Where I slightly disagreed with Ken Walibora

As I write this, I’m just from a memorial of the fallen Swahili writer, TV personality, and academic Ken Walibora (1964-2020).

His death is a testimony to the utter contempt in which our institutions hold the lives of ordinary Kenyans.

The author allegedly suffered stab wounds before being hit by a bus in a seedy part of Nairobi. His identification documents were stolen in the melee.

If government officials knew the victim wasn’t an ordinary Kenyan, they would have rushed Ken to hospital faster — and to a facility his condition demanded, not where he had to wait for an ICU bed for hours on end. (My dog Sigmund here doesn’t believe a word of the Kenyatta National Hospital bosses’ insistence that they did everything to save Ken’s life when he was brought to their rotting facility as an ordinary “unknown African man”. Such institutions would treat a “known” dog better).

I taught Ken briefly at the University of Nairobi in the early years of this millennium in a class where I was not only the youngest but also the least educated in the ways of the world. Elitist. Chaotic. Rude. (I passed off such bad manners as “deconstruction”, and, believe you me, I had some followers).

But the respect Ken showed this young mwalimu of his, who knew not much more than a few polysyllabic words from French theory books he had half-read, was quite flattering. He easily became my favourite student.

Maybe I was a bit overzealous one day when I put aside my long lecture (for which I hadn’t prepared well enough, anyway) to reprimand in the strongest terms possible, and for a full three hours, a big government bureaucrat in the class who had addressed my best student as Swaleh Mdoe.

I liked Swaleh’s broadcasts (and I still do), but I decoded the bureaucrat to be pretending he was so important that he could not tell between different TV guys if he met them off-screen.

I was pissed off and spewed lots of insults about people who used their balding heads primarily as objects to carry their remaining tufts of hair on.

Now I know most of those bureaucrats and government spies hate me, but I don’t care — and you can go tell them I said that! You can add I’m here.

When Ken joined Ohio State University in Columbus in 2005 for his postgraduate studies, he came over to Athens, Ohio, several times to say jambo to his teacher.

I also wrote one of my early essays on his 2003 Ndoto ya Amerika (American Dream), a beautiful book about an ordinary boy from rural western Kenya who, literally, dreamt that he had gone to America to become the superpower’s president.

I can’t quite remember what clever things I said in the essay now, but Ken was so kind to tell me in person when we met next that I had discovered in the book things that he himself as the author had not thought of when he wrote it.

We texted each other often, and he was one of the people with my secret phone number, different from my fake computer-generated WhatsApp line you can’t track.

But my intellectual relationship with Ken was sometimes rocky because my dog Sigmund usually came between us, sowing seeds of discord.

Like my younger self, Sigmund loves chaos, stepping on people’s toes, and burning bridges even before crossing them.

He wonders why upcountry Kenyan writers try to imitate the dialects of Swahili imposed on the region by colonialists and missionaries in stories about Juma, Ali, and Zainabu.

Aspiring to a purity they call “sanifu”, they pepper their Swahili with so many Arabic words you’d think you were hearing some Imam preaching in the streets of Bayt al-Faqih.

As if suffering an inferiority complex, such Kenyan Swahili users can’t separate the language from a religion they don’t even profess and seem to think they are Zanzibari born in Kenya by mistake.

Yet the sweetest and most liberating Swahili, according to Sigmund, is the one textured with local words and accents of ordinary people, the kind of Swahili we find in Congolese rhumba music.

Kamata nayo (hold on to that)! Sigmund usually incited Ken to rebel against his “sanifu” masters of the coastal strip and Indian Ocean islands, but I don’t think he took the mad dog seriously.

I wouldn’t, for fear the masters might castrate me and ship me to the Middle East.

I’ll have to gag Sigmund if he continues making this other incendiary argument about Swahili scholarship, some of which he uttered in Ken’s presence — maybe to just provoke him.

He used to tell Ken that because of the fetishisation of “sanifu” Swahili of the Indian Ocean coast while the ethnic Swahili themselves continue to be economically marginalised and stereotyped as lazy and intellectually inept, powerful ethnic groups have over the decades colonised the Swahili people and appropriated their culture and language.

In this form of internal colonialism put in place by Jomo Kenyatta’s tribal oligarchy, the ethnic Swahili are pushed further and further from the centre of their own language and institutions.

Now it is people like Evan bin Mwangi al-Murang’a (wearing his kofia and kanzu) who are Swahili experts in Kenya and abroad.

If this trend continues, Sigmund feels, there will be no major ethnic Swahili expert of Swahili in a couple of decades.

The few remaining Swahili scholars in the academy today will all be gradually replaced by the likes of Ustaadh Mwangi al-Murang’a.

Indeed, the post-independence system of Kenyan education is such that native Swahili students are failed in Swahili, their mother tongue, while Mwangi al-Murang’a gets good grades because his Githweri-teaching school in central Kenya is better equipped and staffed than schools in Swahili-land.

The system has also uprooted Swahili language from its quotidian usage by ordinary people in favour of some spurious pure “sanifu” dialect put in place by some now very dead European missionaries a long time ago.

Call it tribalism if you want, but I’ve seriously been urging my colleagues in various universities to help me recruit ethnic Swahili students into our literature and language PhD programmes.

However, now Covid-19, on which Ken wrote his last known poem as of now, has struck. We may not get the funding for this initiative for a few more years. Still, something needs to be done to correct this dire situation.

I met Ken last at the University of Nairobi’s Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies last year, where Prof Besi Muhonja of James Madison University in the US organised a symposium on local knowledge production.

Ken called me aside at some point and urged me to start writing in Swahili. I tried to do so almost immediately, though I wrote large portions of my essay in English and translated them into Swahili as I went along, with the help of such colleagues as Nahashon Nyangeri.

I was waiting for Ken’s feedback on the manuscript before sending it to one of the few Swahili-language journals.

When he tried to call me to discuss the work, the connection was bad. It also appeared like he was busy with travel and his work at Riara University, where he taught languages, culture, and international relations.

I didn’t push too much for Ken’s feedback, though, because I wasn’t sure how he took Sigmund’s insistence that much of Swahili criticism today is done by friends or slavish acolytes of the authors, who cannot be brutally honest in their evaluation of bad texts.

To be sure, there is a condescending attitude by male scholars towards women writers, but most of the readings of Swahili texts are praises of the author and his talents.

That’s why whichever Swahili work Ustaadh Evan bin Mwangi al-Murang’a picks to discuss, you’ll hear him regurgitating stock expressions about how the writer “amesisimua na kuibua hisia changanishi na tatanishi” (whatever that means).

Sigmund (to me with a wink): Ustaadh al-Murang’a, do all authors “sisimua na kuibua hisia changanishi na tatanishi?”

Then one morning in mid-April, amid these heated debates, I saw what was also quickly dismissed online as rumours regarding Ken’s demise. I tried to call him. No answer. I texted: “Hi, Ken!” No answer.