Book captures Africa’s political atmosphere

Though it is said most critics don’t write, Chris Wanjala doubles as critic and writer as Abenea Ndago analyses his work

It is rare for a seasoned critic to also sit and practise what they preach. Not that the old argument about literary critics being physicians who are unable to cure themselves stands.

Chris Wanjala joins the few who go against the grain. In spite of being synonymous with literary criticism in East Africa, the University of Nairobi don has penned a novel, which strikes the reader by its engagement with the debate about national elections as tools for identifying good leaders in the African continent.

Many African readers will remember the chest-thumping heroics of the Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, who once claimed he could rule for eternity if he so wished, not to mention his remedy for HIV/Aids. For the Kenyan reader, memories of a member of parliament who lost his seat for having wrapped himself in sheepskin at a witchdoctor’s den are rekindled. How do we use the electoral process to find another Julius Nyerere? We must not see people being sworn in at night, nor should election results be hidden for over a month as happened in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe in 2008.

Political heartaches

First published in 2005, Drums of Death explores the political heartaches that many postcolonial realities have to endure every electioneering year. The novel is set in the early 1990s when autocratic regimes across the continent, suddenly abandoned by their Western patrons, began to crumble as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union which ushered in the end of the Cold War. The setting is Nambayi, a countryside constituency in the state of Sibala, where leadership has passed through the hands of two tribes only: the Bazulu and the Mbaxa. Two clans in the Bambayi tribe are locked in a fierce battle to represent the constituency in the national assembly. Coming from the dominant Bakitan’ga clan, Thawako represents the old order, which has ruled Nambayi for many years. He has now fallen out with President Ramathuma’s Pala party and joins the opposition Bisie party. But the President is an expert at antagonising clans for political expediency.

On the other hand, Mothendu is a progressive PhD handpicked by the President to beat Thawako. A literary scholar at the Metropolis University, Dr Mothendu comes from the smaller Kwangwa clan. He finds himself in the unfamiliar storm of politics where he has to rely on Robusto, his campaign strategist. Robusto’s equivalent on Thawako’s side is Thituma.

Thawako’s former wife is a wily sex pest called Nassio. She is so aggressive that, apart from being the Director of the Institute of Gender and Technology, she outwits Mothendu’s reserved wife Lesso and becomes her co-wife. Nassio finally hijacks Mothendu’s campaigns and works for him against her former husband Thawako. She has a child with Mothendu, but Eric dies, whereupon Nassio accuses both Mothendu and Lesso of witchcraft. Angry, Nassio flees back to her former husband just when the elections are around the corner. But Thawako has stepped down for Thituma, who subsequently wins the elections.

The novel depicts a hopeless African world where the biggest obstacle to Mothendu’s political ambition is the Bambayi culture. Like the myths and stereotypes, which dominate African politics today, Mothendu should not become a leader because he is the first son of a widow. The witchdoctors are also in their element as they look for money in this high season. When no money is given for divination, one curses: “The ancestors are beating me! They are angry with you. You came to the hut with empty hands.”

Greed for money

Equally stark is the novel’s subversion of the usual perception that only the politicians are greedy for money. African voters are indeed gullible, but they are also rapacious in a way that alludes to Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966). The narrator confesses, “The voters had turned into political octopuses. They ate from both candidates with abandon.” The church and the provincial administration are not impartial arbiters.

Pastor Munika of the Harlem Luther Church prays that God destroy Mothendu’s opponents with “hailstones, cyclones, thunder and lightning.”In the chaotic electioneering world, one aspect of African culture which the text privileges is the insight and wisdom of the traditional seers that the historian William Ochieng identifies in Kenya’s People: People of the South-Western Highlands – Gusii (1986).

The Bambayi prophet Wachiye wa Naumbwa had foretold the coming of the colonisers in the same way Mugo wa Kibiru (Kikuyu), Sakawa (Kisii), Masaku (Kamba), Mwenda Mwea (Embu) and Od Jobilo (Luo) had.

In terms of Africans’ nature, which Ali Mazrui shows in Cultural Forces in World Politics (1990), Thawako seems to exemplify “short memory of hate” as he goes to mourn Mothendu. He puts aside their bitter rivalry and pays respect to the man who once snatched his wife.

This, I think, should be the most important advice to Kenyan politicians who now want to see the very internal body organs of their opponents.

The writer teaches Literature at Bondo University College.