One Who Dreams is Called a Prophet | Novel | Sultan Somjee |
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform | 2020 |
ISBN: ‎ 978-1545513200 | pp 641 | $ 30.90

 

Protecting the native wisdom from colonial influences in the African setting

Sultan Somjee’s third work of creative writing One Who Dreams is Called a Prophet (2020) is a massive tome of 641 pages that invites close reading from multiple perspectives. The thematic content of the narrative is far different from Somjee’s earlier two novels which focused primarily on the gendered lives of the Asian diaspora in East Africa.

Somjee’s main protagonist is a Turkana elder called Alama who sets out on a spiritual-philosophical quest for the source of peace. He is troubled by his desire for revenge against humiliation suffered against his family and clan, largely based on his upbringing that a warrior must take pride in acts of aggression. Restless and uneasy, he sets out from the arid lands of Northwest Kenya and traverses the Kenyan landscape in a quest for self-discovery. As a nomad, walking is central to his existence and the act of walking is intoned in the rhythm of reading that has an intimate relationship between the self, creative experience and the soil of the earth: “When I walk, I feel I am a nomad, and I am pleased. When I sing, I feel I am the poet’s son ...?”  When the rhythm of the nomad’s spring-walk began to return to him, and the song filled his body, he was happy, almost ecstatic (271).

One Who Dreams is Called a Prophet engages with the eternal and universal quest for the source of peace within self and oneness with the environment, as well as collective social cohesion. The narrative can be read through the lens of Gandhian philosophy of Ahimsa or non-violence in both thought and action, stressing the struggle within that Somjee describes as the struggle between the mind and the heart.  It defines the pull of the power of reconciliation as against the desire for revenge and reprisal.  What adds to the narrative is the remarkable lyricism of Alama’s descriptions of his surroundings, calling out to the features in the environment as his companions in solitude “From the Asai I learned all people are of the umbilical cord. All trees, animals, insects and snakes of the Earth have mothers too. We are one family in nature’s homestead. We are all related” (447).

Alama has his walking stick, Koko Kigongo, as a close companion.  He engages in long conversations with the peace staff and also listens to it for counsel. Born of the peace tree, walking sticks become the central trope of the narrative.  It is possible that the  kernel of this compelling narrative may have germinated two decades ago  when Somjee held a conference on peace trees and walking sticks with tribal elders from conflict zones (https://vimeo.com/566513646).

Hence, each chapter in the book is named after a stick used by indigenous tribes to mark peace and Alama exchanges peace staves with elders from other tribes whom he meets on his journey as per the tradition of peace seekers described in the narrative. Embodied in the elders’ storytelling are proverbs, riddles and songs. Through the linguistic exchanges expressed in musical tones, we gain an insight into the vernacular humanist philosophy of Utu. Utu is the beauty of a world view that is accepting of the another’s ‘others’ “To have utu you must be mtu, a human. A human is alive to all the senses. That’s how he was born” (414). Reminiscent of the style of Ayi Kwei Armah in Two Thousand Seasons, Somjee draws from material culture as much as from orality – songs, myths and folklore to present traditional spiritual beliefs which may soon be lost to us. Utu is a pan-African concept and has been used for generations among cultural communities to forge reconciliations and closure of conflicts. In the entry to the Oxford International Encyclopaedia of Peace (ed. Nigel Young, 2010), Somjee states that in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu used Ubuntu as the key concept during the difficult times of Truth and Reconciliation processes. The Zulu word Ubuntu has the same linguistic root as the East African Utu in Swahili.

Along the way, Alama interacts with villagers of different tribes who have experienced abject poverty due to the repressive tactics of the government.  Yet he is welcomed with kindness, and the villagers applaud his courage to dare to dream, wherein the act of dreaming itself is prohibited by the government:

We, too, need peace with nature and fellow beings. But most of all we need peace with the   governments that rule us in Malia and here in Yeta. We pray you find peace, and when you do find peace, we too will have peace because peace is shared like a family meal. One cannot keep the peace to oneself.  No one remains hungry when the mother puts the pot on the fire... Your walk leaves us behind, we are starving, but your story will stay in our bodies and we will dream of peace on empty stomachs” (219).

Alama   arrives in the Siti (city) which he sees as a site of noisy urban chaos different from the placid plastic refugee camp that he encounters earlier and is struck by the ‘silence of starvation’.   In the Siti, he witnesses ethnic conflict and wanton acts of violence by the police and despairs at the dangerous consequences of ‘’hasira kali’ (Swahili: bad temper) and the spiritual annihilation it brings to the one seized by it.   Alama is seized by a sense of hopelessness on seeing men who have turned to “Matumbo Hayashibi” (Swahili: insatiable stomachs).  The narrative offers a critique of the long-term consequences of cultural colonization as well as the dangerous impact of neo-colonial political economic practices. The price to be paid in the name of development is described through the protagonist’s travails through refugee camps and dismal city slums that pose as the stark reality of ‘land garbs’ by Matumbo Hyashibi. Consequently, there is loss of identity caused by a disconnect from the land and language. The two are connected, “In the end, when you lose the language, you lose the land. When you lose the land, you lose the walk. When you lose the walk, you are not a nomad but a security guard in Siti. You live in filthy slums and life passes by” (26).

The   depth of   Somjee’s knowledge of the indigenous worldview of the tribes of Kenya derives from years that he spent as in the field (1973-1993) and later as the Head of Ethnography at the National Museums in Kenya (1994-2000). In 1994, he launched a project for the sharing of inter-cultural knowledge through material culture among eight ethnicities in Kenya that was funded by the Mennonite community. This project later evolved to cover a wider range of ethnicities and also in setting up a series of community-based peace museums. These museums as countryside civil societies to drawing from traditions, make visible material culture, languages and the arts used to promote Utu through traditional practices of peace and reconciliation.   In recognition of his work, the United Nations honoured Somjee in 2001 as an Unsung Hero of Dialogue Among Civilizations.   

Perhaps the successful African peace museums initiative, based on Utu may be used to similarly promote inter-cultural practices of peace and reconciliation in parts of Asia and South America. The path would divert us from reliance on the colonial legacies from the North and former colonial masters, as the source of knowledge especially when it relates to the well-being of our immediate communities and nature at home. 

From a South-South/postcolonial perspective, Somjee’s narrative is a text of importance in that it requires the reader to familiarize themselves with a new and an alternate source of knowledge beyond our existing set of references derived from Western paradigms.  We realize how our academic knowledge systems based largely on Euro-American institutions offer little or no window into the rich heritage such as the trove embedded in African traditional values. These have been marginalized by the continuing colonialist projections of the African as being uncivilized and easily prone to violence. In doing so, One Who Dreams is called a prophet, challenges Eurocentric epistemologies and knowledge production when it comes to sustaining nature, peace and social values or simply human values. 

Somjee satirizes western assumptions that indigenous peoples have no history of peace-making and conflict resolution, and that intervention needs to come from outside.    An entire chapter describes the academic antics of Dr Richard, a fellow Jua of the protagonist Alama, who conducts   peace-making workshops to market the Western concept of liberal peace. At first Alama, an illiterate nomad, associates himself with Dr Richard on ethnic line with the hope that he will learn from practices drawn from book knowledge. But later when Alama realizes that Dr Richard is also part of a larger nexus of corruption and exploitation, he is deeply disillusioned. Here is the first hint of Alama’s transformation to awareness of class over his blood or ethnicity. He then returns to peace-making and reconciliation processes that are an integral part of traditional African cultures and belief system. 

While   the narrative is presented as a fictionalized account, a reader who is familiar with the contexts of political upheavals in colonial and postcolonial Kenyan history, will be able to discern scathing satirical references directed at successive post-independence Kenyan governments which have suppressed land rights and freedom of expression.  Attention is drawn to the workings of “Matumbo Hayashibi” who deliberately promote violence among cultural communities.  Somjee’s political critique can perhaps be connected to his involvement with   theatre activism at the village of Kami~ri~i~thu~ (1977) where Ngugi wa Thiong’o had started people’s movement for the use of local languages rather than English as a powerful tool of political mobilization.

Towards the end of the narrative, Alama meets a kind elder at Rangani Hills who directs him to take a walk within himself and to deconstruct the belief system ingrained in him from childhood that a warrior must necessarily inflict violence and destruction in acts of revenge to appease his humiliation. As part of the process of self-purification, he learns, in Gandhian fashion, to cleanse himself of anger and that the desire for revenge only begets humiliation. In turn, humiliation returns us to the vicious cycle of seeking retribution for acts committed in the past, particularly in situations wherein the murder or rape of a single individual is considered the humiliation of an entire community. 

Alama returns home a changed man with the desire to mobilize the communities of a variety of cultures he has met on his journey to collectively defeat the Matumbo Hayashibi. But he has resolved that he would do this not by acts of anger or violence but rather through creative medium of song, dance, and prayer as well as the local literary heritage of proverbs, parables and riddles, propagated over centuries by the ancient wisdom of the forefathers.