Chapter Eight.
Nairobi, 1988-1990.
Meanwhile, Mr. Josephai and I had both risen from our chairs and, cups still in hand, witnessed the hasty departure. We sat back down and, without any prompting, Mr. J. picked up the thread of Mishach’s story. As he did so, he wore #11, the weary “this is the way of the world” smile, but it was mixed with #1, the small smile that acknowledged agency in a good deed.
“He is running off to an interview with the IMF. Although I, myself, set this interview up, through ‘a friend at court,’ there is almost no hope that Mishach will be selected for the position. There will be hundreds of other applicants, many of them better qualified than he is.”
“But excuse me, Mr. J. In that case, why did you intervene?”
#11 reappeared. “Because Mishach’s situation has been so hopeless for so long, I thought that even a temporary rise in expectations might be better than nothing.” He read my skepticism. “Let me explain.” The explanation lasted ten or fifteen minutes. I will limit myself to a summary.
By now, Mr. J. had been Mishach Ndukwe’s on-and-off benefactor for more than two decades. The relationship began when the Nigerian’s name was forwarded to Mr. J. by the American Jewish Effort for Biafran Relief (AJEBR), an organization of which his own (unnamed) organization had long been an affiliate. Mr. J. explained that he considered his support of such endeavors not charity (for which there is no Hebrew word), but tzedakah, which means “justice,” or “righteousness.”
In passing, he also confided to me that he was not what is called “an observant Jew.” Since I could not be called an observant anything (except, perhaps, for a vestige of the universal African belief in juju or, more politely, “traditional religion”), the confidence did not shock me.
At that juncture, Mr. J. made an observation that has meant so much to me over the years that I can still quote it, verbatim: “It was not the deity, but the AJEBR, that brought this Mishach out from the fiery furnace. However, the poor man’s deliverance was followed, alas, by several decades that were, if not infernal, purgatorial.”
Thus did Mr. J. characterize his beneficiary’s protracted period of wandering, of menial jobs, or none, and, at times, of near-starvation and no fixed domicile. Over those years, contact between the two had been sporadic, usually taking the form of desperate cries for help, met to the fullest extent of Mr. J’s ability -- that is, depending on how his business was doing.
Then, Mr. J. beamed upon me #8, his ‘paternal pride’ smile. Again, his words have been worth remembering: “In the two-plus years that you have been my assistant, Pierre, with the invaluable services you have provided to the business…” he possessed the means to be especially generous to Mishach Ndukwe, and to several others in similar plights.
In Mishach’s case, for instance, in 1985 Mr. J. had posted a bail bond to have him released from a Kampala jail, where the charge had been “no apparent domicile.” By the time of this rescue, Uganda’s brutal dictator, Idi Amin, had, through a combination of mismanagement and massive peculation, essentially ruined his country’s economy. (This, too, I would not forget: Mr. J’s account of Amin’s evil government was among the proddings that set me on the long road to my fateful 2007 meeting with Major Odhon’g.) Of course, the bail bond was forfeited when Mishach left Kampala for Nairobi on, as Mr. J. explained, a bus for which he (Mr. J.) also bought the ticket. That trip took above fifteen hours, and, ever since then, Mishach had stayed put, pretty much, subsisting on a combination of Mr. J’s charity (yes, charity!) and the menial jobs he managed to procure for him, from time to time.
Thus ended Mr. J.’s narrative. Thereafter, Mishach Ndukwe returned to the shop on many occasions, often when I was present, and he never departed empty-handed.
I return now to an important detail in the narrative that involved my master, Mr. Eliyahu Josephai. You will recall his mention of my own “invaluable services.” I think he was alluding to several very different “services.” First, as custodian, I kept the shop spotless. Then, when I came to be a sort of “junior partner,” I made sure the wares were properly displayed, and the customers assiduously attended to. Since quite a few of them were visitors or refugees from Ngongo, or other neighboring francophone countries, my ability to communicate in fluent French, Kiswahili, and Luo (plus increasingly fluent English) made every customer feel welcome –- and spend freely! Mr. J., whose own languages were English, Kiswahili, and several from his native India (Hindi and Urdu, I think, and Malayalam, the official language of Kerala, his home province), plus Hebrew and a modern descendent of that ancient language whose name has long eluded me, fully appreciated the value of a polyglot assistant –- me!
I mention our shared polyglotism because it was to become an ever more important theme in my life. Rather than narrate my subsequent conversations with Mr. J., I will say simply that their most salient points were, first, his encouragement for me to begin taking courses that could lead to a career as translator. And, second, lest my studies linger into the next millennium, I should study full-time at U. of N., with, of course, his help (more tzedakah). As for my job as shop assistant, he suggested that I might come in on one day only, and that he would hire another janitor for the rest of the week. His closing words, I must again quote: “You have earned this, Pierre. You deserve a future beyond what our small shop can offer.” This advice was both generous and welcome.
And so it was, beginning in Fall semester, 1989, I assumed a full-time course load, with a declared major in International Studies, special emphases in Political Economics, “L & L” (Language and Literature), and Global History. In short, in my nineteenth year of life, I came of age as a scholar.
Eliyahu Josephai
As usual, with me, I am left wondering whether or not I have done the right thing. What might happen to young Pierre as a result of my assistance and encouragement? In the short term, I assume, my help will expedite the completion of his degree and improve his employment prospects. But I fear that the intervention could also speed him along the dangerous road of political activism. For my example, alas, might carry inordinate weight with this impressionable young man.
Besides, my own motives may not bear scrutiny. The immediate one is obvious: to assist a deserving young person. But he cannot have heard Mishach’s story, including how I have helped the Nigerian, without an impulse to model his own behavior after mine. I could see the fascination and empathy on Pierre’s face as the Nigerian’s tale of woe unfolded. If he chooses to follow the path of tzedakah, Pierre will undoubtedly learn the high costs and grave perils of doing so. I can only imagine what might happen to him if, for instance, upon his return home, he were to join the CPLN. Ngongo is a far more dangerous place than Nairobi.
Nor does it take a Sigmund Freud to understand that Pierre is a surrogate son for me. Of my own six children, four are already grown, and their patterns of life, established. My adult sons both run commercial enterprises, and their sisters are “good Jewish wives,” with all that this innocuous phrase implies. Of the two younger children, Bessie shows a budding interest in the arts, and Jacob shows signs of… who knows?
So, in a sense, when this young man from Ngongo showed up on my doorstep two years ago, it was as if the magic word, tzedakah, were already printed on his brow. But that fanciful idea does not lessen my responsibility.
Oh, and one final detail with which to end this critical self-analysis: the timely appearance in the shop that day of Mishach Ndukwe, on whose behalf my assistance has proven so ineffective, may have triggered my desire to assist a more promising recipient, Pierre Tshombe.
Among the items of particular fascination in my expanded studies was one that combined my interests in “L & L” and Political Economics. To complete my thesis requirements for the Bachelors, during Spring semester, 1990, I delved into the works of H.G. Wells (of shopkeeper origin) and the Fabian socialists.
If, Reader, you can possibly forgive yet another digression, I will say a bit about why Wells was so important to me. First, many of his ideas, including his predictions (a mixture of bull’s eyes and wild misses), spoke to my own circumstances. One example of a bull’s eye is how, at the end of his famous fable, “The Time Machine,” Wells summarizes the thoughts of his narrator’s “master”:
He… thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end… to me the future is still black and blank –- is a vast ignorance…
Since I was aware of Wells’ anti-imperialism, I readily grasped the applicability of this passage to colonialism and its legacy. The end of European empires in Africa has meant that the “foolish heaping” (i.e. the immense profits from exploitation of our minerals, labor, and other “commodities”) would “fall back upon… its makers” (e.g, precipitate the decline of the British and French economies, exemplified by the oil crisis of 1980, a decade before I read Wells). As to whether the collapse of colonialism will ultimately “destroy” those “makers” is still, even forty years later, to be determined. As you may have intuited, my Bachelors Thesis was entitled, “The Applicability of H.G. Wells’ Progressivism to Africa.”
I also note in passing that Wells’ relevance to YT (aka PT) extended to the erotic -- that is, to my personal life. Wells was a notorious lifelong womanizer, a “Don Juan.” On the other hand, his mentors, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, practiced what the French call un marriage blanc [“without sexual relations”]. Both extremes applied to my own erotic life at this time. I will return to the subject shortly, but I must warn the prurient reader that the account will be brief and bland.
To continue with the main subject of this digression, in addition to Wells’ extensive writings, both fiction and non-fiction, my reading for the Bachelors thesis included quite a bit by, and about, the Webbs, and their role as originators of modern British socialism. I even tackled a few plays by their colleague, G.B. Shaw, but I must confess that this author’s irony and sarcasm left me cold.
I promised the reader a glimpse into my erotic life, and prefaced the promise by touching upon its resemblances to both that of Wells and of the Webbs –- and, for that matter, to Mishach Ndukwe's. You will recall that, in describing his flight through war-torn Nigeria, Ndukwe found consolation in the fact that he was without the encumbrance of a wife or children.
Like the exiled Nigerian, I was a bachelor, but I was harassed, long distance, by my poor mother, who constantly entreated me to be “a good Acholi son.” In both her frequent letters and our occasional telephone conversations, she would beg me to return home and to marry a bride chosen by the elders of both parental clans, through a process involving the multiple visits and rituals of coy courtship.
Nor was my mother above enlisting traditional Acholi wisdom in her campaign. “Cin yii obedo koti apiti” was among her favorite proverbs. Literally, this means, “Your intestine is your seed that feeds you,” the implication being that, in old age, one’s children will be the main source of sustenance.
Not only was this an unfortunate choice of proverb, since its target was fast developing a severe digestive problem (which, in fairness, I must say I never divulged to my mother). But this is the type of proverb to which our culture offers numerous rejoinders. My own choice, on the eighth or ninth instance of her telephonic nagging, was “Gwol pe mako Ikwee,” or “A dog cannot catch a fox.” The implication, somehow, is that relatives should not tamper with each other’s lives. Despite this barbed rejoinder, my mom may have secretly reveled in the sense that her educated son had retained a remnant, at least, of his Acholi-ness.
I have frequently referred to “Acholi-this” and “Acholi-that.” Perhaps, Reader (as Mr. J. said to Mishach Ndukwe), the time has come to provide some context. Here is more of what I know about my “roots.”
Between the late seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, drought was the primary mover of social change in Ngongo. During this period, the nation’s population included several proto-Acholi groups. Although these groups did not generally raid each other, they did participate in the widespread raiding, for both food and human chattel, triggered by land abandonment and mass migration (both ultimately caused by drought).
One side effect of all this social dislocation, during those days, was a broad clash of cultures, between farmers and herdsmen. This conflict could be savage. “You see!” one victorious group of agriculturists is known to have crowed. “These people are thieves who came here to steal from our gardens, and so we have killed them.” To discourage future incursions, they went so far as to stuff the mouths of their defeated adversaries with sorghum.
Assuming they could protect their herds, groups with large numbers of cattle were best able to endure the recurrent droughts. Across Ngongo, dynasties fell, and new ones arose. New leaders emerged from among those rwoti [“chiefs “] who were most successful at war and at procuring food for their followers.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, internecine conflict brought to Ngongo a new generation of opportunistic Arab and European slave traders. Their depredations caused further migration and other forms of dislocation. Following the Congress of Berlin, in 1884, enter France! With the new wealth created by Ngongo’s colonial economy came a new, royal aristocracy, which used war profits to enrich themselves. (Such were the forebears of Festus Nkwema and Alphonse Batakoudou!) At that point, what we now call “Acholi identity” was born.
I hope, Reader, that you have found this thumbnail history more illuminating than tiresome and confusing…
Speaking of Mishach Ndukwe, the man’s sorry tale of disastrous ethnic conflict further soured me on things ethnic, including Acholi marriage customs. At any rate, my real excuse to my mother was irrefutable: our combined funds were insufficient not only to support a wife, but even to pay a respectable bride price of, say, two cows and five goats. What money I did have in hand I intended to spend very differently. Of course, I was careful to couch my resistance in the most respectful terms, for no Acholi son, however deculturated, wishes to labor under a mother’s curse!
Meanwhile, I embraced the erotic outlet of dalliance with several willing female students, one of whom was actively political. This young woman, whom I am about to introduce, was the source of my first contacts with Kenyan anti-government groups and (if I may be coy) an important figure in my later life.
To be continued...
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