What value does the truth hold when its knowledge threatens to rock the delicate balance of an entire nation? What lengths are people who wield power willing to go to silence the truth and alter the events of the future and the past?
How much of our history as we know it today has been concocted to suit the powerful minority? Kalumba wrestles against life and death again and again to preserve his faith in truth and to make sure it isn’t buried like a bag of flesh and bones.
In an interview with One Read, Mukoma wa Ngugi explains that the trigger for his book We the Scarred is the nightmare of witnessing a massacre. This experience forms the bedrock that holds the heavier conversations of pan-colonialism, revolutionism, the weight of exile, the loneliness and trauma that comes with it, betrayal, love, and finding purpose.
The setting is Kwatee Republic, which this reader now knows to be an allegory of East African Kenya, more precisely during the second wave of liberation from postcolonial dictatorship. Mukoma is no stranger to the buried truths and altered histories of his people. Having an intimate relationship with this history, it seems almost divinely imposed that he gets to tell this story as he did.
I have not read many books about Kenyan history or the turmoil that was their political system post-colonial period. But I have read many books about postcolonial Nigeria, and the parallels in experiences are glaring. No character (human) walks away from such experiences whole or the same. Freedom struggles such as these tend to do that to a person.
First, it starts small, as it did in this book: a small group of people that cannot stand the injustices handed to their people, so they aggregate, teach their people their rights, and teach them to fight back, to withstand the push. Soon, their ministry grows bigger, louder, and stronger. To repress this rising opposition, the Dictator will do anything to weaken the resolve of the people.
First, he will start with bribes, then he will try to break their spirits with threats and force, and when nothing gives, he will target the pillars. For one who is intoxicated with power, the sanctity of life matters little. So soon, he will turn his land into a bloodied battlefield.
Kalumba finds himself an exile in Wisconsin ten years after the gory massacre that sets him on this path. What starts as a shabbily written List containing names of members of an active movement against a brutal government and Dictator ends in him needing a disguise to flee his home and life. Memories of that night evade him; the night when the massacre happened, it should have been him rather than Baba Ogum who should have died. So he enlists the help of alcohol to dull the pain and loneliness. He should have died on that night, he tells himself. On the night when the massacre happened, it should have been him rather than Baba Ogum who should have died. And now all that remains is this guilt and sense of worthlessness. Until he meets and befriends Mrs Shaw. A woman who seems in the beginning merely a feisty seventy-something-year-old retired history professor who lost her husband to Kwateen independence soon reveals her hefty secret to him. This gets him rethinking his role in the future of his country and a promise he must fulfil. But first, he must return home.
Mukoma encapsulates vividly the effects of change and revolution on a people. Much of his focus is on Kalumba, who in turn shares his story through his journal. Once a political radical, the events from ten years ago shrink him into a stranger he cannot recognize in a strange land. He has to deal with emotional and mental trauma and hates himself for not remembering details that could help him reconcile questions from the past. He details how lonely it has been being away from home, his father, his love, and his brother. He mourns what could have been his life if he wasn’t forced to leave and if he had a purpose for living. Through him and many other characters, we see the effects a fight for freedom can have on the individuals involved.
To fill a longing for his son, Kalumba’s father takes in and treats Ogum as his. Ogum realizes that “when Kalumba left, he left behind a silence between Sukena and Ogum. On the drive back from the border, there was a silence between them, and sometimes Ogum felt that they had become lovers to fill this silence.” And it is not until Kalumba meets Mrs Shaw and Melissa that he starts to feel a sense of belonging and love again and can finally look at his future and purpose more positively.
There is a lot of loss recorded in this book, which is very telling of how this desire and longing to hold on to something we cannot control and the loss of such things causes us to spiral in different directions and to find stability only when the gap is filled.
At the core of this book is the fight for the truth and all the obstacles that stand in the way of that. The whole reason Kalumba is exiled in the first place is so that the truth is hushed. Rafael finds himself in jail for wanting to propagate the truth of his people. Baba Ogum and every other freedom fighter lost their lives on the day of the massacre for this same reason. This underscores the senseless drive and desire of people in power to use such power to control and remodel. This is also why this book seems quite relevant in today’s conversation about politics and power tussles. It beckons the earlier questions asked at the beginning of this review and goes further to provide answers to those questions.
Baba Ogum talks in one of his many sermons about betrayal.
“There is Judas, and there is Peter. Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver with a kiss. And Jesus told Peter, “I tell you, Peter, before the cock crows this day, you will deny three times that you know me.” And so it happened that after Jesus was captured, Peter, though he’d vowed to follow Jesus to his death, instead followed in the footsteps of Judas the traitor, denying Jesus three times.”
The significance of this is revisited over and over again in the book, and as saddening as the ending is, it comes as no surprise. It reflects the essence of trust in building and growth and the ease with which that trust can be betrayed by only a loved one, halting the process of growth.
The conversations in this book are deep and require time to digest and assimilate. No part of this book is for entertainment, as you would expect of a book of fiction. Mukoma was on a mission to share, expose, and solidify the information he has wielded about the parts of history that has been omitted from the books to suit a narrative more conforming and patronizing. Lives were lost in the fight for freedom. Many lives were affected in the process. Through this book, many lives and sacrifices will be remembered, etched in the sands of time forever.
***Precious Nzeakor’s review won the Ken Saro Wiwa prize for Book review at the Lagos Book and Arts Festival (LABAF) 2024
