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Humble origins of a national icon
By PETER KIMANI
The Sunset Grill is a boisterous city restaurant that lives up to its claim of being the place "where the sun never sets". On the day the TV flashes news of Mr Wahome Mutahi's passing, a stunned silence engulfs the satirist's favourite haunt.
It is at Sunset that his friends put a knife on the tenuous relationship between the fictional Whispers of the Sunday Nation fame and Wahome.
And it is in separating the humourist from the man that Wahome's varied talents become apparent.
Actor-activist Ndungi Githuku, who co-authored the prophetic musical Makaririra Kioro with Wahome, says: "Whispers and Wahome were two different people, but he was the same person."
Mr Githuku says the laid-back Whispers contrasted sharply with the hard-working Wahome ľ who was always dedicated and committed to his art.
"No matter what time he retired at night," Mr Githuku reminisces, "he always kept his appointments however early. He always beat me to it.
"He was an ordinary man who was so extraordinary," says Mr Githuku, "I have not met any person as creative."
Speaking in 1991 interview after the launch of his novel, Three Days on the Cross, "I can be very, very serious." That seriousness would become apparent a few months later when the book won the Jomo Kenyatta Memorial Prize for Literature.
"It takes a lot of faith in oneĺs nation and commitment to the cause of justice and social fair play to make a rendition such as Three Days on the Cross," says Mr Barrack Muluka of the novel Wahome wrote about his incarceration.
"More so when the environment in which that rendition is made is [still] predominantly totalitarian," adds Mr Muluka, who is the Managing Director of the East African Educational Publishers.
Wahome gave new meaning to expressions which only he could tell their origin. Over time, they became firmly embedded in Kenyaĺs everyday expressions.
"The highest tribute to his art is the fact that many of his character sketches and phrases became part of the everyday," says renowned author Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who taught Wahome at the University of Nairobi in the 1970s, and now a Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, US. "He provided images by which people could look at themselves and make sense of what was happening around them."
The 1982 birth of Whispers column was humble: "I used to like reading Mambo's sarcastic pieces," Wahome said in an interview last year, alluding to a columnist with whom he worked at the East African Standard.
"I decided to come up with little snippets, the funny little things we do not want to say openly, but which are nonetheless true. I called the column Whispers as whatever I wrote were things that people never discussed beyond whispers."
But the public mood was somewhat tense, following the abortive 1982 military coup; a wave of fear and panic was spreading across the country. When the crackdown on Mwakenya suspects commenced, Wahome could not escape the dragnet.
"Whenever I read of the arrest and automatic imprisonment of yet another Mwakenya suspect," Wahome reflected in a Nation article in 2000, "I would say, 'What an idiot! How could he join an underground movement whose leadership and membership does not seem to have an idea about keeping their tracks covered? What kind of underground movement is this, anyway, whose members are all admitting guilt in the court of law as if they are members of a choir in a sing-song?'"
He got the appropriate answers, he wrote, when he was himself arrested: "Like all those suspects I had read about, I went to court and pleaded guilty to a charge related to Mwakenya activities. I pleaded guilty to those charges after spending one month in the basement of Nyayo House where, like the rest, I had been held incommunicado and tortured.
"We boarded the prison van to serve prison sentences for offences that we had been induced to admit by 30 days and 30 nights of being stripped naked, beaten, starved, humiliated and threatened with death. A prison sentence looked a better prospect than a day longer in Nyayo House," Wahome wrote.
He turned the coarse jail life into a whetstone where he sharpened his pen: "After his imprisonment, his satire became more biting," says Mr D.H. Kiiru, the chairman of the Literature Department at the University of Nairobi. "Instead of silencing him, the experience sharpened his gift."
Mr Kiiru adds that Wahome's "courage as a literary figure" was displayed by his critical works at a time when the political mood curtailed such _expression_.
"His works were very political and critical of anything dehumanising," he says , adding: "One major legacy of Wahome's was to show the power and beauty of satirical writing. He kept Kenyans entertained much as he has helped them understand their environment. For me, he surpassed other newspaper satirists."
Mr Muluka pays tribute to a great artist: "From his thespian days with the Free Travelling Theatre Troupe of the University of Nairobi in the 1970s, Wahome never looked back from his commitment to educating us by making us laugh at ourselves. He gave invaluable advice to our authors, both young and seasoned, and contributed immensely to the growth of our literature list."
Wahome's own list of writings is long, and includes The Jailbugs, which scrubbed beneath the labyrinth of Kenya's jails to expose the rot at its core, and How To Be a Kenyan, a runaway success that stamped his authority and growing stature on the literary scene.
"He was part of the second generation of writers in Kenya who represented a continuation of our writing," says Mr Kiiru.
"The cutting wit and satire in this book," adds Mr Muluka, "makes you so shy of being Kenyan that you do not wish to show it to a foreigner, yet the humour that informs it makes you feel cruel to deny anyone the opportunity to read this book."
Wahome's other books, Doomsday, which was inspired by the August 1998 bombing of the US embassy, and The Dream Merchants, co-authored with Mr Wahome Karengo, which was launched while Wahome lay in hospital in a coma.
Poet Sam Mbure worked closely with Wahome, first at the Writers Association of Kenya, and later at the Freedom of _expression_ Network for the Defence of Media in Africa.
"I have lost a friend, Kenya has lost a friend," mourns Mr Mbure. "We will always miss him. It's a pity he has passed on now, when we a have a new government in which we have hope."
Wahome was fascinated by the idiosyncrasies that define our Kenyanness, and wrote extensively on what traps the masses in poverty and misrule.
"He addressed contemporary issues in a very creative way," says Prof Octavia Gakuru, the chairman of the Sociology Department at the University of Nairobi. "He captured the conflicts and tensions of the modern family."
Wahome's portraits of the humdrum rural existence and the emerging urban culture poignantly mirrored the nation's dilemma, while ensuring his readers understood, and recognised the fact that his writing was largely informed by their day-to-day living.
Whether recounting his eventful childhood, his travails as an altar boy, and his eventual life as a writer, Wahome put a personal touch to his writing � and everyone felt that they knew him in a very personal way.
Through the laughter lines, Wahome provided penetrating vistas into a society he loved and cared for, and served faithfully.
It may seem that he was born to write, but art came late to him. In the beginning, it was the Church that beckoned him, and in 1971, he joined the St Thomas Aquinas Major Seminary.
Although he would leave the seminary, Wahome remained a very religious person.
"In spite of everything, Whispers was a man of faith," says Fr Dominic Wamugunda, the University of Nairobi chaplain. "There was a lot of religion in his column."
He had worked in the Civil Service, where he briefly served as a District Officer, first in Meru, and later in Machakos. But it was in creative writing and journalism that Wahome found _expression_, and great success.
"He had incredibly sophisticated writing skills even at the undergraduate level," reflects Prof Micere Mugo, who taught Wahome at the University of Nairobi and is currently teaching at Syracuse University in the US.
"He was a model student: attentive, serious, deeply reflective and self-motivated. A man of few words, rather shy during his student days, the strength of his voice was in his writing."
"I recall him as a bright student in my classes way back in the seventies," says Prof Ngugi, who considers Wahome "one of the brightest products of the University of Nairobi in the glorious 1970s".
"His death is a loss to his family, to Kenya and Africa. There is no doubt in my mind that he had become a national icon and many readers in and outside Kenya looked forward to his humorous but incisive observation of the Kenyan scene."
In his final years, it was to theatre that Wahome turned. It was full cycle as previously, he had a fleeting affair with the University of Nairobi's Free Travelling Theatre.
Mugathe Mubogothi replayed the jaundiced political class that lorded it over Kenya for years, and Mugathe Ndotono rehashed the autocracy that went with political short-sightedness. Makaririra Kioro (They Shall Cry In The Toilet) refined these themes: its ambition was huge, its vision, bold ľ and very prophetic.
But Wahome went further: he took theatre to the people, performing in venues across the country. On that score, his efforts popularised theatre, an effort only comparable to Prof Ngugi's Kamirithu experience, when he took his plays to villagers in his native Limuru.
His experimentation with the Kikuyu language, first in theatre and later in prose, writing for publications such as Inooro, and Mwihoko - both published by the Catholic Diocese of Murang'a - attested to Wahome's unwavering belief that meaningful change could only come from the people rather than political systems.
"Wahome had faith in the people's ability to change things," says Fr Wamugunda.
"As a playwright, he added to the new movement of writing in African languages," says Prof Ngugi, the celebrated author who elected to write in Kikuyu two decades ago.
His interest in politics nearly pushed him into the political arena, and he even announced his intention to vie for a parliamentary seat. But after consulting his friends, Mr Githuku reveals, Wahome changed his mind ľ perhaps by realising he had a national constituency through his writing.
"He always felt a responsibility to his national audience," says Mr Kiiru, who ran a column that Wahome edited during his stint as Nation's Arts and Culture Editor.
Sunday Nation's deputy chief sub-editor Joe Mbuthia concurs. Wahome always delivered his column, even when outside the country.
"He was in a class of his own," says Mr Mbuthia. "He never suffered from writer's block, despite pleasing everyone on all fronts ľ theatre, humour, fiction, and even when you met."
"He was an asset to the country," says cartoonist Paul Kelemba. In 1991, Mr Kelemba and Wahome formed a media company, and the cartoonist illustrated the early Whispers columns. "He was a friend."
His later columns were well illustrated by the equally able Samwel Kuria aka Kourier, who brought Whispers to life in such a way that when one thinks of Whispers, the first thing that comes to mind are the cartoons.
"Even in death, Wahome is full of life, full of creativity and full of laughter in my mind," says Fr Wamugunda, "I will always remember him with a smile."
It'll be hard for Kenyans to live without Wahome, even harder for his wife, Ricarda Njoki, and their three children. Perhaps they shall find comfort in Mary Frye's song in Jack Stamp's Canticle:
"Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain
When you awaken in the morning's hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight,
I am
the soft stars that shine at night
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there, I did not die."
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