Let fiction writers chronicle our lives for generations to come

People write books for different reasons. For memoirs, it could be that a certain experience had such a profound impact on one’s life that it naturally overflows into a need to pour one’s heart out. For a biography, it is often that a writer feels that a certain personality was of such significance to society and therefore there is a need to immortalise their words and deeds for future generations to benefit from.

For the autobiography, where one writes their own story, of course with the help of an editorial team, in most cases it is the need to document family or political histories so that others can glean lessons from their experiences and get a clear understanding of the journey their family, community or country has travelled, illuminating the events and realities that brought them thus far.

For creative works, too, the reasons are varied. It could well be that someone feels they are talented in writing, or maybe someone has spotted their ability and encouraged them to do it. Other times it comes as a challenge.

Maybe there is a call for a type of manuscript that one feels they can cobble together. Still, others choose whether – and the kind of fiction to write – based on what the publisher or reader they are targeting prefers in terms of narrative style, thematic concerns, length of manuscript and so on.

For whatever reason one chooses to write, works of literary art do not just teach and entertain. They expand our minds and compress realities other than our own that may have been lived for decades into a form we can decode in a matter of a few sitting hours or at most a couple of days.

Thus, if you read three novels set in apartheid South Africa, or a short story based in Tanzania at the height of the Ujamaa era, you do not just read an interesting story. You gain insights into a world you never lived in, in a way that, if you were to travel to these places, your culture shock would be much less than that of an innocent traveller who feels giddy at every little thing that is different from one’s own. The reason I started this piece with the main reason given for writing autobiographies especially is that more often than not, we do not see the privileges we have or the wrong turns we may have taken – or may be taking – unless we know how those who came before us lived.

Today, someone gets a call to remind them that they were to travel some 200 kilometres away and they can do it in just under three hours. That may sound normal. I also see people board a matatu or sit astride a boda boda to travel a distance of three kilometres in Nairobi. Many of these young people may not know that, for instance, before the Thika Superhighway was built, it was easier to walk from the city centre to Roysambu after work than to board a matatu and be stuck in an ocean of biofuel fumes and exhausted humanity, travelling a few yards an hour and paying for it.

When we were young, whenever we complained about how tough life was, we were always reminded that those who came before us had to dip their feet in cold water and read under firewood light or moonlight because there were no lamps or electricity.

Again, looking at schools today, they are a far cry from those rural outfits of yore. Back then, a child was expected to carry a panga, books, packed lunch and a five-litre jerrican full of water – which you had to fetch from the river on your way to school – and still walk seven kilometres. And woe unto you if the bell – in most cases an old car-wheel rim struck with a metal bar – sounded at 7am before you were in class. You would be made to kneel on rough earth for an hour, after which you would be spanked as if you had committed a capital offence and still be made to singlehandedly uproot a tree stump or do some other punishment.

To a child boarding a bus to and from school and being chaperoned by a school employee to cross the road, it would be difficult to fully appreciate how privileged they are unless they get to read about other school-run realities that shaped some of those taking them to school today. Even politically, you hear Gen-Z bragging that for the first time they are articulating issues, as if we old geezers did not even raise a finger. For such children, who mostly scold us at the local to remind us how woke they are, I just eyeball him or her for three seconds, then quaff my absinthe, pick up my cap and head home. You see, they have no way of knowing that there was a time you could not talk about politics or government, or that people stood up against that and there was no social media or phones to help them mobilise.

The point I am making is that lack of understanding of where a people are coming from does not leave generations wallowing in blissful ignorance; it creates unnecessary inter-generational tensions because, as someone once said, a nation that does not speak within itself is a nation in eternal conflict. And we are not just talking about appreciating the hardships others have faced.

The most important lesson, which fiction perhaps does better than history and even autobiographies, is that it sheds light and breathes life into realities that would otherwise be non-existent, highlighting the values that see humanity through the worst of experiences anywhere.

It is the kind of socio-cultural discordance that arises when other realities are not appreciated that convinces me that there is a near-sacred need to help every generation tell its story. Even as publishers rush to meet textbook submission deadlines, they must remember that while it is profitable to align fiction with curriculum needs, there remains that sacred need to let fiction writers immortalize our lived experiences for the benefit of those who come after us. As Okot p’Bitek so famously and ethereally put it, the pumpkin in the old homestead must never be uprooted.