Beni’s story continued…
By Wesonga Robert
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
It is a good path, that which allows the walker to walk it in peace. A walker looking for peace of mind would fancy walking on a path like that; perhaps trying to piece together the broken pieces of his life into one significant piece. Such a path permits its walker to get harmony in the glorious appreciation of nature. In fact, a path like that enables the walker to become one with nature.
You unite with the little acacia shrubs as you walk along the path. You commune with the no less hardworking bees of the semi-arid ecosystem as they go about their business among the rare flowers of succulent cactus plants. As you walk trying to avoid the dusty tracts left behind by herds of goats, sheep and cattle, you get constantly reminded of the presence of life. You walk on carefully here; slowly and musingly. You might even freely choose to allow your heart to join the hearts and spirits of other beings in this celebration of life.
Beni badly needed the loneliness of the path as he did his usual walk home from work. It is with silence and a calm sense of awareness that he enjoyed witnessing the sublime innocence of the environment in Samburu. This day had been long. His job, which had been steadily becoming a burden to both his body and mind, had gone a notch higher in attempting to destabilize his self-esteem. He was having more arguments at work than he considered safe. Each morning he left for work promising himself never to participate in the controversial discussions at work. He would leave his house intent on keeping his ideas to himself. So far, this efforts had followed by no success.
Many times he had been accused of being abstract and theoretical. Not a few of his colleagues and friends now believed that his ideas were impractical and could only find functionality in the non-existent utopian world. Beni felt that if his accusers were right, then he was not to blame. If he ever thought that these accusers were right, then his experiences were to blame. It was in the lecture halls that he began having his mind. At first, it appeared to be a mere working of his mind towards the satisfaction of his academic curiosities. But, like all good things, this thinking held him hostage. It held him a slave in the somewhat futile thinking that the theoretical world of the academy could find its full realisation in the practical world. Even now, he wondered why courses like Critical Thinking were being taught when thinking critically was never really readily acceptable anywhere he had been.
She was beginning to slacken her pace. Beni noticed that her strides were growing shorter with each successive stride. When he had got out of the gate, she was about two hundred metres ahead. She had glanced back and seen Beni moving towards the main road. At this point he began imagining that she would reduce her pace. And now she was doing it. She was a new addition to their workforce. Rael was one of those ageing ones who refused to accept the reality that age was finally catching up with them.
The top of her head was a maze of the natural and the synthetic. Where the natural Samburu hair would have held sway, overused artificial hair dominated. And this artificial hair made her cut the image that had induced a friend of Beni to remark that head looked like the mane of an ageing lioness. Misled thus that she looked younger with her head, she had the habit of swaying her head periodically when she talked. I think by this she meant to place her hair behind the ear. She did it not with the finesse in Hollywood movies; hers must have been a practiced move copied from a Nigerian movie of the lowest calibre. And Beni fell short of telling her that if she did it out there, she would be made to feel out of place in five seconds.
Rael was the reason why Beni decided to start dressing badly. She had one morning smiled, exposing two browning metallic teeth at the corners of her upper teeth, and told Beni that he was very smart. At that time, Beni almost thought her mouth was a masterpiece of dental genius imposed upon her by a film director. That was until he realized that she was not the creature he had seen in the movie, Nightmare on Elm Street. Beni decided to punish Rael by showing her the greatest contempt expressed in his poor dressing.
There was something better to look at. This thing was happening fifteen kilometres north-east of Kisima. It was above the forest on Kirisia Hills overlooking Baawa. The semi-darkened cloud was so selective; it was severally selective, sometimes for weeks or even months. It was doing this again. What reached Kisima and the surrounding areas when this happened was only the exceptional scent of soil held in the resultant cold breeze that wafted from the hills. The scent reminded Beni of the months of January and February in his childhood.
Back then, this smell would come after weeks of hard sunshine. At first the smell was not there, but it soon came after the spattering fall of the rain on the ground. When the singular drops turned into streamlets and began flowing collectively, the smell disappeared and left the people and the land bathing in the healing aspect of the rain. The misty picture above the hills was further illuminated by the six o’clock sunshine. Beni decided to catch the image using his camera phone.
The image was a little hazy but with some editing could suffice to be a screensaver on his desktop. He turned round and captured the sun. The image of the sun was clear but harsh to the eyes. He regarded it for some time and decided that he did not need it. He deleted it. A good photographer is one who captures rare and romantic images with freshness of style, he thought. The sunshine in Samburu was not something one could write home about. It was what everybody expected to hear.
By the time he resumed walking, he noticed that Rael had given up. She was hurrying ahead of him. She cut the corner at the Kisima Catholic church without as much as glancing at the approaching lorry. It was the same lorry Beni had seen selling timber and posts in Kisima. The dark smoke emanating at the back as it laboured on spoke more than a thousand words. He wanted to think about it but dismissed the idea. He had to stop his ung’ombe ideology from resurfacing again.
………………………….. TO BE CONTINUED.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Friday, April 8, 2011
BENI’S SPEECH: “SINS OF THE FATHERS”
By Wesonga Robert
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
He had to be a little silly. That is what he thought of himself. As long as he still thought about the trees and the dust and the dried grass, and the abrasive dry winds, and the absentee rainfall, he had to think of himself to be little nuts. In the face of his own personal problems, the heat and dust and dryness of Samburu were issues that deserved to be always left alone. Those were problems of the environment. Problems he had neither created nor commissioned anybody to create.
And for all he cared, the residents of Samburu should have been left to their own devices if at the time they still refused to see the relationship between the dry winds and the dry bones, protruding under the skins of their cattle.
He had his own problems back home. Beni had his own district hundreds of kilometres away from Samburu. And his district of birth too had its own peculiar problems. In fact he thought it was a little unfair of him to think in a manner by which he risked an interpretation by the natives that he treated the problems in Samburu as though they were the only problems in the country. For the case of Samburu, the results of the conflict between human beings and the environment had become too stark to be ignored. Even then, still, nobody listened to The Professor. Forcing distractions out, Beni let his mind concentrate on the speech. He had been obligated to make a speech on the World Environment Day. So he went on writing:
“For the rest of the country, a sense of complacency that hurls environmental fears through the window still dominates. These rare fears of a future in which generations to come will be incapable of sustaining their own development because of the sins of their fathers are needlessly cast from the halls of human concern, out to the darkness; to the hounds and wolves. And this attitude still reigns. Only few like The Professor now retain a tender spot that entertains these fears. They are, to say the least, fears concerning what everybody else seems to have failed to start worrying about.
When you travel to the North-Eastern part of the country, you will not meet this kind of disregard. You will find that the winds of the Northern Frontier have done their bit in this widespread degeneration of the essence of nature. As a consequence, you are to find a people resigned to the brutality of nature; a nature that seems to paying back for an equal measure of brutality it has received from man. And here you find a people whose faces show hardly more than their resignation to this unfortunate arrangement. Perhaps it is this brutality of nature that – in a somewhat magical way - manifests itself in the mercurial temperament of some members of the population. Who can blame a man for being harsh when everything around, ranging from the sun to the wind has little intention of letting up a lifetime beating it has inflicted on a people for ages?
Sometimes on one of your travels – voluntary or otherwise - you have left the Northern frontier and moved to the centre of the country. Here you sometimes find the succulent breeze invitingly wafting past your eyebrows; leaving you with a feeling as if you have been touched by a Greek enchantress. On a lucky day, when the air is not being chocked by the teargas smoke, you will walk into Uhuru Park taking in this breeze. And the breeze will caress your inner sensibilities so that anyone appreciative of the co-existence between nature and modernity will not stop to draw comparisons between Tokyo and Nairobi as two great cities. Sometimes you will stand, or even sit under the tree planted by The Professor and witness the artistry of the elevator as it moves upwards to the eighteenth floor of Anniversary Towers.
If you went to the university somewhere around the start of the millennium hitherto, you will know you have been in that lift as you rose with bated breath going to check the status of your university loan at HELB. If you were there much earlier, you will remember how many a time and oft you had to descend after being told that your loan would be approved the week after. Maybe you were once one of those who had appealed for an additional loan. And so as you savour the shade under that tree planted by The Professor, you remember how you descended in the elevator having been assured that your appeal had gone through.
And the breeze would help you invite a question to your mind. How many of those now descending in the lift from HELB ever thought about being like The Professor? Or had they become those who left The Professor become a prophet disregarded at home?”
He stopped. Beni was almost through with his speech.
And as he went on, almost summing up, he also remembered the many who said that The Professor was their heroine and role model even as they, in the same breath as their words, threw filth and food remnants out of moving vehicles. But he decided he was not going to include that in the speech. This is a speech he wanted to raise the least eyebrows. Beni had to go on writing the speech, moderating everything so that his passions about the issue of the environment remained only implied. In fact, he said he would go through the whole speech and edit it so unemotionally for it to remain detached from him. He discarded these thoughts that were going through his mind and bent down to finish the speech:
“From Uhuru Park, you moved to the inner core. There you would constantly be reminded that all was not well. You saw the gaping gushes that spewed the filthy contents of the gutter into the Nairobi River. The inner core, considered the citadel of order, knowledge, class, reason and all the things that can be mentioned in the same breath as the phrase: Modern Civilization …”
Beni stopped writing again. He was unimpressed by the direction this speech was taking. What needed to worry him was the lack of his own person. At this time, this thought hit hard. He thought about the bills he had to pay; the school fees he was obligated to provide, and the total sense of presence and direction required from him by family and relatives. These, he mused, were the real things he should solve before he moved to what concerned the universe. This came to Beni because he thought he was a man who believed in the charity that must begin at home.
“I don’t have to give this speech!” he said to himself loudly, folding the writing pads he was drafting on. He went out of the house, locking the door behind him. “A cold Pilsner at Jere’s might help me arrive at a decision,” he thought loudly.
wesongarobert@yahoo.com
He had to be a little silly. That is what he thought of himself. As long as he still thought about the trees and the dust and the dried grass, and the abrasive dry winds, and the absentee rainfall, he had to think of himself to be little nuts. In the face of his own personal problems, the heat and dust and dryness of Samburu were issues that deserved to be always left alone. Those were problems of the environment. Problems he had neither created nor commissioned anybody to create.
And for all he cared, the residents of Samburu should have been left to their own devices if at the time they still refused to see the relationship between the dry winds and the dry bones, protruding under the skins of their cattle.
He had his own problems back home. Beni had his own district hundreds of kilometres away from Samburu. And his district of birth too had its own peculiar problems. In fact he thought it was a little unfair of him to think in a manner by which he risked an interpretation by the natives that he treated the problems in Samburu as though they were the only problems in the country. For the case of Samburu, the results of the conflict between human beings and the environment had become too stark to be ignored. Even then, still, nobody listened to The Professor. Forcing distractions out, Beni let his mind concentrate on the speech. He had been obligated to make a speech on the World Environment Day. So he went on writing:
“For the rest of the country, a sense of complacency that hurls environmental fears through the window still dominates. These rare fears of a future in which generations to come will be incapable of sustaining their own development because of the sins of their fathers are needlessly cast from the halls of human concern, out to the darkness; to the hounds and wolves. And this attitude still reigns. Only few like The Professor now retain a tender spot that entertains these fears. They are, to say the least, fears concerning what everybody else seems to have failed to start worrying about.
When you travel to the North-Eastern part of the country, you will not meet this kind of disregard. You will find that the winds of the Northern Frontier have done their bit in this widespread degeneration of the essence of nature. As a consequence, you are to find a people resigned to the brutality of nature; a nature that seems to paying back for an equal measure of brutality it has received from man. And here you find a people whose faces show hardly more than their resignation to this unfortunate arrangement. Perhaps it is this brutality of nature that – in a somewhat magical way - manifests itself in the mercurial temperament of some members of the population. Who can blame a man for being harsh when everything around, ranging from the sun to the wind has little intention of letting up a lifetime beating it has inflicted on a people for ages?
Sometimes on one of your travels – voluntary or otherwise - you have left the Northern frontier and moved to the centre of the country. Here you sometimes find the succulent breeze invitingly wafting past your eyebrows; leaving you with a feeling as if you have been touched by a Greek enchantress. On a lucky day, when the air is not being chocked by the teargas smoke, you will walk into Uhuru Park taking in this breeze. And the breeze will caress your inner sensibilities so that anyone appreciative of the co-existence between nature and modernity will not stop to draw comparisons between Tokyo and Nairobi as two great cities. Sometimes you will stand, or even sit under the tree planted by The Professor and witness the artistry of the elevator as it moves upwards to the eighteenth floor of Anniversary Towers.
If you went to the university somewhere around the start of the millennium hitherto, you will know you have been in that lift as you rose with bated breath going to check the status of your university loan at HELB. If you were there much earlier, you will remember how many a time and oft you had to descend after being told that your loan would be approved the week after. Maybe you were once one of those who had appealed for an additional loan. And so as you savour the shade under that tree planted by The Professor, you remember how you descended in the elevator having been assured that your appeal had gone through.
And the breeze would help you invite a question to your mind. How many of those now descending in the lift from HELB ever thought about being like The Professor? Or had they become those who left The Professor become a prophet disregarded at home?”
He stopped. Beni was almost through with his speech.
And as he went on, almost summing up, he also remembered the many who said that The Professor was their heroine and role model even as they, in the same breath as their words, threw filth and food remnants out of moving vehicles. But he decided he was not going to include that in the speech. This is a speech he wanted to raise the least eyebrows. Beni had to go on writing the speech, moderating everything so that his passions about the issue of the environment remained only implied. In fact, he said he would go through the whole speech and edit it so unemotionally for it to remain detached from him. He discarded these thoughts that were going through his mind and bent down to finish the speech:
“From Uhuru Park, you moved to the inner core. There you would constantly be reminded that all was not well. You saw the gaping gushes that spewed the filthy contents of the gutter into the Nairobi River. The inner core, considered the citadel of order, knowledge, class, reason and all the things that can be mentioned in the same breath as the phrase: Modern Civilization …”
Beni stopped writing again. He was unimpressed by the direction this speech was taking. What needed to worry him was the lack of his own person. At this time, this thought hit hard. He thought about the bills he had to pay; the school fees he was obligated to provide, and the total sense of presence and direction required from him by family and relatives. These, he mused, were the real things he should solve before he moved to what concerned the universe. This came to Beni because he thought he was a man who believed in the charity that must begin at home.
“I don’t have to give this speech!” he said to himself loudly, folding the writing pads he was drafting on. He went out of the house, locking the door behind him. “A cold Pilsner at Jere’s might help me arrive at a decision,” he thought loudly.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
BENI AND THE MIDDLE-FINGURE PHILOSOPHY
By Wesonga Robert
I have never been to heaven. I can swear upon any religious book that I have never been there. If, in Dr. King’s fashion, my hitherto absence from heaven can be likened to poisoning, then part of the postmortem will read my failure to die. He stopped. Maybe dying should not have been a good example, but the manner in which Beni said it made it the perfect anecdote. As he went on, anyone would have realized that Beni’s words could not at any time be reduced to the ranting of a man frustrated on his birthday.
He rose up and served two other cups of rigid Nescafe’. Kenny Rogers was once more persuading people to become sentimental at sunset. His performance of “The Gambler” was in tandem with the reddish-yellowing element of the sun that was now fast disappearing in the western horizon. While the coffee was tantalizing, the setting sun inspired a feeling of nostalgia; a nostalgia emphasized by the thought that when a day ended it ended.
In a country where many tasteless things seemed not to want to end, you felt nice with the assurance that at least there are some good things that ended. Where bad politics was endless, a beautiful shiny day in the Samburu plains always came to an end. It did not just end; you also remained assured that there was another day coming on the following day.
He was once more doing one thing that he really disliked doing in the evening. And this thing he was doing was now stopping him from savouring his devotion to KBC’s Sundowner. He was thinking. The ending of a day is not a lie. In fact, a day is not even political. In this African Savannah of which Samburu was part, a day began at six in the morning and ended at six in the evening. And he began to speak.
“When the mayor’s son called, I thought that he had something important tell me. I didn’t expect him to conjure up a threat.”
“What did he say in particular?” asked Njoro.
“That there are so many things I ought to know about Samburu,” Beni continued.
“Like what?” Njoro pushed.
“Well, he didn’t say it quite openly. But I guessed he wanted me to understand that the forest I was complaining about had not been planted by anyone. He seemed to want to make me understand that there is a limit to the things I should talk about in this district. I find that middle-fingure kind of philosophy most distressing.”
“Middle-fingure philosophy,” Njoro said with a chuckle, “I like the sound of it. However, if I were you, I would listen to that timely advice. Especially now that it was offered free of charge.”
“I don’t need his advice. I may not know exactly what to do with my life; but I know exactly what I don’t want to do with it. And that is listening to such fellows.” Beni declared with a clear note of defiance in his voice.
That somehow brought an end to that bit of conversation. The two men sat in silence and seeped their coffee. Even in this silence, they understood each other perfectly. To them, silence did not mean any tension. It meant a rare moment of reflection. As Beni moved to a corner of his room and switched on his secondhand HP desktop, Njoro picked up Beni’s poetry manuscript from a stack of books at a level under the table and began flipping through the pages.
Beni had initiated an idea to write environmentally conscious poems. Besides, he had sent invitations to friends he knew telling them of his project. The result of the venture was that he now had countless pieces.
He was a little disappointed. Some of the pieces he had were actually what one of his friends had said were paragraphs forcefully turned into verses. They lacked conviction though it was clear that their writers insisted more on the message. The effort of the writers notwithstanding, Beni felt that art should not be sacrificed on the altar of preaching in support of social causes. Regardless, it was good way to start doing something important.
As he sat in front of his computer, he began creating a Facebook group which he had conceived to name: THE SAMBURU INITIATIVE ON ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS. Then the thought of the morning heat came back to him. It had hardly been eleven but the heat outside had already started to build. It had been the morning of this day. No, the heat had not just started to build, it had begun to walk.
On some afternoons the heat became so real; so palpable that it could be sliced into tangible bits with a knife. Even this evening as he went on doing his work, a minor heat wave wafted into the room. He wanted to believe it had to do with the coffee but it was not. It was minor heat wave but it carried the essence of a heat-inspired brutality that was always there in the latter part of most afternoons.
Shuddering at this junior heat wave that came in and left as suddenly as it had entered, Beni felt nothing other than disgust for anyone who came up with narrow middle-fingure philosophies in the face of the tragic onslaught of man on the environment. It had to be a constricted middle-fingure philosophy that told people to mind their own business just because you were thought to be aliens; visitors who must not go poking their nose into the affairs of a district in which they were not born.
Njoro interrupted his line of thought when he started reading, rather loudly, one of the poems Beni had written. Beni was almost embarrassed that it was his poem Njoro was reading, but he thought it sounded good:
POOR GREY FOREST
You yawn in crackles of fire; and go grey
Poor Grey Forest, once dark in your day
The gaps in your mouth send shivers
For long dried and gone are the rivers
Rivers that once flowed gracefully
From your rich bowels incessantly
I won’t feed you grey hungry forest
You’ll yawn and yodel to your own rest
You ask them what they do; what they did.
Ask them where they got that deed,
The deed they brandish as you bleed.
I will watch the red western sun set on you,
Die! Go home; for you, I won’t live in rue
I too, will follow you, Poor Grey Forest
I too, starve, Poor Once-Dark-Forest.
You yawn in crackles of fire; and go grey
Poor Grey Forest, once dark in your day
The gaps in your mouth send shivers
For long dried and gone are the rivers
Rivers that once flowed gracefully
From your rich bowels incessantly
I won’t feed you grey hungry forest
You’ll yawn and yodel to your own rest
You ask them what they do; what they did.
Ask them where they got that deed,
The deed they brandish as you bleed.
I will watch the red western sun set on you,
Die! Go home; for you, I won’t live in rue
I too, will follow you, Poor Grey Forest
I too, starve, Poor Once-Dark-Forest.
………………………….. TO BE CONTINUED.
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