Prof Bethwel Ogot at his home in Millimani Estate, Kisumu County on March 17, 2016.
When he found out that he was about to be ejected as the founding director of The International Louis Leakey Memorial Institute for African Prehistory (TILLMIAP), Bethwell Ogot lunged into a proactive campaign to secure his position, having learnt ominous lessons from the crude ejection of his colleague, John Onyango Abuje, from his position as the head of the archaeological division of TILLMIAP.
TILLMIAP had been established in 1977 to honour the archaeological fetes of Louis Leakey, and had a central place for his son Richard, and his widow Mary. The institute sought primarily to promote and coordinate “internationally research into the prehistory of man, and disseminate knowledge on a world-wide scale through publications, symposia, lectures and conferences”, as Ogot later recalled in his memoir.
Given his standing as the most refined historian of the time, it was unsurprising that Ogot was headhunted from the University of Nairobi, where he had survived ethnically driven machinations for most of his professional life, and enticed to be the pioneer director of an institute whose work would resonate across the world.
Yet, if TILLMIAP was his refuge from the brazen tribalism at the University of Nairobi then, it proved to be a startlingly fragile one, quite incapable of insulating him against the remote manipulation of the tribal bigots who manned high places in the knowledge food chain.
Back in 1970 while still at the university, Ogot had learnt, both as observer and victim, how tribalism could impede one’s career growth along pathways of administration. The moment coincided with the imminent exit of the then principal, the expatriate Arthur Porter. The inauguration of the founding vice chancellor also coincided with that of launching Kenya’s first full-fledged university.
And if common sense had prevailed, the honour would have gone to any of the three seniormost professors then: David Wasawo, a former vice principal of Makerere University College and Dean of Faculty of Science at University of Nairobi; Simeon Ominde, the first African professor in the entire eastern Africa, a former Dean of Faculty of Arts; and, of course, Bethwell Ogot, the second African professor at Nairobi, also a former dean of the faculty of arts, and former acting principal of the then university college.
None of them was deemed fit, so Jomo Kenyatta opted for his kinsman, Josephat Njuguna Karanja. In Ogot’s words, Karanja was by then “a supernumerary lecturer in the Department of History, teaching ‘A’ level syllabuses for less than a year,” and was so appointed although he “had virtually no experience in university administration, not even at the departmental level.”
Ogot won senate elections to deputise Karanja, while remaining sensitive to the vulnerability of university leadership to political dynamics unfolding at the national level then. In January of the previous year, lawyer Argwings Kodhek had died in a mysterious road crash; in July of the same year, Tom Mboya was gunned down by a suspected government errand boy and, in December, Jaramogi Odinga’s Kenya People’s Union was banned and Jaramogi himself detained without trial. It was the peak of Jomo Kenyatta’s draconian and ethnically polarizing rulership that would go on for another eight years.
Throughout, Ogot was something of a stray cat in senior management meetings within the university and the entire education ecosystem that had but only slight variations of the tribal logic prevalent at the university then.
This crippling reality could have been the ultimate trigger that made Ogot to leap at a chance to head TILLMIAP when, seemingly out of the blue, Richard Leakey approached him in May 1977 to consider serving as the first director of TILLMIAP. It was also at TILLMIAP, where he went after resigning from the university, that Ogot got a chance to prioritise merit of argument and individual over ethnicity and related considerations.
This decision would, somewhat ironically, benefit the same University of Nairobi from which he had scampered in flight from the rabid tribalism of the day. Simiyu Wandibba and Henry Mutoro, who would later serve as professors at the university, were awarded fellowships by Ogot, who defied Richard Leakey’s directive that such fellowships should be open for international competition.
So while dabbling in the politics of institutional management and administration, Ogot’s first and most enduring love was for knowledge. As he wrote in his autobiography, he was deeply curious to know how humanity sought to relate its past to the present and to the future, so as not to “stand lonely and isolated in the great sweep of time or intimidated by the formidable earth and the vast stretch of surrounding seas.”
In a scholarly journey that started back in the Gem of his fathers, through Alliance Boys School and Makerere to St Andrews, Ogot sought to know how the human being, through their myths and legends, “bridges back to the very dream morning of creation”, and to understand “what moves the (human) spirit to grief or to exultation.”
Through his interest in mathematics, philosophy and history, Ogot exerted himself through sheer striving and unimaginable industry to appreciate the broad scope of human knowledge. He believed, when others within academia had their misgivings, that proverbs and sayings contain the learning of centuries about human nature, and about how people bring their environment to do their bidding.
This could well be why, as Dean of Faculty of Arts in the late 1960s, Ogot invited his faculty to produce papers for discussion as part of the planning for the triennium 1967–1970. In response, J. Steward, then the Acting Head of English Department, who recommended the establishment of a department of modern languages alongside a department of linguistics and African languages, while defending the supposedly unassailable status of the then English Department.
Steward’s somewhat outrageous recommendations are what provoked Owuor Anyumba and Taban Lo Liyong, then in the Institute for Development Studies and English Department’s James Ngugi, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o was known then, to reject the position and write their own widely cited “On the Abolition of the English Department.”
The rest, as they say, is history. But it is clear that Ogot’s approach of involving faculty in planning for the faculty indirectly altered the course of teaching and learning of literature in Kenya and the whole postcolonial world.
What has come out of postcolonial literary scholarship aligns with Ogot’s own intellectual investment in producing versions and subversions of history that are postcolonial in spirit. One only needs to look at History as Destiny and History as Knowledge or Zamani: A Survey of East African History, or even the UNESCO project Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century to get a sense of the clear thinking that Ogot practiced.
Having survived the machinations and all within universities and other institutions, Ogot took a final disapproving look at everything around him and headed in retirement to Yala, where he continued to read and write awash in the nostalgia of his boyhood and experience of adulthood until, at 95, he left us on Thursday for the world beyond. Go well, Bethwell Allan Ogot.
Godwin Siundu is associate professor at University of Nairobi and Advocate of the High Court
