Over the past couple of weeks, the political discourse in Kenya has been dominated, in part, by Mbeere, a Bantu community found in the southeastern part of Embu County. The Ambeere inhabit two general areas. There is Mbeere South (covering Kiritiri, Makima and Mwea) and Mbeere North (Siakago and Evurore).
Growing up in the northern, colder parts of Embu, it is to Mbeere that the people of Embu looked up for gems such as songs, proverbs and other oral forms of traditional art. At Standard Three, I hazily recall, we had a teacher from Mbeere, Mrs Scholastica Kamunyi, who re-enacted Mbeere folk songs that enabled our humble public school to ace the music festivals and other artistic competitions in a way whose memories we shall carry to the grave.
Those who keenly watched the recent political events in Mbeere must have noticed how folk songs, oral chants and other oratorical gems were appropriated by both sides of the political divide for political mileage. For it is the sublime - ethereal - language that rules the ways of the Ambeere, who are culturally related to the Embu, Kamba, Tharaka and Meru communities, with whom they share linguistic and social similarities while retaining distinct traditions.
While the recent by-elections may have been the first time Mbeere captured the nation’s political imagination, keen followers of the cultural ways of the people of Mbeere must have heard of the magical stories from Mbeere. These stories, many of them scaffolded with exaggerations, painted a picture of a world straight out of Hogwarts, the fictional school of witches and wizards in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, or Stephen King’s universe of hauntings and supernatural dread.
In Mbeere cultural lore, there was Gacamuku (a name that loosely translates as ‘the Boiled One’), from a part of Mbeere called Uvarire, who is said to have had so much mystical power that, when a magistrate jailed him for some crime or other, he famously told the judge that he had also jailed the man of the law overnight. So, after banging the gavel on the table, the magistrate tried to stand up but found himself fastened to his seat by a bolt that ran all the way from his navel to the bottom of his chair. This made Uvarire so revered that it was believed no one would dare take anything that belonged to anyone from Uvarire, so much that threatening to go to Uvarire was, for us, a call for justice and awe. For theirs was the magical world of phantasmagoria that you find in the great literary works of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.
Magical realism aside, it is my belief that county governments should go beyond a mortar-and-brick conception of development to preserve the cultural ways of their people. Many good people have been doing that. Those who are familiar with East African publishing will tell you that, while multinationals have dominated publishing in East Africa, it is the indigenous publishers who have done the heavy lifting when it comes to cultural publishing. True, the African Writers Series may have been born in London, but many multinationals in East Africa have historically avoided publishing what some derisively term “ogre stories”. These stories and other original African literary gems need to be preserved because they were not just stories; they carried a whole way of life and thought.
On this, I agree with Okot p’Bitek, who argues in Artist the Ruler that the true foundation of African cultural identity, intellectual life and social renewal lies not in the rhetorical world of politicians, priests, or Western-trained scholars. It is, rather, in the cadence and crooning of the singer, storyteller, dancer, sculptor, poet and performer. For it is the artist who has always served as the community’s moral critic, historian, philosopher and imaginative guide.
P’Bitek further contends that genuine development must begin with reclaiming and empowering these creative traditions, because the artist alone can articulate a people’s deepest values, confront their hypocrisies, preserve their memory and envision their future. In this sense, the artist is not merely an entertainer but the ruler of the communal imagination and Africa’s rebirth depends on restoring this role to its rightful central place.
In Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), a foundational work of African literary and cultural criticism, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka captures the unique structure of African cosmology, particularly Yoruba thought, showing how this worldview shapes African drama, ritual, myth and artistic expression. Soyinka argues that African literature cannot be understood through Western theoretical frameworks because African cultures conceive of time, being, tragedy and the spiritual continuum very differently.
Of course, that is not to say that the African and Western worlds cannot be brought together in art. This blending has been done beautifully in works such as Ola Rotimi’s 'The Gods Are Not to Blame', which uses the Greek framework of Oedipus Rex as a skeleton upon which he layers the spiritual, communal and ethical worldview of the Yoruba cosmos.
But before we can marry the two worlds, we need to preserve the African mythical world so that we blend it with other ways from a point of strength. It is for this reason that I strongly feel we need to continue the noble duty of documenting and preserving African cultural codes as enshrined in our people’s orature. Of course, not everything must make it to the world we aim to create. We must discard what does not serve us, borrow from other cultures what works for us, and face the future boldly. We must step into the future not as a people conditioned to detest their ways, but as consciously proud people who understand that the world is a beautiful rainbow where hybridity and identity are the beads that thread the necklace of world cultures.
We can’t be anyone else. Or, as the old Mbeere proverb goes, kaviu gacangacangi gatigaga kwao gukithinjwa (a restless knife wanders away on the days there is massive slaughtering for a feast in its own homestead).
