Ouma Fred
My awakening to myself happened sometime in the earlier side of 1980s, in Mombasa, Kenya. I have opted to get this self portrait going from that point not out of sympathy with the art of reductionism as such is practiced of the neo biographer, nor to play a surgeon out to slice incurably infected parts of the body from a patient. No. The life I have so far known has seen not much of scandals of the sort worth sugarcoating with fancy speech. The option rather was dictated upon me more than two decades before I sat to this venture, courtesy of the hand of fate. For it's to that unpredictable hand that I ended up short of material useful enough to assemble me a clear self-portrait predating the point at which I took of with this tale, much of the material - including my place of birth - having accompanied my parents out of the land of the living before I could come into grip with it. Not much survives of the picture that the pre-school me was - not much beyond my date of birth, which, thankfully, was immortalised in the admission records of Shimo la Tewa Primary School, North of Mombasa, as thus: the first day of July, the year 1973.
I own not much data on my father, either. The picture I possess of Mr Zacharia Ouma is as misty as that of a mountain viewed from below - no more than fragmented views remnant of the colorful narratives I grew up listening to. I know little of the man who became a primary school headmaster at the tender age bracket of twenties, an office he only came to settle on after his father had sanctioned him against pursuing an award of scholarship out of the country. He was a man brilliant and pure of heart, was the chorus. And the tale was often allowed out with a tone such expressive whenever I happened to be part of the audience that the boy of seven I at that time was couldn't help reading of the weighty expectations they threw at him, owing to it that my father had three wives and, even though the first son to the second wife was ten years senior to me, the ways of our people dictated that I was my father's first son, being the that I was the first son to his first wife.
"You must never make fireword of this type of tree," I recall my paternal grandmother cautioning her granddaughters by the fireside inside her hut, on one of the many school holidays that often saw me join the near classroom size crowd she commanded of grandchildren at her place in Muhuru Bay, within sight of Lake Victoria, day times of which the grandsons of us would exhaust either being useful in the grazing fields, or tearing through one forest after another hunting for wild berries, or just being boys by the shores of the lake, while the evenings usually saw all her grandchildren - of male gender below 12 and of female gender all ages - assemble in her hut of a kitchen to be treated to the inexhaustible library of folktales she was, and to be soothed by the cool, fermented, sugarless poridge that a big pot by the curved wall seldom ran dry of.
I wondered why making fuel of some tree was forbiden, for by age seven or therebouts children usually are already awake to it that any tree, whatever the type, is food to fire. I waited for the explanation that often followed such cautions. "It's a tree enemy to our clan," came the explanation, but which struck me as unusually brief compared to those that I had heard before. It was too vague to neutralise the relentless curiosity known of children - unless it were from a parent foul of mood, or from a person of character less friendly to children. But grandparents are never such unlearned before their grandchildren. The "why" came from me, and somehow took her by suprise, being that I was a child of "the silent one" character. She half-turned her head and half faced the direction of the young faces that occupied a reed matt to her back, briefly ran her eyes through the grandsons of us, then, softly, planted her eyes on me..to be continued..
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My awakening to myself happened sometime in the earlier side of 1980s, in Mombasa, Kenya. I have opted to get this self portrait going from that point not out of sympathy with the art of reductionism as such is practiced of the neo biographer, nor to play a surgeon out to slice incurably infected parts of the body from a patient. No. The life I have so far known has seen not much of scandals of the sort worth sugarcoating with fancy speech. The option rather was dictated upon me more than two decades before I sat to this venture, courtesy of the hand of fate. For it's to that unpredictable hand that I ended up short of material useful enough to assemble me a clear self-portrait predating the point at which I took of with this tale, much of the material - including my place of birth - having accompanied my parents out of the land of the living before I could come into grip with it. Not much survives of the picture that the pre-school me was - not much beyond my date of birth, which, thankfully, was immortalised in the admission records of Shimo la Tewa Primary School, North of Mombasa, as thus: the first day of July, the year 1973.
I own not much data on my father, either. The picture I possess of Mr Zacharia Ouma is as misty as that of a mountain viewed from below - no more than fragmented views remnant of the colorful narratives I grew up listening to. I know little of the man who became a primary school headmaster at the tender age bracket of twenties, an office he only came to settle on after his father had sanctioned him against pursuing an award of scholarship out of the country. He was a man brilliant and pure of heart, was the chorus. And the tale was often allowed out with a tone such expressive whenever I happened to be part of the audience that the boy of seven I at that time was couldn't help reading of the weighty expectations they threw at him, owing to it that my father had three wives and, even though the first son to the second wife was ten years senior to me, the ways of our people dictated that I was my father's first son, being the that I was the first son to his first wife.
"You must never make fireword of this type of tree," I recall my paternal grandmother cautioning her granddaughters by the fireside inside her hut, on one of the many school holidays that often saw me join the near classroom size crowd she commanded of grandchildren at her place in Muhuru Bay, within sight of Lake Victoria, day times of which the grandsons of us would exhaust either being useful in the grazing fields, or tearing through one forest after another hunting for wild berries, or just being boys by the shores of the lake, while the evenings usually saw all her grandchildren - of male gender below 12 and of female gender all ages - assemble in her hut of a kitchen to be treated to the inexhaustible library of folktales she was, and to be soothed by the cool, fermented, sugarless poridge that a big pot by the curved wall seldom ran dry of.
I wondered why making fuel of some tree was forbiden, for by age seven or therebouts children usually are already awake to it that any tree, whatever the type, is food to fire. I waited for the explanation that often followed such cautions. "It's a tree enemy to our clan," came the explanation, but which struck me as unusually brief compared to those that I had heard before. It was too vague to neutralise the relentless curiosity known of children - unless it were from a parent foul of mood, or from a person of character less friendly to children. But grandparents are never such unlearned before their grandchildren. The "why" came from me, and somehow took her by suprise, being that I was a child of "the silent one" character. She half-turned her head and half faced the direction of the young faces that occupied a reed matt to her back, briefly ran her eyes through the grandsons of us, then, softly, planted her eyes on me..to be continued..
- Nationality: KENYA
- Date of birth : 1973
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- Groups: Contemporary Kenyan Artists
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The Natural Cosmopolitans.
Truth is rarely a figure as nudely exposed as it is in the holding: that man in his infancy is universally a being of one culture. It maybe of sound a deduction of merit preinflationary before the scholar, whose world is seldom accomodative of thoughts such informal of grounding, often assigning them status little respectful outside the basket of verisimilitudes. But despotic lingo-aesthesticism such scholarly is seldom a facility profitable to mankind when employed extra-jurisidiction; that is, outside the duty of crafting up comical lines of sound learned, as intellectualism dictates of such in the sophisticated comedy theatres that institutions of higher learning are. Not one quote useful was ever recorded of Sophists, and the verbal acrobats that our era owns of their descendents, their eloquency notwithstanding, are seldom of feet worth standing on before the precision spoken of the humble voice of primitive wit, upon which the observation aforementioned is rested. For it's a fact beyond argument that the sound with which man announces his arrival on earth is universally of one language; whether the birth is received in a country of standard of living as high as the statistics state of Scandnavian countries, or in a country as lame of such as the developing world is always of picture in the slanders that Aid Agencies often peddle of it; in a city of scape as heavily polluted with civilization as the Big Apple, or in a village of tranquil existence unknown outside the pygmy world; in an hospital baroque grand, or by the roadside; inside a mansion corporately snobbish, or inside a shack of an aura as gloomy as that of van Gogh's "Potato Eaters."
One lingua franca is all that infants newly arrived universally know of language. It's never anything a language known to the dictionery, beyond a piercing shrill of sharpness miraculous of a being hardly one minute old; but nature designed it a speech of cryptic shell such brittle that even people of IQ strongly suggestive of de-evolution of man are seldom made to struggle making of it the paraphrase: "I have arrived! I have made it from the land of the unborn to the land of the living! I am not a product of my own idea, yes; but I am me! I am one with the family of man!"
Such universal a being man always is with his maiden step into life; not a hint of the misanthrope he frequently is an adult. He is at that phase of his life a being neither oriented with this language nor that culture; an atherent neither to this religious sect nor that philosophical dialect; a citizen neither loyal to this city nor that country; and neither a friend nor an enemy to anyone. He is then clad in conscience as blank as a fresh page from a note book, and before writers both good and bad as vulnerable - open to all possibilities and deaf to any sound suggestive of "boundery." Man then is at his mode most allied to the words with which Stoic philosophers pioneered cosmopolitanism: "Never, in reply to the question of what country you belong, say that you are an Athenian or a Corinthian - say you are a citizen of the world." Zeno of Citium is a soul such immortal in children. Uproot a caucasoid child from an environment caucasoid and ferry the child to China, and there do the transplant, and yours will be the first accusation of fraud ever aimed at the seasons if five runs of their cycle fail to yield you with a being of shape caucasoid but of soul more Chinese than Mao ever was - as the tale was with the child of "The Good Earth," that Pearl S. Buck was, or would be if the imagined in the comedy "Mr Bones" were brought to reality.
Many a narrative of theme peddled cosmopolitan time has treated us to; tales of nomadic hearts wandered from homelands to lands exotic and far off: Lawrence of Arabia; The White Maasai; The China man politician in Mali.. Tales such touristic. But the high rate of failure so common with them, vis à vis the aims often peddled to have founded them, is a picture vividly suggestive of the Iscariot doing his thing against the covert nature of their true aims, which are rarely hostile to the juicy book contracts common with such tales, next door to the money ladden movie world.
Adults seldom see such feats home. And the horizon is mute of anything different, owing to their custom of leaning their existence heavily on knowledge predefined when faced with environmental situations new, of which the chief aim is seldom removed from that of exploiting benefits quoted of. Adults are generally sterile of the genius natural with children under environmental situations. For children are seldom made to exhaust their wit to talk even the most hostile of environments into a "win win" co-existence peace accord, with the aid of no other alliy beside, to paraphrase George Eliot, their own instincts - as the trait is with the equally natural cosmopolitans that wild animals are - souls of existence never aimed away from finding bond with their environment.