Remembering Wahome Mutahi and the making of our art gala
Wahome Mutahi, popularly known as ‘Whispers’, after a column of the same name, wrote for the Daily Nation newspaper from 1982 to 2003 and offered an artistic spoof on the vicissitudes of Kenyan national life.
What you need to know:
- In early 2003, as he underwent what was supposed to be a routine, minor medical operation at the Thika District Hospital, in Kiambu, Mutahi fell into a coma, from which he would never recover.
- He died on July 22, 2003, at the Kenyatta National Hospital after an agonising 137 days in a coma.
- The late Wahome Mutahi's legacy is immortalised through a family-led initiative, the Wahome Mutahi Memorial Trust, that furthers his work.
On August 25, 2011, as the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ raged on in the Middle East, Mohammed Ali Farzat, one of the Arab world's most widely acclaimed cartoonists, was reportedly headed off as he left the iconic Umayyad Square, in the Syrian capital Damascus, by members of a pro-government militia who pinioned his arms onto the bonnet of his car and smote them with mallets as a "warning" for depicting the country's president, Bashar al-Assad, as "desperate for flight after defenestration".
The attack on Farzat, also head of the Arab Cartoonists Association, recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Peace (2011) and named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine (2012), drew worldwide condemnation and sparked an outpouring of solidarity from fellow cartoonists in the Arab world and internationally.
My memory of Farzat's tribulations and punition was summoned up on Friday, July 22, as we marked the death anniversary of Kenya's beloved humourist, Wahome Mutahi.
Born on October 24, 1954, Mutahi, popularly known as ‘Whispers’, after a column of the same name, he wrote for the Daily Nation newspaper from 1982 to 2003, offered an artistic spoof on the vicissitudes of the Kenyan national life.
Theatre
He was equally well known in theatre. The late Mutahi, in memory of whom a bust has since been erected at the Kenya National Theatre, along Harry Thuku Road, in Nairobi, also wrote humour columns for Ugandan publications, the Daily Monitor and Lugambo.
His artistically rich literary oeuvre includes books such as Three Days on the Cross, which won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature (1992), Jail Bugs, Doomsday and How To Be A Kenyan.
Other titles include The Miracle Merchants, Mr Canta, Hassan the Genie, The Ghost of Garba Tula and Just Wait and See.
Like Farzat above (and Ngugi wa Thiong'o in 1977), the late Mutahi was arrested alongside his brother Njuguna Mutahi in 1986 and held at the infamous Nyayo House torture chambers in Nairobi for alleged sedition and association with Mwakenya Movement and later transferred to Kamiti Maximum Security Prison.
They would both be released 15 months later without having been brought to trial, an experience that inspired Mutahi to write Three Days on the Cross and Jail Bugs.
In early 2003, as he underwent what was supposed to be a routine, minor medical operation at the Thika District Hospital, in Kiambu, Mutahi fell into a coma, from which he would never recover.
He died on July 22, 2003, at the Kenyatta National Hospital after an agonising 137 days in a coma.
Benevolent mindfulness
Kenyans will remember the late Mutahi’s staple refrain, pithy and coined in benevolent mindfulness of the downtrodden: “I am neither too foolish nor too clever.”
By the time of his death, his style, craft and vocational métier had received so much top billing from Kenyans and artistic admirers of his that both The Standard and The Nation newspapers immediately attempted "reincarnation" of his column, ‘Whispers’, through surrogate (ghost) writers.
Benson Riungu reintroduced Benson's World, written along the lines (and in the tradition) of "Whispers" in the Sunday Standard after Mutahi's death.
And the Sunday Nation attempted a replica of the Whispers column with a new writer pen-named Mwalimu Andrew, he of the Staffroom Diary fame.
However, the style of expression and representation of the late Mutahi evolved and moulded over the years, which was mainly a juxtaposition of humour, satire and the use of certain widely diffused iconographic imagery, continues to be and form the stylistic muse of cartoonists and authors of social and political spoofs to date.
The late Wahome Mutahi's legacy is immortalised through a family-led initiative, the Wahome Mutahi Memorial Trust, that furthers his work.
The familial celebration and extolling of the late Mutahi's acclaimatory apogee is a complementary initiative in addition to the bi-annual Wahome Mutahi Award for Literature founded in 2005 by the Kenya Publishers Association to honour, and fossilise the renown of, one of Kenya's greatest artists of all time.
Also, as part of the aforementioned initiative, a book offering an analytical and synoptic retrospect of the late Wahome Mutahi's works titled Wahome Mutahi's World, edited by Herve Maupeu and Patrick Mutahi, has since been published.
If there's one vital lesson that we can learn from the vocational lives and artistic times of the late Wahome Mutahi, the late cartoonist Joshua Nanjero and countless other artistic aces who've since passed on, it's that, not only is talent magical if and when used to the glory of that which is good, worthy and noble, it's also one of those subtle strengths Man is specially endowed with, of which the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) once said: "There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no-one ever comes to warm themselves at it. And the passersby see only a wisp of smoke."
Mr Baraza is a votary of global peace, historian, writer, thinker and founder Public Affairs Volunteers for Global Peace and Climate Justice (PAVGPCJ). [email protected]
