We are still celebrating Mother’s Day and it’s in that spirit that TONY MOCHAMA brings you an inspiring story of a great grandmother, a grandmother, a mother, daughter and a baby girl
It’s 10am at the serene Garden Hotel in Machakos County. A soft breeze blows into the breakfast room, whispering generations that have lived and died around these green hills that roll out into the Sunday horizon on this International Mother’s Day.
But around this table, four generations of mothers, and their daughter, granddaughter, great granddaughter, and great, great, granddaughter are alive. And well. And she is eating Weetabix.
The little girl is Chelsea Nzula and she has just turned one, having been born last year.
Her mother, Evalyne Muthei, was born in 1987. Evalyne’s mother, Mary Nzula, was born in 1963. Mary’s mother, Litha Muthei, was born in 1942. Litha’s mother, Esther Ndulo, was born in 1919 – when Kenya officially became a British Protectorate; really a fancy word for ‘colony.’
“Really,” says Litha Muthei, 70, ( it’s a tri-lingual table as Kikamba, Kiswahili and Kizungu flow in loose translation of the conversation), “who were the British protecting us from? Themselves?”
Esther Ndulo was 44 by the time the Empire’s ‘protectors’ granted Kenya independence in 1963, the same year her grand-daughter (or Chelsea Nzula’s grandmother) Mary Nzula was born, in Matungulu, Kangundo.
CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
“Child of Uhuru?” Mary laughs. “We didn’t know what independence was in our childhood in Matungulu. We just spent our time playing. It’s only when we went to high school that we were told by waalimu, ‘Oh! Kuna president wa Kenya anaitwa Kenyatta! Sio kama siku hizi unapata watoto wako werevu wanajua siasa. Sitashangaa kama huu mjukuu wangu Chelsea, by the time she’s four (in 2015), aseme ‘President ni Raila, na Vice President wake ni Kalonzo Musyoka’ kama ni hivyo.”
Mary feeds baby Nzula another spoonful of Weetabix as the little girl makes a comical face.
Litha, the 70-year-old great grandmother says she brought up Mary in Kangundo on malenges, mahindi and ndumas.
“Ni kweli,” Mary Nzula says.
“Mimi nilijua Blueband nilipokuja Nairobi after Form Four.”
She also says they (her eight sisters, and four brothers, all of them alive) were brought up on a strict diet of stick by their mother, Litha.
“Ukifanya makosa, ni kiboko! Hakuna kuponyoka.”
Evalyn Muthei, 25, laughs and says: “Mum, ni vile umekuwa cucu, you have become soft.”
Bubbly baby
Her mother Mary looks tenderly at her Weetabix rebel grand-daughter Nzula chuckling happily on her lap, and waving her spoon about like she has the flag of some conquered territory; although the only land she has captured are the hearts around the table.
“We grew up hardscrabble but very healthy without chips or ice-cream,” says Mary.
“Our countryside pizza was oranges, paw-paws and guavas. I was never ill!”
“Except that time when you had to miss a whole term in Standard Three because your legs had become mysteriously paralysed,” chimes in Litha, who has since moved from Matungulu to Mwala.
“But I think that was sorcery.”
“I was treated with a herbalist’s roots, and was fine,” Mary says, eager to dispel any notions of young affliction due to practitioners of the ‘dark arts’.
The old woman in the room, Esther, 93, who has been dozing in the morning sunshine coming into the hotel breakfast room, awakens.
Looking out at the picturesque scene of undulating hills, Esther wants to know if her dairy cow, moniker ‘mzungu,’ has been fed its nappier grass and watered.
She is reminded that she is at a hotel in Machakos, and not at home in Tala, and smiles sheepishly at this news.
She then tells me how scorching and hard her own childhood in the 1920s was, full of ‘nzaa’ (hunger), and of taking cows 30 miles in the 1930s to seek pasture – from Tala to Masaku to Lukenya.
“I’d get home so tired, I’d collapse asleep, too tired even to eat.” In the 1940s after she got Litha, things got better.
Evalyn, 25, then tells tales from her own childhood — how she had a good childhood that was fun, how her mom is wonderful but was also firm, especially during that “tricky, slightly rebellious mid-teen years, when your mom knows very little, while you, EveGal know everything in the world.”
Evalyn says the greatest thing that her mom ever did for her and her two younger sisters, was move them when she was eleven out of a certain estate in Eastlands, to a better neighbourhood.
“There was a lot of ‘tabia mbaya’ in that esto,” Muthei says adding, “and all the girls I left behind now have three, four, five children – at my age.”
Fast and furious
The elder Muthei lady, Litha, now admits that it is good, this new thing of parents ‘communicating’ with their children.
“Us we never used to talk words, it was just (fast and furious) action,” she laughs.
“And the most the mzee of the boma was expected was to provide food and school fees, not counselling.”
Mary negates her mom’s mea culpa immediately.
“Boma yetu ilikuwa ikiogopwa. There was no whistling of boys by our boma. While other girls got married off early, I am the only one who managed to finish my fourth form.”
Litha takes the story back from Mary.
“Our home is well known for producing good girls. Watu kama Mama Star (a relative) were specifically asked for by their husbands, like Wambua, because of our good repute. None of you girls have divorced, or come back running home from your husbands.”
“That’s because we know how to select good guys,” Mary Nzula, who is married to a Mr Ongumbo, says with gusto.
I ask Evalyn Muthei what dreams she has learnt from her mother Mary Nzula (daughter of the elder Muthei) that she intends to pass onto Chelsea Nzula.
“First of all, to love her with all my heart, forever,” Evalyn says earnestly, “to make her cared for even with discipline. And to share my very soul with her as she grows older, no name calling or quarrelling or secrets.”
That is the secret behind the mothers’-and-daughter bond? I don’t know.
Destiny
In the whispers of the breeze, and the fancies of my mind’s garden, I hear the faint lilt of song:)
‘Chelsea, turning sinners into saints, swimming through seas of lullabies, checking on nanny’s alibis. But it’s just the price she pays, destiny is calling her, she opens up eager eyes …’
Baby Nzula, now through with her Weetabix breakfast, has been passed round the table from her grandmother, to her great grandmother’s hands, while the writer day-dreamt.
Now she is in her great, great grandmother’s weathered 93-year-old hands.
The old woman’s ancient eyes light up as she makes a funny face at tiny Nzula, who laughs and says her first proper word of the interview, ‘grammy.”
For grandmother! Not quite accurate – that would be the other Nzula.
But it doesn’t matter.
And I wonder whether one day, this baby Chelsea will be here at the Garden Hotel, staring lovingly into the eyes of her own great, great grand-daughter, when she herself is 93. One sunny Saturday, in the May of 2104.
