A FRUIT OF UNRIPE WISDOM (OR THE REASON WHY I NEVER LIKED KAREN BLIXEN)

With all their pride and handsome noses, many ‘old school’ wazungus come to Africa with so much romance and fire burning in their hearts that one can only wish to pour bucketfuls of ice-water on their heads.

It all starts with the promises of an exotic hotel in a glitzy magazine that ‘provides the ideal getaway to the luxury traveller who is looking for a unique enchanting experience of serene beaches and traditional wildlife that Africa has to offer’

Or an ubiquitous nudge from a distant aunt who travelled before to Africa and fell for ‘the spell of the land and became instantly reborn’ after passing through ‘idyllic villages’ where ‘the men and women were eager to burst to song at her sight’ and she was able to learn a lesson about happiness from the way they ‘managed to laugh and sing despite their moderate means’.

It all ends in pleasant journeys through Africa where, like new shiny coins falling into a murky mine, they admire the primeval days of their iron ore; the seduction of the unsophisticated and the simplicity of the smiles of the mud-splattered, mucous-blocked children who will flock around and break into a rictus of joy when given a 250 ml can of yoghurt to fight over.

Words such as ‘corruption’, ‘Aids’ and ‘poverty’ will be avoided (apart from the militant kind that move about in herds called conferences reciting the same old tale till it is tedious listening to them) and replaced with spiels of how they were ‘awestruck by the majestic leaps of Maasai warriors’ and how their tears fell at the sight of the ‘tragic beauty of the wildebeest migration in the Maasai Mara’

Ultimately we will be reminded of the amazing world we live in and why we should never lose our customs, our dances and our music for it is a ‘rich heritage’ and that we should always ensure that this part of the world remains ‘wild and untouched’ for it offers so much ‘tranquillity and serenity that the rest of the planet could learn from’.

They will hold their passports safely nevertheless and despite the ‘enchantment and magic of the land’ grumble at any delays in their return flights for somehow they still need to rush back to their ‘boring, developed world’ where people are ‘cold and unfriendly’ and not like us ‘pleasant people’.

We will be left behind always, perpetual guardians of the African serenity and tranquillity. The beach boy to be in love with the Malindi sand and the erotic promise a beckon from another Italian tourist brings. The Maasai woman selling her trinkets to trot back to her house-fly infested manyatta and seek for no more pleasure than the promise of a new bore-hole to be dug in her village. The sweaty-faced tea-picker to trudge every morning through rain, shine and poor pay and be in love with the immense expanse of green tea and marvel at how lucky he is to be outdoors when everyone else is cocooned in concrete prisons in London, Sidney and New York.

Beneath this calm veneer painted over ‘untamed Africa’ is a loud discontent. I remember as a child the way it painfully agitated me and I would walk to the edge of the Kerio valley and stare at the horizon and pray for the vision to overpass that limit and stare at another busy world I had heard of but never seen. I desired more practical experience than I possessed. An acquaintance with a variety of character than was here within my reach. My heart would heave with exultant movement as I allowed my mind to dwell on that bright vision; to feel it swell, quicken and expand with life; but most of all to relive, if only for a moment, a greater existence of my being, before the relentless sun took me back to reality with its heat.

It sad and narrow-minded for these more privileged fellow-creatures to think we ought to be satisfied and confine ourselves to our tranquillity. The African mind seeks for action and greater exercise of its faculty just like any other mind. Millions, however, of my dark-skinned brothers are condemned to a still doom; an absolute stagnation and restraint of the soul as if they were mangrove trees stuck in a dismal swamp.

There is another reality of Africa however, a more vivid kind and filled with so much goodness. It shows in the face of a graduate who steadfastly applies for jobs and believes he will eventually get one for deep down he knows he is intelligent and hard-working enough to add value to the corporate world. It shows in the hard, chiselled faces of hawkers in Gikomba who haggle and cackle their voices hoarse selling second-hand clothes to make enough money to buy land and build a brick house where there children will be able to sleep soundly. It shows in the speech of a woman dying of Aids who sits her children beside her bed and makes them promise that she be the last one in the family to die from the disease. It shows in the matatus that flood our towns in a riot colour, bringing men and women of all kind and tribe, to hustle and move about in our pot-holed roads and dusty shops in pursuit of their private hopes, dreams and happiness.

That is the kind of Africa I love, not the one Karen Blixen and her followers try to create.

with a crock of gold, they wait for us, at rainbow's end

a long time ago, when the earth was still new, many feet shuffled up a valley ... may be it was the words of a powerful shaman that made them go... may be it was a volcano that erupted that chased them away... may be it was their changing spirit ... or the curiosity in their heart ... the important thing is that they moved ... and through them the whole world was filled and explored

the valley was the famous Rift Valley ... and they were our ancestors, so they say, the homo erectus ... i found the tracks of one of them ... so i believed ... firmly embedded in a piece of volcanic rock ... happened when we were digging a well, was a small child then, playing around as the strong workmen dug ... when one of the workers handed me a small rock ... and told me look

it was their clear as day ... the small foot of a small child immortalized in rock ... did he make it to his people's intended destination,what was his name,was he beloved by his mother, was his father a famous hunter, did he see the mammoth and the mastodon ... was he going to be a cave painter ... i was excited ... it is always exciting to connect with the past ... events like wine, tastes much better with time ... time makes even the most small-time act, a great feat for mankind

probably, 10,000 years from now,a scientist might discover your discarded shopping list and spend the rest of his life researching on who you are ... because we are all important ... one away or another ... and everything we do so precious

as a child i listened a lot to my mother, she is a natural tusitala (teller of tales )... i learnt about my grand parents and my grand parent's grandparents ... i just felt important to know about them for once they lived ...breathed ... ate ... loved ... just like me ... their footsteps might never have been immortalized in volcanic rock, but they were forever printed in my heart, mortal though it may be ..

it is sad that one time our laughter is born by the wind ... and the next day the wind bears no recollection of our voice ... and it is the turn of our children and grandchildren to laugh ...i wonder if my ancestors ever dreamt of me ... i wonder if they knew that one day one of their children would try to write about them but have no tale ... but just a heart for them

i met my maternal grandmother only briefly ... my mother was the last born and my grandma gave birth to her at a very late age when the former already had grandchildren ... i was the second last born in a family of 7 so by the time i was just a toddler grandma was already advanced in age ... but i remember visiting her, when she was sick and ailing ... she was already blind and as i reached the doorstep she called out with joy ... who is that with the voice of my father? ... i was to shy to answer and my mother said it was me

it was creepy being there, in her dark hut, seeing her in her gaunt, 'old-age-scented' wrap blankets ... yes old age has a smell for your information ... she struggled to sit ... i could not see very well ... the hut was dimly-lit and her children came in and out, hovering over her like vultures ... but she had so much joy, she did ... she laughed all the time and just wanted to be with me ... interrupting her conversation with mama so as to call me to her side ... i could not speak Keiyo then and she kept referring to me as her 'little Swahili boy'

i remember her holding my hand and muttering something in keiyo ... my mother would translate her words into swahili ... she wanted me to spit on her white head, there was a clash of culture for a mini sec, but i obliged ... and she began her blessings ... she wished that i live till my head was whiter than the clouds, that i be happy and have all my heart desired, that i become a good warrior to my people just as was expected of men at her time ... then she spoke of her oncoming death, that i should not cry when she was gone ... that she was old and needed to meet her husband on the other side ... so that they could sit together by the warm fires in the sky and tale tales of old

it was the most powerful moment in my life ... she died soon after that ... my mother did not take me to the funeral ... grandma, i realized later, had forbade that i attend ... she knew i was too young and would be afraid of seeing her casket ... but mama took me there much later and pointed at the ground where she had been lain ... i shook though i was not afraid ... and reached for mama's hand

the dead have no use for the living, grandma would have said ... i had to reach to my life ... to let my laughter ride in the wind ... and to reach to the blessings my ancestors had left for me and make rich my stay on earth, for fellow mankind and I ... we are not here to stay my people say, but only to prepare the road for those who will follow us