It is hard to explain why people write.

I recall the wisdom of the late Prof Chinua Achebe when he gave a keynote speech during Black History Month at the University of Minnesota, where I undertook my undergraduate studies. 

After his speech, a student asked him why he kept on writing.  Initially I thought the question to be rather awkward. For me, it was a no-brainer; a writer, like Achebe, had to write, I thought.

Achebe took a deep breath and responded. He said that there once lived a man in Nigeria, who woke up every morning and pounded his head on a huge stone.  Every time he did that, villagers came and asked him “Why do you do this?” and he always replied to them, “I feel good when I stop.”

Well, Achebe concluded, writing is analogous to pounding your head on a stone because it feels good when you are done.

REALITY IS SUBJECTIVE

Only after writing for various Minneapolis and St Paul publications did I realise the truth of what Achebe had told us.  There is a beautiful madness involved in putting letters into a word, words into a sentence, sentences into a paragraph, and watching as the paragraphs pile up into an article. 

It is like designing and building a house. People will admire it but they will never understand the pain you went through to put it up.

The biggest challenge in writing is how you remain your own self without being influenced by society.  How do you remain objective without offending your friends? 

In Calm Down Mind, Sen defines “being objective” as simply the:

 conscious state of seeing reality as it is, in its light and dark aspects, and making deliberate choices, towards expressions and experiences, from this place of reality-based outlook.

The reality of life is that it’s a mix of light and dark (yin/yang), you can’t escape this truth because it’s the very nature of life-energy, yet, a lot of people seem to have a hard time being objective about this truth and hence they constantly keep trying to hold on to delusions (hoping for some purely light-natured experience of life).

The phase of letting-go is about releasing the momentum created by past unconsciousness and it prepares the ground to start living “objectively”, which involves making choices deliberately while being fully aware of the light and dark nature aspects of your choice.

I learnt early that reality too is subjective.  When I was in Class Six, we received a new teacher.  He came from Central Province which to me, then a 12-year-old, seemed like a foreign country.

He taught us English. One day he asked us to write about our weekend experience as our homework. To me this was a puzzling question. I didn’t do anything interesting, or so I thought, because I looked after cows during the weekend. 

OMAR KHAYYAM

After a long, agonising search, all the time feeling embarrassed about writing about herding cattle, I decided to write about my curiosity towards a beetle that rolled cow dung into a beautiful well-shaped ball.

In my best English, I wrote, not in the following words but similar:

As I looked after the cows, a small beetle spoiled my attention. The beetle rolled cow dung into a ball.  It was working hard to take the ball away. It was going away from its home in the dung.  But it was confused because it was rolling all over.  The cow walked and stepped on the beetle.  It died working hard. 

End of my story. 

The teacher made us read our stories in turn and when I finished reading mine, he asked me to hand over my exercise book.  After class, he asked me to remain behind.

“What is this story about?” he asked me.  “About the beetle that I saw while taking care of the cows,” I responded.  Suddenly he slapped me.  “What is this all about?  Lie down there,” he ordered. 

I lay on the dusty clay floor as my teacher rained canes on me. “I will beat you until you tell me the truth,” he said. I had no other truth. His cane had broken, and as he went for another one, I took off. 

The following day, I was suspended from school by the headmaster for rudeness and for walking away from punishment. Later, after the intervention of relatives, I was allowed back to school but the teacher had already killed my confidence.

Several years later, in college, I took a keen interest in Persian literature.  It is here that I came to learn the life and tribulations of Omar Khayyam.

Although he wrote what he saw, his kinsmen saw him as a ribald poet who wrote about wine and women and whose philosophy mocked Islam.

UNPRECEDENTED BASHING

In one of Khayyam’s exposés, he describes a scene where a man who always suspected his wife to be adulterous walks on the street and meets a veiled woman. 

He suspects her to be his wife and starts to beat her. It turned out it wasn’t his wife after all, but society condemns the woman anyway.

Street toughs declared Khayyam an infidel and he was carted off to the judge to be given an appropriate Islamic punishment. It is after this encounter with Persian literature that I came to know that reality is in the perception of the reader.

Perhaps my teacher thought I was writing about him moving from his Central Kenya home to Kisii only to be crushed by some other mystic power. Or perhaps he thought the story of a hardworking beetle was too trivial. I will never know what he thought.

Social media has made it possible for us to see reality and perception at the same time. I see this every week when I write a column. Social media allows readers to comment, rate, vote, critique and otherwise assess an article.

What I have noted is that some people get the true meaning of an article while others miss the point completely.

When I narrated how investors are moving to Ethiopia last week, I thought readers would reflect on our declining moral standards, our seeming inability to elevate the national interest above personal interest, and on the professionalism of our people, since ministers are supposed to conduct themselves professionally.

The argument in the article was quickly hijacked and deflected from corruption to opposition politics. The article was used to anchor an unprecedented bashing of the Jubilee government. 

Although the governor I had referred to was not even a member of the Jubilee coalition, readers assumed he had to be from the Jubilee side.

GOVERNMENT APOLOGIST

Too many Kenyans online appear convinced that only those in government can sabotage the national interest. Actually, the opposition can drive foreign investors away too, by portraying the country as riven with chaos and disorder.

And here too, I may be driving myself deeper into perceptual problems. I have therefore persuaded myself to avoid writing about politics.

Politics has a way of distorting facts. It is a monster that will eat anything, including its own young.    

I am quite sure that if we got a call from God and He said He would be sending an angel to save Kenya, we would ask which tribe, gender, colour or party the angel belongs to. These are the prisms through which we see life in Kenya. 

While Achebe felt good when he was done with writing, I am finding that happiness in writing comes from the intrigue that arises from the articles. 

Whenever I offend the government, the opposition cheers with relish. And whenever, I offend the opposition, I am branded a government apologist.

When I meet people and they say 'I read your piece', they leave me more encouraged and give me the motivation to write another piece. 

This good feeling lasts until the insults starts to flow on social media. Then I remember the yin and the yang, life in its light and dark.

Merry Christmas!

The writer is an associate professor at University of Nairobi’s Business School. Twitter: @bantigito