You know that game where you’re asked if you were to have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would you pick? I know you may already have your favorites, but the next time you’re asked that question, say Reuben Kigame, whether it’s a game you’re playing or you mean it. You’ll thank me later.
That’s all I feel like saying, I'll leave it at that, but then I’ll be doing Reuben Kigame the sort of injustice he’s so accustomed to. He's so often reduced to nothing more than some blind mystical singing figure — and the ground around him shakes when he sings — and ignoring his entire range.
Be it in the intelligentsia — he’s at home discussing Negritude, Ngugi, Shakespeare, Plato or Okot p’Bitek, or his depth as a cultural connoisseur swinging from being rooted in reggae to jazz to blues to rhumba to calypso to Fela’s Afrobeat.
Or his patriotic valour starting with street protests during the clamour for multipartism, or his unpopular crusade against the get-rich-quick abracadabra gospel. In a word, you need to know Reuben Kigame, whether he becomes Kenya’s next President (which he hopes he does) or not.
Part 1: THE WORLD IS YOUR OYSTER
If Reuben Kigame had a dog, he’d name it Gorbachev, as an homage to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union. When Kigame was a first-year student at Kenyatta University in 1988, the 22-year-old travelled to West Germany. But due to the dynamics of the Cold War percolating into East and West Germany, Kigame couldn’t travel to East Germany.
And so e went to a cathedral and wrote a prayer on a piece of paper, which he pinned on the wall. He sought intercession that the Berlin Wall should fall so the people of Germany would move freely.
A year later, partly courtesy of Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost programmes, the Cold War as we knew it lost steam and the Berlin Wall fell. For this and other sentimental reasons, Kigame held Gorbachev as one of his heroes. And yet Kigame’s fascination with Gorbachev or the world of geopolitics hadn’t started with his visit to Germany.
"By the time I was 10 I already had such an affinity for current affairs which I consumed from a shortwave radio through which I’d listen to the the BBC, Radio Moscow, Radio South Africa, Radio France International and Voice of America," Kigame said with enthusiasm.
"I am sitting in Vihiga but I’m listening to and learning guten morgen from Deutsche Welle, or I’m listening to Radio France and I’m learning bonjour, or I’m learning about the kwela flute from listening to Radio South Africa."
When Reuben Kigame was born on March 13, 1966, in Vihiga, the fifth born of seven entered a peasant's home where his parents, Richard and Susan, could barely keep the family afloat.
And so Kigame’s father became a long-distance bus driver, which in turn made him an absentee.
It was during one of his once-in-a-blue-moon appearances that Kigame’s father brought home the transistor radio, which Kigame wouldn’t let go of.
The radio became Kigame’s favorite toy, not only because he liked listening to music and following world affairs, but also because he’d lost his sight. That meant he had to depend on and heighten his other senses — hearing, smelling, touching and tasting — to get a feel of things.
One evening at the dinner table, three-year-old Kigame had aimed for the plate of ugali and missed it. His mother had wondered out aloud whether Kigame was going blind, because how could he miss the plate?
I am one of the most blessed people because I enjoyed a lot of family support since my parents and siblings never quite saw me as a blind person, and so I was very much integrated.
Kigame had finally lost his sight, having cataracts in both his eyes, which had gone untreated and damaged his cornea. And so for the next four years, until he had to leave home, Kigame was showered with so much love and acceptance that recognition of his his visual impairment didn’t turn into a pity party.
"I am one of the most blessed people because I enjoyed a lot of family support since my parents and siblings never quite saw me as a blind person, and so I was very much integrated," Kigame said.
"We went out to the shamba together. I was shown my line to dig, my siblings were digging along. The most interesting time was harvest when I 'discovered' what millet, maize and cassava looked like. I still get excited going back home. I guess that's why leaving home for boarding school was difficult for me."
Kigame ended up at the Kibos School for the Blind in Kisumu, which itself was a huge achievement on his mother’s part, considering she wasn’t a woman of means.
"I was in boarding school right from nursery school, but it wasn’t easy because as a child I was being plucked from a life and culture I liked, to go and be incarcerated for three months at a time," Kigame said.
"But either way I look back to that childhood with a lot of fondness because it is that ambiance of the '70s that really shaped me. Kibos School for the Blind was right next to the Kibos Maximum Security Prison, and about a kilometer away was the Railway Station in the midst of the Nubian settlement."
Kigame says these details — the prison and the railway station — are significant for him.
"Let’s begin with the prison next door, with the sirens going off whenever an inmate escaped and a police chase ensued," Kigame said.
"Then there was the railway station which for me — and Roger Whittaker [born in Nairobi to British parents] sings about The Good Old E A R and H.
It wasn’t just about the whistle and the rumbling of the wheels but an exposure to long-distance travel, because he knew if you went to the railway station you could get to Nairobi, where he had never been.
"And so for me, when we discuss railway transport, it is not something distant, something that I approach intellectually, but it is an emotive issue."
Kigame recalled his first trip on the Lunatic Express to Nairobi for the music festival, an experience he wishes every child could be accorded. He regrets seeing that rail hasn’t been made to work as a major component of public transport as it is elsewhere.
I was plugged in with students from all over Kenya, some from Uganda and Tanzania, and I still think one of the best things that happened to me was being introduced very early to diversity in society.
But beside the prison and the railway station, Kibos School for the Blind was flanked by huge sugarcane plantations, which were sometimes tended to by prisoners.
And so other than allowing Kigame and his schoolmates proximity to prisoners and prison culture, Kigame said pupils developed an appetite for sugarcane, the craving even became a cause for delinquency.
Occasionally, Kigame and others would attempt to go over the fence to grab some cane, only for them to endure strokes of the cane once busted. But aside from what Kigame terms peer-influenced misbehaviour— he mentions puffing on something in the toilet since pupils would sneak in a cigarette — Kigame largely stuck to the straight and narrow.
Then there was Kajulu village nearby, which Kigame remembers for its ceremonies, the singing and dancing streaming into the school air.
"I was plugged in with students from all over Kenya, some from Uganda and Tanzania, and I still think one of the best things that happened to me was being introduced very early to diversity in society," Kigame said.
"I learnt to pick up Luo, Kalenjin, Mijikenda and words from many other languages and got inculturated into some kind of national ethos. That’s why I get very depressed seeing people divided on the basis of ethnicity. It kills me. The cultures of this country intersected in my life since I was seven years old."
And yet if Kigame thought he’d seen the best of cultural Kenya at Kibos, then real culture shock awaited him at the Thika School for the Blind where he reported in 1981.
After excelling in his Certificate of Primary Education by scoring an impressive 33 out of 36 points, Kigame had little in terms of O Level options other than the Thika School for the Blind, run by the Salvation Army just like Kibos. The education system then couldn’t accommodate visually impaired students in the average non-specialised schools.
"The first thing I encountered was monolisation, touted as some kind of initiation into teenagehood where the big boys came and the first thing they did was to tell you they wanted to show you the school compound,' Kigame said laughing.
"They then took you to places you didn’t want to go, the thorn bushes, where I got pricked a few times. Or they’d take away your shopping — the juice, biscuits and bread. The fact that it was an institution for the blind didn’t mean we didn’t suffer the fate of every other Form 1."
But on the more serious side of things, Kigame said Thika was worlds apart from Kibos. The education was more intense, and the student population comprised fellows from as far as Ethiopia, Sudan and Mozambique. Kigame’s own mentor, Chris Kakoma, the senior student whose piano-playing prowess Kigame looked up to, was Ugandan.
"I emphasise this integration because seeing people by their last names isn’t how to do life," Kigame said "That integration rubbed off on me so much so that when I met the love of my life, I was to discover she was Kikuyu only after the love had happened."
I emphasise this integration because seeing people by their last names isn’t how to do life.
At Kibos, the furthest Kigame had gone in terms of playing an instrument was the percussion, but at Thika, Kigame not only played the piano, the guitar and drums, but also joined two different bands.
With the Super Igniters, which did a lot more pop stuff, Kigame played the drums, while with the Starlites, which focused more on the religious, Kigame did a lot more singing. And yet music wasn’t the centre of Kigame’s life, much as it was integral. For instance, when Kigame got to Form 3, he dropped music in favour of literature, since to him music was but a hobby. Literature took over.
Fortunately for Kigame, once he was done with his O Levels, there were a few more A Level options for the blind, and so he opted for Thika High School next door since he yearned for learning in an integrated setup.
Unfortunately, Kigame said, the academic atmosphere was very unsupportive considering it lacked the requisite equipment. It didn't have a Brailler, which Kagame used to write in Braille. Nor did it have a typewriter.
Kigame had learnt to type at Kibos, which he used for communication with sighted teachers and assignments.
After a term at the new school, Kigame retreated back to his alma mater, the Thika School for the Blind. This back and forth affected Kigame’s grades, seeing him miss studying Law by two points. Kigame was devastated.
"I considered repeating," Kigame said, "but then I decided not to cry over spilt milk."
In 1987, Kigame reported to Kenyatta University — kicking and screaming — where he took up his slot to study for a B. Ed degree majoring in History, Philosophy and Religious Studies.
It is here that Kigame met Mercy Wanderwa, one of the student volunteers who had been seconded to read for Kigame. As the reading happened, a love grew, and soon the two were inseparable. As if fuelling Kigame’s pursuit for a new Kenya, Mercy raided her father’s home library and brought with her copies of the Weekly Review and Beyond Magazine.
Reuben wants to be MP for Mathare, so he can rescue the people.
Kigame said he hid these in between his clothes in the closet, lest he was profiled as a subversive. But even if Kigame hid the magazines, he couldn’t hide his thoughts on paper. And so whenever responding to his course work, Kigame wrote critically about the state of the nation in term papers that were graded but never returned.
At one point after Kigame’s European trip, he wrote a booklet on communism. It vanished from his room. When Minister for Foreign Affairs Robert Ouko was assassinated, Kigame joined the protests. And when Bishop Alexander Muge was killed in August 1990, Kigame joined the riot, he didn't call them protests any more.
"Reuben wants to be MP for Mathare, so he can rescue the people," Kigame’s then-girlfriend wrote in her diary.
Read Part 2 tomorrow in the Star. This story is a collaboration between The Star and Debunk Media whose editor-in-chief is Isaac Otidi.
(Edited by V. Graham)
