Our African ancestors left cultures that attempted to impart Utu to their descendants, according to my grandfather who says that among these cultures is idumi, which imparts Utu to Tiriki boys. Guga and I never discussed the details of how this conscience is usually imparted, despite my nudging. So I proceeded in my inquiry about the history of the Tiriki with the help of another elder. This is an appraisal of idumi – the Tiriki institution of manhood. Here, my conversation with this elder is documented. From it, I end up drawing parallels between the present day practice of idumi and extreme performances of masculinity – the propensity for force – in Kibera.
When Mzee Chacha of the Menge clan of the Maragoli of Western Kenya evades my question about the violence that is randomly meted out to circumcised Tiriki boys during their seclusion, answering that it is only discipline that is given, and that no harm is meant to vakuru – initiates, he does so having ensured he’s told me about intricacies of the precolonial past. Such as a sling bag that the Maragoli used to carry food in called emodia, as they grazed cattle at Iriva in Terik. Long ago. When a friend or relative would invite you to come and tema vugwe – clear the bush. A colloquialism for settling or setting up a home, close to their homestead free of charge.
He takes a sip from his cup of tea, then makes it clear that we are Maragoli. That the assimilation of Tiriki culture was a concession our ancestors made, when they settled in Tiriki land. Having left their original home in Mungoma. He answers my other question about the existence of Nandi names in our clan, with the fact that there were intermarriages between the Maragoli and the Nandi subethnic group of the Kalenjin.
When we met, Chacha didn’t know it was the institution of manhood, idumi, that inspired my curiosity about our history. Still, he shared important bits of it that have remained as fresh in my mind, as when they were first told to me. Perhaps, Chacha was taking his time to explain the context in which idumi was at its prime – the precolonial past – to save me the trouble of seeing old traditions through their present day image and practice.
Chacha is a black. But he is kind enough to indulge me, a white. He proceeds to tell me the difference between how whites vida – bless their initiates, by smearing milk on them, and how blacks vida, by smearing Busaa. This is just one among many other differences between them, which the elder would have expounded, had he not needed to get home.
When he told me about mnusu – the half one, a name given to whites when they defected, I kept the meaning of the name I had to myself. Perhaps embarrassed that I had failed to figure out who was being gibed, when I had heard blacks chanting it in songs countless times before. In my estimation, mnusu meant something else. An outsider, one who didn’t know the culture. Which wasn’t close to the true meaning of the word, when you recognised that its use by blacks did not aim to exclude whites from idumi. Despite whites dropping some of the practices that their adoption of Christianity rendered problematic, such as the use of Busaa to bless initiates – a brew which they also drank, there remained a tacit agreement between the two factions that idumi was one. Chacha confirmed this when he confided in me the attempts by some elders to reunite the two factions.
Actualizing the reunification of idumi is most likely my generation’s imperative, considering how deeply rooted the Tiriki are in its practice. It might mean more of us committing ourselves to teaching what we have learned from elders during initiation, and long after. An exercise which is bound to bring to prominence the role of a mdiri.
Among the Tiriki, a mkevi – circumcisor, is the first, but not the last person to take care of the business of boys becoming men. There is a mdiri – handler, who takes care of vakuru. And just like a bad mkevi would during circumcision, a bad mdiri can lead to the loss of life long after initiation. This reality is what my village has had to adjust to over the past few months, when a mdiri led members of an age group that was initiated the year before in “disciplining” one of their own, who died shortly after the incident.
Let’s call him Browny.
Browny’s death had hit close to home. That our culture sanctioned the “discipline” he was to receive, and thus he took the fall, wounded me. Such that whenever I thought about him, I began to wonder whether things could have turned out any different, had I intervened in this discipline.
Let’s gaze into the past…
I had writer’s block at the beginning of the year 2021. Then one night in June, I saw a friend among a group of young men heading toward Laini Saba in Kibera. I would soon learn they were in search of a gang that was known to have come from Mashimoni. These youth had apparently caused destruction to businesses some of them owned, while mourning a fallen member. I wanted to see this scene unfold, hoping that it would set a piece in motion. A moment later, when I caught up with him, this friend would hand me a knife saying, “Place tunaenda unaneed kujipin,” “Where we’re going, you’ll need to protect yourself.”
When the group begun singling out young men suspected to be from Mashimoni for questioning, which included violent threats, a few others and I intervened. In hindsight, these interventions are even more surprising to me than how I had clutched the knife I was given with ease. Perhaps, I never felt the weight of the knife because boys from older age groups and mine had done similar night patrols in the village, with weapons stashed in our jackets and pants. We were headed to the itumbi – seclusion, where vakuru stayed to sing idumi songs during my teenage years. And perhaps, too, it was only because I was an outsider, that I found the courage to act upon how I felt about the boys who were cornered by the militia. Yes, I was a man. But I didn’t share with them a code from Soweto, as I did with Tiriki men. One that would ensure I cooperated in their drill.
Now, aware of the extreme nature of the performance of masculinity required of me, both in Tiriki and Kibera, the fact of my early years – one needs to protect themselves – is laden with contradiction. Though I still find it sound to have taken the necessary measures to protect myself, I admit it begrudgingly, after seeing how others required my protection from the people I was with. And though my desire to continue seeking agency in the practice of cultures such as idumi seems ethical to me, I’m struck with guilt when evidence appears that their participants require protection from some of their aspects.
For me, consciousness of these contradictions is proof that there should be a sequel to any true story. One which, if is a failure at showing why things are the way they are in its precursor, documents the attempt to show how they might be made different.
This is a reflection on my beginnings as a writer. We see this in my encounters with a late writer, made possible by my membership in a travelling theatre troupe (a tangent in this reflection), . whose work I use to contemplate masculinity. Here, I show how outsiders to my culture lent me lenses that helped me revise idumi.
The first time I met a writer, it was at two set books travelling theatre shows in schools in Western Kenya. These were the precursors to my streak as a full-time artist for the remainder of that decade. I started out as a spoken word poet, became a copywriter who moonlit as a thespian, then would settle as a writer.
My first theatre troupe was part of the underclass in the Kenyan art industry. I was too young to intuit this, even when our day rehearsals were held at Kayole Social Hall. A space that seemed a more popular host for boxing matches than art. The social halls in Eastlands’ neighbourhoods was where recent high school graduates who were inclined to art, and lived in Nairobi, often converged to try their luck in acting. This usually happened whenever Central Park had become inhospitable due to flooding or the crowding of troupes. It is the same neighbourhoods in Eastlands that our troupe would come to call home during camp rehearsals. We remained ambitious, in spite of the knowledge of the misery coming our way, as soon as our bus rode out of the city. This was clear from the adjustments we had to make to meet the necessities of life during camp rehearsals. The biggest one being our move further East, from Kayole to a neighbourhood near Chokaa, to afford rent. Yet, we still dreamed.
By the time we hit the road, we were already acquainted with the lot of struggling artists.
So, sharing bedbug infested rooms in a lodging in Nyakach, where we did our first two shows, never shook us. Migori town, where we spent about another week stranded after a show close by, didn’t either. Even when the county tour ended in Ntimaru, Kuria – about an hour’s trip that most of us made packed like sardines in the boot of a Probox. We remained unrelenting. But we wouldn’t be so for long. Any luck we had travelled with would run out in Oyugis. Where we quickly discovered that we were on our own, after our producer stopped answering calls.
With our savings depleted, we inevitably became guests at a colleague’s rural home for some time. And since the troupe was intact, we figured we could produce ourselves. Which could have happened, had another opportunity not come knocking. It was a director who would occasionally help with our rehearsals who had come to save us.
Our troupe was happy to be booked for a number of shows in Siaya, after the South Nyanza streak that ended in Oyugi’s failed. For this we were promised a cumulative pay. But at the end of those wretched days spent in a village along River Nzoia, which was the source of our drinking water during that period, we ended up performing only one show. Never receiving full pay for it. Proceeding further from this point seemed unsound. And so, we began seeking help to return to the city from family and friends. That year would be my only stint in travelling theatre. My experience as a stowaway in a Nairobi bound bus from Siaya the last straw that made me quit.
I would fall seriously ill on our return to the city. The illness a culmination of the risks we took as a group, for art’s sake. Or, could it have been more personal, based on the last risk – stowing away, taken alone? Likely. I could have been taking these risks to prove that I was really a man. At eighteen, the desire to prove that I was really a man, which here meant being independent, did not seem problematic where my agency was limited. Not because I had friends or family that were ready to send me cash whenever I needed it, but because the risks I was taking in order to achieve this independence cost my health. This was similar to the times I put my body on the line in the night patrols in Tiriki. Only this time, it was done on the pretext of chasing a dream.
Pretext or real, the dream endured. If I wasn’t meant to be an actor, I was going to be a poet. For I had found a muse who would guide my journey. He would be my mdiri. Literature my new idumi. And if I could put my body on the line to prove that I was really a man, risking my pride to become a poet would be nothing. So I thought, when I remembered that I had slipped a few of my earliest poems in Ken Walibora’s hands.
The only time I was ever in an audience Walibora was speaking to was in Migori. I was listening to him talk about a bird that sang a song in a language they shared with his grandmother(Was it his grandmother who had taught him this bird’s song?)
That would be the last time I would see him.
My next encounters with Walibora would be with his work, after his death. In Televison interviews and his later writings such as his essay ‘Doing Things with Words in Prison Poetry’ in Abdilatiff Abdallah’s ‘Poet in Politics’. These works gave me a better sense of the politics of this writer. In hindsight, I understand how much of an error I’d made expecting him to give me direction, having not fully understood that I qualified as the subject of one of his works. He might have even had the pleasure of a writer meeting an avatar of one of his characters. I could have easily fit in the shoes of Amani, the struggling young writer with dreams of getting published in his novel ‘Kidagaa Kimemwozea’. Or, was it possible that I had embodied the themes in his work – that are slowly revealing themselves as the preoccupation of my current work, long before reading him? That, when I came across the man, and finally his work, it was more like a bird finding the voice to sing its song.
In ‘Doing Things with Words in Prison Poetry’, Walibora follows J.L Austin’s concept of “doing things with words” by “(examining) the various voices and guises that the poet adapts, and adopts, to do things that help remake his world unmade by the prison experience.” He argues that “the poet’s (Abdallah’s) “I” appears in many guises, and is heard in multiple voices so as to problematize the notion of a stable, unitary self.” This argument challenged the notion of there being a single and complete form of consciousness capable of characterizing an individual’s identity in isolation from their community; as idumi purports with masculinity in Tiriki.
Considering this challenge, I begun to see how one needed to build their identity in relation to an other – fathom a duality, for any meaningful identity formation to take place. Understanding this concept of duality meant acknowledging that the process of my identity formation had happened in a prison like setting. The fact that idumi had attempted to impart Utu to Tiriki boys by seclusion, absent of duality, producing men who had no empathy for women, whose bodies they felt entitled to, was proof of this.
In order to remake my world, I still needed a mdiri. And the lenses Walibora and writers like him, who explored the complexity of the lives of Black men around the world in their work, performed this role for me. Noteworthy is my encounter with the concept of nabsi in Nuruddin Farah’s novel ‘Secrets’, which taught me to treat others’ desires with utmost grace. Rendering this concept into a duality meant I was obliged to express desire the same way. The furthest idumi had gone, as far as desire was concerned, was given a heavy handed demonstration of how to express desire. We were taught by boys from older age-sets to touch as you endeared yourself to your desired. An approach which problematized consent. Scenarios where we were the ones receiving desire were never given. Which left us awkward when they occurred. Thus, when I learnt to become comfortable with those who endeared themselves to me, one could have observed that I had become a Tiriki man with a Somali ethic. But they would still not have captured the essence of this duality.
It is true that some aspects of idumi were wrought in isolation, making their present day practice problematic. History, however, gives us the liberty to disavow their faults, since it makes us privy to our ancestors’ concessions. Allowing us to make our own concessions. Namely, the assimilation of concepts from other cultures by Tirikis to enhance idumi’s present day practice. Even more radical would be to have the criteria for selecting a mdiri expanded from just a Tiriki man. Since he is clearly the most influential person in the process of identity formation among Tiriki men. We could benefit from outsiders whose cultures and ideas complemented idumi becoming Vadiri.
The knowledge that I could find in literature a mdiri challenging the toxic aspects of masculinity passed on to me, is liberating. It is what reconciles me with my culture. This knowledge certainly couldn’t resurrect the dead, and therefore does not absolve idumi of its sins. What it does, at least for the Tiriki man who wishes to appraise his culture, is offer them one way of writing about the grief caused by it.
