In My Dreams I Dance. Anne Wafula-Strike

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       Chapter Four A Terrible Loss

      It was Saturday 30th June 1979, right in the middle of the rainy season. I was nine years old and had been at Joyland for four years. Saturday was the day we sat outside and styled each other’s hair after we had completed our chores. We wore our own clothes at weekends and were all in a happy mood.

      The day started like any other. The more able girls weeded the flowerbeds, while the rest of us cleaned our dormitories. Then one of the teachers came in and said abruptly, ‘Oh, Anne Olympia, you need to go home.’

      I started laughing and said. ‘I’m not a fool. It’s not closing day yet. I can’t go home until the end of term.’

      ‘Yes, you can. Get your things together. You have to go home because your mum wants you. Come with me to the office.’

      I had no idea what the teacher was talking about, but we had been taught to obey our teachers, so I did as I was told.

      When I got to the office I saw my big sister Alice there.

      ‘Hi, Alice,’ I said breezily. I wondered why she had come to my school. It was usually my mum who picked me up at the end of term and brought me back afterwards.

      ‘Where’s Mum?’ I asked. ‘The teacher says she wants me at home.’

      I was beginning to feel uneasy. Something wasn’t right.

      ‘Oh, she asked me to collect you,’ said Alice, trying to sound casual but not quite managing it.

      ‘But where is Mum? And aren’t you supposed to be at school?’

      ‘Come, Anne, we need to return home,’ she said, without offering any further explanation. ‘There’s a taxi outside waiting to take us to the bus station.’

      She had got a bus from Webuye to Kisumu town and from there had got a taxi to Joyland.

      I hurriedly packed some things and anxiously followed Alice into the waiting taxi and then got the bus to my mum’s village. My cousins and uncles were gathered at the bus stop with a bicycle to transport me to the centre of the village. I couldn’t understand why we were there rather than in Nairobi and why there was such a large group of family members waiting for me.

      As I was wheeled along the dusty track local women kept running up to me, wailing and crying, ‘Oh, Ruth, you have died and left this flower. Who is going to look after it now?’

      What on earth were they talking about? Surely my lovely mum couldn’t be dead. The village women must have made a mistake.

      I started screaming. ‘Where’s Mum? Where’s Mum?’ I cried.

      Nobody answered. We arrived at the main part of the village and the terrible truth was confirmed: I could see that my mum was laid out on a bed outside her family’s home.

      Nothing felt real. My mum had been a strong and healthy woman and she wasn’t old. Was I stuck in a horrible dream? I couldn’t take in what was going on.

      One of my relatives carefully placed me next to my mum. I flung myself on top of her, willing her to start breathing again.

      ‘Mum, Mum, wake up! You promised to make me a jumper, where is it?’ I sobbed. I hoped that she would hear me and remember her promise and that would be enough to coax her back to life.

      The shock was too much. I told myself that it was all a terrible mistake and that she’d wake up and give me a cuddle very soon. How could she leave me when I needed her so much?

      ‘I’m sorry, Anne,’ Alice said, with tears in her eyes. ‘We don’t know what happened to her, but she really has gone.’

      At that time nobody had mobile phones and few Kenyans had landlines, so circulating good or bad tidings always took a long time. It had taken five days for the news of my mum’s death to reach my dad, who was working in Nairobi. One of his friends had travelled from the village to the district commissioner and asked him if he could get a message to my dad. The district commissioner had sent a telegram to the Department of Defence in Nairobi and only after that had my dad been informed of his wife’s death.

      He couldn’t believe it. ‘She only left Nairobi a few days ago and there was nothing wrong with her then,’ he said over and over again.

      My mum had been in her village attending a memorial service for her brother, who had recently died, and had collapsed at his graveside and died herself. In those days people were rarely rushed to hospital, nor did they have post-mortems, so the exact cause remained a mystery. As usual when people didn’t have a rational explanation they attributed it to witchcraft and said it was the result of a curse, although why my mum had been cursed nobody knew.

      People said that her last words as she set off to pay her respects to her brother were that she hoped my youngest brother Geoffrey would be weaned by the time she returned. He was two and a half and she was struggling to get him off the breast. She hadn’t expected to be gone for long and hadn’t envisaged just how absolute the weaning process would be.

      I couldn’t think straight. I had never thought that my mum might die. She had always been there for me and I had assumed that she always would be. I felt very lost and empty at the thought of continuing life without her and sobbed uncontrollably.

      Alice tried her best to comfort me. ‘I promise I will look after you, Anne,’ she said, ‘just like our mum did.’

      I was amazed at how strong she sounded.

      A carpenter was enlisted to make a coffin to carry the body from my mum’s village to my dad’s village, half a day’s walk away. It was traditional for a wife to be buried in her husband’s village.

      I was taken on a bicycle and spent the whole of the bumpy journey crying.

      Finally we arrived in my dad’s village. I looked around at the place I had been born in but barely remembered. It was the first time I’d been back since we’d been forced out. I remembered the wild roses growing outside our front door. They were still there.

      The village was full of people sitting and weeping. My mum had been a very popular figure and everybody was sharing their memories of her. There’s much to recommend the African system of mourning. People let their grief spill out freely and don’t hold back their emotions. This helps them to heal more quickly.

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