The one thing I recall from my childhood is an old bookshelf my father kept in the living room of our small house. The books were arranged in categories; illustrated children books, pacesetters, adult novels, college textbooks, Weekly Review Magazines, Reader’s Digest magazines, old Daily Nation newspapers and anything else made of paper that my father brought home.
The moments I most cherished were the days I sat with my father for long hours rearranging the bookshelf, drowning cups upon cups of milk tea, laughing and wiping away cockroach skeletons. This bookshelf provided my first reading materials. We lived too far from Nairobi, in the sugar growing region of Western Kenya. In terms of formative events and early experiences that concretized my interest in reading and writing, I can trace my beginnings to this period of my childhood when I sat at my father’s feet in front of the bookshelf. Sometimes father read fables to us.
‘Books are precious,’ my father would say at the first opportunity. He disproved of people who didn’t take care of books. ‘If you can’t take care of books then you are fit for the gallows,’ he joked.
I was a thirteen year old boy in February 2002. The abruptness of dry wind, fierce sun, cracked soil, mirage, and dehydrated butterflies portended new adventure. I was joining high school.
I brooded over the horrifying tales of form one students being ‘monolized’. It filled me with a dreadful foreboding. I anticipated nothing but a deep dark pit peopled with venomous creatures. These form ones, only new to their places, were verbally abused, physically harassed and even, in worse of situations, molested.
The new uniform felt crisp on my small body. Grey trousers, white short-sleeved shirt, an orange-navy blue tie and a green sweater with double white stripes at the wrists and waist. The school motto: be the light. I stepped out in shiny black shoes from Bata. It felt unreal. Finally, I was joining high School. Bragging rights, eh.
‘What do you want to become?’ my father asked.
I looked at him, read the expectation in his eyes and quickly realized that my father would do anything to make me succeed. I didn’t want to think so much about it. I promised myself to do my best.
‘I want to be a surgeon,’ I blurted, ‘like Ben Carson.’
‘A neurosurgeon,’ my father repeated, a smile decorating his moustache-shielded lips, ‘that’s very good of you.’
‘Or a lawyer,’ I added.
‘Oh!’ my father exclaimed. The smile on his face was still there, the glee was still outlined and broad, ‘you must be meticulous and you must read many books. You should love and respect your teachers.’
‘Yes, father,’ I said, ‘I will be meticulous and I will read many books.’
The first place I toured when I joined high school was the school library. I was fascinated by rows upon rows of ceiling-high bookshelves. I thought of the dwarf bookshelf in the living room of my parents’ house. How minute it now seemed!
‘I have four years,’ I muttered with excitement.
