Tragedy played out behind poverty's veil
Read an extract from The Stone Hills of Maragoli.
The Stone Hills of Maragoli
2002
Stanley A. Gazemba
Acacia Publishers, Nairobi, Kenya
267 pages
Review by Richard Bartlett
Having spent a week at the London Book Fair and seminars related to books and Africa I realise how much work has to be done. Not just when it comes to Africa, but especially when it comes to enlightening ignorant and patronising Europeans as to what our continent has to offer. Too often the debates veered away from literature and got stuck on literacy. There is no arguing that literacy levels in most of the countries on the continent are less than ideal, but when discussion on the need for literacy leads to the conclusion that it is not worth speaking of literature, Africa is being done a serious injustice.
Then along comes a gardener, yes he finished school before dedicating his working hours to "tending grass and flower shrubs", who creates a tragedy of such dimensions, such variety, and originality that it should remind us of how serious that injustice is. What makes The Stone Hills of Maragoli so special is that it has no pretensions about attempting to address issues of modernity, of city life, of "clash of cultures", of the rural-urban divide or other themes that are too often the substance of popular African novels. Yet the issues it deals with are as immediate, even if they are beyond the gaze, beyond the limits of the urbanity that attracts most writers.
"There are constant diversions that are the reality of lives lived in the search for something beyond subsistence"
Stanley Gazemba has situated his novel in rural Kenya, in a village whose most important employer is the local tea estate. The central character is Ombima whose dream is to save enough money to build a house of brick with a roof of corrugated iron, so he and his family can move out of their hut. That dream is far off as the novel opens with Ombima resorting to stealing fruit and vegetables from his employer’s fields just to feed his family.
From there we are introduced to the quotidian drudge of life as a labourer, where tending the vegetable garden is a job to be relished because it saves the back-breaking work of tea picking in the heat of the day. We are introduced to the many methods used by the tea pickers to avoid that final arduous task of taking the harvest to market. But more important than the nature of the work are the lives of the myriad characters who live in Maragoli. In this aspect, Gazemba has created an epic in that we are presented with a panorama of characters who add numerous layers to a story which charts individual idiosyncracies that comprise a community. This is not an introverted narrative of one person’s trials and tribulations – it tells of an entire community shut off from the advances of globalisation due to one simple fact of their lives: poverty. This is life on the fringes, on the periphery where people cannot see beyond the stone hills – not because they lack vision, but simply because they lack the means of disrupting the cycle of poverty.
There is Ombima’s wife Sayo and his two children Saliku and Aradi, who revel in their first trip to the nearest town, and its fairground, travelling a matatu taxi for the first time in the week before Christmas. Ombima’s best friend and colleague Ang’ote falls in love with Rebecca, a woman much older than him, and they hide their relationship out of fear of both being ostracised and teased. Divorced from the daily grind of village life are Madam Tabitha, a teacher, and her husband Andimi, a businessman who owns the tea plantation which forms the focus of the villagers’ lives.
Gazemba takes us on a tour not just of the village but of the events that comprise the lives of a community that lives on the periphery of the visible world. There is one story which weaves its way through the narrative, of the labourer who somewhat unwillingly begins an affair with the lady of the estate (which ends in a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions), but what makes the novel so appealing are the constant diversions that are the reality of lives lived in the search for something beyond subsistence. The dilemma of squandering savings on spoiling the children with a Christmas excursion, meaning the new roof will have to wait. The girl who comes down in the night with some inexplicable illness and dies soon afterwards, and it makes sense that we never know what caused her death – the doctors and nurses who treat the child never tell the parents what their daughter suffers from, and there are no expectations for such knowledge – it makes no difference and means nothing because the family did all they could and suffer no less for this absence of neat categorisation that comes with the privilege of education.
There are rats which live in the thatch roof and the cattle are kept in the kitchen at night, the men squander their earnings in the local beer hall, there are arguments between couples over matters of finance, of bringing up children and of trust. Among all of this the affair between Ombima and Madam Tabitha develops as Madam becomes all the more demanding and the man begins to turn his unwelcome situation to his own advantage. Ombima discusses his dilemma with his close friend who commiserates and then uses this information to advance his own position. Thus betrayal on a number of fronts reaches its climax as tragedy on the stone hills of Maragoli as the Christmas procession passes in jubilation below.
Gazemba, the self-confessed gardener who has published many short stories, has created, in The Stone Hills of Maragoli, a work which reflects this expertise in shorter fiction. It is as if Gazemba has woven together a number of stories and crafted a novel – but it is remarkable because it works so well. It is powerful because it offers no pretense of ‘great’ literature. It tells an ordinary tale of love, celebration, betrayal and revenge, but places all this in a context that is at once familiar for its emotional impact and unfamiliar for its cultural environment. It is an easy novel to read, but disconcerting at the same time for readers who have not experienced life in Africa beyond the city limits. Gazemba gives no obvious clues to slot the story into a particular environment – the cars, telephones, architecture, shops give few hints as to whether this is set in 1950 or 2000. That being said, however, this is undoubtedly a novel of post-colonial Kenya. It is a comment on how the lives of ordinary people have progressed but changed little, on how slowly the trickle-down effect takes place when it comes to good governance and wealth management. But it is told by an insider who has an eye for detail and a twist of phrase that frees the characters, and their environment, from being cast in a mould of indifference
Gazemba succeeds in creating a great book because he does not attempt to abuse this dichotomy of un/familiarity to appeal to a particular type of reader. He has written an epic tragedy of Kenya that illustrates how far modernity has yet to go. And how easy it is to commit an injustice with a world of good intentions.
The Stone Hills of Maragoli was awarded the Jomo Kenyatta prize for Kenyan literature in 2003.
Richard Bartlett is the co-editor of the African Review of Books
This review posted 20 April 2004
