Elegy to theatre sage Wasambo Were

Picture this. You are in an office. It is in a government institution. It is a public office. One of the name tags on the door is no longer there. It is on a notice board behind you.

An ant so tiny it can hide between papers or books shows up. It is dawn. It sees you. It sizes you up. It uses the antennae. They are black. They are brittle. A thought crosses your mind. What if I just release the pressure in my mind to my index finger and thwart it. You look at it again. It is harmless. It is not aggressive. You lift your finger and move it towards it. It stands its ground. You hesitate.

Another thought comes to your mind. This ant is alive. It is a vessel of life. In this entire office at dawn, it is the only other life beside your own. Both of you are alive. If you now bend forward and kill it, only your life will be in this square place. You will see the carcass of the black ant – head, thorax and abdomen now a black smear on a spotless white printing paper or the cover of a drama book.

Where will the life it had just a moment ago be? The body is here. You are here. Both of you are alive. Then one dies. Where does that life go?

****

This is the question that has haunted me throughout this week. Ever since I received a call from Yala that a good teacher who I knew for a quarter a century is no more, the meaning of life haunts me. The retired, septuagenarian drama education doyen Dr Wasambo Were is gone. We sat in this same square office at Kenyatta University for more than 130 months.

For about 4,000 days, we sat as colleagues, teaching, examining and mentoring literature and theatre students here. Between 2011, when I returned from further studies abroad, and 2022, when he retired after attaining the retirement age of 75 for government dons, we shared 5,760,000 minutes of our lives in this office.

Just imagine the volume of words exchanged here in that duration. You can imagine the gravity of those words as well as their depth. This man who invited me to share an office with him had been my teacher earlier. He had taught me from the late nineties as an undergraduate novice. He intensified his teachings to me as a Master of Arts student under the NARC government. Imagine the scope of interlocutions we shared in this office of public service?

****

I was born in the late seventies here in Nairobi at Mater Misericordiae to a man who worked for Marshalls (EA). His office was on Harambee Avenue, behind the Kenyatta University City Campus. Across the street at the Ministry of Education, Wasambo Were served the nation. He was one of the pioneer black school inspectors in Kenya, and from Jogoo House, he helped conceive and birth the annual national drama festivals for schools and colleges.

Wasambo and my old man were acquainted. Both parties confirmed in vivid nostalgia their joint jolly exploits after work in this Green City under the Sun. As youths, they attended great concerts of Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau. They danced to Tabu’s hot hit Maze at Bomas of Kenya together with the late critic Chris Wanjala and Okot p’Bitek, back then of UoN, who were with my elder father, 86-year-old Collins Masibo.

This is the man who has left us. He was not just an officemate to me or a former teacher but a family friend of many years standing. When I first left the farm in Bungoma, where my father had retired for Nairobi to pursue a degree, I was armed with a letter handwritten by my father with Mwalimu’s name on the envelope. He took me in and disciplined my focus at age 18 towards being a superlative intellectual.    

***

I returned from abroad in the autumn of 2011. My now aged benefactor took me in. Again. Now we were at par, Were quipped. Were we? All these years, he had never completed his doctorate. While cleaning the office, I stumbled on a rough thesis draft gathering dust on a shelf. I offered to edit and critique it. He graduated with his own PhD years soon after at over 70 years!

The advent of Covid 19 hauled universities to e-learning and blended pedagogies. Mwalimu was from another generation of Kenyans. Working together, we executed his digital services to his students. He had wanted to call it a day after teaching and learning went digital. Fate that made us unite in this office made that decision invalid, null and void.

****

Papa Doc is the name his students fondly called him by. Many in recent times since 2000 were actually his grandchildren. They also called him Papaa. He paid fees for one or two, whom I knew were very needy children in this republic.

He sent me once to clear the rent of one who was about to be evicted in a slum inside Githurai. When I arrived at the venue of eviction, complete with one of his many academic sons as a backup and wielding two things: machetes and the disputed rent, it stopped drizzling.

We helped the lad to haul his potholed mattress and yellow jerry cans back to his dim single room. The boy graduated. I read a long letter he wrote before taking off to his distant village to the north. He had slipped it under the door of our office.

Mzee made me read it to him as he reclined on his bigger seat with wheels behind his massive desk. He said go on. I said I have finished. He took a handkerchief out of the inner chest pocket of his pin-striped suit. Wiped a tear and said: “Mwalimu, our salaries are not personal...”