Failure of Kenyan autobiography to include sins committed by leaders

By ABENEA NDAGO

Classical Greek and Roman traditions viewed biography as a chance to embellish one’s name and character, but that was a clear ideal. Life writing has since changed accordingly over the centuries.  Memoirs are these days so explosive that – as we learnt from the experience of Peeling Back the Mask (2012) and Kidneys for the King (2013) – they can equally be flung at former friends when settling bitter scores.

Human beings are not angels. That’s why it raises suspicion when recent Kenyan writing in the biographical genre bombards the reader with saints, a lie which Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1995) rebutted a long time ago.

 It may be true that accepting one’s weaknesses is a measure of greatness. The courage and honesty necessary for that feat is way beyond the reach of many arrogant simpletons.

Of the twenty-three Nobel Prize winners who have an African heritage, all the four who have written memoirs (Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai, Barack Obama, and Wole Soyinka) willingly carry the crosses of their own shortcoming.

The houses in which we live these days are mini battlefields. However, Maathai did not hide the nuisance of her divorce in Unbowed: A Memoir (2006). At the top of his voice, Soyinka has been braying his intellectual apology to the late Sedar Senghor over the former’s Negritude comment many years ago. As for Dreams from My Father (1995), there used to be enough harmless noise about Obama’s bhang-smoking habit of years gone past. But that does not strike the reader as does the author’s own acceptance that he could not contain his running stomach after drinking chang’aa in Kendu Bay.

Unlike many of us, Mandela did not put a seal of silence on his family life, and the long thread of divorce, which haunted it.  These are the things, which made David James Smiths’ Young Mandela: The Revolutionary Years (2010) less effective as an unauthorised biography. Yet what makes South Africa’s first post-apartheid president’s case even more intriguing than the rest is his accepting that he was once a thief who stole other people’s pigs, butchered, roasted, and ate. It is interesting to compare that with the Kenyan case where robbers mobilise memoirs to further their career in criminal stardom. Not only do politicians use their life writing to hide important facts, they also deploy it as a weapon with which to scavenge for votes.

Everything goes. The autobiographical persona of Beyond Expectations: From Charcoal to Gold (2009) – God rest his soul – conveniently forgets that, apart from his initial charcoal selling, he was at one time the chairman of Gema, a very powerful position that he did not hold for free, and which instantly opened a million doors.

Wilful silence

Even worse is the willful silence on his Cabinet career omission which trivialises the reality that African politics spawns fat parasites that suck from their own people. Consider the following titles: Politics of Betrayal (2011) by Joe Khamisi; Kiraitu Murungi: In the Mud of Politics (2000); Raila Odinga: An Enigma in Kenyan Politics (2006); and Musalia Mudavadi: Man With a Vision for Kenya (2013). Politicians should be accused of assaulting memoirs indecently. The titles are as predictable as the point that two of the books appeared only months to the elections. The very able James Shimanyula – Mudavadi’s biographer – is the closest you can get in confusing a biography with a panicky campaign slogan.Because of their human nature, certain Kenyan memoirs make very interesting reading.

They include Henry Wanyoike: Victory Despite Blindness (2009), A Voice Unstilled: Archbishop Ndingi Mwana a’ Nzeki, Waithaka Waihenya, Ndikaru wa Teresia (2009), and The Life and Times of Maurice Michael Cardinal Otunga (2006).

Blinded by their own pursuit of fame, most Kenyan memoirists forget that human beings are simple, fallible creatures who sin, win, and lose. One of the most humorous memoirs I have recently read is the Tanzanian Adam Shafi’s Mbali na Nyumbani (2012). The author has not lost a single hair for exposing his simple but chaotic love life.

In a good biography, such success and personal achievement cannot be treated like a huge club to be wielded over readers’ heads.