Long Tussle with Dearth

By Kennedy Siboe

It is not easy growing up in a little village on the slopes of Mt Elgon. It is even more difficult if that village is a marginalized, desolate place devoid of basic government infrastructure. In the eighties and nineties, the region was (and it still is) steeped in myth, custom, tradition and abject poverty. Almost every aspect of life was governed by superstitions and curious belief in mythical forces. Amid this ridiculous way of life, fierce ethnic jealousies and rivalry between the Sabaot and Bukusu communities were becoming increasingly difficult to conceal. Ultimately they would boil over in 1992.

My remembrance of my early days is a life of penury and astounding ignorance. I was surrounded by myths, tears, jiggers, hunger, illicit brews and ethnic conflict. Of all these, ethnic rivalry and tension gained prominence. Everything, from childhood games to adult relations had an ethnic dimension to it. As a matter of fact, apart from this heightened ethnic consciousness, the only other constant in our lives was poverty. Little boys and girls, their feet ravaged sore by jiggers, would stage meaninglessly painful duels to demonstrate the superiority of their tribe while elders concluded their illicit beer parties in acrimonious arguments over tribal relations. Weakness was frowned upon and you earned respect by not only demonstrating that you were fearless but also provoking someone from the other tribe into a fight and beating them resoundingly. A group of boys would organize fights between any two boys at some inconspicuous location and almost everyone would be present to watch the vicious exchange of kicks and blows. Bound by honour, no one dared refuse to fight when his combat was arranged. No one consulted you when scheduling the fight, but you had no right to reject the invite. You just fought when your day came. It was more honourable to have your nose bloodied than to chicken out of a fight. Later on, fanned by political differences, this ethnic rivalry degenerated into full scale ethnic violence with far-reaching ramifications.

Poverty, alcoholism, ignorance, negative ethnicity and marginalization. These things destroyed many. Emerging from such a background to lead a normal life needs determination. This is my story; a story of hope amid deprivation and senseless blood-letting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kennedy Siboe
• Release date: Jun 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370357321

Kennedy Siboe

Kennedy Siboe was born to a poor family in a remote village on the slopes of Mt Elgon in Kenya. He grew up in penury and political turmoil witnessing and suffering adverse effects of politically motivated ethnic violence. He narrates these events of his life in his first book, Long Tussle with Dearth. Kennedy works as a Systems Technical Analyst at one international bank and is an accomplished social justice activist and grassroots mobilizer.

Book preview

Long Tussle with Dearth

Kennedy Siboe

Copyright © 2017 by Kennedy Siboe

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

First published by Kennedy Siboe at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Ninteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

About The Author

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many people who in more than one way contributed to the production of this book; to all those who encouraged me, talked things over, read the manuscript, critiqued it, and assisted in the editing and proofreading.

I want to thank my wife, Judy and our children, who supported and encouraged me all through. It has been a long journey together.

I would like to thank my parents Joseph Siboe and Gladys Siboe for always supporting me. This book would not have been possible but for their vivid recollections of my childhood.

Thanks to my friend Isaac Magero for the constant encouragement.

Last and not least: I beg forgiveness from all those who have supported me in the course of writing this book and whose names I have failed to mention.

CHAPTER ONE

My remembrance of my early days is a life of penury. From my mother’s accounts, I was born to her at a time my father was still an A –Level student and so the mission of taking care of me from my infancy lay squarely on her shoulders. She was hardly 20 years of age when I arrived and by the time she was 24, she was already a mother of four. In the course of that time, father completed his high school education and was hired by the board of governors of Sirisia Secondary school as a Laboratory Assistant and later a teacher of Chemistry. With that trade, he was able to sustain us to a certain extent and it would appear to me that the suffering subsided albeit only ephemerally. Before then, she had endured persistent rejection and constant psychological and emotional torment from her in-laws. Father’s elder brother has always been a loquacious individual with colossal fondness for involvement in affairs of other people. He was fiercely opposed to the matrimony of my parents and for the extent father remained an A – Level student at Sigalame High School, his brother took it upon himself to make existence arduous for mother. On one occasion, he is said to have invited elders to throw her out, but it so happened that on the day the elders were supposed to perform this commission, father arrived home for his mid-term break thereby throwing their design into disarray.

My father in accordance with the Bukusu custom of naming children after departed relatives named me after his grandfather. From the accounts of several people present in the family during my young days, I deduced that my grandfather was the only son of his father, the person I was named after. My father seems to have been his grandfather’s favourite. As soon as people around me were convinced that I was old enough to understand things, they started narrating to me magnificent tales concerning my father’s special relationship with his grandfather and by these narrations I came to discover that I had been born at a time the family was at the nadir of its fortunes.

The person I was named after had been a man of great resources. He had possession of great pecuniary resources comprising land, teeming herds of cattle and even developed properties. Of particular pride and satisfaction to him however, seems to have been the significant herds of cattle. Almost everyone who had been on familiar terms with him narrated to me how in his boyhood, my father always accompanied him to herd the cattle and how they would stay in meadowland for extended hours just chatting and watching the animals graze. My grandfather on the other hand did not demonstrate the remotest interest in his father’s assets as well as his way of life which is said to have been very strict. In his youth he had been a free spirit who often left home for unmitigated periods and only returned when want had brought him to boredom. When he had married and established a family, he quickly ran into misfortune. His marriage union had been blessed with thirteen children over several years, but seven of them had died in their infancy.

Even with a family to take care of, it appears to me that grandfather’s carefree attitude did not subside and he still took little or no interest in his father’s wealth. In the mid-1950s and with his wife pregnant with a child who would later be my father, he took the family and crossed the border into Mbale district of Eastern Uganda. This is where my father would be born. Once again, when boredom had set in and he had fallen on hard times, he had returned to the land of his father. This time he seems to have decided to settle down and raise his family. He even enrolled his children in school. It was during this time that my father enjoyed his grandfather’s intimacy and confidence. For reasons that are not very clear to me, it seems my father stopped attending school for a couple of years during which time he herded his grandfather’s cattle and learnt a great deal from the ageing man. Finally, when he returned to school he skipped one or two classes and joined the other kids he had first enrolled in school with. From that time, he spent his childhood and early youth shuffling between academics and herding his grandfather’s cattle.

In 1969, the old man was accosted by unknown assailants as he looked after his cattle. He was slashed severally and left for dead. Those who heard the commotion and rushed to discover what had happened found him at his last gasp. There was no way of ascertaining who had committed the fiendish act but all accounts concur that the iniquity was perpetrated by people inspired by fierce jealousy and a burning desire to take control or have possession of what the deceased owned. Once his father had departed this life, my grandfather struggled to take control of his inheritance. Of the lands, he only ended up with a fraction of the primary acreage. Soon even the herds of cattle were lost to his relatives and he was living in destitution. This is the circumstance into which I was born eleven years after the murder of the family patriarch.

During my childhood, almost everyone around me seemed to have nostalgic memories of the man I was named after and as I grew older, I formed the opinion that their fond memories were inspired less by his absence than the gulf of biting neediness that his murder had plunged them. My father adored his grandfather and his murder seems to have so tremendously hurt him that it made it almost impossible for him to trust people outside his immediate family. He viewed everyone with suspicion and was overly conscious of our safety.

From my early recollections, father had an oval shaped grass thatched shed for shelter and this seemed the standard in my grandfather’s entire family. On one occasion when I had grown a little and was competent to fathom the situation around me, my father being a devotee of traditional custom and society invited my maternal grandfather to our humble address and used the circumstance to offer him four or five head of cattle as the advance element of my mother’s bride price in harmony with the Bukusu customs and mores. It so happened that after my father and his relations had made this application to him, it started to rain. The intensity of the rain was such that the roof started leaking. While the heavens had opened up to rain cats and dogs, the covering over our heads was precipitating light rain all over the hut so that everyone was now moving about in desperate attempts to dodge the drizzling in their regions. Even the assortment of polythene papers in their expansive array of colours that in my childhood I assumed were meant to obtain the same end as a ceiling board did not help. The rain water would collect on each paper and when it could hold no more, would let down streams very much reminiscent of the gushes we see from iron sheet ridges when it rains.

The apparent deprivation and dearth compounded by the heavy rain and the energy-sapping shuffling and shifting the party was involved in seems to have had a profound impression on my grandfather and it was definitely not a good one. Having listened to father’s proposition, he politely turned the offer down and supplicated with him to put the animals to transaction and use the profits to set the family up in a better cottage. Taking this recommendation, my father built us a three roomed abode with an iron sheet roof. This would be our home for many years to come.

The first lesson I learnt from my mother was perseverance and determination in the face of adversity. In all this squalor and indigence, she demonstrated a great spirit and always went about her daily chores with enthusiasm and a smile that seemed to many an abiding feature of her face. As a matter of verity, the only indication of the hardships she endured was the roughness and blisters in her palms. She was a committed mother and she demonstrated her willingness and determination to raise us the best way she knew how by triumphing over all manner dangers and misfortunes.

My brother Tadayo came at a very difficult time for mother. Shortly after his nativity, he suffered a series of maladies ranging from measles, mumps to more manageable ailments such as Malaria. This state of affairs made it almost impossible for him to sleep like most babies. He cried for the most part of the nights and only slid into intermittent spells of sleep towards dawn. It being so, my mother spent the nights making strenuous exertions at pacifying him often with modest accomplishment.

Unable to afford a constant stream of paraffin to light the nights away, she fetched certain wild seeds which she pierced through with a wire so that when she set one on fire, it would burn slowly and by the time it was reduced to ashes, the fire would have spread to the next seeds. It is a skill I saw her employ to light the house whenever we couldn’t afford paraffin for our little tin lamp. The light derived from the smouldering of the seeds was only dim but it sufficed mother’s lighting needs.

As time went by, it became more and more apparent that father was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the squalor around us. He was not making much by way of income from his trade as an untrained teacher and with the growth of the family he became progressively displeased with the circumstances. When I was about four years of age, he vacated his post as a teacher and travelled to Nairobi to further his education. His ambition was to disentangle the family from paucity and he determined that the only way to do so was by expanding his edification.

He enrolled for an Engineering course at the Kenya Polytechnic. It was during father’s initial year in college that mother did something which even at my young age struck me as very extraordinary. Though our dwelling had two bedrooms, our parents had decided that my two brothers and I would be sharing their bedroom. We were a close knit unit and I speculate that the young parents estimated it something unimaginable to leave us to our own devices in a room in the long dark village nights. My brothers and I had large cow hide and an outsized collection of torn clothing for beddings. Each night, mother would spread the hide on the floor before neatly arranging the rags on it. Then, we would joyfully plunge onto the humble bed before she covered us with a large blanket. Even in such fetid conditions, we slept through the nights soundly.

One night, I was woken up by the cries of a new born. The crying made known the arrival of my third brother. Mother had given birth to the newest member of the family without any form of help from anyone. Now that I reflect on the incident, I cannot help but marvel at just what rank of courage and endurance it took her to go through the phase of labour and finally deliver herself of a baby without as much a groan to wake us up. It is this attribute of mother’s that I believe I inherited in full measure – a determination to pull through hardships on my own without relying too much on assistance. It is a blessing having family, friends and colleagues you can count on in life, but it is a greater attribute to possess a fighting spirit and the will to overcome odds.

It was while father was advancing his education and mother bore the task of raising us that her conscientiousness was manifested. We did not have much by way of revenue. Mother was not occupied in any variety of formal or informal employment. She did not even possess a piece of land to till for our subsistence for grandfather had not yet considered it a thing of necessity to bequeath a piece of land to father as was the custom then. Mother had the four of us to provide for. We lived from hand to mouth. The community we lived in was an agricultural one. Wealth was guesstimated in terms of how much land one owned, how much crop one harvested and how many head of cattle one possessed. It being so and mother owning none of these units of value, our place in the community was at the bottom.

CHAPTER TWO

There is inherent indignity and a general lack of a sense of belonging in deprivation. The years following father’s enrolment to college were characterized by mother’s invariable exertions not necessarily to give us a good life but to merely sustain our existence. We had little or nothing to eat and I had attained school-going age. Father determined that I was to be enrolled in school and instructed mother to take me to Chesikaki FYM Primary School in January of 1985. For reasons I have never divined, he was vehemently opposed to the idea of mother enrolling me in nursery school and that being the case, I was adorned in what mother considered my best outfit and delivered to primary school.

My first day in school was an encounter to behold. Once mother had presented me before Mr. Mang’eni the Class One teacher and announced her desire to have me enrolled, he took a sweeping look at me and as though harbouring grave concerns about my readiness for the task my mother intended me to accomplish, cautiously advanced towards me, grabbed my right hand and with guarded effort stretched it over my head with the object of seeing if in this way I could touch my left ear. I tilted my head a little towards my right and my little fingers touched the ear. Then, instructing me not to move the hand he stepped back and surveyed me once more. With a bizarre kind of caution he approached me again and placing a large stick he had been wielding since we came in on the table, clamped my head upright in his large hand and using the other attempted the same motion. It was apparent that I could not reach my left ear by passing my right hand over the head.

Mr. Mang’eni tentatively announced to mother that I was too young to join his class and recommended that she should enrol me in nursery school but mother would hear none of it. She applied herself to him more earnestly, requiring him to admit me in spite of my stature and Mr. Mang’eni yielded to her importunate pleading. She thanked him fervently and left. My first observation after mother had left was that there were very few new kids in the class. I formed the opinion that most of the boys and girls present that day were either too old or too comfortable to be Class One pupils.

No sooner had mother left than I joined the other new kids in incessant crying and in this course of action, came to discover why the teacher approached kids with so much caution. He had barely managed to restrain me from following mother home by chasing after me and dragging me back into the pandemonium that constituted his class when another kid attempted to run away. Dashing after the boy and catching up with him after just a few paces, a scuffle ensued with the teacher finding it very difficult to calm the inconsolable boy down. With despondency setting in, he lashed at the boy’s feet a couple of times with the stick. The boy reacted to this by biting the teacher’s hand so viciously that he halted the caning, let go of the boy and spent the next few minutes nursing the bleeding hand. It was the last time I saw the boy in school, but incidents of this nature persisted.

I did not like the school at all. The teacher spent most of the time leading kids in singing songs and playing games I did not understand. I later realized that the reason almost every other kid seemed to know these songs and games and I appeared to be the odd one out was because more than half of the pupils were repeating the class, many of them for the second or third time. Everyone in the school was a stranger and it was the very first time I was among so many strangers. I never played with anyone for the sight of so many children with runny noses darting about in all directions and engaging the teacher in astounding wrestling tussles overwhelmed me. I cried all the time. For the few weeks I was in school, I cried myself sick.

One day, after I had cried myself to the extent of suffering a severe headache, Mr. Mang’eni sent word to mother requiring