We had been warned that it was coming. Over the days, everyone kept tweeting it. Or hushing it. “Ameenda?” Is he really gone? Or perhaps, he really is gone. I kept thinking, maybe I too should talk about Raila, but how do you write about a man who curated his own life? A man for whom everything has been written about? That would be similar to an earthworm announcing the death of a snake.
Yet the grim Reaper is no respecter of protocol, for on the same day that Raila Amolo Odinga died, the man I had known as a political bastion and swashbuckling showman for the entirety of my life, I got news that Kimani Mbugua—surely you must know Kimani Mbugua?—died.
An invigorating emptiness filled me. For in the wake of a death even your own breath, your own shadow come as a shock. Everything feels inappropriate, indecent, for a while. The problem with grief is that while pain may be public, it requires a standard privacy to it. Kimani was a maverick, with an elevated intellectual plane, and we were all in Moi University or what used to be Moi University, before you-know-who turned it into his election cash machine. Allegedly. It was in Moi University that Kimani Mbugua was christened, his talents blooming with a full, peacock-like spreading of his feathers. Was it not our elders who said, Wali wa kushiba huonekana kwa sinia?
He, Kimani, appeared like a lucid dreamer and reminded us why we all dream in the first place. Yet Kimani was just about 16, barely a teenager. That means he was far removed from some of the things that would weigh heavily on men like me in their early 20s—drugs, petty sex, ka-uji na chai, and relationships that would end faster than a bouncing class.
I knew Kimani in first year because were it not for Kimani, I would not have crystallised my first relationship with this certain girl, this girl of whom I was a big fan of her parents’ work, a brown-skinned woman who might not have been pretty enough for the rest of the universe but was more than pretty enough for me.
Kimani served in church with her, and I would text Kimani every now and then to check on my abebo, make sure the doves are not circling my angel, and he would assure me that abebo may not have been clinically blind, but she only had eyes for me. Kimani, on the other hand, was in love with another of my baby’s friends, but he didn’t know how to say it, and I, a man of the world, and wizened by lust and sheer greed, would tell him, Kimani stop wanting the girl, and get the girl! Kimani was a better man than I, for he could control his urges. In that respect, Kimani 1, Ashioya 0.
But I run ahead of myself.
I had met Kimani in many other situations in Nairobi, and some of his other friends would call to ask if I had seen him. I would always play coy, for it felt like intruding in a moment of private grief. To the extent that we own our friends, how much do we owe them?
To write about someone’s death risks trivialising their life into your own memories of them. That’s true. What’s also true is that by the time Kimani was dying, my last conversation with him was just after he appeared on Kenyan influencer Oga Obinna’s YouTube show, where he was poleaxed about his struggles with mental health. At the time, I felt the interview was caustic if not corrosive, a slow lava flow that masks the black river of suicide, a most public display of private affliction. I still feel the same.
That was until now. You know where all this is leading. As I have grown up, or at least older, I’ve seen my friends, fellow sojourners, slide off to being who they are. Is that when it happened? Is that where it all began? The “when” and the “where” elude me but the “it” will be decided by posterity. What happens to a man is less important than what the world remembers as happening. Another truth. And isn’t truth just what men are led to believe?
We remember what we want to remember of those we love, and those we care about. Nostalgia, those wiser than me call it, is simply the ability to forget the things that sucked.
As I write this sentence, there is this line from Anne Sexton which comes into my head—“take off your life like trousers,” which is from Sexton’s “The Wall,” a poem about dying which seems to suggest a way of living. Reveal yourself, Sexton says. Dismantle your wall. Take off your clothes, your flesh. . . .
unpick the lock of your bones.
In other words
take off the wall
that separates you from God.
Kimani had slung life over his shoulder like Christ’s cross on his way to Golgotha, his bouts with bipolar a yoke that proved too burdensome to bear. What porn does for masturbation, suicide does for mental health. It proffers the illusion of control. Kimani took his own life—“killed himself” as the media reported, because that’s what happened and isn’t suicide just a crime of loneliness? But that would be to belittle it, to think it was ever just black and white, this or that, in a country where men are three times as likely as women to kill themselves…
To write about suicide is to risk sounding bucolic and churlish, for my culture does not even have a term for it. Where I come from, thoughts of suicide are as rare as night runners. We know they exist but they rarely are spotted. Kill yourself? Ha! Taboo! Do you want to bring shame to our family? Do you want your mother to become the laughingstock of the village? Who will marry your sisters if people know that someone in your family has a brain that is touching wires? And, who will sell you the rope that would hang you? We do not sell such things in our markets. And even if you do get a rope, who will bury you?
A wise man once opined that the most memorable endings are “surprising, yet inevitable”. Kimani must have walked the same path and wondered the same things. What else has passed through his heart that does not occur to us? We will wonder. In Lurambi, we say a man dies with his secrets. Yet Death spooked, and drew itself up and spread its hood like a King Cobra about to strike. Which is why, perhaps, I think they call it the sting of death. Kimani’s death was surprising, because everyone would have us believe he was getting better. But it is inevitable that in a country that treats mental health as “zile ungonjwa zingine”, death would become less a possibility, and more a probability.
For what is the use of arriving too late to your own life when death arrives 20 minutes early? Death smiled at Kimani, as it will, inevitably, at all of us. All a man can do is smile back. We send off Kimani next Tuesday, having fought his private fights publicly, gallantly. His soul leaves without regret, to a place better than our town. We’ll say farewell to our friend, Kimani Mbugua, and go await our turn, in this city where the dead are born every day.
