Prof Wanjala tribute: A literary icon par excellence

Chris Wanjala  (pictured) was one of those people whom you encountered before meeting. His eloquent pen and incisive scholarly ethos went before him. I encountered him in the mid 1970s, when I was in high school and met him in 1979. The smiling youthful scholar lit up the pages of the Sunday Nation in the mid 1970s, with sprightly artistic writing that got you yearning to join the University of Nairobi. He gravitated across the landscape with scintillating perorations on negritude, African personhood and identity at home and in the Diaspora, verbal artistry, decolonisation of art and the language debate.

These, and much more, were then emerging issues in African scholarship and debate. They captured our impressionistic imagination in high school and you longed for the day you would meet Prof Wanjala. Other regulars in these pages were his teachers, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Edah Gachukia, Micere Githae-Mugo and Tabaan Lo Liyong. These people popularised literature, art and scholarship.

Exploring new horizons

Nairobi was East Africa’s fountain of knowledge, after the disintegration of the University of East Africa in 1970, and the going it alone of Makerere and Dar es Salaam. Nairobi was, without a doubt, the new soul of intellect in East Africa, the king of scholarship. It was within this context that Wanjala came to flower, reeling off literary artistry in the newspapers and journals. He was a delight to read; and he swooned you with his nomadic traversing of the landscape – from literature to philosophy, and on to religion, fine art and political science.

The soul of East African scholarship having migrated to Nairobi from Makerere, he was in great company with the likes of the late John Ruganda, David Rubadiri and Okot p’Bitek. Other literary greats who passed through Nairobi at this time included the late Joe De Graft who published the seminal play titled Muntu. Adrian Rascoe, Eldred Green and Bernth Lindfors were also regular voices in the debates of the time and Wanjala was in his element doing battle with them.

Relative to Rubadiri and p’Bitek, however, Wanjala was a sprightly fledgling, going through an experimental phase, where he tried his pen at everything from poetry, to creative writing, oral literature and literary criticism on to essaying.

He was a man of knowledge, who just enjoyed exploring new horizons to discover new things. In the same docket was the late Francis Imbuga, who was experimenting with playwriting and who captured the attention of theatre lovers on Voice of Kenya TV with Greg Adambo, David Mulwa and Esther Kantai in late night drama.

While Imbuga and Mulwa settled in drama, it was in literary criticism that Wanjala’s intellectual and creative soul would eventually find rest. He would tell me on a radio interview at the Voice of Kenya in 1986, “I am an admirer. I allow other people to create. When they are done, my role is to admire their creation.” In this, he sat well with other admirers like the late Abiola Irele of Nigeria, who is considered worldwide as the doyen of African literary criticism. Apart from his own essays, published in Season of Harvest, Wanjala contributed to magazines, journals and compendiums of literary criticism. He is one of the contributors to the great work that is The Companion to African Literatures, edited by Douglas Killam and Ruth Howe. As you read the section on African-Caribbean Literature, you cannot fail to detect the distinct pen and voice of Wanjala in all of the elements, on his pet subjects.

When you have encountered the legend in newspaper pages for several years, it is a great joy to eventually meet the man behind the mask. Such joy became us when we eventually met Wanjala as freshmen in September 1979. He was a jolly ever smiling free spirit at the Main Campus, where he taught an introductory course on the East African novel. The credo at the university in that age was, “Seek ye the kingdom of knowledge wheresoever you may find it.” There was a sense in which your official course at the university was just that. Young people simply wanted to expand their frontiers of knowledge – or shall we say to shrink the frontiers of ignorance?

They trooped into classes, beyond the official registered courses, to gather knowledge. Wanjala’s classes attracted many such students, from across different departments in the Faculty of Arts and indeed from other faculties, too.

It was in the age when the Heinemann African Writers Series were in spring of growth. For his part, Wanjala was in his spring writing about them as they rolled off the press. He was, however, not just a reviewer of books. He was more interested in the ideas and the thematic focus. Of particular concern to him was the wider social relevance of works of art. This was the age of the debate on the role of art in society. Wanjala belonged to the school that thought art should have a more ennobling and liberating social role. It was, indeed, the age of liberation for Africa. If African countries were regaining independence from colonizing powers, what role was art playing?

The debates could get caustic, ugly and personal. You saw them in the East African Journal of Literature, published by the defunct East African Publishing House, in Transition, and Joliso. The journals died one after the other, largely due to the challenges of economics of publishing. The debates shifted into other forums. I was privileged, as a youthful radio broadcast journalist, to host Wanjala on a regular weekly show on the Voice of Kenya, titled The Literary Forum. The late Kavetsa Adagala was another regular panelist, as was George Odera Outa and Wanjiku Kabira. Ideas were floated and discussed with illuminating scholarly candour.

Most unforgettable thing

This way, Wanjala became a public intellectual who brought into homes, in simple language, the complex things that people discuss in universities, where they read mind boggling books. I have had the honour to work with him in book publishing, on radio talk shows and to train younger professionals with him. We worked together in the Kenya Oral Literature Association, the Kenya Writers Association and the Kenya Book Development Council.

What will I remember most about him, now that he has gone beyond darkness? Is it bringing Soka Gakkai and Daisaku Ikeda from Japan to the University of Nairobi? Or is it that he once took flight into Kanu politics in 1992, or his short stint as a director of Kenya Airways? I don’t think so. The most unforgettable thing about Wanjala has been the matrix of his complex mind and easy mien. He has lived throughout as a very affable individual with amazing capacity to look at the lighter side of life, and his easy ability to poke jokes at himself. Above all, was his ability to effortlessly bring out the best in those around him. He leaves behind an indelible mark in many hearts and minds. Wanjala will be sadly missed. I will greatly miss you, Mukhwasi. May his soul rest in eternal peace. Amen. 

- The writer is a strategic public communications adviser.

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