It was from two wild animals and two young girls that I first learnt the English word 'care' and its full meaning. That was when I was in Std 5 in 1976.
The wild animals and the two young girls taught me that care is taking care of, or protecting another person in a vulnerable or subordinate condition.
The two animals that taught me compassion, to use a little more impassioned word which denotes care, were a wolf and a hyena.
Lukume Primary School in Kakamega had a library from which we borrowed books. It is from this library, superintended by a prefect, that I borrowed a book on Roman mythologies.
According to Roman mythology, the city’s twin founders Romulus and Remus had been thrown into the Tiber River by their uncle, the king, who saw them as a threat to the throne. Luckily, they were rescued and suckled by, of all animals, a wolf, who nourished and strengthened them.
The story had a picture of the wolf in question, standing, with two small children underneath it, suckling it, while squatting. I had not seen any animal suckling a baby. The animals I had seen in our village were dogs in people’s homes, some of whom bit people. The idea of a wolf suckling two helpless babies had a permanent impression on my mind.
The other encounter with a compassionate spirit was in a Luhya folk story my grandmother, now long deceased, regaled us with. The story was about a woman who abandoned a baby girl in the bush after her husband’s decreed that if any of his wives got pregnant, they should deliver in the bush. He had enough girls and didn’t wish any of them to give him another daughter.
“If the child any of you delivers happens to be a boy,” he said, “come back with it and I shall organise a big feast to celebrate."
“But if the child happens to be a girl, leave it there,” he said.
It happened that one of the wives became heavy with child. She accordingly went to the bush, as directed, and gave birth to twins—a boy and a girl.
In obedience to the husband’s proclamation, she abandoned the baby girl in the bush and returned home with the baby boy. She didn’t tell anyone about having abandoned a child in the bush.
A hyena that was going back home after a fruitless hunting mission heard the cries of a baby. It went near where the cries came from and found a bubbly infant lying on bare ground.
Although it was tired and hungry, the hyena took pity on the helpless infant, lovingly took it into its hands and headed home with it.
Instead of eating the child, it took good care of it—doing to the child what I had seen mothers do to children—including giving her a name, 'Wayela'.
What ultimately happened to the child when it grew up is irrelevant to the hypothesis of this article.
Suffice it to say, however, that the idea of a hyena taking care of an infant instead of eating it, touched my heart.
At the end, the twin brother and his peers kidnapped the girl and reunited her with her human family. When the hyena returned and found an empty heath without his Wayela, it broke into loud wailing. For some reason, I broke into tears, sympathising with the hyena. I felt the human beings were unforgivably unfair to the hyena.
Our grandmother was a very good storyteller. I felt the agony the hyena felt when she mimicked the heartrending song it sang, pining for its daughter.
It was around the same period that I read an edition of Bible Stories for Children—again from our school library. I read about a young girl called Miriam, standing not far from the reeds on the banks of the River Nile where her mother had laid little Moses in “a papyrus basket for him, and coated it with tar and pitch.”
The Bible continues: “Pharaoh's daughter came down to bathe at the river. Her maidens walked along by the river's side. She saw the basket among the reeds, and sent her handmaid to get it. She opened it, and saw the child, and behold, the baby cried. She had compassion on him, and said, 'This is one of the Hebrews' children'.
"Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, 'Should I go and call a nurse for you from the Hebrew women, so that she may nurse the child for you?'
"Pharaoh's daughter said to her, 'Go'. The maiden went and called the child's mother.
"Pharaoh's daughter said to her, 'Take this child away, and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages." The woman took the child, and nursed it.
"The child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, and said, 'Because I drew him out of the water'."
The story of an anxious but watchful sister, concerned about the safety of her little brother greatly moved me.
I learnt inerasable lessons about care, compassion, protection and trust not from benign adults but wild animals and children. A wolf, a hyena and two girls.
These are not the only incidents in mythology, folklore or the Bible that demonstrate care and compassion and the situations evoke care or compassion.
Fiction, nonfiction, sacred and secular works abound with stories where care or compassion is present or absent.
I have in mind Elijah and the widowed woman who gave the man of God the last morsel of bread that had remained for her and the son. I have in mind the story of the Good Samaritan, to name but a few.
The thesis of this article is that our folklore, sacred books and great fictional and nonfictional works have models of nearly all the desired virtues or values that society wants the young generation to learn and act by.
In the great sacred and secular books are incidents or illustrations of such values as honesty, loyalty, courage, responsibility, patriotism, respect for authority and age, self-discipline, friendship, work, perseverance, honesty, loyalty and fair play.
Indeed, in the 19th century, literature, biography and history were taught with the explicit intention of infusing children with high moral standards and good examples to guide their lives.
The founders of the USA, particularly Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were convinced that the form of government they were adopting was, at heart, a moral compact among people. Hence, the emphasis on the moral education of children in the ideas they imprinted on educational institutions of the time.
I don’t know of any other way of nurturing values or morals in children except through the study of religious education, history, and literature—in a word, the humanities and the social sciences.
With appropriate rigour of the curriculum in these disciplines, society has a sure foundation for moulding the values and morals of children in a more effective way than any that the ingenuity of current thinkers on education can ever imagine.
And in the best that has been thought, said and done, lie minefields of stories demonstrating evil and good, right and wrong; stories well-structured, sequenced and taught, which can teach children what is right from wrong and the stoicism that goes into choosing right from wrong.
