Why alumni associations are not all about hollow nostalgia and nothing

By Barrack Muluka

We launched the Agriculture Chapter of the Alumni Association of the University of Nairobi on Thursday this week, the seventh chapter of this dream we began in 2005. Growing alumni associations is no mean task. Anybody who has tried will tell you.

At first there is excitement all round, as people come back to their alma mater, some for the first time in years. You look around for your old classmates and other associates in your time. There are different, even if somewhat similar narratives across different generations of experience. Two, three meetings down the line and only two to three people are turning up. The effort dies a natural death, like a straw fire. 

I first had this experience in 1973. Even as stripling adolescents, we tried forming something we called OJOMA. It meant Ofafa Jericho Old Members Association. I still recall the young man who sprung the idea – Matheri, was his name. He had only joined us the previous year from Dr Kraph Primary School, where the idea of an alumni association had apparently worked well. OJOMA would be our meeting forum as ex Jericho Primary School boys and girls.

It did not work. Perhaps it is the romantic sentimentalist in me. I get attached to places and people. That is why I still remember many boys and girls I went to primary school with, by name and face, although I have not seen them for 40 years.

 Peter Wanjala, I hear he became a Professor of Dentistry and a surgeon, Kyalo Ben who disappeared somewhere in the Americas, David Wanjohi, John Wanjohi, Kassim Fulasia, Josephat Lawrence, Margaret Solomon, Regina Wanjiru, Anne Wangari, Anne Kaluki, Abigail Wairigia, Leah Wangui, Milka Atieno, Samuel Olewe – I could go on and on. And I recall many incidents, almost as if they only happened a few months ago.

That explains my attachment to where I have come from. My passion for Emanyulia, my birthplace, is legendary. If the people have gone, the place will somehow be there. But I long found out that it is never exactly the same. 

Once, when we were waxing nostalgia over an old Rumba song, a friend said to me, “Barrack, it can never be the same. You need to bring back the same people who were there and to recast the whole thing exactly as it was, for you to have that experience. The rest is hollowness, nostalgia.”

I know this. I have been to Langata High School, to Chavakali School and to Cardinal Otunga, Mosocho many years after I left. You sometimes look around almost as if you expect to see the boys and girls you knew.

But they only live in images trapped in your mind. It is the same feeling you get when the children have grown up and left home. It is strange how often you wonder where the children went. You think that they will come back as the little fellows that you once knew. But no, it is different.

Still, it is good enough that they come back from time to time. You try to do some of the old things that you once did together. It is perhaps an illusory struggle against the reality that you cannot reverse time. Yet I think we could still love to turn back the clock after the manner of H Wells of Time Machine fame. However, we cannot. I think there is a very practical sense in which we are literally living through time and space. Anyway, my recent fiasco with Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton is still fresh. Let me not go that way, for now.

We were talking about the Agriculture Chapter of the Alumni Association of the University of Nairobi. I think forming this association is one of the finest things that we have done, those of us who have been behind it. Our first objective is to develop programmes that promote effective networks among members. This should take care of romantic idealists like me.

But these alumni efforts have far wider significance than feeding romantic appetites. An institution will thrive only to the extent that its alumni want it to thrive. If not, it perishes. It could be the primary school in your village, the university you attended, or even the family home.

Do these places betray a utilitarian strain in us? Do they betray certain soullessness in us? How is it possible that you could spend a significant portion of your formative years in an institution, gain manifestly from it and eventually walk away never to return, and yet feel nothing?

If you are reading this and you are from the University of Nairobi, we are looking for you. Come back home, you have been gone for too long. But it does not matter that you are not from our university. Surely, you attended some school or college somewhere – that is why you can read this stuff. Go home. They are looking for you.

In case you think it all about nostalgia and nothing, we have other intents, too. We want to promote academic, physical, moral and spiritual growth of the members of the university. Then we want to advance socio-cultural and co-curricular activities – like the free travelling theatre that we used to have in the 1970s and ‘80s, to say nothing of the “nyam-nyams” of the Christian Live House. If we cannot do this, we could at least mobilise for community service? Our objectives also say that we can recommend who plays leadership roles at the university.

Our biggest dream, however, remains to build an alumni centre, somewhere near the arboretum, a place for mathematicians and philosopher kings that those of us who went through this university are.

We intend to meet here to talk and to be happy. And yes, I cannot apologise for nostalgia, romance and all that. Apart from graduating from this university three times over, it gave me the family that means the world to me. What about you?

The writer is a publishing editor and National Director of Communications at Raila for President Secretariat