling a crossword takes similar time and is more refreshing and not so frustrating) Do words have to be cryptic to be poetic?

I must confess that I have resigned myself in the last couple of years reading poetry that doesn’t kill my brain cells from over exhaustion. Weldon Kees collection of poetry is a favourite, dark though not depressing (unlike, lets say, Philip Lurkin’s) and simple (not simplistic), vivid, dramatic, almost like watching a play (let the stage reveal the logic of (my) destiny). My most favourite is Muhammad Al Maghut, whose Fan of Swords doesn’t kill but cools my brain from metres and stanzas and everything. Even in translation it still is poetry. And Caroline Nderitu. And rap/genge/bongoflava from Dandora and K-south and Dar.

I guess then for the love of the overtly rebellious poetry (both politically and artistically) I am a pessimistic person, and yes, I believe art can’t save anyone and anything and that so far it has been over rated (as the solver of worlds problems,) but isn’t it refreshing to read poetic prose and prose-sounding poems(proems?) That are colourful in language and vivid and direct rather than mull over a phrase for years just because it is ‘classical poetry?’ That excite my passions and sentiments into quick action and/or excitement rather than make me spend the whole month sitting in a daze trying to figure out what the meaning was? Performance poetry that tingles my senses not by the sweet voice of their performers or their movements at the podium but by the fact that I understand them the minute each flowery sentence is uttered, like an instant dose of caffeine? Hip hop chants that tell me cat throw your hands up and tell me all about the Game and we Ride in the same wave, One Blood, and I feel happy spitting staccato bursts of rhyme rather than agonise over a Mr Prufrock (or was it?) who life is measured in teaspoons or agonise over an Eliot cat?

For those who love such, I have no qualms and no quarrel. But as for me, poetry similar to rocket science can as well gather dust in my shelves, quantum physics in shortened, rhyming sentences simply gives me a headache. I confess, then, that I am lazy. For those writing un-poetic poems, (who comes up with such classifications anyway?) you have a client in me because I got the disease too. Poetic Laziness.

BABU’S BABIES TSOTSIED!

Kenya should have won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2004’s Babu’s Babies written and directed by Christine Bala. Compare it to Gavin Hood’s South African Oscar award winning film Tsotsi. The reason why the later won and the former is relatively unknown is a lesson for every script writer, for everything else about them is so similar.

In Babu’s Babies, Babu Mereka aka Baba Juma, a driver in a coffee warehouse, is sent on an errand but diverts the company van to use as a public taxi, only to realise someone has dumped a white-fathered black-mothered infant in it, and he spends the rest of the film saddled with the motherless child. Tsotsi, whose name translates to ‘Gangster thug’ in south African street language, steals a car only to realise that there is an infant in the back seat, and for the rest of the film he too is saddled with it.

And the similarities do not end there. Babu lives in a low class income area, Tsotsi in the shanties. Babu carries the infant in a basket at some point in the film, Tsotsi carries the kid in a shopping paperbag all through. Both Babu and Tsotsi have comic moments whey they try to feed their infant ‘burdens’ with commercial milk. Both Babu and Tsotsi struggle to change the child’s diapers. Both Babu and Tsotsi don't want people to know that they have an infant in their care. And Both Babu and Tsotsi leave the child in care of a neighbouring woman for a period. Babu and Tsotsi who are portrayed as uncaring people at the start of the films end up being sentimentally attached to the child by the time the film ends.

So with all these similarities, how come Babu’s Babies did not get even a quarter of the worlds and even Africa’s attention that Tsotsi got? (despite Zimbabwe’s Ben Zulu being involved?) It can’t have anything to do with the acting, Ian Kaburu as Babu the broke company driver is as convincing as Presley Chweneyagaye as the ruthless young thug with a soft heart that no one had noticed.


The answer is that the script’s depths in Tsotsi were definitely deeper than in Babu’s Babies. By depth we don't mean that Babu was not well written, it was very well written by East Africa’s and indeed Africa’s standards, the reason why it was a project in the (now defunct?) African Development Script Fund.

The thing that Tsotsi capitalised on, making it such a gripping story, is raising the stakes for all the characters by creating extreme opposites in each situation. Contrasting the worlds at all levels, from economic, psychological and sexual, makes one understand more the urgency for the main character to do something fast or else, and makes one fear what would happen next, and generally made Gavin Hood smile at handling the golden naked statuette (whose sex isn’t moulded.)

Just look at it. Tsotsi is a ruthless killer, a youthful thug who doesn’t hesitate to kill. What better opposite than to make him take care of an innocent, sinless, voiceless, physically weak infant? Tsotsi is a single male criminal, why not give him Miriam the wide eyed, innocent looking lady (superbly acted by Terry Pheto ) to start having sentimental talks with? The child comes from the new very affluent neighbourhood where Tsotsi stole the car from its mother as she waited for the electric gate to open. Now what? Take the kid to the slums, the one roomed rusty metal contraption that Tsotsi calls home. Dangerous, noisy, violent, and dark, so opposite from the posh, electric gate, wine-racked, many roomed mansion that its parents live in.

Now you really start feeling for the kid, and wonder whether Tsotsi will kill it as he has beaten his best friend ‘Boston’ to a pulp or as he has killed even ‘Butcher’, his comrade in thuggery. But Gavin sidetracks and doesn’t dwell now on Tsotsi’s badness but its opposite: kindness, sentimentality, love undercurrents.

On Babu’s side, Babu already has a wife Rita (averagely acted by Lorna Irungu) and two children, one of whom needs medicine for Malaria. Babu, apart from his lack of money, doesn’t really come out as a mean guy from the very beginning. Leaving him with a child doesn’t raise the stakes. For one, while tsosti didn’t know how to feed the child, and doesn’t know how to change diapers, so that we have a tense moment when Tsotsi tears at the diapers to change him and comic moments as he tries to shut him up, for Babu these things are easy to do. So what are the stakes here? Why keep watching when there are no major obstacles for the main character?

We don't see where the infant left with Babu originates from, so we can’t feel whether when Babu goes with it to his estate the infant has entered another lower world or if the child was from a meaner ghetto and now is in a more safer area. It is no accident that Gavin Hood cuts from scenes of the infant with Tsotsi in the shanty town to those of the father in his posh residence.

While Bala has Babu buy milk from a street kiosk, Gavin has Tsotsi hold a woman (Miriam)hostage at GUNPOINT and force her to breastfeed the infant. Raising the stakes, that is the difference. What drama does one want if not a suckle at gun point, I mean people get guns pointed at them for their mobile phones or their cars or their cash, but a tit or the bullet? This was my first, and it was exciting, adrenaline was flowing thinking is the milk really that precious, is Miriam going to dilly dally and get shot because of breast milk, oh my God!


But Tsotsi is not all about angst and violence and Tsotsi trying to figure out how to stay with the kid. The film has breather scenes of sentimentality, digging deeper into the characters and their relationship with their immediate world; building three dimensional characters rather than cut out cardboard figurines. Babu’s Babies lacked these moments of passion, moments of breathing between Babu and his wife Rita. From the word go to the end of the film Rita and Babu are biting at each other with angry words and sarcasm. Well, it started out fine, but like an orchestra that has a song starting on the high notes and screaming them to the end, with no low notes to give a breather, it became constipating. That is why when Rita runs to her parents when she suspects Babu of cheating on her, there are no tears in our eyes, those oh my God and the way their relationship was so lovely why do they have to divorce? In a nutshell, if the screen writer had built a lovey dovey relationship between the two, then when they separate we would know what they have lost. Contrast this with the moment Tsotsi jeopardises his life with the cops at the gate. My mind first did not think of him in danger, but of the dangerous loneliness Miriam would have loosing a man with whom sparks of love were exploding. “Here she goes loosing another man, who similarly went and in the evening didn’t return,” was what brought tears to my eyes.

When Tsotsi gets taunted by children who will be the next generation of thugs yet he has lived in the same pipes they now live in, when the foul mouthed kids laugh at him yet he is a dangerous criminal, there is a look Tsotsi Tshegwaye gives them where he sees himself in them that doesn’t need words. Raising the stakes through opposites: Hopelessness is recycling itself. They see themselves as heroes wishing to live a life he has already lived and seen as not heroic.

What about when the cripple in the Railway station says that he still wants to live on so as “to feel the sun on his fingers?” how poetic in such squalid un-poetic surroundings full of darkness, gambling with life and of death? And Tsotsi with gun as he holds Miriam hostage and talks of the broken glass but is taken through lessons of “I see light and beauty on your face?” I mean, opposites raise the stakes. At the moments of danger and death, simple beautiful things are talked about, heightening the sense of danger and drama because for you to appreciate beauty, you must rate it against ugliness.

Like a well conducted Orchestra, the Tsotsi script writer takes us high then low. Just when we think Tsotsi is softening he swings us up and makes Tsotsi kill his comrade Butcher; reminding us of how he also ‘fucked up Boston real bad’ and how Aaap might be the next. This unpredictability in Tsotsi’s emotions are well written.

Audiences love good people, that is why they love Tsotsi, not because Tshenagwaye is handsome (is that why he is called Presley as in Elvis?) but because despite his gangsta nature, he seeks to do a good thing. Tsotsi gets stranded with an infant after a robbery, it is dangerous for him to keep it as it can lead police to him, It is embarrassing to his tough guy image in the gangsta land to be seen with it, he doesn’t know any girlfriend to clean it, he has every reason not to keep it, BUT HE CHOOSES TO KEEP IT. Babu gets stranded with an infant, it is not dangerous for him to keep it as he could have driven to the next police station and handed it in as a lost and found child, he has a wife who can clean it, he has children who can play with it, he has every reason to keep the baby, but HE WANTS TO DUMP IT. Who will the audience love?

The raising of the stakes is lacking even when Babu is told to take the parcel to the MD as it is crucial to the boardmeeting just before he greedily detours to do a taxi ride and get stranded with the baby at the end of the ride. The cruciality of the parcel is ‘talked’ about not ‘shown’, and even then it is talked after Babu has suffered delays delivering the parcel and is back in the office. The importance of the parcel is not even specified, we are just told it was important. But for Tsotsi, time is of essence, we are shown how crucial every second is when we realise John the father to the kid is an important rich man who orders police to track Tsotsi down. With this simple urgency every moment counts for Tsotsi and hence the urgency and confusion of his movements.

While Tsotsi raises the stakes by dragging you bang into the life of Tsotsi the thug whom we don't even know his name till three quarters of the film later, Babu’s Babies spends most of its time with the back story, taking almost twenty minutes to tell you how broke Babu is. In Tsotsi the back story is subtly hinted out when Tsotsi says he has once seen a dog with a broken back, then gently revealed halfway through that he is from a AIDS suffering mother and abusive father. But Babu has too much backstory of Babu’s brokenness. Babu quarrels with wife over lack of medicine, he goes to neighbour Nora and talks of his brokenness, then goes to office crying I am broke give me an advance, then cries to his friends in the coffee warehouse, we go back home again with him crying to wife oh no money yet, then the pub where his beer is watery from the tears of brokenness, then house again where wife asks for medicine, then the following morning he is woken up with ultimatums find money and medicine or else, oh God. How many scenes are those, do they really advance the story or do they have a stuttering effect? Tsotsi’s action in just one opening scene in the train and we know we better not fuck around with him, he is a dangerous thug.

The danger the infant is in is well illuminated in Tsotsi when he feeds it on canned milk and forgets to clean it up, and on coming back finds the infant attacked by an army of ants on its face. (opposites: beauty and innocence Vs Ugliness and terror) But the way Babu’s friend Jimmy lays the infant as they attempt to dump it in a garbage dump is too neat and clean and doesn’t evoke as much sympathy and terror that the kid is in. The best tension in Bab’s is when the Matatu (public transport van) tout takes the basket with the infant in it and swings it around as he hangs dangerously out of the dangerously driven vehicle. For Tsotsi, the stakes are high in many places, right to the very end when we think a crazy cop might try to shoot Tsotsi and he in turn would use the infant as a human shield to catastrophic results.

The soundtrack of the Tsotsi also goes a long way in raising the stakes in the story. Throbbing Kwaito beats, with its ‘almost Rock’ guitar beats, give a sense of raw urgency as well as the chants of the rapper. Babu’s Babies has a jazzy feeling in Eric Wainaina’s benga influenced ‘Nchi ya kitu kidogo’, with Eric’s silky voice creating a sense of calmness and smoothness. Contrast with Tsotsi’s rough Kwaito in -your-face music that creates a sense of confrontation and attitude, and you immediately get the feel of an unstable ghetto environment.

The sub stories for Tsotsi enhance the stakes: Tsotsi’s haunting childhood, violence in the streets, gangland politics and the competition between Tsotsi and Fela for supremacy, police zeal, ghetto betrayal; and loyalty between Aap and fellow thugs etc. it is a social commentary on the economic disparities, and how it hardens people. But for Babu’s, the sub stories infact burden the stakes. His lack of money, his lack of money, his lack of money.

At the end of the film, Tsotsi has a real character journey. We grow with him from a mean street smart thug to a sentimental, cornered, softie. What a contrast. Babu? Well, he started off a poor guy and ends up still poor, no inner character journey change. No contrasts.

Tsotsi, despite it being a Babu’s Babies look alike, gets its greatness from a superb script that justaposes contrasts to heighten stakes. It is a lesson that many screen writers need to learn from. Contrasts heighten stakes and bring drama. The people we cry for most when they die were the ones who were liveliest when we knew them.

So when is the Kenyan Oscar coming?

WHEN WE FINALLY COLONISE AMERICA

Preamble: I have been sent by the Parliament of Drunkards with this Hansard of the proceedings that take place at the People’s Parliament, that is Njuguna’s Bar, mostly on late night past closing hours. We normally lock ourselves with a bottle of Bozoi Vodka as the Official Mace, which is carried by the sergeant at Arms Mr Ole Tukkoi, whose official job is the night guard at the pub. The speaker is the Bar Man, Davie, whose day job is sleeping, night job is serving at the pub and collecting tips, and late night job after official closing (grave yard shift) job is being the speaker of our parliament which means indicating who is to talk next and also making sure we don't raise our voices too high for the police patrol to come knocking. Since all drunkards once they have drunk all their money will always blame the government for the bad state of the economy, there is no Leader of Government Business.

When we as Africans finally colonise America and in extension the rest of Europe we will force Gucci and Yves St Laurent to sit together in a warehouse and sew their clothes together. There is no need go be divided. American artefacts can sell better if the fashion houses join hands. We will pay them peanuts, and I mean literally pan-roasted peanuts from Bungoma because there is no need to pay Dollars when peanuts offer food for the stomach. After all, we will be teaching the Americans enterprise skills and building a work ethic among them. We will then market Gucci bracelets to the Maasai and the Zulus as authentic Inca Traditional wear common among the Aztec. Who cares if Gucci is French and Inca are South American? America shall be known as a far off country (continents, countries, what is the difference? Americans themselves don't even know geography, they think Nigeria is the capital City of Kampala so why teach them geography when we colonise them?)

We shall arrange interviews on the voice of Africa (as we shall rename VOA); Congo News Network (CNN); and Ougadougu Time to show how a single African Veteran of the Angolan War who lost one hand to a land mine, came to America and single handedly (no pun intended) taught Americans work ethic. “Americans don't have a work ethic” shall be the opening statement to all African entrepreneurs who migrate to our colony, America, and make them work for peanuts. “They sit in offices all day chatting on the internet and using computers to design clothes. We Africans, the Cradle of civilisation, use our brains and our sweat; we flex our muscles till we produce clothes, working from 6am-8pm.” Here he will pause, and wearing a look of pity, say “I collected a few stock market women from Wall Street and told them instead of lazing around drinking cappuccino and mourning about men till 9 pm they can better that time and sew clothes. That way they would earn money to buy food for their children and no longer be under the control of American men who are all gender insensitive.” If this is a woman saying the above, we shall omit the fact that she came to America on Safari and hunted a white American man in Malibu Beach to satisfy her curiosity about their famed sexual prowess only to discover he had a white wife back in his rural Kansas hometown. Since Congolese love fancy clothes to look ethnic French, they would import Gucci by millions.

We will start Non Governmental Organisations (NGO’s) in America, headed by Africans, and funded by donor organisations the most prominent of which shall be the Bantu Bank (which shall replace the embarrassingly uncivilised Ford Foundation.) Bantu Bank, as the name suggests, shall fund all grassroots developmental organisations in America provided they are founded by the Bantu people or other African races that share the similar characteristics of being black.

Top on the list of possible funding shall be media. As such we shall form organisations like Media For Education in America (MEDIAE) where we will send our bush doctors to impart the latest Film and Television production skills to Americans who are really not bad people, who really love TV, but don't have Media Schools to teach them the art of looking into a pot full of water and see what is happening a kilometre away. We shall laugh at their Sofa set productions like Larry King Live, silly comedies like Friends, and un-believable movies like Titanic. We Africans don't like such things, so come on gather the directors of such programmes and teach them real skills. But the way to teach Media skills is not to teach advanced production skills to anyone. In all interviews where this question is raised the answer is ready. “Oh, you know we want to teach them quality TV production but we can’t teach them advanced production skills because really, most of them don't own water pots anyway. Imagine, their most famous director Steven Spielberg has never invested in a water pot! Those who own them don't know how to use them properly, so the picture quality isn’t very clear like in the water of Lake Victoria. Most images in America are coloured instead of black and white and the America government has for a long time banned use of water pots, insisting on using water taps which the locals call faucets, reason being the government can easily control the amount of water and even water contend in their taps. Big Man Syndrome. Every broadcast around here starts with ‘George Bush has taken the war against terrorism a notch higher…. Etc.”

To achieve all this we need support from a reputable statistics organisation. So we will do away with the Gallup Pollsters and form SteadyMan Ltd which all donor agencies can turn to to have statistics tailored to suit their needs. Doctored Numbers, that is the in-thing. (so one donor can rush to Bantu Bank and say that obesity is the number one killer of Americans according to the recently released Steadyman statistics released last week and two hours later an African can start another NGO saying Starvation is the number one killer of Americans according to the recently released Steadyman statistics released last week… and in another two hours….


We shall never show the images of smiling Americans because that is not interesting to the World audience which actually means African Audience. Angry Americans smashing mobile phones on walls as their primitive market that they call the stock market crashes is the image we shall preach. As a way of showing their primitive war instincts where they can’t get the sense of civilised diplomacy but exhibit their war tendencies, we shall count on our fingers all the wars the Americans have fought. Oh my God! They even raided Iraq to get such a simple thing like oil! Oil-Rustlers, that is what those of the Texas Tribe are taught from a young age. They say it is cultural, but what they need is Christianity (or is it Nkosinity?). If any Texan asks why in their colonial mother country Africa the Kenyan Turkanas raid the Karamajong of Uganda to get cattle, we shall say we do no such thing. Turkanas only go to Karamajong to fight terrorism and take cattle back home because we are promoting democracy all over the world. Reconstruction of the infrastructure among Karamajong will need money, so we take their cattle to cover the costs of rebuilding Karamajong. On a larger scale, if the Ranchers of Texas and other cattle rearing states of America rear so much cattle, we shall declare that none of our cattle shall be slaughtered for beef. We shall therefore say that George Bush is rearing weapons of mass destruction and form a coalition of Democracy which shall include Uganda’s Karamajong, Kenyan Maasai, West Africa’s Yoruba, Hausa’s and Berbers from North Africa and with the Zulu in South Africa selling us the latest weapons in the spear industry i.e the short handheld spear called the Assegai, declare a hunt for Bush the terrorist, and swoop down Texas. Double results: We shall test whether the Assegais are effective in close combat, and we shall get enough cows to make beef to feed our insatiable appetite back home.

In case the Assegais don't prove as effective as we think and Texas repels us in prairie warfare, we shall fund North Carolina to secede from America. We shall give them military aid for a coup in Texas, look for the local thug in Texas and give him an un-ceasing supply of spears while praising him as a messenger of democracy. In other words, we shall praise him as “our boy in Texas” who is spreading democracy in that state so brutalised by the Bush Dictatorship. “How can a country like America be ruled by a father and then his son takes over? That is not democracy. Americans need to learn that ruling the country is not a family thing. Imagine Bill Clinton’s wife wants to rule too! Jesus!” Ooops , sorry, we shall swear by our Gods, so more like Nyasaye! Or Amadioha! Or Ogun!

If George Bush hides, we shall place sanctions on him and 40 years later if he is still alive due to Texas oil we shall broadcast on CNN (Congo News Network) that our CIA (Chimurenga Intellligence Agency) have copies of medical certificates that he is down with a constipation that looks fatal. Just to show that this is good news Americans living in exile in Chad shall be choreographed to dance in the sand dunes of the Sahara in joy over the impending death of Bush. Bush shall be called a Republican and that word shall be said with repulsion. Fighting Republicanism shall be our cold war rallying cry, our God sent agenda on this world, and Fidel Castro our ally in the Americas shall be the head of the Anti-Republicanism Operations.

To fight the menace of Republicanism we shall use NGOs, which shall only be registered if they bear names that have the suffix or is it prefix ‘Community Based NGO’. Since Americans can’t run such sophisticated organisations, those damn natives, we shall staff all NGOs in our American colony with African Expatriates. Only the front office receptionists shall be white and the drives too, so that the visible face of the NGOs can be white. If anyone asks why it is ‘community based’ and yet all decisions are made and executed by black Africans we shall sit in a bar under a mango tree in Bujumbura where one can see stars above and be able to identify at least five star constellations (hence the name Under the Mango Tree 5 star Hotel) and laugh as we drink Libondo Palm Wine tapped in the Congo. “These bloody natives in America can’t make their own decisions to solve their own problems, so why should American Human Rights Commission complain that NGOs are predominantly African staffed?” To prove that Americans can’t afford to run NGOs, we shall ask ourselves “How many American natives can you see who can afford to come eat in this Under The Mango Tree Hotel? They don't even know the difference between the Libondo palm wine from the Congo and the one that comes from Mombasa called Mnazi or the one from the palm trees in the Ivory Coast. To them palm wine is palm wine! With such a mentality, can they really discern different ways of solving problems?” “Yeah!” I can hear some one else laughing, “I can say this here among you fellow blacks but I can’t repeat it anywhere else for fear of being labelled Racist. But Prof Masekhela from the University of Pretoria has just made a breakthrough in his studies indicating that the Native American, infact all whites, have a lower IQ than us. Using studies carried out in Pretoria and the University of Yaoundé Cameroon, they have discovered that Brain power is proportional to the size of our buttocks, and since Americans naturally don't have huge protruding buttocks like ours, that is visible proof enough for us to say that it goes without saying that their brains are inferior to ours.!” “Hear Hear!” we shall shout and give instances why Prof Masekhela should be awarded a Nobel (Or a Mandela, for that matter.) Americans can’t mend a broken pipe in their own houses; they have to call a plumber. An American was stranded for a whole night in Lamu because he couldn’t force a donkey to move! What? He said he doesn’t know how to use a donkey, as if that is any news. No, but even with their own modes of transport, an American was stranded a whole night in Missouri because he couldn’t repair the puncture to his own car! He had to call a mechanic! But couldn’t he have driven home on that rim and buy a new one the following day to replace the spoilt one? I tell you! Americans!

“Yesterday I met two American girls studying here who said they have never seen a live chicken!” The Mozambican Bantu Bank Country Director for the State of Oregon shall laugh. What? Who doesn’t know a live chicken in Africa? Hahahahhahahahahahah! Surely, we need to educate Americans or else the bastards might die of starvation not having realised chicken is food.

We shall flatten the Empire State Building. If our grandchildren during their times want to visit those ruins we shall let them, but no way are we going to leave those towers standing for future generations to realise Americans had civilisations and even built houses to rival ours. We shall glorify Mwene Mutapa ruins in Zimbabwe as colossal examples of African architecture.(If we capture Spielberg alive he shall direct Mwene Mutapa: The Ndebele starring Russel Crowe whom we have already identified after his role in Gladiator. No, Djimoun Honsou will star, Crowe will act as the antagonist white cruel King who Ndebele vanquishes in the great fight choreographed in front fo the Victoria Falls (which we shall re-name Mama Rucy Kibaki Falls)

When we, Africans, finally colonise America, we shall force them to stop eating rice and vegetables. Matoke from Uganda is more nutritious. Zulu cuisine is better, or better still Maasai meat and blood to give them energy to run long distances. How the hell do they think they will ever win the Boston Marathon those Americans while feeding on burgers? Infact, Boston Marathon shall be run in Windhoek Namibia and shall only be hosted in Boston to celebrate 100 years since Africa organised the Boston Marathon under the banner ‘Boston Comes Home: The 100th Edition Of The Greatest Marathon On Earth.’

We shall start Zulu cuisine restaurants in New York and Chicago, and the emblem of the Zulu ribbed Buffalo hide shield shall be the mark of how far Americans have become civilised. All American teenagers will be rushing to Zulu fast food chains for their romances, and if a town doesn’t have such restaurants we shall not include in a map. Once that is done, even when Americans become independent politically, unemployed Ibo and Yoruba women from West Africa can rush to New York and Chicago and Beverly Hills and start theme restaurants in converted residential areas where they shall serve Foo Foo and Ogege at ridiculous overpriced prices simply because American middle class will believe that a way to show you are civilised is to take your dates to an African Cuisine restaurant where your wallet is robbed without violence by the figures on your bill and the half emptiness on your stomach.

All inventions by Newton, Columbus etc shall be erased from history books and declared simple machinations that any Achebe, Mariama Ba' or Lumumba could have easily made. The National Conservatoire of Music shall study Oliver Mutukuzi’s guitar wizardry and organize yearly concerts to show fellow white Americans how un-musical they are; playing Todii and Mutserendende and Dzoka Uyamwe( in the key of acoustic guitar) over and over again.

When we, Africans, finally colonise America we shall force them to learn Swahili in their universities. Swahili shall be the international language the world over, with Yoruba as another alternative since Nigerians love it so. (Gikuyu shall also be available just because Ngugi wa Thiong’o shall have a fit if we don't rate it.) No university in America shall teach in any other language but Swahili, but we will be considerate enough to give them a token ‘Department of American Studies’ in Yale and Harvard where those interested can learn of Shakespeare, James Joyce and Hemmingway. Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison shall be canonical books written by blacks who sacrificed to live in America, and who give us expert insights into American life. It doesn’t matter what Americans think of themselves, if Morrison says a Chicago man loves playing cowboy and hence is not intelligent that shall be the truth. We shall even form a Doreen Baingana Museum in the flat that she lives in and have a Baingana Golf Club next to it, furnished with Furniture from the Karen Blixen Museum. Any African wishing to go to America shall read Baingana’s books to understand American’s better from our elevated African Civilized point of View.

If Americans want to learn of their culture, arts, languages and literatures, they shall beg us for scholarships to come to University of Lagos, University of Durban, and University of Nairobi which shall be said to have ‘strong American Cultural Studies Departments’. Universidade in Mozambique shall infact have a School for American and Occidental Studies (SOAS) which shall be stocked with All American writing most of which would not be available in America itself. To qualify to study American Studies in these Universities Americans will have to write papers on Hemmingway’s copying of Kikuyu Landscapes to influence the strength of his books or such papers like ‘Swahili Syntax and How It Made Moby Dick Stylistically Better’. These papers will have to be presented in Swahili or Ibo, the only other internationally recognised language once we colonise America.

We shall not, as Africans, enslave Americans and bring them here to work in slave plantations. Such was the pain we underwent we shall never wish it upon any race.

However, we shall send canoes to rescue Chris Rock and other blacks who have been Prisoners of Race in that country for generations.

All American States will pay allegiance to Mugabe, who shall also conquer Blair and rule over Britain as a Zimbabwean Protectorate. Blair shall be captured for abusing Mugabe and Congo News Network shall declare Blair a terrorist who doesn’t like Civilisation. Blair shall die in exile among the Eskimos, alone and Forsaken. Maybe Sinn Fein and the Irish shall resist Mugabe and British be granted Independence, but there after we shall erase all mention of Sinn Fein’s struggle for Independence in history books. But even when that happens we the Mother Country I mean Continent shall conveniently forget where we buried Tony Blair so as not to allow his body ever being brought back to Westminster Abbey for burial. They can name all the streets in London after him if that makes them happy, but no hero-worshiping for a terrorist who resisted Africa colonising the world.


We shall rescue black Americans from Harlem, Bronx and Mississipi and start an Afro State for them in Chechnya, where they shall forever fight surrounding Kurds. We the Africans shall supply them with arms for the wars.

We shall baptize Americans with black names. Moi Raila Reagan. Museveni Clinton. Waangari Maathai Rice, nee Condoleeza. Mengistu Edgar Haile Hoover, Mobutu Sese Seko Bush senior. Mobutu Sese Seko Babangida Bush the son (he shall have to convert to at least one traditional African religion before we hang him one 30th of December for Crimes against Humanity. He let our Brothers in Katrina die, he signed the documents for the Iraq invasion, he ordered his army to bomb Baghdad, he tried to occupy Afghanistan…etc.)


Ah! When we finally colonize America.

This debate ended when the mover realised all the others were dead drunk and were in a black out state, so he walked home still ranting and we couldn’t hear what he said for transcription. We shall however see if we can ignite it again. There being so much other business, the Parliament adjourned at 4.05 AM.

KIZUIZINI: DETAINING OUR STORIES

KIZUIZINI:DETAINING OUR STORIES.

Just like Japan in the late 18th Century, ever since Kenya was exposed to the European world in the 1980’s, it has been faced with the herculian task of embracing the new and at the same time not letting any of its sedimentary self be replaced, sometimes with violent resistance. So was China’s resistance to the outside world during its cultural revolution. The resultant impact on the lives of its people created a rich fodder for serious study, and in the case of Japan, the resultant literature in subsequent periods has been a documentation of such periods in the Shiden style of historical-literature propagated by the likes of Mori Ogai, author of Saiki Koi And Other Stories. However, a look at biographical and autobiographical works for the Kenyan literature scene reveals that very little has been done in documenting lives of people who lived in this and other periods. The revelation that so far only two Swahili novels have been written about the Mau Mau period, namely P.M. Kareithi’s Kaburi Bila Msalaba and JM Kariuki’s Mau Mau Kizuizini makes the news that a Karatina peasant farmer Joseph Muthee has written Kizuizini; http://www.kwani.org/books/index.htm a book about his life in detention a cause to both celebrate and at the same time wonder why a vacuum exists in our literature in terms of the historical-literature genre.

Joseph Muthee was a trusted farm hand employed by a colonial settler, Captain C. O’Hagan, who so loved him that he called him ‘son.’ However, when the fight for independence started, O’Hagan tricked Muthee into the hands of the colonial police, marking his journeys across five detention camps all over the country after being labelled a Mau Mau hardcore. He therefore narrates his life in the ‘personal-history’ novel published by Kwani? Trust.

Reading Kizuizini reminds one of Wild Swans-Three Daughters Of China by Jung Chan; the book that won the NCR Book Award in 1992. Her use of first person to describe her journey from a peasant worker in Yibin, China into a lecturer at London University makes it a vivid reading. In the two books, this style of ‘personal histories’ acts as a window through which we can gaze into the histories of a people and nation. Other books in personal- history strand include Frederick Douglass’s The Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written By Himself, as well as Mori Ogai’s historical biographical works.

Though Ogai differs from Muthee in the fact that he did not favour the contemporary narcissistic ‘I’ narrative style that Muthee uses to give a personal account of his life during the Mau Mau period, a lot of similarities are seen in the two who combine aesthetically entertaining writing (Rekishi Sosetsu to Ogai) and historical, (auto)biographical accuracy (Shiden to the Japanese). This fusion of personal, historical , religious , philosophical and aesthetic dimensions in the novel form becomes more powerful (though necessarily not better) in articulating important responses to the problems of their days than historical text books like Prof. Caroline Elkin’s Britain’s Gulag, Histories of the Hanged and the rest.


Kizuizini narrates both small and big events to reveal some useful themes which lend credit to the fact that the Mau Mau war is so central to the conceptualisation of our Kenyan-ness. There is the concept of hard work, perseverance, and diligence, where regardless of where one comes from, the observance of these ideals will ensure a future full of fortune and everlasting glory. Muthee articulates these ideals with his never die attitude that made him survive detention to become a leader in his local village when independence came, having been elected in-absentia. He can be equated with Chuhei in Mori Ogai’s ‘Yasui Fujin’ who despite being ridiculed for being ugly, educated himself to become the nightingale that finally sings with glory, a leader of his people. Jung Chang too persevered through her ordeals as a worker in a steel factory, a peasant doctor walking barefoot, life in Spartan camps, and despite Mao’s disdain for Europeans where he said following them is like ‘sniffing after foreigners farts and calling them sweet’, learnt English and went abroad to get a more fulfilling life.

Kizuizini details the activities of the Mau Mau intelligence as offered by their sympathisers giving insights to the colonial period, analysing the myths of the Imperial governance and the Mau Mau resistance to it. So simple and unbelievable are some of their surveillance networks, yet they worked. Muthee reveals a lot about the fighters, both the great ones and the lesser ones, as well as the betrayers during the cause with amazing objectivity.

Social criticism as well as subtle commentating of the colonial and post colonial rule remind a lot of the abuse of power that authority can succumb to. Just as international politics are shown to influence local events and plans to protect motherlands in Ogai’s ‘A Plan to Repel Foreigners and Defend the Harbours’, Muthee in his simplistic way captures the impact of International forces on his life in detention. The letters that the detainees wrote to Her Majesty’s attention, the fights against torture in some of the camps, all these got the attention of the Parliament in an imperialistic Britain whose credibility started to erode and changed the world agenda from colonialism.

The need for deep appreciation for human beings due to their human nature than superficial appearances is a human ideal that runs across most of autobiographies and historical biographies that document turbulent social times.
Perhaps this superficialities are the ones that lead to the writings of personal historical biographies. History is often revised and written to favour the status quo, which has led to a lot of Mau Mau research and documentation being accused of thrusting Gikuyu Nationalism to the national discourse. Catherine Fourshey says in her review of the book Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority, and Narration (edited by E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale, eds) in Jenda Journal of Culture and African women studies that ‘Official state endorsed histories tend to be the stories of the status quo and they must be recognized as such, distinct from the multiple realities that accompany nationalist movements. This seems to be the repeated conclusion throughout the text’. Well, since Muthee writes from a position of personal experience, one can’t accuse him of such traits, a fact that makes personal histories more believable.


Stylistically, the book is a proof that great works are not just about great events, but that they are also a blend of great aesthetics too. The act of narrating real occurrences of a phenomenal past like the Mau Mau war, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Meiji dynasty in Japan can easily dissipate into an archaeological paper presentation. Muthee circumvents this through his narrative skills.

He tells his story in the first person narrative, lending credence to inner emotions and well placed hooks in each chapter. Personal histories told in first narrative like Muthee’s give emotional appeal, the movement and inner journey of a person in nightmarish situations, with a passion that is lacking in most third person accounts.

Another stylistic devise that the author uses to crystalise reality is the intense detailing of events. There is intense information given about dates, times and people. Even mundane routine activities are shown. This comes in as a way to ensure that the facts are accurate; part of historical literature attempts to provide details so as to counter disbelief. It is therefore no wonder that even the most unbelievable paragraphs in Muthee’s novel collaborate with archival history.


And here in lies one of the major issues about the book: Too much detail. Some sections tend to be clustered with very many names and even those of minute characters, times and places. His descriptions for example of the process whereby milk is finally made into cheese in his days as a farm hand emphasises his diligence and love for his job, the rudimentary machinery then, and so on but also makes feel slowed down a bit as the story moves fast in the preceding sections. Jung Chang’s Wild Swans also has such paragraphs where she details her job in a steel factory and in an electrical factory, while Ogai’s descriptions of rituals like tea drinking in the Meiji Dynasty and names of soldiers in the war dot his works. They read like a cataloguing of events better found in historical shelves in the archives and the cataloguing section in Moby Dick.


The non linear form of narration in the book, is reminiscent of the jolting of time and normalcy all through the harrowing colonial times. While Jung’s Wild Swans adopts a linear style tracing China’s history and the author’s ancestral lineage from 1909-1978, Muthee’s jumps from the colonial present to his grandparents days to his detention and back to his Gikuyu’s ancestral days to show disruption of his inner psyche. So is the constant revision of time where he hacks back to an idealized Gikuyu nation that was full of harmony (as his grandmother used to tell him while young) at the time when his own life is in extreme disharmony during his detention. The book starts off with the day he was arrested, then going back to lay the historical background as to why he was arrested and the politically volatile situation of his environment at that time, then back to tribulations in detention. This is good work in not making the narrative boring, sort of a compelling popular history narrating.

The use of not so complex everyday Kiswahili rather than over -vocabularised, stylistically complex Swahili a la Ken Walibora’s Siku Njema makes it accessible even to readers not very deeply into Swahili readership.

Inner meditations and musings make picturesque passages in most personal histories books, almost poetic in their sensibilities. Just as Frederick Douglass on the banks of Chesapeake Bay reveals his yearnings for freedom and doubts whether he will see that day, so does Muthee offer some of the most brilliant passages in his book that illuminate his personal fears when he was detained in Mageta Island and stares into the lakes waters in moments of near death.

The lack of adequate women presence in the novel and the state of Muthee’s family during his detention is another problem that makes one question whether this is as a result of disconnection from the family set up during turbulent times, or a result of their absence in the historical power structures.

The book however benefits a lot from the concluding chapter where you get the reflections of the man years down the line after all this happened, giving it a sense of organic inner peace and structure, both of the book and of the author. Like Wild Swans, The Slave Narrative and Mori Ogai’s works, it is ultimately a book of courage, an uplifting book, a celebration of humanity despite the horrors of the times.


The un-understandable ironies that history books will never be able to capture, the complex paradoxes that are human beings especially after being brutalized, are the strength with which personal narratives draw their attraction from. The fact that Muthee can bear no hatred to the whites saying “they had to do what they had to do and we had to do, it was fate,” beats the logic in historical texts that see only hatred in their black and white lens. The fact that Muthee can criticize priests (and in effect the hypocrisy of Christianity during the Emergency period) and yet now be a devout catholic saying it was through God’s grace that he lived through it all. The fact that he can laugh as he recounts death defying torture instead of shedding tears to recount the pain. Or the fact that he goes into silence over some things and casually says “lets not give details as I don’t want to make readers cringe,” as if he thinks he is telling a comic story which the novel definitely isn’t, are its strengths. In Jung’s Wild Swans, the use of humour as she talks of feet binding among Chinese ladies is ironical, as is her admiration and appreciation of some aspects of Maoism like hard work under which she served as a Red Guard, which contrasts with her demonisation of communism which she felt led to the death of her father.

With all these strengths, one wonders why personal histories (and historical -biographical literatures) have for so long been a rarity not just in Kenya’s Swahili literature circles, but even in Kenyan literature written in English. Evan Mwangi’s Bildad Kagia: Patriotic Rebel and Ezekiel Alembi’s Elijah Masinde: Rebel with a Cause are great books about great heroes, but how we wish there were more, or we could have had inner emotions from the heroes themselves in their personal accounts.

Heroes are not just the people mentioned in history textbooks, but also include common people like Muthee with compelling stories to tell, people who could have passed unnoticed. Many more people need to be encouraged to write about their lives, if we are to understand our selves. There-in lies the strength of our literature.

NGUGI’S GREED CREED IN THE WIZARD.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o claims that in writing The Wizard Of The Crow, his main aim was to “Sum up Africa of the twentieth century in the context of two thousand years of world history” If that was the case, then in his book the history of Africa can be summed up in one word: Greed.

Set in the fictional Free Republic of Aburaria under the Second Ruler who is only referred to as The Ruler, the novel dramatizes the conflicts that come into play once the Ruler approaches the Global Bank to fund the building of his Babel tower, under the program of Marching to Heaven. The Ruler heads to America to seal the deal, leaving his Ministers and close associates undermining each other in the quest to position themselves for the impending gravy train. All this leads to the mistaking of Kamiti, a jobless man despite having a BA Econ and MBA from India, (degrees he earned at the expense of the family land which his parents sold to have him educated) as the fabled Wizard of the Crow who can make dreams come true. In this he gets entangled with Nyawira, and soon they find themselves on the run from Sikiokuu and in the ensuing embarrassments, are declared enemies of the state. The Ruler comes back suffering from a mysterious disease, a ‘male pregnancy’ and the Wizard is told to cure him of it. As all this plays out, Ngugi masterly takes us back and forth into the history of Aburaria from the pre colonial, colonial and post colonial present to set the socio-political and economic fabric upon which the humorous if not tragic tale is woven.

Greed leads to gullibility, and this summarises not just the major themes in the book, but of Africa and the Africans who bore resemblance to the Aburarians (buri meaning the useless in Ngugi’s native Gikuyu, hence Aburarians the Useless citizens of their own republic full of folly). There, the currency is Buri notes (useless notes that can’t buy anything unless one carries sacks and sacks of them) which everyone seems to want to die for. Once the Ministers propose to the Ruler that if they build a tower to reach Heaven his leadership shall be the most powerful in the world, He gets gullible and quickly talks with the Global Bank to fund it and sets in motion the endless gullibility that comes with the project.

It is Greed that leads to the quest for the un-achievable; a grand delusion that often ends in disappointment. It promises a glorious future that dissipates into a useless now. The major magical realism books that are similar in style to Ngugi’s all promise grand beginnings only to end up in disappointments: Culvert’s attempts at communalism in La Tour Brouyarde in A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower, Colonel Aureilia Buendia’s escaping the curse of the pig tail and Macondo in Garcias Marquez’ 100 Years Of Solitude, Ben Okri’s ‘bad milk of politics’ in The Famished Road, Salim’s dreamy powers in Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children etc. Hence disillusion is a major theme in such texts. It is Greed that leads to all the daemons in Wizard of the crow: the queuing daemons, power daemons, female daemons, bearded daemons and all maladies of the Ruler.

Fueled by the achieving the unachievable so as to be great, greed for power leads to paranoia. States and its agents want to exhibit power, suspicions abound, both true and unfounded. Greed for power and its trappings breed paranoia which grips the state and populace as they imagine and chase daemons i.e. wizard of the crow. Silver Sikiokuu’s greed to be in the inner circle closest to the president made him go and have his ears enlarged so he can hear even the faintest whispers plotting against his Ruler. He ends up being an absorber of everything audio, including unfounded rumours like students sabotaging events with snakes, and about the wizard. Machokali went to have his eyes enlarged so that he can see anyone planning the demise of the Ruler, ending up with a grotesque face. Even Njoya panics when Tajirika uses Coup de tat as an allegory. Tajirika says he imagines people envying him due to his money. Sikiokuu threads together unrelated words from Tajirika’s taped conversations to conclude that a coup is on the offing. He further becomes paranoid by taking the names of Julius Ceaser Big Ben Mambo and drawing links through his name to suggest power hungry coup plotter as his names bear traces of Ancient Rome and Imperial London.

Greed leads to selfish egos, elevating oneself to imaginary states of importance and titles. This leads to sycophancy as the others recognize the vanity of such greedy people, and in their own greed to benefit from the powerful, chant praises ever so often so that they can be paid to keep on singing them. The ruler proclaiming his tigritude in statues of him as a lion and other cat animals in the paradise hotel seven star hotel shows his Self centeredness. The Ruler decrees children should learn things relating to him. Geography means reading of countries he has visited or intends to visit. Other subjects include Rulers philosophy, Ruler’s maths, with the decree that all books have to carry the Ruler’s name as the original author. The Ruler yearns for world attention and when told he won’t get Americans to give him a state reception and that he can’t appear on America’s Global News Network (GNN) in the Channel’s ‘Global Luminaries and Visionaries’ as well as ‘Meet the Global Mighty’ he rants and develops his amazing disease.

Paranoia where beneficiaries of power fear ever loosing their nearness to it leads to sycophancy. Sycophancy is a major past time of choice for the characters who populate the novel. The Ruler talks nonstop for 7 days, 7 hours, 7 mins, 7 secs to his ministers who clap and yell themselves hoarse “Give us More!” till they are numb! Sikiokuu and Machokali always try to out do each other in chanting praises to the Ruler. When Arigaigai the police constable becomes paranoid and ‘discovers’ Kamiti as the Wizard of the crow, he outdoes himself in praising the man and his feats.

This means that the root cause of dictatorial regimes is greed, greed for power, for money and for status. The dictatorial regimes of African leaders stem from this yearnings, and the intellectuals become cowed into silence like Prof Materu the Aburarian historian who had been arrested for 10 ½ years for writing about the Aburarian independence and forgetting to mention the Ruler as one of the freedom fighters.

Fear that one won’t get what they greedily want leads to superstitions: your mind absorbs all phenomena indiscriminately, and tries to find logic in them. Since there are none, you use magic as the link to their presence in your brain. This leads to gullibility, translating to absurdity. Constable Arigaigai Gathere’s lack of clear vision in the dark and his lack of speed, the presence of bones and dead cockroaches, and the fact his boss wasn’t even angry when he came in late to job having delayed at Kamiti’s, plus the death of his fellow competing cops in and accident makes him conclude that the Magic of Kamiti has worked and hence he is the wizard of the crow. This single event is the one that makes the novel possible, elevating Kamiti from a starving vagabond dumped at the dumpsite to a main protagonist in the novel whom everyone thinks is a miracle worker, and either wants to befriend so as to gain wealth or wants to get rid off to protect their power status. Greed drives gullible people like Tajirika and the Ruler to the Wizard of the crow to have themselves and their property protected. Somehow Kamiti the wizard reminds of the Ugandan rebels Alice Lakwena and Kony. Dictatorships (greed of power) led to their powerful lies, branding themselves people peddling hope and solutions to a superstitious people.

Greed leads to political assassinations. Aburaria feeds the vanity of its Ruler and his accomplices ushering in he era of Self induced Disappearances (SID), assassinations, and court martials. Only after seven days of Machokali’s disappearance did the government officially announce he, the Minster for Foreign Affairs is missing. This was soon after the American Ambassador had hinted he could lead the country after the Ruler retires. (Remember the assassination of Robert Ouko our Minister for Foreign Affairs so soon after a trip to America where some hailed him as the natural successor?). The Aburarian government hints he could have fled to another country after realizing his attempts to overturn the government had been known are circulated. The disappearance of Machokali the foreign Affairs minister sparks dissent, public rallies disguised as prayer meetings which police cant break up due to Global Bank pressure.

To maintain their status quo, dictatorial regimes breed corruption and palming of hands to receive favours, creating situations where juniors become more important than seniors in administrative hierarchy. Once rumours abound that the Global Bank will fund the Marching to Heaven project, Tajirika becomes inundated with gifts. Sacks of Buri notes palm Tajirika and later Sikiokuu. Greed leads to nepotism and corruption. Vinjinai, Tajirika’s wife, is nominal founder and MD of the Mwathirika Banks, while the Rulers sons are the board of Directors. The Ruler promotes crooks leading to an inefficient administration. The more a crook you are, the better. Tajirika became Central Bank Governor and Minister of Finance because the Ruler discovered he is a good conman. On discovering Kaniuru’s scheming he made him the Minister for Finance and Youth, and Jane Kanyori into Comptroller of Central Bank and National Bank of Commerce and Industry. Tajirika as central bank governor proposes setting up banks to launder money and swindle money to Swiss bank accounts, creating financial scams under the Mwathirika Banks.

In such a paranoid atmosphere that dictatorial regimes operate, feeding on greed and more vanity, shapeshifting is a common strategy for survival, both of the victims and perpetrators. Nyawira is a chameleon who is a secretary one moment, then a player in the politics of poverty. Just like Sadera Munyakei in Billy Kahora’s story The True Story of David Munyakei in Kwani 3?, everyone has to pretend to be what they are not if they are to live. So are chameleons Kamiti, Nyawira, Tajirika, cops and all those who go to the wizard eg Tajirika and Kaniuru disguised as labourers having left his Benz. Ministers in the cabinet watch Sikiokuu and Machokali fight before jumping to the winning side. BigBen Mambo is an expert in this. The highlight of this is the way Machokali praises the ruler for making history as the first pregnant man courtesy of the wizard and when the ruler becomes angry he pretends he was praising him for recovering from the wizards curse!

Shapeshifting taken to the extreme can make one long to be of another race. This has led many black people wishing they were whites as they think that white means being affluent. Ngugi calls this disease ‘White ache’ which many characters fall sick of. Tajirika suffered it when he couldn’t speak saying only ‘if!’ only to discover he meant if only he were white he would be better of. Finally has one white leg and arm as the Genetica Company that was modifying him to become white went under before finishing their modifications of him into a modern American man. This made Gaciru think of her parents as ogres. Nyawira’s father had white ache too, he hated being called anything African preferring Sir Charles. Greed for colonial mentality is seen in the Wanguhu’s speaking of English idioms. If my skin was white, would the directors of the Global bank have insulted me? Asks the Ruler as he suffers his male pregnancy.

Greed is what led to colonialism. Aburarian was colonized due to its resources so that they could be taken to the imperialists countries and earn them money. As was the case of Africa, colonialism was a means of grabbing resources under the guise of civilization. Blacks were not allowed bank loans and they were denied business opportunities because Global bank executives believe ‘money is the root of more money.’ To protect their interests, the colonialists in Aburaria (you can switch this with the word Africa anytime you want) installed unpopular locals into power so as to continue raping the resources via proxies. It is this that led to the rise of the Ruler, and the political mess the country has found itself in.

Once a leader is installed by the west Neo colonialism sets in, with its indecent adoration of foreigners and lots of butt kissing. The Aburaria government in conjunction with foreign companies ‘know how to take but not how to give back to the soil’ leading to desertification in what was once paradise. Tajirika rants to the Ruler about volunteering Aburaria as the first to be wholly managed by private capital. A ‘Corporony’ where the West can run it as a corporate business and NGOs relieving the state off its social obligations and allowing the Ruler to run the country as his Real Estate. Global Financial institutions like Global Bank and Global Ministry of Finance are ‘clearly looking to privatize countries, nations and states’ arguing that the modern world was created by ‘Private capital.’ The government extracts so much from citizens and nothing in return, even the women sang ‘we expected independence to give us a cow to milk but yesterday I slept Hungry!’ Greed leads to colonialism and racism. Black has been oppressed by white, female by male, peasant by landlord, and worker by lord of capital, so says Nyawira.

International exploitation is not just economical, it is intellectual too. Dr Furyk, after Wizard unlocks the Ruler’s tongue, claims he is the curer and even patents the patient. This is a jibe at western pharmaceuticals who patent African inventions, like the recent controversy over the AIDS Vaccine tests among the Majengo Prostitutes between Nairobi University and Oxford.

Foreigners in the modern world are accused of cloaking their greed in the term ‘Democracy.’ They freeze donor funds till Aburaria government ‘ instituted economic and political reforms and took concrete steps to end inflation and corruption’ Minister Tajirika and Kaniuru after Baby D is born, go to America and talk donors into resuming leanding to Aburaria. (but note : it is exploitative, they get money to buy arms from the west, and to explore oil and natural gas and minerals in Aburaria.) During cold war the ruler was brutal, but the West were happy. Now they censor him for any violence. He questions the turn about.

Greed leads to religious hypocrisy and conflicts. Hungry to show that God is on their side, the soldiers of Christ try to hunt down the wizard. Martha and Mariko poke fun at Soldiers of Christ. They in turn crucify the duo’s cat. This led to the splinter church ‘church of Christian soldiers’. The three Christians calling themselves Sweeper-Of-Souls, Souls -Walking-Stick and Pilot-Of-Souls under the Trinity of the Holy Spirit were invited to the US, but then splintered into 3 as they argued about the nature of Satan. Religious hypocrisy is also shown when witchcraft is legalized. Church going and mosque going people rush to state house to showcase their wizardry.

Religious hypocrisy goes hand in hand with moral decadence, perverted sexual fantasies and actions. Kaniuru loves watching porn and is shown buying pornographic videos in 42^nd street. Sikiokuu panics when Kamiti ask wherever anyone else has used his mirror, he remembers women, other people’s wives he has bedded, including one girlfriend of the Ruler. The Ruler gives people jobs abroad so that he can have unfettered access to their women. He kills anyone dating his girlfriend e.g. the prominent business man who bragged of doing so. The ruler himself asks how many husbands and fathers has he humiliated by demanding their wives and daughters for sex. Ruler only takes Viagra with an insatiable appetite. Sikiokuu self confesses to having three wives, several mistresses, and talks of kinky sex though he himself pretends to be conservative. Wawira’s death and numerous graves in Kiambugi from HIV AIDS are a stark reminder of this sexual promiscuity which Ngugi unfortunately has handled in a preachy mode.

Greed leads to deception so as to cover it up. Tajirika doesn’t want to speak of his sacks of Buri, nor does Kaniuru, sikiokuu and Machokali dwell on spinning deceptions etc. deception leads to lack of trust, lack of trust to paranoia. Tajirika lying about burned dollars leading him into problems. Commissions are only put up as witch hunt. Fake reports as the ‘Kaniuru Report on the origins of the Queuing Mania and Its Possible Connection with Anti-Government Activities’ and the ‘A Secret Report on Acts of Treason’ written by John Kaniuru and Elijah Njoya & Peter Kahiga Respectively can be printed but they are smoke screens for the real culprits.

Since deceptions always get found out, the end result of greed and its servant gullibility is shame. The Ruler who regularly comes with plomp now hides under darkness as he comes from America, giving the media blackout. The Ruler had desperately wanted international press attention in USA but only got it when he came to Aburaria to confirm that he suffered bodily expansion or male pregnancy! Sikioukuu spent a whole cabinet meeting on his knees begging the Ruler, and his seeking for attention ends in shame. Kaniuru’s first ever picture in the newspapers is the humiliating fiasco of him frog marched along the streets tied with ropes, yet he had tried to be in papers as he rose through the ranks metereorically. Big Ben He always wanted to be in the army but soon got shot by the firing squad.

Greed and peoples middle-class apoliticism (seen in Vinjinia saying her perfect man is a middle class man not into anything political) leads to hanging onto power for so long even in ill health that Gemstone the American ambassador tells the Ruler to retire. The greedy people need protection on retirement, hence offers to help have laws of immunity so that his successor doesn’t prosecute him, or even arrangements made for him to relocate to another country.

Greed leads to incompentence. Sikiokuu had been left a job to do when the Ruler went to America but on coming back nothing had been done as Sikiokuu had been playing paranoid politics fed on greed. Sikiokuu has been dressing up and role playing the ruler-greed for power. Self confessedly, he says ‘we lust for power, and what power is greater than that of a supreme ruler? Similar to the Kenyan Attorney General Charles Njonjo’s decree, imagining the death of the Ruler, dream or think of it is high treason punishable by death. Sikiokuu shatters the mirror in case it has trapped his ‘seditious’ confessions.

The names of individuals denote greed in the book. The Swahili name of Police chief wonderful Tumbo translates into ‘Wonderful Big Tummy’, a greed symbol. Tajirika translated from Swahili means Mr Get Rich , which he duly is. Njoya notices how Tahirika’s hostility is abated by the food, he is a glutton.

The mirror is a tool of vanity, of greed. Where people lie to themselves rather than face the truth of their faces. It gives opportunity for one to make cosmetic changes to their faces, selves, egos, etc. No wonder then that there are numerous references of the mirror in the book, almost like in the works of Borges, and Kamiti the Wizard ends up crushing them into splinters.

As Kenyans should have learnt from previous multi-party elections, once we choose politicians full of greed there actually is no change, things remain the same if not worse. ‘Emperor Tajirika’ overturns the Ruler and offers continuity, only that he is even more dictatorial. He bans literature in foreign languages, makes Rulers children say their father suffered SID, pronounced the death of Baby Democracy, ordered the construction of a modern coliseum on the site once earmarked for Marching to heaven and renamed roads, buildings and institutions Imperial this and imperial that. And fed the previous regime’s people to crocodiles in the red rive.

Coups are not the cure for greed, they only breed more greed. Ask Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the African countries perennially racked by them.

Greed leads to fantasizing. No wonder the book is full of fantastical happenings, and magical realism. Greed is a prison which Kamiti frees some from ( as well as locks some tighter in) and as he asked Tajirika when in the same cell, “ from which prison do you want to free yourself? There are two: one of the mind and one of the body.” Supernatural things happen through out the book: The ruler now defies gravity and floats in the ceiling. (levitation as in Garcia’s 100 years of Solitude). The wizard seeing himself floating like a crow floating on sky is similar to Chamchawala in Salman’s Satanic Verses.. Note that all who float have seen themselves in elevated positions they are not, including Kamiti who claims to be a wizard when he is not.

Absurdity of the book reflects the absurdity of our situations full of absurdities. When the Global Bank is coming to town ‘the lame get lamer, the blind get blinder’ but when attacked by police a miracle happens, “ those with humps fled upright, the blind could see once again, the legless and armless recovered from their limbs as they scurried from the gates of paradise.

Stylistically, Ngugi has done his research well helping in characterization especially Dr Kabocha who writes to Dr Furyk and Clarkwell in medical jargon about probable causes of the rulers disease. The Rulers characterization is superb, as is that of Tajirika, Sikiokuu and Machokali.He has researched well the various religions: of Gikuyu folklore, Buddhism, Chinese Astronomy and Christianity. Operations of government and back stabbing are well researched to give the political tensions in the book more twists and turns than a bowl of spaghetti. Research has helped Ngugi nail down all problems of a 3^rd world dictator despite him having spent 24 years in exile abroad.

However, we as readers too should curtail our greed in looking for superlatives to describe the book. Anyone equating Ngugi with Salman Rushdie obviously is taking praises too far. The two have distinctive styles, with Ngugi the Marxist writer sacrificing aesthetics at several sections in the book to come out extremely preachy (subject to another analysis of this.)

“That’s the point, Mr President. Everything is upside down in your country!” Global Bank officials say to the ruler. It could as well be Ngugi telling African Leaders what their greed has led to.

AK 47

Well, if you ever wanted to know more about Kenyan & African literature, film and madness, this is the site. We shall be hitting you with serious stuff, critiques, reviews and comments, as well as mad thoughts when the seriousness drives us to the edge of sanity. We got you in the cross hairs, click click boom!