Austin Bukenya: Reflections of a retiring scholar

It is April 30, 2014, and I am on my way to JKIA, rushing to catch a flight to Entebbe to attend to a dissertation submission by one of my graduate students at Makerere University. As I chug down the sluggish traffic of Argwings Kodhek Road, I realise that I have been flying into, out of and through Nairobi since 1965. That’s just a year shy of 50!

And of these, I’ve been 22 years firmly on the ground, mostly criss-crossing the ways and byways of Nairobi. I haven’t lived that long in any other city and it is unlikely that I ever will. This is my city, and my love affair with it is not just about to end.

It all started rather bumpily, as many of these affairs usually do, when I flew into Embakasi Airport (then) on an East African Airways flight from Entebbe one July afternoon in 1965. It was the first time for me to feel really cold. Those who know Nairobi understand what it can get like in July, and in those days global warming hadn’t even entered climatological vocabulary.

But the cold did nothing to dampen our excitement. We were a bunch of Ugandan boys on our way to Dar es Salaam, to start our freshman studies at the University College there. These were the days of the University of East Africa, with Makerere, Dar es Salaam and the former Royal Technical College, Nairobi, as its constituent colleges.

It was assumed that we were all going to study Law, as indeed most of us did, since it was the main specialised course offered at the college in Dar, just as Engineering and Veterinary Medicine were the specialties of Nairobi and Human Medicine and Agriculture belonged to Makerere.

Some of us, however, were hot-headed adventurers bent on taking full advantage of the wide-open-door policies of the East African Common Services Organisation, soon to be constituted as the East African Community, to see and savour life in the EACSO countries other than Uganda. It was temptingly easy: a common regional airline, with tickets heavily subsidised for us students, no visas, no passports or border checks, and even the East African shilling still in place!

I, for example, was born and bred almost literally in the shadow of the famous Makerere Ivory Tower. But I chose to go and study Literature, Language and Linguistics in Dar es Salaam partly because I thought I liked the French language course there and partly because it would afford me an opportunity to live in the environs where my maternal grandmother happened to have been born and raised for the first nine or ten years of her life. But that’s a story for another day.

It was that spirit of adventure that sent me and four of my colleagues on our first, rather chaotic, exploration tour of Nairobi. Landing at Embakasi, we realised we had just over two hours before the flight to Dar es Salaam. So, why not make a dash into town and have a looksee?

We piled into a rather ageing cab and asked the driver to take us out to the city centre. The fare was five East African shillings for all of us, one way. But we had to cut our ride short in the middle of nowhere and return to the airport. There wasn’t much between Embakasi and Central Nairobi in those days, mostly shrubs and grass. We got worried after about twenty minutes of this, and when the driver told us it would be another half-hour or so before we got to town, we had to ask him to turn back, or we would miss our flight.

We actually missed the flight, dramatically. In our excitement about seeing Nairobi, we had failed to note that we had to check in for Dar es Salaam, as our Entebbe flight had ended at Embakasi. Our names had been called out over and over again on the communication system, with advice to us to check in urgently. But then we were tearing down the highway towards beautiful Nairobi.

By the time we got back to the airport, the Dar es Salaam flight was already boarding. These were pre-terrorist days and there were no stringent security measures even at the airport, so we got through quite easily and managed to get on to the plane. But the captain soon got word that there were some unchecked-in passengers on his plane and he flatly refused to take off with us on board.

We were unceremoniously chucked off the plane. Indeed, one of us, now a very prominent jurist in Uganda, had to literally jump off the craft on to the tarmac, as the boarding steps had already been removed in readiness for take-off. Fortunately, it was only a small Friendship model, not anything like today’s giant jetliners, so no significant damage was done.

Anyway, our flight to Dar es Salaam that afternoon was off. We were bewildered and we complained loudly to the Airline personnel but they politely pointed out to us that it wasn’t their fault, and we were lucky we were not accosted by airport security for our unauthorised boarding of an aircraft. So, maybe there was some security even in those days, though I imagine we could hardly have looked anything like a security threat in our green rustic ignorance.

In their customer-service magnanimity, East African Airways rebooked us on to the next Dar flight, the following afternoon, offered us a dinner at the airport restaurant and a ride on their passenger service bus into Nairobi, where, however, we had to find and pay for our accommodation.

We were certainly more full of grins than frowns by the time we hit downtown Nairobi, just as night fell. Though we had to fork out the few shillings we needed for our accommodation, the missed flight was beginning to look like a blessing in disguise.

We were not only in the heart of Nairobi, which we had so wanted to see, but we were being escorted around by a lovely East African Airways hostess from Uganda, and they were dazzling in those days. She even offered to take us on a tour of Nairobi the next day up to the time we were to catch our bus back to the airport.

What’s more, she would buy us lunch at her hostel, the Central YWCA. I was beginning to enjoy Nairobi. The love-affair had begun, and, although I didn’t know it then, it was to be richly tended and nurtured by the infinitely surprising generosity of this Green City in the Sun.

WAVE OF LONELINESS

But, as with all things bright and beautiful, creeping age begins to dull and blunt the edges of the emerald. This April 30, I notice it through a sudden wave of loneliness that envelops me when I walk into what used to be one of my favourite stomping grounds, the Education Building at the UoN Main Campus. I have to stop briefly at the Department of Literature to seek some professional advice from my longtime colleague, Professor Helen Mwanzi.

I cannot find her. At the department office, they tell me she is probably on the upper floor, showing a documentary film to one of her classes. One of the ladies in the office seems to have some faint recognition of me. The other, the younger one, none, and when I ask if she might have Professor Mwanzi’s phone number, just in case I don’t find her, she just gives me a look that reminds me that I probably look utterly and convincingly senile.

How the times change, and we with them! Hardly ten or even five years ago, walking along the corridors here would have meant bumping into hordes of my colleagues, theatre partners and current and former students. I know some friends are still around, as I can see from a few names on the office doors — Ciarunji Chesaina, Wanjiku Kabira, Henry Indangasi — but probably they, too, are beginning to feel that sense of being a minority vis-à-vis the younger generations. Suddenly, I’m restrained by a strange fear of barging into any space.

I also want to ask about my ‘makoki’ agemate, Chris Wanjala, with whom I interact regularly on Facebook, but I’m too shy. Do I even know if he’s on this campus? The same goes for Kitheka wa Mberia and a clutch of other elders. Jameni, it’s high time we renewed genuine contacts and, literally, looked up one another.

From the Departmental Chair’s office, I can hear voices but I just don’t have the courage to even ask if I can go in there and say hello. I realise I don’t even know who the current Chair is! I think back in the day, stretching as far back as the late 1960s, when you could just sashay into the ‘Head’s Study’, without any ceremony, since you knew whoever sat there was a first-name acquaintance: Jim Stewart, Andy Gurr, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Henry Owuor Anyumba, Henry Indangasi…

Upstairs, I find the class watching their film. I walk in and discreetly look around. Not finding the professor, I ask the young man who seems to be in charge if he has seen her. No he hadn’t but maybe I could ask the lady over there, her colleague, if she had any idea. A literary colleague at UoN and she neither recognizes me nor I her! Change indeed!

The young man, however, gets curious and asks me who I am. When I tell him, he seems to be genuinely pleased and impressed. “I’ve read a lot of your writings,” he says. “I didn’t know I would ever have the opportunity of meeting you.” That flatters me, but I quickly remember that it’s a double-edged compliment. Ever heard of the writer’s occupational hazard of being dead in order to be recognised?

Anyway, when he tells me he is doing a Master’s degree in literature, I give him my e-mail address and ask him to get in touch. I walk out of the room and head for the stairs. But I’ve hardly taken the first step down when Edwin Nyutho of the School of Journalism (I think they have a more fanciful name for it these days) and Kimengich of the Kenya Oral Literature Association (KOLA) rush out and hail me.

A brief but warm banter with these two longtime friends reassures me that maybe the loneliness hasn’t quite fully set in.

As I tell Edwin and Kim, “So, I’m not travelling completely incognito after all!” For Edwin, this definitely recalls our great theatre days and the escapades of The Government Inspector.

Prof Austin Bukenya is one of the pioneering African scholars of English and literature in East Africa. He taught for many years in Kenya.