Austin Bukenya: My book week reading, and a little problem with my English

When did you last buy yourself a book and actually read it? For the purposes of this question, the textbooks you had to buy for your children do not count. Some university graduates, I have heard, have not visited a bookshop, let alone bought a book, since they left the campus, maybe several decades ago.

Since Africa cannot take off with a population of graduate non-readers, I invite you to join me in a book adventure this coming week. I call it book week because it will witness the Nairobi International Book Fair between September 28 and October 2. I suggest that each one of us connected to UoN acquires a copy of Fountain of Knowledge: History of the University of Nairobi, 1952-2020 and reads it. You will have done a great job of identifying as one of us.

I will say a few more words about this work and also give you a few lame excuses for my apparent reticence about it so far. First, I should mention my second prospective book for this book lover’s week. This is Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, by our very own Wole Soyinka. Need I say more?

Bookshop

Anyway, as I keep boasting (or honestly and gratefully confessing) to you, my job, which is books, also happens to be my hobby. So, I do not have to limit myself to only one book for a whole week. Have I told you of that recurrent feeling of mine, every time I walk into a bookshop, that I want to buy up the whole place?

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, as the adage has it. I also remember the caution of the sage who laconically said, “I fear the person of a single book (timeo hominum unius libri).” Double-edged, the saying could mean respect for one who has studied one text and thoroughly grasped it. Negatively, however, the same utterance could suggest the sterility of arguing from a single point of view.

Back to our texts, the burst on to the literary scene, last May, of Fountain of Knowledge, by Profs Bethwell Ogot and Madara Ogot, threw me into a fluster of emotions. To begin with, I must have heard, from impeccable sources,  that this work was coming, but somehow, my attention appears to have wandered, and I lost track of the events. In any case, the coronavirus scourge ruled out, last year and this, our now cherished tradition of gathering at the Homestead in Yala to commemorate and celebrate significant events with our “Japuonj” Bethwell Ogot. The times are, indeed, out of joint.

The foregoing hints at another reason for my mixed emotions. My partiality and enthusiasm for the Ogot literary and intellectual enterprise is no secret to my regular readers. Would I be able to give an objective and balanced comment on this new work? Would it not be prudent for me to wait, as I have done, for others to have their say? Anyway, I can humbly reveal that I am not alone in claiming that Ogot the consummate historian and Ogot the precise engineer have competently blended their skills in this work to give us an enlightening and heart-warming narrative of the origins and growth of our UoN over the past seventy years.

I feel good that, although not quite directly an alumnus of this august institution, I was for many years, and still largely am, under her wings. This is where you, too, come in. Whether you were at the “Main”, Chiromo, Kabete, Kenyatta or Kikuyu Campus, the University of Nairobi was and is your Alma Mater (kind mother) and your Fountain of Knowledge. The “Fountain” in the title is not only an allusion to the iconic sculpture on the main campus but also a symbol of higher education and intellectual history in East Africa.

As for Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, it is Soyinka’s first novel in 48 years. I remember reading his first novel, The Interpreters, back in 1968, and characterising it as part of what I call his “cult of complexity”, as contrasted with Achebe and p’Bitek’s simple “creative conformity”. Chronicles is, understandably, about Nigerians, once voted in some poll as the happiest people on earth. You do not have to be a specialist in Soyinka’s work to guess that the novel is satirical.

Language

Two considerations, however, attracted me to the veteran’s new book. The first is our endless struggle with language, and the second is the elusive concept of happiness. With regard to language, it would be silly to imagine a Soyinka lost for words. What, then, accounts for this remarkably long silence of his in the field of prose fiction? We cannot be sure, but I hypothesise that the silence marks “a search for an idiom”.

Living long (as 87-year old Soyinka would testify) teaches you that language changes, drastically, even as we are using it. In meaning for example, you find some words end up meaning almost the opposite of what they formerly meant. “Oversight” used to mean an erroneous omission. Today, apparently, it means “supervision”. The pandemic era has transformed “breakthrough” from a fortunate and significant development (as in a financial breakthrough) into a disastrous “breach” through the protective wall of a vaccine. “Mandate”, which used to mean authorisation now seems to suggest a hated and coercive order. How does a writer cope with such challenges?

Regarding happiness, we cannot limit it to the Nigerians. It is, apparently, the rarest and most desired “commodity” on Planet Earth. We will chat some more about it one of these days, inshallah. But you might have heard that Dr Tal Ben Shahar of Harvard University runs the most popular and heavily subscribed course at that august and prestigious institution. The course, in Positive Psychology, is on happiness, Dr Shahar is known as the “Happiness Professor.

That is a title for which I would like to work.

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and literature. [email protected]