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Blue Eyed Dolls in Africa
By Betty Wamalwa Muragori
There are dolls in my past, two of
them. I found them lurking menacingly
in my subconscious. Those dolls had
made their journey to Africa to unsettle
an unsuspecting black-eyed little girl.
They remind me of those Hollywood movies
in which children’s beloved toys turn
into monsters and pursue their child
owners in the darkness of night. Both
the dolls were blond and blue-eyed.
“Kinky haired babe,
think again.”
That’s what they
said to me in their silence. It was
these dolls that revealed the texture of
my hair. I was kinky haired. My hair
grows in tight little corkscrews. It
certainly was not blond. One time I got
to experience what it was like to have a
mane of hanging, swinging blond hair.
It was quite by accident. I was
helping my mother husk green maize
cobs. I looked at the silky blond
tussles and gathered a handful and put
them on my head. My mother laughed with
me as I swung golden locks out of my
eyes like a white girl.
But let’s tell the
stories of those dolls.
The first doll
surfaced in my first week of primary
school. I was six years old. The
second one featured at my first birthday
party. It wasn’t my own party. It was
my friend Diana’s birthday party. The
very first one that I had ever been to.
It all happened in the same year. The
year I like to call “The Year of the
Dolls”.
So
back to the second doll story. The
first week of primary school. It was
only 3 years after independence and the
mzungus who had not fled were still
making plans to flee the country.
African children of the soon-to-be
bourgeois were taking over their places
in schools. Whilst their parents took
over their jobs, homes, businesses and
farms. There wasn’t going to be a
Zimbabwe situation. Where a President
looking for a reason to reinvent the
heady freedom fight days casually threw
out the white farming community and
brought the country to its knees.
The
fleeing mzungu’s in my country made it
unnecessary for Africans to get nasty
en-mass by forcibly taking back their
land like they are doing in Zimbabwe
today. Still there were a few incidents
that I overheard the grown ups talk
about. A muzugu or muindi had had their
land or home taken away by so and so, a
minister in the new government who could
not be refused. There was always a
sense of victory and sometimes a mumbled
“serves them right”. We don’t talk about
that in public. In that uniquely Kenyan
way we swept that uncomfortable thing
under the carpet. Too late we have
found that it is your secrets that will
kill you.
Story One: The
First Doll
I
would like to say that I decided to
write my memoirs because I have lived a
memorable life full of lessons for the
young, but that would be a lie. I
haven’t reached a place to know what
happens. The truth is that my memoirs
decided that I should write them. They
decided that it was time. All of you
who know about giving birth know that
when the time comes for the baby to be
born, the baby must be born. No amount
of gritting of teeth and holding on will
make much difference. Besides I have
had a title for the book for years. As
usual I had announced the title to
everyone ages ago. Unabashedly I
created expectation which I ignored
until now. The title? “Blue Eyed Dolls
in Africa, My Memoirs”. The picture on
the cover was already fully formed. (I
hope it is the one I have in the end.)
A broken toy doll with blond hair,
blinking blue eyes. A fat baby doll,
beheaded. Its body and head separated.
Grotesque but beckoning the browser to
buy. So intriguing for those with a
taste for the macabre!
The
memoir style suits me. I can go on
diverting here to tell one story,
leaving it to tell another, doing
whatever I want to do with my story
really. I haven’t decided whether the
memoirs will be a true story or just a
story which could be true. Let’s not
venture into philosophical conundrums by
asking “what is truth anyway?”
But
how rude of me? You don’t know whom you
are talking to? My name is Sitawa. I
like to think of myself as Sitawa the
Third. I was named after my father’s
mother and my mother’s grandmother, who
both had the same name. As you figured
I am a self made woman. I crafted my
own title from those two fore-mothers
who only relate with each other upwards
through me, when their blood finally
mingled. They are my kin who doubled up
us my guardian angels when I was a young
child in trouble. I don’t know much
about Sitawa my great-grandmother except
that she was my mother’s grandmother. I
know lots about Sitawa my grandmother,
my father’s mother. From knowing her
until she died when I was 9 years old
and from the stories about her from my
father, a natural story teller.
What was she like? Even as a child I
couldn’t miss her strangeness. My
grandmother Sitawa did not look like my
people. She looked foreign, exotic
even, a real African, the type
photographed by westerners in their
romance with old vanishing Africa. She
had what I like to call Masaai ears.
The ear lobes had been stretched so that
they dangled. My people’s ears are
whole. She wore beaded ornaments in her
ears, around her neck. Brass and other
metal ornaments were worn on her wrists
and ankles. Another thing, she had a
hole below her lower lip in which she
sometimes wore a small wooden plug. I
found out why she looked this way when
as an adult I went to a district called
West Pokot in north-west Kenya for the
first time. And there she was walking
around in many of the Pokot women.
Her
people must have come from people who
neighbored the Pokot. And in that
quintessential old African way, they
intermingled with little distinction.
Over the years ethnic groups that
neighbored would swap dress, traditions,
practices and relations with ease. My
self image was shaken. Here I was
looking at people whom I thought of as
unknown strangers. I had in fact come
on a great adventure to discover them,
to separate myth from fact. Were they
really warlike people? Or cattle
rustlers who could spear you for your
cows. Now I realized that all the time
there was a relationship with me,
through my beloved Sitawa.
But
that’s how she looked. What was she
really like? My father told me a story
that for me explains her. He says that
even on the eve of independence, Sitawa
refused to believe all the talk of
freedom. “Ahh, Ndala, how can Africans
talk of getting rid of the British.
Even if they manage are you sure
Africans can rule themselves?” You
would name her a skeptic, a cynic
perhaps. But she wasn’t. Many years
later I came to learn of the life my
grandmother had lived. Widowed twice,
in a community in which being a widow
was akin to admitting to being a
congenital husband killer, her life had
been hard. It was her fault her two
husbands died.
In
punishment she was allotted a diminutive
existence that made her fret with
anxiety when more living than her
measure showed up. Her happy
grandchildren playing and laughing in
abandon made her watch and wait for days
for the calamity that must surely
follow. In mitigation she offered up
her misery like some supplication to
ward off the misfortune that was sure to
follow. As a child I remember her
carrying a pathos even more magnified by
what she called herself, “Omkhana we
Chimbwa”, Daughter of Dogs. A person
without people allowed, imbibing the
merest sliver of life.
* * * * *
So
let me begin by telling you the story
behind the title, “Blue eyed dolls in
Africa”. There’s more to it besides
being a lovely title that promises
clinical insight into post-colonial
angst in Africa. And no I don’t collect
dolls, but you would expect me to. This
is the story of me and the first doll.
* * * * *
I
was six years old when I first saw a
real live doll. It belonged to the
little blond girl whose real name was
Susan in my new class in standard one in
K primary school. I wanted that doll.
Its eyes blinked and it cried “Mama,
Mama” I had to know why and how. Where
did the sound come from? So I took it
home with me that day. Technically I
stole the doll, I went into Susan’s
school bag without permission, I took it
without telling her and I took it home.
I didn’t tell my mother that I had it
either.
The
next day I returned it and handed it
back to Susan with a calm,
“Here is your toll”.
Heavy mother tongue interference in
evidence. I was an earnest little girl
simply returning the accoutrements of a
successful scientific experiment to a
fellow avid researcher. Where I come
from the “T” sound becomes a “D” and
vise versa. P, and B are also
interchanged. We have real problems
with “W” interestingly because when you
think about it, it is pronounced with a
series of “Ds and Bs”. I was yet to
acquire the posh upper class English
accent that I have today, that always
makes foreigners ask me where I went to
school.
Innocent of the consequences of my
actions I was surprised when Susan burst
into tears clutching her doll and ran
away.
I
did not expect what followed. The
abiding image I remember is of me
standing with many tall white adults
looking down on me with opprobrium. I
was in discomfort. I was being accused
of being a thief and being lectured at
as if I were a half wit. My mother was
there and a weeping golden haired Susan,
clutching the hand of her mother.
“Never steal again”, the headmaster Mr.
Asher sternly warned me. I couldn’t
understand them. What were they on
about? Couldn’t they understand that I
could not be a thief? I only took the
doll to find out how it could cry, how
its legs and arms could move like that,
whether it was real, how it could
exist. The thoughts stayed in my head,
unspoken. I stood silent looking from
face to face overwhelmed.
Can
you imagine my horror when I met Susan
in first form in my new secondary
school? The first thing she said to me
was,
“I
hope you won’t steal anything from me
again.”
No
send-up. We were still too young to know
irony or sarcasm, described by my
secondary school teacher, Mrs. Hopkins
as “the lowest form of wit.”
“No
I won’t” I assured her.
I
was relieved when she left that school
shortly afterwards. This part of my
memoirs is true.
posted 8 June 2007
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posted
20 October 2007
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