Art and Impulsivity: The Fighting Must Stop

The hill still stands. The ancient hill from where the King foraged the expanse of his loyal community. Ibwami was a resident like no other. It was the royal capital. And surround it, in a cyclical entourage were the other hills. Conical in structure, domical where the weathering had taken its toll and sometimes pyramidal pointing...don't know. The people perhaps awestruck by the architectural simplicity of physical nature, they had decided that they were part of it too. Grass for their heads in the night, daub for their walls, miniature serenity of the domical beehive for the pygmies in the girth of the Kongo forest and the pyramid and monolithic in far East. A rumbling architectural power was in place. Fractal scaling.

Mud rules; its sleek reprimanding nature means you look earthy. From earth. Made of Earth, whether it is the finest, it still is earth. Ask the Great Mosque of Djenne its all clay. How glorious it is standing so firm yet by some structural conceptions perishable and inglorious. If you want permanent, ask the South Africans. In East Africa you might find a ruin of a road- permanent by your modern standards but its ownership raked.

The hill still stands. This time in its thick savanna grass and the whistling umbrella acacias, just beneath its old granites, is a hole. A bottomless pit the glowing orange of the sunset never penetrates its darkness. If you looked through, you would notice the spiral, the staircase winding like a snake, only you see its tail. It is not the Mau Mau caves at Karura forest, no. Not even those at Mathira's Rui Ruiru (Black River). This is different.

Some time aback, before this pit that is definitely with all virtuosity a solitary hiding place, he was here. Somehow he had seen (probably in a vision at night) that the only place left virgin; green virgin, was only around the hill. Now, he had his sons, the strongest from all the seven wives, they were to pack the dried meat. Get guards from their mothers. Get itahas, mukimo to push through the first few days of the journey. It was a week's journey to the hill.

Cattle heads, goats were wealth. With the drought at Murang'a, there was a risk of losing everything that kept life; thereby losing life. That is why the migration was important. In the land beyond the Nyandarua ranges, just where the rising sun settles its healing rays every morning when it emerges from the peak of the Kirinyaga (Mt. Kenya), lies a sacred field. All animals, both wild and domestic pay homage to this shrine mostly when all hope is lost.  The old man knew this place. He knew it and he called it Mwituria (sole survivor), and the hill Kamwituria (the hill of the sole survivor).

Kamwituria. People settled. The people, the offspring, and posterity whatever you call them; just people. The school was built. It was important, its presence. Education, we want education mama, not arrows, not spears, not... we want pen and paper papa. It's alright. It's okay... the hill is scratched, it is baldheaded, it's okay... It has an electric fence all around its perimeter. No more of huts and royal paths. Well, that is alright. We get to see buffaloes in there. The Big Five. The Giraffe is the best, you should see its craft in a souvenir. And that is all good.

 The hill stood. No earthquake quivered it. No tornado uprooted its umbrellas. Just cobras' heads popped up. Pythons snored... snakes. Snakes, elephants and the birds; birds chirping with a divine rhythmical tone, flying from one umbrella to another, seeking coherence and singling out the most habitable ecology in the jungle. Zebras, impalas...the grazers, gathuni, hares, gazelles, thwariga, don't forget the reindeer- well, not typical of Africa but its horns. I remember its horns were amazing. It was almost camouflaged with the twisting of the acacias around it. Lions before hyenas. Hyenas before vultures. And man before the lions.

Competition? You could call it that, but see this. In the school, two boys are fighting. One of them has this pointed head. He is tall. Both are tall. The other the head is flat. Noses. Noses are different. One seems to lose out on his nose's mischief. It's now white. He should know, how elongated the nose is. And subsequently how nosy he has become; he only came the other day. Like the rest of us, he was in uniform. Khaki shorts and blue sweater; we were all uniform! All of us are eager to get informed.

It is quarter to eight a.m., the fighting has been on for five minutes or so. How it started? I can't tell. But you know, a couple of insults. Names; you are a cow, I turn out to be a ngui dog, you are a warthog, I turn out to be a thegere monkey. I am a juka newcomer, I am not known my power. Who I can fight... my capabilities that is all. My place in civilization.

And the mole, white of the caving... he has power. The black swaddles him and tries to grab his neck; just where the throat is. There somewhere... this monkey is violent. He is impulsive, he doesn't think before he acts. He just...he just does. His stare furtive and open, curious, intelligent and irrelevant, stupid, sometimes discrete or indiscrete, flattering, rarely contemptuous, greedy, peremptory and pertinacious, drunken, fierce or pugnacious... the stare cannibal¹. 
The mole boy is groaning. His tactics, well orchestrated all geared to win the enemy...  the enemy doesn't give a shit. I'm going to use my teeth when fists and feet (tutende) don't work. I'm gonna bite you! Eat you alive! Your flesh fresh and alive!

At the top of the hour, a decision must be made. The spectatorship is profusely active. The women yell. Sometimes ululate. The men scoff, laugh weirdly like warthogs. Like rhinoceros facing the full moon.

And then the fighting turns tables. It's all psychological now. The two boys, in the midst of panting and spasms of saliva, it's all changed now. But the white mole is not the same white mole... there comes another expatriate. The monkey remains. He is the newcomer.

He might have won in the battle of fists and bruises. Clenching one's fists was not to be learnt in school. Cannons could be counterfeit, you know. And the forest was not a hostile environment as such. Experience my friend. Adaptation. Survival. The mosquitoes liked the white blood, it's alright. The highlands were for the whites, it makes sense.

The war of the mind is not a good message home. That language barrier... the monkey stammers. He has the idea, the insult, the prank, the... mchongoano but he takes ages to say it. And you know these days even the sun is aging. The mole is winning. C'mon, see what I said about moderation? You don't just clench and yell you are a monkey, no one will believe you are even if you walk barefoot and hail folklore.  The invitation to some English university was not a professorship, so you could profess your roots in the jungle. It was a univers(e)ity. The universe, it's more than the cheap street fighting. That is infinitesimal compared to the cosmos. It's on the broader scale. I wish you understood this then, you would spare us the agony.

I was born and raised on this side of the hill. They told me its name was Kamwituria. Not Himalayas, Kilimanjaro, Esiepala², just Kamwituria. And I have been accustomed to life here, it's hard sometimes. This place is no longer the shrine it used to be. Sahara is eating all Africa, and they think we practice ecotourism. 2014 was declared the hottest year world-around. My fish died, I thought I was capable of initiating things! I mean the times have changed, I should be the aquarist! No longer am I a mere fish!

 In my silence, I still watch the sun set. It has always been the African sunset. However you paint it in silhouette or in surrealism... and then the impulses... I can't stop them... they flow like the Black River. All these ideas... I don't have the technology, I have never acquired a 3D printer... but they are there. It's like I have the cure to Ebola right on my face only I am taking long maneuvering through its actualization.

I know my Dharma³, my purpose in life. Well, I watch most of their movies but it's alright. They are inspiring and I love them. Probably they love their audience too. They should read this, be my audience. After all it's never too hard to reach them even if I am at the periphery, landlocked, with no network sometimes. Radiowaves are in the atmosphere!

 The fighting must stop. It stopped. What I am tapping into now is the massive black hole⁴. The hole on the hill was massive, but this is a million times larger than the sun, the lonely star closest to us. You know how it feels to get a hunch? Talking to God?

The old man, when the shrine was dry; when all land was under drought, the hill included. Cattle heads started dropping dead one by one. The more they died, the more alienated from his wealth he felt. His wealth was dying away. He was going to die!

Tell me, old man. What were you thinking when you locked yourself in that hut. When you withdrew yourself from your family, your community and you stayed by yourself in silence away from society; everything you had lived for.  Had it ever hit you how ambivalent and skeptical you had become of your faith? I just don't get it... you should have left a note... a miniature painting just something. You know, they named me after you. How I wish I knew you in person... not the exaltation stories they accord you with the lyre during ensembles. But this is me now. You didn't know any of the things I mentioned earlier, did you. The painting or the writing⁵, they were Moon language to you, weren't they?

They tell me to study Da Vinci, Salvador and Picasso. Picasso has a long name actually, a paragraph in whole. And this has become of me. At least I have learnt a universal language by which I can express myself. I have a computer and this Internet Web from CERN... the best technological gift to the contemporary world. Global warming is real, and it is all someone else's fault, not your own. Cattle heads cost money. The worst effects of this warming are evident on us, innocent we are. Bad things always end here even if the cause was nothing to do with here. Just tell me what it was like breathing your last, taking away your own life, especially on this impulsive part of the planet.

Footnotes  

1. The African Civilization (Utamaduni wa Kiafrika), Kihumbu Thairu, Kenya Literature Bureau, 1975 pg 1-2

 2. Esiepala is Luyha for The Hill of the Red Ochre. Here the soldiers smeared themselves with the red ochre in preparation for battle. Source: Esiepala Cultural Centre, Maseno. Privately owned by John Diang'a.

3. Timeless Wisdom by Robin S. Sharma, 2003

4. BBC Richard Hammonds series Invisible Worlds, season 2

5. Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Tanzania Publishing House Macmillan, 1972. (The idea is rather paraphrased from the essay Voices in the Whirlwind)