About two weeks ago, at a serene spot in Embu fashioned out of a farm that once hosted caves inhabited by Mau Mau during the liberation struggle that led to Kenya’s independence in 1963, I met one of the most versatile artists I know.
Makumi Njue has a number of reggae songs to his name, has a group that re-enacts traditional Embu music, carrying on the work done by the late historian, Prof Mwaniki Kabeca, and Prof Emeritus of Literature Ciarunji Chesaina, who has written two beautiful books: Oral Literature of Embu and Mbeere and Oral Literature of the Kalenjin.
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On that chilly Sunday morning, I found Makumi not practising the moves for a high-frequency folk song, neither was he belting out a reggae tune. On a side note, I wish he could sing more in Kiembu or Kenyan English instead of the obviously elusive – to him – Jamaican patois, but that is not the story today. On this chilly morning, Njue was standing a few yards from a canvas suspended in mid-air by two wooden pillars. After greetings, I was of a mind to ask him what he wanted to do with the canvas, but after many years in the art and literary field, I fully understand an artist’s relationship with solitude and secrets.
When I was a young man tasked with smoking out budding artists from their hideouts and putting them on the popularity map of East Africa, I came to appreciate the fact that artists are the most sensitive lot in society. You could commission a storybook illustrator to deliver twenty artworks within two weeks, and then two days to the deadline, with only one artwork remaining, he or she may at best delay the work for another two weeks trying to psyche himself back from muse block occasioned by just one unkind word from you. Or he or she may decide to tear to pieces the nineteen pieces already done on a piece of manila paper and start afresh. All because you inadvertently used a single word that triggered the artist the last time you called to remind him or her about the deadline. Yes, and to hell – or wherever bad people go – with your deadline and future gigs.
For this reason, and many others gathered over two decades of working with writers and other artists, I resolved to keep my curiosity as to what intention Makumi had with the canvas right in front of us. So I left him there, a brush in his hand and a muffin-full of dreadlocks at the back of his head as he peered mystically at the canvas.
The only question I asked this artist was: Where do you get the people, the time and the resources to put together a team that not only researches near-extinct folk songs, with all the cries about tough times – by the way, was there ever a time when things were not tough? – and so on. His simple answer was that he did it using his own resources. I had thought some donor agency or even the devolved government was behind it.
About one hour later, I went back to check on Makumi and on the canvas was a painting of children playing on one side and, on the other, across a grain-level authentic tarmac road, was a lion, its ferocious eyes peering back at you in a manner that left no doubt as to who was the real king of that canvas jungle.
As I travelled back to Nairobi, I kept asking myself: what kind of passion drives one man who works for a living like the rest of us, to take it upon himself to preserve the ways and traditions of his people, an obviously expensive task that should ideally be tackled at the collective or sponsored level?
My mind wandered back to the late Dr Ezekiel Alembi. Now, for those who have no idea who this was, Dr Alembi was a literature don at Kenyatta University. A distinguished Kenyan scholar of literature, drama, and folklore, he once chaired the Literature Department at Kenyatta University and directed the university’s radio services.
When my employer back then tasked me with coming up with a series of storybooks for preteen children, I knew Dr Alembi had to be on the list. For the prolific author of more than 40 children’s books had the passion for the authentic African story – the kind of life I wanted to breathe into the stories I was coming up with.
The author of A Ride to the Park, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga: People’s Revolutionary, Elijah Masinde: Rebel with a Cause, Andisi and the Cat, Brave Girls, The Tortoise Song, and Kwa Nini Ndovu Hali Nyama had long earned his stripes when he successfully defended and earned his PhD in Folklore from the University of Helsinki in 2002. His dissertation? Construction of Abanyole Worldview through Okhukoma (funeral) Poetry. Who manages to do that? I found myself wondering.
The next thing I knew, I was eating ugali and chicken with Dr Alembi at the senior common room at Kenyatta University, the culmination of which was the coming to birth of a literary milestone I am sure to cite when I’m asked by Angel Gabriel what I did with my time on earth, at a panel in heaven when our time here on earth is done.
It is from the passion of people like Dr Alembi, and now incarnated in younger artists like Makumi, that shocks us into the realisation of how much potential is bottled in the hearts of the people. Back in Nairobi, watching the patriotism-inspiring game between Harambee Stars and Congo DRC, I saw how charged the crowds at the local were, and how the young stars carried the aspirations of a country in every pass, shot on goal and defensive move.
Perhaps it’s time we ended the bittersweet relations between politics and things like sports and the arts by supporting artists to do what they really like rather than asking them to do our portraits, sing songs in support of an aspirant for an MCA seat, or otherwise participate in the self-aggrandisement project of some politician or other. Perhaps this is not about politicians but rather about a much-needed search for a non-political pool of resources to support art. And perish the thought that this would be another endless abyss into which to throw good money. Art pays, and I should know.
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By Henry Munene