The Bushman, Kafiraman and the case for rational thinking

The Bushman is Prof Everett Standa, whom we lost to the Grim Reaper last Sunday. The Kafiraman is, of course, Prof Francis Imbuga, who will have been gone from us all of 11 years come next Saturday.

Both men, as you may know, were close friends of mine, and comrades in the literary struggle.

You can see why these literary icons are on my mind. Indeed, one of my memories of the three of us together is of when Imbuga and I made a courtesy call on Standa at the Vice-Chancellor’s Office at Kenyatta University.

Standa had just taken over as VC at that august institution, replacing the mercurial George Eshiwani. Imbuga had returned from his long stint in post-genocide Rwanda and I was visiting from Makerere.

We chatted merrily, congratulating Standa on his elevation to the high office, and expressing our joy at his return to his KU base, where he had taught with us for many years before moving to Moi University.

I hinted at my fear that his many new responsibilities might pose a challenge to his creative pursuits. He agreed, humorously pointing out that mine was an understatement.

Before we parted, he gifted me with a slim collection of his verse, which includes his famous signature piece, “I Speak for the Bush”.

Little did I know then what a precious treasure this little volume would become for me in my bereavement and loneliness (upweke na ukiwa).

As for Imbuga, remembering his death anniversary prompted me to look again at one of his last dramatic works, The Return of Mugofu. Those who were with the legendary thespian on the eve of his departure told us that he wished that that play had been put on the school syllabus, instead of his classic Betrayal in the City, which was making yet another return to the classroom.

Maybe, when you have had another look at The Return of Mugofu, you will see why Imbuga felt that this reflective dramatic piece deserved serious attention from our new generation of readers and theatre goers.

In any case, my intuition is that The Return of Mugofu underlines a continuity of Imbuga’s awareness and critique of humanity and, specifically, the Africa (Kafira) of his times.

Several literary scholars have pointed out to us the coherence of Imbuga’s “Kafira” plays, including the posthumous The Green Cross of Kafira.

The recurrent theme of depravity (Kaffir, kafiri) in African public affairs. But even in his non-explicitly Kafira works, like The Successor, Mugofu and his first novel, The Shrine of Tears, that “Kafirasque” thread of the absurd in African affairs is unmistakable.

In his irrepressibly humorous and ironic style, Imbuga persistently asks why, of all the choices open to us, we seem to go for the most perverse.

Why, when the truth is known to us, should we want, and even beg, our leaders “to tell a lie”, as Oriomra does in The Successor? Has reason become a prisoner within us, as John Donne hints in his “Batter My Heart” sonnet?

This brings me to my direct musings about our literary enterprise and what writers like Standa and Imbuga might be expected to contribute to society. A professor friend of mine, a top flight medical doctor specialising in endocrinology, recently asked me, “What does Philosophy teach? What do people learn there?”

“It teaches you how to think,” I answered. “It trains you in how to reason systematically.” I confess I was improvising. The question had caught me off guard and I did not know how to answer it without plunging into a lengthy lecture on the history of knowledge. Moreover, I have never studied Philosophy in any formal context.

Yet, somehow, I know that all my scholarly and other operations are grounded in philosophy. Have you ever wondered why our eminent scholars, who formally prove themselves in their areas of knowledge, are called PhDs? “Doctor of Philosophy”, etymologically, means “a teacher of the love of wisdom”, sophia being the precious gift of rightful thinking.

But if the professor had asked me what Literature teaches, I would have answered him confidently that Literature teaches you how to feel.

In other words, Literature trains you in the skills of closely observing the realities around you and responding to them rationally and sympathetically. These are the skills that the best of our literary practitioners, like Standa and Imbuga, operate and share with us.

“I speak for the bush,” writes Standa, “you speak for the civilised: will you hear me?” This is the skill of realistic acceptance of differences and rational approaches to them.

Pretty obvious, you might say, yet how difficult to live in practice! I believe that the minds of most thinking people are oppressively preoccupied with humanity’s apparent inability to live rationally with its infinite varieties.

The bloodiness and destructiveness of this year, the first as we emerge from the covid-19 scourge, sadly illustrates our inability to live rationally and sympathetically. Lack of Philosophy (thinking) and Literature (feeling) skills is exposing us as the mere self-destructive animals that we might end up as, if any of us survive at all.

Look at Palestine-Israel, Sudan, Russia-Ukraine, to mention just a few of the worst scenario cases around us.

Are those thousands of children‘s corpses littering our TV, computer and phone screens symbols of our status as the most intelligent, most advanced creature on the planet? Our literary practitioners, experts in feeling, have consistently detected these absurdities and contradictions in us and urged us to liberate ourselves from them.

“Will you hear me?” asks Standa. Wetu, as for Imbuga, and indeed the whole of our generation and the one after us, our heartfelt question, based on our observation, is simple and direct. Can we humanise this continent? Can we change it from the “kafiri” (apostate, renegade) Kafira into the true Africa for which our liberators fought and died?

Imbuga and his fellow writers trace their “Kaffirisation” of our continent through betrayal of our promises of uhuru, through deprivation of freedoms, selfish power grabs and instigation of conflicts like “tribal clashes” and pogroms like the Rwanda genocide.

Do you remember that Imbuga and David Mulwa were in Rwanda soon after the tragic events there, and shot a film, Some Time in April, about it?

But even the younger Kenyan writers have not failed to address these sad developments, as we see in such works as the late Ken Walibora’s Kufa Kuzikana and Assumpta Matei’s Chozi la Heri (which I recently translated as A Tear of Joy).

Shall we hear them? (My friend, Prof Egara Kabaji, invited me some years ago to deliver a memorial lecture on Francis Imbuga at the Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology. I travelled there, but logistical snags made it impossible to share. I hope this compensates in a small way for our hijacked date).

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