Impact Masters: the long version

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Michael Kimathi hosting, recorded in Kakamega in western Kenya at the end of a long day of workshops. This is the only conversation on this page where nobody asks me about Elixir. It runs from the early 1990s up to the first computer I ever saw and it stops mid-thought, because we ran out of evening rather than material.

Growing up in a school

I was born and raised in Kisumu, beside Lake Victoria. My earliest memories, from the early 90s, are of teachers' quarters. My mother taught in the primary school, my father in the high school and every neighbour was a teacher or a teacher's child. I would watch the secondary students at their evening preps and want to be one of them.

My father became a school principal in his thirties, as did most of his friends, which was normal then. You finished form five and six, went to university and the government placed you somewhere. It was a set path. It is not that any more, which is freeing if you want to be an entrepreneur and hard if you want a guarantee. You can hold a PhD and be jobless. A friend of mine left a bank job to do a master's in South Africa and came back overqualified for everything he tried.

The primary school was Chanda, in Uyoma, Siaya County. I was lucky, a few metres away across the fence. Others walked kilometres home to prepare lunch and back before the bell. I had shoes.

Being a teacher's child is not the advantage it sounds. My mother would leave me with hot tea and get to school before me and she would be on duty. She would make certain I was on the latecomers' list, because she knew.

The fence and the gate

There was no fence you could buy, so we grew one. Every pupil brought a stick from home. Some grew, some did not, so you came back with more. There were three kinds: the ones that grow, the thorny ones and the ones for tying. Cows got through and the upper classes were responsible for rebuilding it, which happened often, especially if a teacher caught you crossing it.

There was no gate either. At the end of term we would cut thorn branches and lay them across the entrance and that was the school closed.

The lower classrooms had spaces where windows were meant to go and no windows in them. Nothing to open or close, just the gap, waiting. Only classes seven and eight had real windows, which is one reason everybody wanted to get there. I took my daughter back to that school recently. It has a real gate now.

Boarding school and losing the language

In class five I was sent to a boys' boarding school and everything changed at once. No more Dholuo and Swahili all the time, which was hard because I was still thinking in Dholuo and translating.

I met people from towns for the first time. I could not understand why anyone would take a bus home if it was not a funeral or a hospital. Everything to me was walking distance, however far. We walked to sports days at the next school, about eight kilometres each way, singing all the way there and all the way back. If we lost we sang victory songs anyway, so the villages would not know.

The teacher had worked out I could not speak Swahili well, although I could write it and would not fail an exam. Reading a paragraph aloud to the class, I hit the letters m-b-u and read them the way I had been taught. The class laughed. The teacher wrote m-b-w-a on the board and asked me to read that too and I read it the same way. I still could not see the problem. They are the only two words in Swahili where you hold the b and somebody expected me to know that.

I stopped associating with the people I was trying to catch up with, because they knew I was behind. I found the ones who seemed to feel the way I did. My marks went with it. Bottom four one term, bottom ten the next.

Music was its own version of this. If you did not know the latest Lingala you were backward. I would go home for the holidays and cram the songs and by the following term there was a new one and everything I had learned was useless.

Electricity that stayed on

At home, electricity came from a generator. It went on at half past six in the evening and ran until about half past ten, when whoever controlled it dimmed the lights once as a warning, then twice, then it was gone. So I knew what electricity was: a thing that exists at night, made by a machine I could point at, whose sound I could hear.

Then I arrived at a school where the power was simply on. All day. I could not find a generator and there was no blinking at night. I remember thinking these people were using magic. You mean I can iron my clothes during the day? That was 1998, when electricity and a tarmac road were both luxuries. The murram road home washed out badly enough in the rains that the buses could not get across and you had to find your own way over and pick up another vehicle on the far side.

Everything else was predictable in the way things are when there is not much of it. The Kamolo buses ran at eight, eleven, two, five and seven and we knew which was which. There were no mobiles and no landlines at home, so adults booked calls at a booth and agreed a date to speak again. Miss the slot and it might be a while. Reverse calls, which people treat as a modern feature, went through the switchboard operator: you dialled them, told them who to call and asked for the charge to go to the other end.

The typewriter and not watching films

A family friend was a secretary at the school where my father taught and she taught me to type. So I could type on a typewriter in the 90s and I would sit doing compositions on it whenever she was free. I learned about correction fluid the hard way, because fixing a mistake meant striking the exact same point again.

Everything on a modern keyboard that seems arbitrary made sense afterwards. Typing fast is worth more to a programmer than people admit, since you can write it, then find the errors later.

On films: I do not really watch them and I never grew up with them. In primary school I decided watching films was an act of fitting in and I did not want to fit in at everything. The films we could actually reach were the ones we watched at a neighbour's house on a generator, part one, part two, part three from Nigeria, where somebody gets turned into a chicken. Fascinating, then and now. But you could not say you liked them, because those were considered the films for people who do not know what to watch. So I decided that if you did not like what I liked, fine. I would not fit in.

Fish and the cooperative

The conversation ends where it started, on the lake. In the early 90s there was a fishermen's cooperative near home. The roads were bad and the lorries still came and they went to Kisumu full. Full lorries meant there were plenty of fish and a cooperative meant people could pool what they had, so fishing made money. You could become a fish millionaire on ordinary fishing.

The government controlled the breeding. There were closed seasons and there are still rules about net size, because too small a net takes the fish that have not finished growing and that damages the whole system.

Not any more, or not in the same way. I wish I knew more about how it is managed now. We ran out of evening before we got to the rest of it.