Unsung heroines: Tribute to my mother.

I didn’t want to write about her in the heat of the celebrations not because she doesn’t deserve the festivities. No. In fact she deserves all the attention worth of any heroine. I purposely delayed her tribute so that when I finally publish, it gets good attention. I didn’t want her tribute to be swallowed and absorbed into the old, repetitive and boring hypocritical tributes paid by our insincere political leaders to our independence heroes whose families are still languishing in abject poverty due to betrayed dreams.

You see, she didn’t attend the Whiteman's classes. People said she didn’t read others said she didn’t go to school while others used more derogatory labels such as “illiterate" to describe her. These didn’t bother me at all. To me she was simply the best in world. I cannot find any other woman comparable to her. I will never find one. And I am also not looking for any.

Writing about this kind of a woman is such an uphill task. The problem is that you don’t know where to begin from, what to include and what not to include. You don’t even know where to stop talking about her.

As a little boy growing up in Talitia village of Bungoma county, I remember vividly my mother tagging me along the narrow foot path leading to Naburereya stream. Apart from serving as an administrative boundary between Talitia and Naburereya villages, that stream served as a rich source of rope fish (mud fish) and clean water for washing, bathing and watering animals.

It was routine for mama to take me along to the stream whenever she went to wash a huge heap of dirty clothes. There were always other women from the two neighboring villages who came to do their laundry in the stream. Many of them were washing baby bedding that were always soaked in poop and pee! Then the women (mothers of my friends) would strip to bath. I don’t remember seeing anything else but I vividly remember the numerous beautiful beads in various colours around their waists. Some could then take a handful of green, soft grass growing along the banks of the stream, add a little sand and soap then thoroughly brush their teeth with that paste! That was long time ago before the mzungu toothpaste reached that side of the Republic.

Another vivid memory I still remember was the day mama took me to school. I was six. I had successfully passed the traditional test for admission into nursery school. Those days kids had to touch their left ears using their right hands passing over the heads! Unless you did it, you could not start schooling.

So this day mama took me to school. I was so excited. I was running after her big strides barefoot but never minding the pain exerted on my young soles when they got into constant contact with small stones on the rough road. It didn’t matter that in nursery we sat on the floor, never had books and pencils but we made use of the dusty earth to write.  It was still exciting.

Since that time, mama was always in my life. She was very prominent in my academic life. Not that papa didn’t care. He cared so much but he was always preoccupied with the hard struggle to provide for us. One day I will write about him as well. But as for mama, whenever I needed a pencil she provided. Whenever I needed notebooks she provided. Whenever my uniform got torn, she fixed it. When parents were needed at school, she always showed up.

She kept encouraging us to take school seriously. "Even if I may not get school fees for your secondary education, primary education is good enough for you to know how to write your names, read road signage and sign properly without having to press the finger." She used to tell us. Her quest for her children's basic formal education was insatiable. That’s why when my brother Musa and I dropped out of Kabula primary school at class 7 due to failure to pay school fees following papa's illness and subsequent death, mama took us back to school. She did not have the means but she had the faith that we had to finish primary school.

That decision, to me, was a lifeline. It changed my life completely. If not for that single decision, I would be perhaps a professional grave digger as teachers used to warn us if we did not  read hard. I had no idea that I would join high school but mama's faith was unshakable. She had faith in God and more confidence in my academic capabilities than I had myself.

After excelling in the primary national examination, the poor, illiterate and unemployed woman was up and down making desperate attempts to see to it that I join high school. I had been called to join the mighty Friends School Kamusinga! Even though I didn’t join that academic heavyweight if our region, I thank God that mama's efforts paid off. Now as they say, the rest is history!

Mama was our heroine. No one may ever compose songs and sing her praises. No one may write books about her because she was not famous but to me she was the best. My earthly god she was. Such a strong African woman. From her womb came all the 10 of us and none through CS! 5 boys and 5 girls, she delivered us normally. Majority of us were born at home. I remember our last born. Mama gave birth to her on her own! Can anyone give me a better description of the strength of an African woman?

Mama was a great disciplinarian and an accomplished gender equity champion. The equality movement never took notice of her efforts. She was on her own in the village. The gender movement likes city women who have read. The village African woman is only used by the movement as a specimen for donor funds! But mama was our champion in gender equity. She was doing it on her own, in her own house away from the cameras. But she impacted on a generation.

To her, a child is a child; whether a boy or a girl, it didn’t matter. We boys would fetch firewood from the bushes, cook and wash utensils! We would also go to the poshomill to mill maize. We would fetch water from the spring, and do babysitting. It was such a good training that I have come to find very valuable in my adult life.

I have come to meet many good people who have touched my life in one way or the other. They are all my heroes. But mama beats them all. She was a heroine and when heroes die they are celebrated not mourned. However, mama was different. Even though I didn’t shed a tear when she died a couple of years ago, an uncontrollable amount of tears rolled down my cheeks immediately after she was covered in the merciless mound of earth. Deleting her phone number from my phonebook was one of the most painful and saddest things to do in my life.

My heroine left me before I could repay her struggles, her love, her kindness and her good upbringing of us! It’s not easy for an illiterate African woman, widowed at an early age, to bring up 10 children single-handedly. But my mother did it! Our heroine.