It is going to be quite remarkable, I assure you, like when I
went to a junior class in college and my lecturer thought I could advise the
younglings. Of course I knew the obvious “read hard” but I had to make it
dramatic. I remembered how I had failed terribly during my last year in high
school when I was struggling with myself and hard to read well into the night
and wake up early in the morning just to get my grades up in time for the
national examination so I didn’t shame my family as a failure in a big
expensive school. I thought that could make a good rhetoric so I conjured up a
tale and told the young lings that in my first year I had it rough and could
not catch up. That regardless of where they are presently they could turn their
fortune and pass students could magically end up being first class students. All
they needed was determination, reading smart, like I did. It was a lie. At least
it was not my story. But what amazed me was the same teacher who had been
marking my exams and knew I was lying concurred and even gave my story an undertone.
“Yes,” he said. “You see everyone of you has his destiny in his hands in fact
even you can turn around your grades as he did.” Maybe pushed by the need to
encourage some of his students or maybe he did not even remember how I was
performing but he lied with me.
Thence I knew how I will tell my story one day. It doesn’t
have to be true, just crafty rhetoric. So I picked around some phrases from
those who tell their stories. How far they have come, how they have suffered,
how they have succeeded beyond all odds.
Coming from a modest family with most of my needs catered
for would not do for a good story. I’ll have to have come from a poor family. Am
lucky I come from Busia, no big town it compensates really. Like see in a
country where secondary school slots give priority to countryside learners and
people from town register for their final exams in the rural areas to raise
their chances, you would know the privilege of belonging there. So in my story I
would lay claim to coming from a peasant farming family in Busia just like I did
when applying for higher education loans bursary to raise my chances of getting
maximum loan.
My schooling has to be apathetic people must wonder how I even
made it to high school leave alone university. It must be rural in elementary
and supported by family and friends in mchangos for secondary and funded by the
higher leans board in university. I must have walked to school with barely
enough to eat . I must have worn torn clothes and barely clothed. I must have
studied hard and like the proverbial Kenyan runner running away from poverty so
fast that he becomes an marathoner by adaptation I must have envisioned my success
early in life.
My career has to have started modest. An internship in an
organization that did not pay a cent and required me to be in the office by 8
am. Being new to the gerrymandering affairs of Nairobi town I will have gotten
lost a couple number of time. I will always lack fare and I will have to walk
for long distances. The great trek will span from probably Muthurwa market joining
the masses from eastlando walking into town. I must have walked antil my feet
are sore all the way to westlands where private offices are in plenty. There where
food vends for my week’s worth of expenses so all I had to depend on was tea
during lunch hours. And then I will have walked back to town and practically
ran all the way to the train station and catch the Zion moments before the loud
voice bellows, “the car of smoke (train) going to makadara, umoja, dandora and
lastly ruiru is on the first line and is about to leave” in Swahili, and jump
on the last five coaches before embarking on the journey back to the annals of
eastlando.
For my home I will have stayed in a brother place or a sister’s
place like dependency rates predict and then moved of to a tine bedsitter and
paid rent late and always had the power switched off for not being able to pay.
I will have barely survived from hand to mouth incredibly
scrapped for life and I will have risen from the ashes.
The art of telling ones story the Kenyan style is not really
complete if you do not have a turning point. It has to be dramatic, like a
street kid who tried to hang himself and the rope miraculously snaps, or a drug
addict who came to the point of death or a whore who was surprised by the
generosity of a white preacher. And yes the Jesus factor has to be in there somewhere.
A moment of reckoning, a sotto castigation. Or alternatively a mentor seeing the ingenious in
the main character and changing the fortune or a literally prize like Binyvanga’s
So I’ll tell my story one day, sitting before eager
audiences amazed by magnanimity of my achievement. Admiring how far I have come
and wishing in my story there is an element of my life they can lay claim to
even morose, like odyssey who had initially refused to go to war and asserted
that even Achilles had dressed as a woman to avoid the war and were it not for
the trick of offering a gift of weapons and embroided cloth that he could not
avoid choosing weapons that rued his guise. Yes, I will be seated before an
audience preferably national TV but who knows I might have to contend to the audience
of four children who I intend to have or a couple of drunkard in a local pub
depending on my success. And I will tell a lie of a story that must impress and
the whole world or the small audience or the intoxicated audience will urge me
on amazed by my achievements beyond all odds. They will know half the story is
a lie, and they will be making a story of their own lying through and through
even to themselves.
Perhaps that’s just the way we see ourselves, through misty
mirrors.
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