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Do you keep in mind the music “Kifo” (loss of life) by a outstanding Mswahili crooner? I don’t have the lyrics on me, however I keep in mind its insightful meditation on the enigma and conundrum of loss of life.
The music got here to my thoughts as I used to be struggling to internalise the shock and sorrow of dropping my instructor and long-time colleague and good friend, Professor Muigai wa Gachanja, previously of Kenyatta College.
Prof Muigai wa Gachanja, who handed away final Monday, was an eminent scholar and tutorial, specialising in Literature, orature and folklore. He was significantly revered for his impeccable scholarship and likewise his “self-made” profession into and thru the echelons of upper training.
I heard that, in contrast to many people of his technology, who benefited from “airlifts” and different early postcolonial assist programmes, Muigai wa Gachanja struggled up on his personal, funding even his (lengthy distance) highschool training as he labored at low-paid jobs.
I preceded him at Kenyatta College by some years and, since I additionally had some (doubtful) claims to orature (oral literature), it was not lengthy earlier than we established a detailed and heat comradeship.
Those that interacted solely casually or formally with Muigai is likely to be forgiven for his or her impression of him as a distant and even “aloof” character. Shut up, the Prof was fairly a heat character, a superb conversationalist with a vigorous sense of humour..
I believe that his obvious guardedness on the Kenyatta College campus was as a result of fairly “loaded” (to not say poisonous) political environment prevailing within the nation, and on our campuses, on the time he returned from his doctoral research within the US.
Within the more and more narrowing democratic house of the Nineteen Eighties and 90s, our campuses have been riven into factions. Other than the vast majority of us who selected to carry our cowardly silence whilst we witnessed the injustices, there have been two diametrically opposed camps.
At one excessive have been the fearless, vocal revolutionaries who dared to talk reality to the powers that have been, regardless of the dire penalties. On the different excessive have been the fanatical supporters of the regime (together with the so-called “lecturers for rent”).
Not keen or ready to be dragged into any of the camps, regardless of the ideological, private, opportunistic or different tugs, Muigai wa Gachanja selected to maintain his personal counsel and never be recognized too carefully, particularly, with both the pro- or anti-establishment teams.
Not that he lacked views or convictions concerning the state of affairs within the Kenya of these instances. Quite the opposite, raised within the powerful pre-independence remaining a long time of the colonial period, and armed with a liberal Western training, he shared the disillusionment of most educated Kenyans of his time.
Certainly, he tried to contribute, in his personal manner, to the elevating of consciousness and reflection amongst his friends. He began, along with his personal funds I consider, a periodical, The Impartial Evaluation: Journal of Japanese African Literary and Cultural Research. It was an impressively high-quality publication, nevertheless it was fairly short-lived, winding up after just a few points, ostensibly for lack of sources.
One ought to word, nonetheless, that the Nineteen Eighties and 90s weren’t pleasant to mental publications, apart from people who sang the politically appropriate songs.
My good friend Bedan Mbugua, who was arrested and subjected to many tribulations following the banning of his Past journal in 1988, can testify to this. Muigai wa Gachanja was alert to those constraints, and he spoke to his associates with vehement anger concerning the political ogres that had infiltrated our management methods, together with college administrations.
Point out of the “ogres” brings me again to my work with Muigai wa Gachanja, as his instructing colleague, co-author and eventual analysis scholar. Muigai wa Gachanja had come to Oral Literature by the use of Folklore Research at Emory College in Atlanta, Georgia.
When he joined the late Jane Nandwa and me at Kenyatta College, our Oral Literature programmes have been operating and thriving. However there have been some variations between Gachanja’s folkloristic strategy and our (Makerere-inspired) “orature” operations.
Folklore was (and nonetheless is) a extra settled self-discipline, with robust important and interpretative theories and strategies. Our orature, alternatively, was a comparatively new strategy, primarily emphasising contact with stay efficiency and nonetheless looking for acceptable methods of responding to its infinite dynamics.
However as we in contrast notes and experiences with Muigai wa Gachanja, I, for one, realised that I may be taught and profit quite a bit from the time-tried important theories of folklore, to counterpoint my strictly and narrowly literary theories.
So, after the lack of our Dr Jane Awinja Nandwa, when my publishers needed me to replace the textual content I had authored for them together with her, I turned to Muigai wa Gachanja, whose work I used to be studying to respect increasingly, as I obtained higher acquainted with it.
Certainly, it was Muigai wa Gachanja who steered that we should always do a two-part work. The primary textual content would freely introduce oral literature to learners within the early years of secondary faculty, and the second would delve into the comparatively superior intricacies of interpretation.
That was how, Oral Literature (a Junior Course and a Senior Course) got here to be. As Prof Muigai and I co-authored the texts, with inclusion of the perfect materials from the work I had executed with Dr Nandwa, my admiration and respect for my new co-author grew by leaps and bounds.
He was not solely a meticulously disciplined and organised employee, qualities that I notoriously lack, but additionally an important networker, arranging with the publishers to get us to quiet upcountry retreats the place we may work for weeks on finish with out interruption.
Little marvel, then, that once I launched into my, belated, doctoral analysis work, I used to be profoundly grateful to my superiors once they named Prof Muigai wa Gachanja as one in all my supervisors. However that could be a story for an additional day.
For now, we solely say, “Relaxation effectively, Prof Muigai wa Gachanja. You advised the story. You sang the music. You danced the dance. Nĩ wega.”
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