Memories of an African Childhood: Facing the Knife

The year is 1992.

I am in class six, very bright if the position at the end of every term is anything to go by. But then our school was not renowned for academics, so I didn’t know how I would have fared in a national exam. I didn’t know and neither did I care. Nobody cared in that school. I was such a happy-go-lucky lad. We didn’t read or anything, save for when a teacher gave us an assignment, which we did lackadaisically, because they were the least bothered too. Why should they when at the end of the month the school was devoid of teachers as they absented themselves to go for their paycheck in Sotik town, in spite of the dismal performance posted in final exams year in year out. We enjoyed their absence, to play football and ogle girls. Girls by then had some nice juts on their chests, some were covered with nice bras, and others had sharp nipples pushing their white school shirts out. Some had big boobs such that their shirts were distended, straining the buttons, showing a peek of some hard, firm tits, they looked like sweet potatoes. I felt like pinching them but who would let you?

 If you ask me, I went through my primary education like in a blindfold.  My blindfold though exempted novels and girls. I was a fan of boobs and books that talked about them. You can say I was prurient or voyeur at such a tender age but can you moralize to a twelve year old who is just responding to the dictates of nature? I didn’t have a girlfriend though. My interest went only as far as admiring nature, not exploring it.

There was talk of AIDS. A pestilence that would wipe all people who dared unzip their trousers or lowered their skirts in a manner to suggest sex, it was a real scare. Talked of in hushed tones, for sex was and still is a taboo topic, it was difficult to discern facts from myths. It was said to be in Nairobi and Kisumu cities, advancing slowly. Anybody from any big city was treated with suspicion lest he/she was carrying the AIDS bug. Girls who shaved their hair with fancy cuts were thought to be sluts and were to be avoided. Hair shaving machines had just arrived in our market center, anything new was associated with AIDS.

Hey, one of my classmates of that year is gone to the ether world courtesy of it. I am sorry for him; I loved playing some game like draughts we had carved on our desk with him. RIP-Paul Rono. I gotta watch my zip too! I should stick to games in desks not beds.

I hated math still. A visceral hatred that blinded my eyes and blanked my mind whenever any figure was written on the board. Thank God I was in a school that didn’t much care what you did with your time in there, as long as you availed yourself in school and on time. Viva! Rotik Primary School. Viva!

I read novels when our math teacher was wasting his time in our class. He talked and talked Greeks, I read and read English. All I was interested was the assignment he gave us at the end of the lesson. The topic number that is. Not that I copied from guys, no. I had inherited an exercise book from my cousin who was ahead of me, a genius in math. I called it an Oracle. When it was topic 32- Algebraic Questions or blah blah assignments in the textbook, well and good, I looked for topic 32 in my cousin’s exercise book and copied everything in my exercise book and handed it in to be marked. My exercise book was dotted with a lot of 100% in red ink accompanied by such superlatives as very good, well done and excellent. That was our school. Mighty Rotik!

I upped my game during end term exams in math. We did some joint exams called ‘mocks’, printed and all that. The saving grace was, everything was multiple choice questions. For math, I never even opened that question paper, why waste time yet I could not solve a single math problem, not even the simplest of all. What I did was get my answer sheet and go on a guesswork spree. See, the answer was either  A,B,C, or D, all I did was write A, B, C,D  then  D, C, B ,A  and repeat again and again from one to fifty. Knowing that math questions were from one to number fifty was bought at a price though. Since I didn’t check the question paper, I once gave/guessed a hundred answers instead of fifty. I didn’t know the questions were only up to fifty. Jeez!

I could finish my paper in ten minutes or less, give out my answer sheet and go basking in the sun, leaving other pupils scratching their heads others biting their nails. I used to wonder why guys were taking that long in a simple thing of ABCD, I mean, come on! If I could finish it in ten minutes, why would no one else even finish it thirty minutes later?  I enjoyed the sun till I changed to a shade and still those numbskulls were not finished yet.

After two hours or so, the rest of the class would join me, complaining that they ran short of time. I didn’t know how. They came with question papers, comparing how they did some questions. I didn’t care joining in their trash talk. All I knew was I could do without math in my life.

When the papers were marked, the highest my guesswork could earn me was 08%. That was the highest score I could get in math. Damn!

But dare me for a duel in the rest of the subjects! You would be so bruised for I scored above 90%. Nobody came near. Not a single soul. At the end of the term, I topped my class, with math sticking out like a sore thumb. 08% or even less, what an eyesore!

1992 was such a momentous year, there was talk of multiparty elections, something I didn’t understand much, we didn’t have a radio or TV at home. Newspapers were outdated ones used for wrapping beef, bought once or twice a year at home. (No. we were not vegans, beef was expensive!) There was talk of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Martin Shikuku, Kenneth Matiba, Mwai Kibaki , FORD, DP and other strange things in the neighborhood. Whenever two or three men gathered, they talked in hushed tones of how Gikuyus and Luos were scheming to steal our land and enslave our tribe, and how they wanted to dethrone our man, Daniel Toroitich arap Moi, from the presidency.

In the evening as I herded goats by the shopping center, I would join men huddled around a radio, tuned to BBC Swahili, talking and discussing the tension gripping the country, opposition rallies in Uhuru Park and Kamukunji Grounds, and the chaos and casualties as police broke up rallies while the people fought back. Nairobi, Kisumu and Nyeri was said to be teeming with opposition supporters, while our own province was sealed off as a KANU zone.

It was said that the Kisiis, our neighboring tribe, belonged to a party called FORD. There were rumors that some of our neighbors belonged to the same party too; threats were doing the rounds that whoever dared vote for FORD would be burned alive for betraying us.

I read from old newspapers about Kenneth Matiba, and Oginga Odinga. I was to vote for Odinga, had I possessed a voter’s card. I simply liked him. Tall boys and girls, hardly sixteen years, were rounded up in our school to be issued with ID cards so as to vote for Moi and defend our land. Chiefs and Sub Chiefs went round collecting names of poor people promising them land in a place called Mauche if they voted for KANU and Moi.

We were in our third term in school, politics was too much, Kisii pupils left our school. Shortly, we heard war had broken out in Molo, between the Kipsigis and the Gikuyus. Our people were angry with the Gikuyus, they wished they could be exterminated for encroaching on our ancestral lands. BBC reported people being killed and many others being displaced. We heard of tension in Nairobi.  The few Gikuyus who were residing in our small town fled. Their property was looted.

Next, we heard our people had been drowned in Sondu River by Luos on a market day. War with the Luos and Kipsigis broke out. There were reports of death and destruction of property all over. Luos left our shopping center to where they belonged. Even Peter Nyamasaria, who had been with us for decades and considered one of us fled our village to I don’t know where. Our men itched for a piece of the action too. All over people were fighting.

One morning, we heard the Kisiis have killed one of our own called Muluka in a place called Tembwo. Tension gripped the area. Kisiis did not pass our road that day. We were in school on a very hot boring afternoon when we heard women shouting in the next village called Chepkalwal, annunciating that the Kisiis were advancing across the border. We were told to run home. From the road, I could see houses burning along the border from Tembwo all the way to Simbi.

Going home, we met many excited men, armed with bows, arrows, clubs, swords and spears, running towards the common border, to defend our land, people and property. In less than one hour, there was screaming and thick smoke and gunshots everywhere. The atmosphere was eerie; there was a feeling of death creeping everywhere. When I stood on the hill, I could see smoke billowing along the border from Simbi to my right and Koiyet to my left.

That night, our village was lighted by the burning houses across the border; gunshots were loud and incessant, fueling the screams from the women. The more the gunshots, the more the screams. That night we didn’t sleep indoors, we slept out near a bush for our home was less than a Kilometer from the war zone.

In the morning, we woke up to more screams. We heard that cows belonging to a prominent man called Chepkebit had been stolen by Kisiis and that the police were tracking them with a chopper. Heard a rich Kissii man called Mwimbi has had his home broken into, looted and all his cows driven away by our men. Again we heard that a fat Kisii neighbor of ours called Osinde had been killed. We mourned our losses and celebrated the gains.

The road by our home was busy, new warriors were arriving, tired ones were leaving with bounties: mattresses, chairs, cupboards, cows, goats, clothes, machetes, anything.  The women of our village cooked for the warriors, cows were slaughtered for them. So many warrior relations passed by home for breakfast, lunch and supper. We had so many people.

A man was shot death, and was discovered the following day. A school mate called Wesily was shot in the thigh; saw him being rushed to hospital.  A week had passed yet the war was showing no signs of abating, in fact it was getting worse each passing day. We were told to move our cattle to our relations in Cheplelwa hill. The war was becoming unbearable. Houses were burnt on either side, but more on the Kisii side. I was getting fatigued from the whole thing, living in strange homes, eating badly cooked mass food, and worrying for our men.  I saw my dad less and less. We feared for him.

Thousands upon thousands of police officers arrived in our village to restore peace, at long last, after weeks of bloodshed. At last there was calm, but tension still hung in the air. We never saw any Kisii person walking on our road that year and the next. We went back to school, our Kisii friends never reported back to school after that.

Closing school that November, it was time for me to face the knife. Earlier in the year, I had sought permission to undergo circumcision from dad and mom and was given the green light. It was doubtful whether there would be enough peace for us to complete our initiation with all the politics that year, but the war never recurred. Politics continued.

We went for a tetanus jab at the health center. It was a Friday, and that was to be the D-Day. I was shaved and I did all the necessary preparations. Evening came, visitors trooped from all over. I was sung for but without the pep talks. My dad said we were a family of ‘lions’. Mom could not beat her tears to sing for me, neither did I want her to do so, it would have burst my own tear bank and reduce me to an emotional wreck. Dad was with me all through, guiding me, talking to me.

We went through a number of rituals that night after we parted with mom. It culminated with the initiator Mr. Haraka showing us a knife, cutting off a piece of meat from his palm and making the following declaration:

“You see this knife, this is what your mom and dad went through. If you want to pee, pee now, if you want to diarrhea, diarrhea now!”

After that scary statement, we left to our hovel at Cheplelwa hill, two kilometers away. On the way, my dad gave me a piece of dry wood from a Sodom apple stem to chew in my mouth till when the whole circumcision thing was over. I bit it in my molars.

We sat on the dewy ground, all huddled together, the sixteen of us, waiting for the initiator with his knife. It was me, Peter, Dominic, my cousins Robert, Geoffrey and Matthew, my friend Johnston and others whom I have forgotten their names, in spite of having spent a month with them in that hovel.

We waited for more than eternity, waiting for the circumciser and his knife. There were a dozen or so pressure lamps, lighting the whole place. Men were talking to us to ease the tension, but I don’t think I was interested in their chatter.

At 3 a.m. or thereabout, we were stripped of our blankets, ordered to sit in a line with our then very small dicks facing the east. My uncle Joel held me, facing me was my dad holding a bare sword and my mom staring, unblinking at me.

It was announced that the circumciser had arrived. Without even a warning, I heard a tearing sound in my penis, a spasm of pain spread all over my body. I looked down at my penis and it was all white. The outer skin was amiss. It lasted a half second. The circumciser had moved to the next initiate. I looked for my mom but she was retreating away, beating my dad and everybody around with korosiot ululating:

ariririiiiii! kongoi lakwenyun!, kongoi kiprotich ne kakomwa chebo iman! ( ariririiiiiii! I am proud of my son! I am proud of Kiprotich who has done us good!)

I knew I had passed the test and was finally a MAN!  My uncle threw a blanket over me. The initiator led everybody in a song that signified that we had all passed the circumcision test with courage:

Initiator: aee yaaa !

Chorus: aeee yaaa!

He repeated it four times and left to circumcise other boys elsewhere. I could hear my mom’s ululations fading in the distance. Everybody had left. There was a lot of pain in my penis. In the distance, I could see light at home, far off in Rotik Hills. I was sure my dad was about to slaughter a cow, and mom was to officially serve beer, and the celebrations to start in earnest.

 I must have dozed off. I was woken up by the circumciser, again, with his knife, to do a good job with my penis. For a whole thirty minutes, he sat cutting I don’t know where or what, washing it and cutting it again. I was writhing in pain, there was no anesthesia, it was considered less manly to undergo the cut under anesthesia. When he was done, my penis looked mangled, small and wet with blood. Ants struggled to cart away the pieces of meat that some minutes ago were a part of me. On the underside of my penis, was made something like a tap control. A handle? Dunno. But, I am a man! In a month’s time I would eat the bearded meat women told us it awaited us if we passed the circumcision test.

FINIS