essayists-from-kenya

"Science is smaller than music, than the patterns of the body; the large confident world of sound and body gathers. If my mind and body are quickening, lagging behind is a rising anxiety of words."

"We fail to trust that we knew ourselves to be possible from the beginning."

"The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas."

"I spent the past few weeks polishing a short story for the Caine Prize for African Writing. It is about a young girl (Girl Child, Gender!) who is questioning the world, and her mother's values (Empowerment). I mine every sexy African theme I can think of. The Caine Prize, based in England, is worth fifteen thousand dollars, and you get an agent and fame and lots of commissioned work."

"Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West."

"There is an ache in my chest today, sweet, searching, and painful, like a tongue that is cut and tingles with sweetness and pain after eating a strong pineapple."

"Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat."

"Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed."

"Readers will be put off if you don’t mention the light in Africa. And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical."

"My laugh is far away inside, like the morning car not starting when the key turns."

"It is an aspect of Kenya I am always acutely aware of - and crave, because I don't have it all. My third language, Gikuyu, is nearly non-existent; I can't speak it. It is a phantom limb..."

"When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa’s situation. But do not be too specific."

"In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions."

"There are dissidents everywhere. We have to all unite and silence the dissidents. From the radio, we know that foreign influenzes are invecting us, secret foreign influenzes are infringing us, invincing us, perferting our gildren, preaking our gultural moralities, our ancient filosofies, the dissidents are bushing and bulling, pringing segret Kurly Marxes, and Michael Jagsons, making us backliding robots, and our land is becoming moonar handscapes."

"I start to understand why so little good literature is produced in Kenya. The talent is wasted writing donor-funded edutainment and awareness-raising brochures for seven thousand dollars a job. Do not complicate things, and you will be paid well."

"Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset."

"Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress."

"Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular."

"The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas."

"....see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas."

"Cloud travel is well and good when you have mastered the landings. I never have. I must live, not dream about living."

"International correspondents with their long dictaphones, and dirty jeans, and five hundred words before whiskey, are slouched over the red velvet chairs, in the VIP section in the front, looking for the Story: the Most Macheteing Deathest, Most Treasury Corruptest, Most Entrail-Eating Civil Warest, Most Crocodile-Grinning Dictatorest, MOst Heart-Wrenching and Genociding Pulitzerest, Most Black Big-Eyed Oxfam Child Starvingest, Most Wild African Savages Having AIDS-Ridden Sexest with Genetically Mutilatedest Girls...The Most Authentic Real Black Africanest story they can find."

"This place, it reminds me how lucky I am — just to be alive, to be walking out of here."

"More than just being flat broke, you could say we were like boxers who, having slugged through predictable wins, were ready to finally fight a worthy opponent. We were ready for a case like the one that nearly broke us, our first case together..."

"It was always a herd boy, venturing into the depths of the forest, who found the dead body. In our instance, he happened to have a cell phone and so we were able to get to the body in a matter of hours."

"DNA was useful only with a large criminal database — Kenya’s was in its infancy, and unless we were extremely lucky, there would be no match. And dental records? Forget about it. We just had to hope that the body would yield some secrets."

"In the United States, there’s the Nevada desert — and football stadiums, if you count Jimmy Hoffa."

"Whoever killed him took the casing."

"It was around midday but it might as well have been midnight, with us canvassing for clues in the light of a full moon — the canopy of the ancient trees let in an annoying in-between light, too low to see well in, yet too bright for flashlights."

"In Kenya, if someone with enough credibility told you that he or she was going to send you to Ngong, you had better back down unless you could get them there first."

"There was nothing more to do but get the body to the pathologist. We didn’t have any body bags and the Administrative Police, or APs as we called them for short, had to carefully roll him onto a woolen blanket."

"To tell the story of a past so as to portray an inevitable destiny is, for humankind, a need as universal as tool-making. To that extent, we may say that a human being is, by nature, historicus."

"Gikonyo greedily sucked sour pleasure from this reflection which he saw as a terrible revelation. To live and die alone is the ultimate truth."

"In Kenya we want deaths which will change things, that is to say, we want true sacrifice. But first we have to be ready to carry the cross. I die for you, you die for me, we become a sacrifice for one another. So I can say that you, Karanja, are Christ. Everybody who takes the Oath of Unity to change things in Kenya is a Christ."

"African countries, as colonies and even today as neo-colonies, came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the languages of Europe: English-speaking, French-speaking or Portuguese-speaking African countries."

"“I would hate to see a train run over my mother or father, or brothers. Oh, what would I do?” [Mumbi] quickly exclaimed. “Women are cowards.” Karanja said half in joke. “Would you like a train to run over you?” Mumbi retorted angrily. Karanja felt the anger and did not answer."

"Unknown to those around him, Kihika’s heart hardened towards “these people,” long before he had even encountered a white face. Soldiers came back from the war and told stories of what they had seen in Burma, Egypt, Palestine and India; wasn’t Mahatma Gandhi, the saint, leading the Indian people against the British rule? Kihika fed on these stories: his imagination and daily observation told him the rest; from early on, he had visions of himself, a saint, leading Kenyan people to freedom and power."

"What is a blood relation? [...] What does it matter if people are alike or not? A child is a child. We all come from the same womb, the common womb one Kenya. The blood shed for our freedom has washed away the differences between that clan and this one, this nationality and that one. Today there is no Luo, Gĩkũyũ, Kamba, Giriama, Luhya, Maasai, Meru, Kallenjin or Turkana. We are all children of one another. Our mother is Kenya, the mother of all Kenyan people.""

"Why, we may ask, should an African writer, or any writer, become so obsessed by taking from his mother-tongue to enrich other tongues? Why should he see it as his particular mission? We never asked ourselves: how can we enrich our languages? How can we 'prey' on the rich humanist and democratic heritage in the struggles of other peoples in other times and other places to enrich our own? Why not have Balzac, Tolstoy, Sholokov, Brecht, Lu Hsun, Pablo Neruda, H.C. Anderson, Kim Chi Ha, Marx, Lenin, Albert Einstein, Galileo, Aeschylus, Aristotle and Plato in African languages? And why not create literary monuments in our own languages?...No these questions were not asked. What seemed to worry us more was this: after all the literary gymnastics of preying on our languages to add life and vigour to English and other foreign languages, would the result be accepted as good English or good French? Will the owner of the language criticise our usage?"

"Many of us talked like that because we wanted to deceive ourselves. It lessens your shame. We talked of loyalty to the Movement and the love of our country. You know a time came when I did not care about Uhuru for the country anymore. I just wanted to come home.”"

"“In a flash, I was convinced that the growth of the British Empire was the development of a great moral idea: it means, it must surely lead to the creation of one British nation, embracing all peoples of all colors and creeds, based on the just proposition that all men were created equal.”"

"I would even say that too much education can be a form of foolishness.""

"At Githima, people believed that a complaint from [Karanja] was enough to make a man lose his job. Karanja knew their fears. Often when men came into his office, he would suddenly cast them a cold eye, drop hints, or simply growl at them; in this way, he increased their fears and insecurity. But he also feared the men and alternated this fierce prose with servile friendliness."

"Look, Sister,You know I want the boy to grow in the Lord."

"[Mugo] had always found it difficult to make decisions. Recoiling as if by instinct from setting in motion a course of action whose consequences he could not determine before the start, he allowed himself to drift into things or be pushed into them by an uncanny demon; he rode on the wave of circumstance and lay against the crest, fearing but fascinated by fate."

"You two are wrong. A thief is no worse than a witch, and a witch is no worse than a thief. A thief is a witch, and a witch is a thief. For when a thief steals your land, your house, your clothes, isn't he really killing you? And when a witch destroys your life, isn't he stealing everything you own?""

"As a worker, I know very well that the forces of law and order are on the side of those who rob the workers of the products of their sweat, of those who steal food and land from the peasants. The peace and the order and the stability they defend with armored cars is the peace and the order and the stability of the rich, who feast on bread and wine snatched from the mouths of the poor—yes, they protect the eaters from the wrath of the thirsty and the hungry. Have you ever seen employers being attacked by the armed forces for refusing to increase the salaries of their workers? What about when the workers go on strike? And they have the audacity to talk about violence!""

"Stay well, Son. Go well and in peace, Mother."

"Different! Different! Puu! They are all alike. Those coated with the white clay of the white man’s ways are the worst. They have nothing inside."

"Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people's culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others."