Prof Muigai wa Gachanja and his scholarly elegance

Do you remember the song “Kifo” (death) by a prominent Mswahili crooner? I do not have the lyrics on me, but I remember its insightful meditation on the enigma and conundrum of death.

The song came to my mind as I was struggling to internalise the shock and sorrow of losing my teacher and long-time colleague and friend, Professor Muigai wa Gachanja, formerly of Kenyatta University.

Prof Muigai wa Gachanja, who passed away last Monday, was an eminent scholar and academic, specialising in Literature, orature and folklore. He was particularly respected for his impeccable scholarship and also his “self-made” career into and through the echelons of higher education.

I heard that, unlike many of us of his generation, who benefited from “airlifts” and other early postcolonial aid programmes, Muigai wa Gachanja struggled up on his own, funding even his (long distance) high school education as he worked at low-paid jobs.

I preceded him at Kenyatta University by some years and, since I also had some (dubious) claims to orature (oral literature), it was not long before we established a close and warm comradeship.

Those who interacted only casually or formally with Muigai might be forgiven for their impression of him as a distant and even “aloof” character. Close up, the Prof was quite a warm character, an excellent conversationalist with a lively sense of humour..

I think that his apparent guardedness on the Kenyatta University campus was due to the rather “loaded” (not to say toxic) political atmosphere prevailing in the country, and on our campuses, at the time he returned from his doctoral studies in the US.

In the increasingly narrowing democratic space of the 1980s and 90s, our campuses were riven into factions. Apart from the majority of us who chose to hold our cowardly silence even as we witnessed the injustices, there were two diametrically opposed camps.

At one extreme were the fearless, vocal revolutionaries who dared to speak truth to the powers that were, despite the dire consequences. At the other extreme were the fanatical supporters of the regime (including the so-called “academics for hire”).

Not willing or prepared to be dragged into any of the camps, despite the ideological, personal, opportunistic or other tugs, Muigai wa Gachanja chose to keep his own counsel and not be identified too closely, especially, with either the pro- or anti-establishment groups.

Not that he lacked views or convictions about the state of affairs in the Kenya of those times. On the contrary, raised in the tough pre-independence final decades of the colonial era, and armed with a liberal Western education, he shared the disillusionment of most educated Kenyans of his time.

Indeed, he tried to contribute, in his own way, to the raising of awareness and reflection among his peers. He started, with his own funds I believe, a periodical, The Independent Review: Journal of Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies. It was an impressively high-quality publication, but it was rather short-lived, winding up after a few issues, ostensibly for lack of resources.

One should note, however, that the 1980s and 90s were not friendly to intellectual publications, except for those that sang the politically correct songs.

My friend Bedan Mbugua, who was arrested and subjected to many tribulations following the banning of his Beyond journal in 1988, can testify to this. Muigai wa Gachanja was alert to these constraints, and he spoke to his friends with vehement anger about the political ogres that had infiltrated our leadership systems, including university administrations.

Mention of the “ogres” brings me back to my work with Muigai wa Gachanja, as his teaching colleague, co-author and eventual research student. Muigai wa Gachanja had come to Oral Literature by way of Folklore Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

When he joined the late Jane Nandwa and me at Kenyatta University, our Oral Literature programmes were running and thriving. But there were some differences between Gachanja’s folkloristic approach and our (Makerere-inspired) “orature” operations.

Folklore was (and still is) a more settled discipline, with strong critical and interpretative theories and methods. Our orature, on the other hand, was a relatively new approach, primarily emphasising contact with live performance and still searching for appropriate ways of responding to its infinite dynamics.

But as we compared notes and experiences with Muigai wa Gachanja, I, for one, realised that I could learn and benefit a lot from the time-tried critical theories of folklore, to enrich my strictly and narrowly literary theories.

So, after the loss of our Dr Jane Awinja Nandwa, when my publishers wanted me to update the text I had authored for them with her, I turned to Muigai wa Gachanja, whose work I was learning to respect more and more, as I got better acquainted with it.

Indeed, it was Muigai wa Gachanja who suggested that we should do a two-part work. The first text would freely introduce oral literature to learners in the early years of secondary school, and the second would delve into the relatively advanced intricacies of interpretation.

That was how, Oral Literature (a Junior Course and a Senior Course) came to be. As Prof Muigai and I co-authored the texts, with inclusion of the best material from the work I had done with Dr Nandwa, my admiration and respect for my new co-author grew by leaps and bounds.

He was not only a meticulously disciplined and organised worker, qualities that I notoriously lack, but also a great networker, arranging with the publishers to get us to quiet upcountry retreats where we could work for weeks on end without interruption.

Little wonder, then, that when I embarked on my, belated, doctoral research work, I was profoundly grateful to my superiors when they named Prof Muigai wa Gachanja as one of my supervisors. But that is a story for another day.

For now, we only say, “Rest well, Prof Muigai wa Gachanja. You told the tale. You sang the song. You danced the dance. Nĩ wega.”

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