Tumani’s baby shower and Evan Mwangi’s postcolonial animal

Former Attorney General Charles Njonjo makes his remarks during the 50th Anniversary memorial service for Thomas Joseph Mboya at the Holy Family Basilica on July 5, 2019.  


Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group

What you need to know:

  • Indeed, all Tumani’s friends were invited to do the same, make donations online.
  • Rafiki met his tragic end a few months after Mr Njonjo’s adventure and I am sure our former Attorney General joined the rest of the world in lamenting the monumental loss.

I have never been to a baby shower party. The fashion had not caught on when my own children came. We still clung to the old belief that you “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched”, and overeager anticipation of a birth might look like courting bad luck. But there was a recent baby shower that got me quite excited.

Sadly, I was not be able to attend the shower, partly because of the pandemic, and partly because the do was some distance away, in New Orleans, Lousiana, which is just emerging from the battering of yet another hurricane.

I, however, contemplated sending my best wishes, and maybe a present, to Tumani, the mother-to-be, if that is the way things are done.

Indeed, all Tumani’s friends were invited to do the same, make donations online. Tumani, you see, would be the first gorilla to have a baby at New Orleans’ Audubon Zoo in the past 24 years. Tumani, aged 13, and Okpara, her 26-year old silverback partner, should have had their baby by now, although I have no details yet of how it was received.

Mention of the silverback, however, brings me to one of the reasons why the New Orleans story caught my attention. Did you hear of the murder of Rafiki? As his name suggests, Rafiki was a well-known and much loved senior male gorilla in the forests of south-west Uganda’s Highlands. In a ghastly crime earlier this year, a hardened poacher, in the pursuit of his nefarious trade, chanced upon Rafiki and speared him to death.

11-year prison term

Fortunately, Alex Byamukama, the poacher, was apprehended and prosecuted and he is currently serving an 11-year prison term for his crime. That, however, is rather cold comfort for Rafiki’s family and his many human friends who came from all over the world to visit and admire him. Do you, for example, remember our redoubtable centenarian, “Sir” Charles Njonjo, going gorilla tracking in those very forests as part of his 100th birthday celebrations last January?

Rafiki met his tragic end a few months after Mr Njonjo’s adventure and I am sure our former Attorney General joined the rest of the world in lamenting the monumental loss. But we East Africans need not make any ostentatious declarations of love for our wildlife. Our animals are not only our furry gold but also our relatives.

I, for example, am antelope, because that is my father’s lineage emblem. My mother was buffalo and my paternal grandmother was sheep. Hajara bint Ramadhan Nakku, my Mzizima-born maternal grandmother, was civet cat. Amusing or puzzling as these might sound to some ears, they are strong identity markers that define and govern our relationships.

Take, for instance, the regulation of our intimate relationships, called umaharimu in Kiswahili. I would never dream of dating, courting, let alone marrying, an antelope or a buffalo woman. The antelope one would be my sister while the buffalo one would be my mother, even if we did not know each other from Adam. Our very names, from the lineage registers, would establish the identities and the taboo.

Such observances are certainly not unique to the Baganda. Nor are they limited to matters of love and marriage. Respect and protection of one’s lineage emblem goes beyond the symbolic to the actual guardianship of one’s patron creature.

 Thus, I cannot hunt antelope, eat its flesh or use any product from it, like wearing or sitting on a hide from antelope skin. I would thus be a vegan as far as the whole “antelope” genus goes.

In a more complex pattern, this would mean that every emblem species, plant, insect, reptile, bird or animal, would have its guardians and protectors. Their territory would be a conservation sanctuary for that species. Do you see the tremendous potential of these aspects of indigenous knowledge, belief and practice for contemporary nature and environmental protection?

We in East Africa, for example, could form an Elephantine super-lineage, with the mighty ndovu as our emblem. We would then ensure that none of our elephant relatives died at the hands of cowardly poachers or greedy ivory hunters anywhere in our territory. Comparable leagues could be formed to speak up and fight for the giraffes, the forests and the wetlands.

Now, if you feel that I am being trivial or facetious, you should read the new book by my friend and fellow columnist, Prof Evan Mwangi of Northwestern University. The book is called The Postcolonial Animal:African Literature and Posthuman Ethics, and it appears to be both tantalizing and frightening. You will be familiar with Mwangi’s light-hearted but insightful comments on our language and literary issues, generated, as he says, in consultation with his dog, Sigmund.

African literature

I had always assumed that Sigmund, presumably named after the great psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, was a simple humour device to sweeten the reading for us. But the Prof’s new book reveals that he is quite serious about animals in their own right.

Indeed, it is about animals in African literature and orature. Its disturbing undertone is the suggestion, especially in that “posthuman ethics” hint, that the way we humans have been relating to our fellow creatures has been downhill.

The scary implication is that if we carry on at the present rate, that “posthuman” may as well end up as a “post-anthropocene” age, when humans as we know them today will be extinct, or “past tense”, as humourist Wahome Mutahi used to put it. Who, then, will be there to consult with Sigmund and his likes?

Incidentally, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Shawki Allam, last month made a strikingly benevolent pronouncement about dogs. I will not presume to quote or paraphrase the Mufti’s guidance, let alone interpret its significance for Islamic believers.

 For me, however, it was another marker of the growing need to readjust, for our own good, our relationship with our fellow creatures.

Check out the Grand Mufti’s guidance, please, and advise me accordingly. I will be instructed, and grateful.