Margaret Ogola’s ‘Mandate of the People’ and the year of big choices

My recommended reading for this momentous year, culminating in August, is Dr Margaret Atieno Ogola’s Mandate of the People. Here, I follow the example of my fellow columnists who have suggested relevant readings for us as we head towards our historic choices in a few months from now.

One of us suggested Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People, and last week, my friend and publisher, John Mwazemba, highlighted the late Ken Walibora’s play, Mbaya Wetu(“Our Own Bad One”).

Mwazemba’s article particularly touched me because of not only the fluency and incisiveness with which he writes about books, but also because of the patent relevance of his choice of text to our politics.

Most of us, especially Nairobians, can readily relate the characters and incidents in the play to several recent experiences in our midst. In addition, Mwazemba’s mention of Ken Walibora on the eve of the anniversary of his tragic departure from us was a worthy opening gambit to the many tributes we should expect to our fallen fasihi (literary) giant.

Margaret Ogola is also a dear departed, snatched from us by cancer, aged 53, at the height of her professional and creative powers, in 2011. I did not know Dr Ogola personally, and my only close encounter with her was at the launch of a book about the late Maurice Michael Cardinal Otunga, at Nairobi’s Holy Family Basilica church hall, some time in the 1990s.The good doctor, you see, was an eminent Catholic Christian activist of the Opus Dei (God’s Work) brand, among other things.

Medical doctor

She was, however, primarily a medical doctor, a paediatrician, who practised for several years at the Kenyatta National Referral Hospital and several other medical facilities. The irony, however, is that she became internationally famous mainly as a literary figure, owing especially to the huge success of her first novel, The River and the Source. Its story of generations of mainly assertive women is intimate knowledge to most contemporary Kenyans.

I often quote Dr Ogola’s and Grace Ogot’s triumphs in Literature as proof that there are no hard and fast divisions between the sciences and the arts. A person can impact either field, or both fields, depending on how they nurture and deploy their abilities.

I hope someone will soon do a biography of Margaret Ogola, detailing for us such points as how and where she picked up the literary inspiration that endeared her to her readers. Was it at the high schools she attended, Thompson Falls and Alliance Girls, or at UoN? The only source that she credits, in her dedication of Mandate of the People, is her mother, Herina Ogunde Odongo, “the best storyteller I know.”

Anyway, Mandate of the People, published posthumously in 2012, is Margaret Ogola’s statement about the nature of Kenyan politics, and especially our election processes. Probably recalling the traumatic events of the previous exercise and anticipating the challenges of the next one, Ogola’s narrative squarely fictionalises an election battle in the “Migodi Constituency”. It details for us the contestants (or is it combatants), their supporters, the actual campaigns and tactics and even outcomes, which are surprisingly far from what one might have expected.

In all this, according to the narrative, the interests and concerns of the ordinary citizens, the people whose mandate is supposedly sought, appear to be of minimal importance to the power seekers. At one of the campaign rallies, a potential voter tells a candidate, “many have promised us all manner of things yet they do nothing or very little for us.

But after every five years they come back.” Does it sound familiar? The voters’ cynical conclusion that now they “demand pesa mbele  – money upfront” is obviously no solution, but it is understandable in the context.

But bribery is only one item in the huge raft of dirty tactics portrayed in the novel. In the moral tradition of the socially concerned African storyteller, Ogola pits a relatively honest and well-meaning hero, Candidate Leo Adam Agade, against a vicious, ogre-like villain, Gervase Kitambo Gwalla. Issues and public interests play next to no part in this veteran politician’s strategy. His weapons are intimidation, factional incitement and even abuse of people’s spirituality through churches and other places of worship. The question is if goodness can win against such evils.

Threat of violence

The most frightening and disturbing aspect of Ogola’s narrative is the endemic threat of violence around election times. In the opening chapter of the novel, significantly headed “On the Campaign Trail”, Ogola writes, “The term ‘youth’… was anyone, usually unemployed, who was willing and capable and could be hired to cause damage to an opposing group by means of hurling abuse, stones and other missiles at hand.” Is this not stuff worth reading and pondering right now? There is even the hint that, even if you win the ballot, there could be a bullet lurking somewhere.

Ogola fearlessly looks all these evils in the eye, and exposes them with a narrative of exceptional lucidity, as in the chapter titled “Violence Unleashed”. Yet, she remains firmly optimistic. Reading Mandate of the People and reflecting on it may help us, too, to figure out how we can remain positive and optimistic as we exercise our mandate. Above all, we may be persuaded to avoid destructive sectarianism and personality cults and the exploitation of our “youth” for missile-throwing missions.

At the end of her dedication of Mandate of the People, Ogola appends a memorable observation. “Hope,” she writes, “is the powerful mental bridge between the present we face and the future we desire.” She does not attribute it to any source. So, we can take it with gratefulness as part of her enlightening legacy to us.

To the Umma of believers observing the saum, I hope it is not too late to say “Ramadhan kareem.”

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and [email protected]