December 2008 was a strange, funny month. Prof Samson Kegengo Ongeri had just come on TV to announce that, in the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education, class of 2008, I, Ediboy “Chinedu” Ashioya, had got 398 marks out of a possible 500, effectively jettisoning my dream of being an obnoxious ‘I-went-to-Alliance’ fella.
Then, as now, I questioned those results. Those results, by the way, are yet to be bested by any of my younger siblings, and I don’t know if that says good things about me or bad things about them.
December 2008 was also the first time I met my younger sister, H—. You don’t need the backstory. What you need to know is that my father is a handsome man, a jawline that looks like it was sculpted by Rodin himself, and the man can talk a snake into growing legs. Had it been him instead of Adam in the Garden of Eden, it would be Lucifer Morningstar who ended up eating the apple. But alas! It wasn’t. So here we are. What I am trying to say is, when God wasn’t looking, my father definitely was.
My father is many things, but he is not a bad father, as fathers go. The man loves his children, all of them, and not once have any of us felt like half-siblings. There is no word for a half-brother or half-sister in our language; is there in yours? Ndugu ni ndugu , he’d say. It’s hard to deny that when we have all inherited a variation of his forehead, a sign from above that he is actually human.
But he has a temper, as do I, since we share the same ancestors. What burns in him leaves ashes in me. He is a workaholic too, believing that a man must eat his sweat, and so we learned to work hard, believing that this was the surest gospel to earn a seat at the right hand of our father. Except Johnny.
That one’s an insurgent, the one rebel who would start a revolution and install a new world order. Needless to say, and as these things go, Johnny is father’s favourite child, which father denies, of course, but we’ve all seen the MPesa messages, and the things I would face a firing squad for, Johnny wouldn’t even be called up to the stand.
I’ve admired my father the man, but I have long respected my father the son. He would leave the house at 4am, go to Mumias, and take his father to the hospital by 8am. His father, now that the world had done things to him, would call him, and he would drop everything—well, not everything, the man loves his meat—and head over to cater to him.
Too often, I have examined his fatherhood with a surgeon’s scalpel that I forget that he, too, is still learning to be a son; and he was raised by the kind of third-world guy that couldn’t exist then without a woman or two or three to take care of. If ever there was an advertisement on why Luhyas don’t marry each other is this: You could be marrying your literal cousin! That ‘shemeji’ you hear being thrown around is not just being thrown around.
I think about this at the most inopportune of moments. I could be in church thinking about St Peter’s pearly gates, and how heaven is the land of milk and honey, and how that is quite unfair to the lactose intolerant—does God have plant-based milk?—and there, in the corner of my mind, hanging on a peg would be a thought of what kind of son I will be in my 60s.
Will I pick up my father’s call as fast as he picks up his father’s? Would I be a willing caregiver when the pressing demands of work, family, and the revolution all boil in my blood? Maybe that is one of the punishments of hell—an eternal yearning to stop thinking about what you are thinking.
On Father’s Day, I had a chat with Arthur Igeria, senior partner at Igeria & Ngugi Advocates. He was telling me how he lost his son, last year, and how that tore the seams of what he believed about fatherhood, because pain is a needle that lodges when you try to remove it, and this is how he had learned that life was all chaos and aching uncertainty, and then he said, “When you lose a child to death, the underlying feeling is that you failed to protect them.”
I had wanted to tell him something that would encourage him, but what would I have said that he hadn’t heard before? They’d all sound like words that had already been said a thousand times, words that people had learned to say to get it all out and over with. Besides, there is no prosthetic for an amputated spirit.
He told me he used to think that if you are very deliberate as a father, you can get your children to be exactly what you want them to be. He knows this now to be a lie. Children will be what children will be. This is his mantra in parenting and should be yours, too.
This past week, I have caught myself ruminating on those words. I think of my father. I think of my father’s father and how the good times are almost over. That despite their success as a parent, you can fail as a child. The inverse is also true. This is also the only plausible explanation for why Prof Samson Kegengo Ongeri denied me two marks to hit 400, because of standardisation, because I was in a private school, because I was in a private school in Nairobi. That you can succeed as a student but be failed by the system. And this has always been the cause of revolutions. Sindio Johnny?
