Unbowed: A Memoir
Click to order via Amazon
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Anchor (September 4, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307275205
ISBN-13: 978-0307275202
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1 inches
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Beginnings
I was born the third of six children, and the first girl after two sons, on
April 1, 1940, in the small village of Ihithe in the central highlands of
what was then British Kenya. My grandparents and parents were also born in
this region near the provincial capital of Nyeri, in the foothills of the
Aberdare Mountain Range. To the north, jutting into the sky, is Mount Kenya.
Two weeks into mbura ya njahi, the season of the long rains, my mother
delivered me at home in a traditional mud-walled house with no electricity
or running water. She was assisted by a local midwife as well as women
family members and friends. My parents were peasant farmers, members of the
Kikuyu community, one of forty-two ethnic groups in Kenya and then, as now,
the most populous. They lived from the soil and also kept cattle, goats, and
sheep.
At the time of my birth, the land around Ihithe was still lush, green, and
fertile. The seasons were so regular that you could almost predict that the
long, monsoon rains would start falling in mid-March. In July you knew it
would be so foggy you would not be able to see ten feet in front of you, and
so cold in the morning that the grass would be silvery-white with frost. In
Kikuyu, July is known as mworia nyoni, the month when birds rot, because
birds would freeze to death and fall from the trees.
We lived in a land abundant with shrubs, creepers, ferns, and trees, like
the mitundu, mukeu, and migumo, some of which produced berries and nuts.
Because rain fell regularly and reliably, clean drinking water was
everywhere. There were large well-watered fields of maize, beans, wheat, and
vegetables. Hunger was virtually unknown. The soil was rich, dark red-brown,
and moist.
When a baby joined the community, a beautiful and practical ritual followed
that introduced the infant to the land of the ancestors and conserved a
world of plenty and good that came from that soil. Shortly after the child
was born, a few of the women attending the birth would go to their farms and
harvest a bunch of bananas, full, green, and whole. If any of the bananas
had ripened and birds had eaten them, the women would have to find another
full bunch. The fullness expressed wholeness and wellness, qualities the
community valued. Along with the bananas, the women would bring to the new
mother’s house sweet potatoes from her and their gardens and blue-purple
sugarcane (kigwa kia nyamuiru). No ordinary sugarcane would do.
In anticipation of the birth, the expectant mother would fatten a lamb that
slept and ate inside her home. While the women were gathered the ritual
foods, the child’s father would sacrifice the lamb and roast a piece of the
flesh. The bananas and the potatoes would also be roasted and along with the
meat and the raw sugarcane given to the new mother. She would chew small
pieces of each in turn and then put some of the juice into the baby’s tiny
mouth. This would have been my first meal. Even before breast milk, I would
have swallowed the juice of green bananas, blue-purple sugarcane, sweet
potatoes, and a fattened lamb, all fruits of the local land. I am as much a
child of my native soil as I am of my father, Muta Njugi, and my mother,
Wanjiru Kibicho, who was more familiarly known by her Christian name, Lydia.
Following the Kikuyu tradition, my parents named me for my father’s mother,
Wangari, an old Kikuyu name.
According to the Kikuyu myth of origin, God created the primordial parents,
Gikuyu and Mumbi, and from Mount Kenya showed them the land on which they
were to settle: west from Mount Kenya to the Aberdares, on to Ngong Hills
and Kilimambogo, then north to Garbatula. Together, Gikuyu and Mumbi had ten
daughters—Wanjiru, Wambui, Wangari, Wanjiku, Wangui, Wangeci, Wanjeri,
Nyambura, Wairimu, and Wamuyu—but they had no sons. The legend goes that,
when the time came for the daughters to marry, Gikuyu prayed to God under a
holy fig tree, mËœugumo, as was his tradition, to send him sons-in-law. God
told him to instruct nine of his daughters—the tenth was too young to be
married—to go into the forest and to each cut a stick as long as she was
tall. When the daughters returned, Gikuyu took the sticks and with them
built an altar under the migumo tree, on which he sacrificed a lamb. As the
fire was consuming the lamb’s body, nine men appeared and walked out of the
flames.
Gikuyu took them home and each daughter married the man who was the same
height as she was, and together they gave rise to the ten clans to which all
Kikuyus belong. (Even though the youngest daughter, Wamuyu, did not get
married, she did have children.) Each clan is known for a particular trade
or quality, such as prophecy, craftsmanship, and medicine. My clan, Anjiru,
is associated with leadership. The daughters made the clans matrilineal, but
many privileges, such as inheritance and ownership of land, livestock, and
perennial crops, were gradually transferred to men. It is not explained how
women lost their rights and privileges.
For the Kikuyus, Mount Kenya, known as Kirinyaga, or Place of Brightness,
and the second-highest peak in Africa, was a sacred place. Everything good
came from it: abundant rains, rivers, streams, clean drinking water. Whether
they were praying, burying their dead, or performing sacrifices, Kikuyus
faced Mount Kenya, and when they built their houses, they made sure the
doors looked toward it. As long as the mountain stood, people believed that
God was with them and that they would want for nothing. Clouds that
regularly shrouded Mount Kenya were often followed by rain. As long as the
rains fell, people had more than enough food for themselves, plentiful
livestock, and peace.
Sadly, these beliefs and traditions have now virtually died away. They were
dying even as I was born. When European missionaries came to the central
highlands at the end of the nineteenth cen- tury, they taught the local
people that God did not dwell on Mount Kenya, but rather in heaven, a place
above the clouds. The proper place to worship him was in church on Sundays,
a concept that was unknown to Kikuyus. Nevertheless, many people accepted
the missionaries’ worldview, and within two generations they lost respect
for their own beliefs and traditions. The missionaries were followed by
traders and administrators who introduced new methods of exploiting our rich
natural resources: logging, clear-cutting native forests, establishing
plantations of imported trees, hunting wild- life, and undertaking expansive
commercial agriculture. Hallowed landscapes lost their sacredness and were
exploited as the local people became insensitive to the destruction,
accepting it as a sign of progress.
At just over 17,000 feet above sea level Mount Kenya towers over the central
highlands. Although it straddles the Equator, it is topped by glaciers year
round. Beholding Mount Kenya for Kikuyus and other communities that live
around the mountain—Kambas, Merus, and Embus—must have been awe-inspiring.
The story goes that the explorers Johan Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann,
upon encountering the mountain in 1849, asked their guide, a member of the
Kamba community, who was carrying a gourd, “What do you call that?” Thinking
the two Germans were referring to the gourd, he replied, “It’s called
kii-nyaa,” pronounced Kenya by the British. This became the name of the
mountain and later the country.
Throughout Africa, the Europeans renamed whatever they came across. This
created a schism in many Africans’ minds and we are still wrestling with the
realities of living in this dual world. At home, we learned the names of
mountains, streams, or regions from our parents, but in school we were
taught the colonial names, deemed the “proper” names, which we had to use on
our exams. The Aberdares, for example, known locally as Nyandarua, or
“drying hide,” because of their shape, were named by the British in 1884
after Lord Aberdare, then the head of the Royal Geographical Society.
Naturally, it was many years before I was to understand the complexities of
the period. I was born as an old world was passing away. The first Europeans
had come to Kenya during the time of my grandparents, in the late 1800s. In
1885, Britain and the other “great powers” of Europe met at the Berlin
Conference to formalize what was known as “The Scramble for Africa”—a
thirty-year dash to lay claim to the entire continent. With the stroke of a
pen on a map they assigned whole regions to the different powers and created
completely new nations. In East Africa, Germany received Tanganyika, which
later united with Zanzibar to become Tanzania. Britain acquired what became
the Kenya colony and the Uganda protectorate. Prior to this superficial
partitioning, many communities in Africa had identified themselves as
nations, albeit micronations. The resulting countries brought these
communities together in arbi- trary ways so that sometimes the new citizens
of the post-Berlin nations perceived each other as foreigners. Some
micronations found themselves stranded between two neighboring countries.
The consequences of these divisions continue to haunt Africa.
My great-grandparents, whom I did not know, lived in a pre- European world.
They would probably not have interacted with any other communities outside
the central highlands, apart from the Maasais, who are pastoralists, herders
of cows and goats. The Maasai traditional way of life required them to
transverse the large plains to the west of the highlands, the vast grassland
surrounded by ridges resulting from seismic activity that ripped apart the
earth’s crust many millions of years ago. The “scar” stretches from Jordan
to Mozambique, forming the Great Rift Valley.
At times, Maasais would raid Kiku...