Mona Kayle; The Daughter of The Saami People. Painting by 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..

• Nationality: KENYA
• Date of birth : 1973
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Kenyan Artists