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Chronicles 6: Reflections on the Transition of a Storyteller’s Matriarch

by

Prof. Egara Kabaji

Our relationship began some forty years ago when I finally plucked up the courage to visit her at her residence in Dagoretti Corner City Council Estate in Nairobi. I was not brave enough to visit alone. I enlisted my friend, the late Dean Nyanza, to escort me. One never knows what reception awaits a young man visiting his prospective mother-in-law!

She welcomed us warmly and served us ugali and chicken. But there was something special about my plate. She added Emondo, the chicken gizzard, to my serving. I did not need anyone to interpret that gesture for me. I knew I had been accepted! In our culture, the gizzard is no ordinary serving. From that day, we became very good friends. We spent countless hours talking about everything and nothing. I remember the many memorable drives between Nairobi and Kakamega, which gave us even more opportunities to share stories and reflections about life.

As I reflect on her life from Bayreuth, I can see that welcoming me into her home opened the door to an extraordinary creative friendship. Without declaring herself an artist or an academic, she was a master storyteller. There was something else about her. She possessed an intuition for speech. And yes, she possessed a sharp eye for human character. Jane Kisia Osore (Tabita), for that was her name, had this uncanny ability to extract deep meaning from ordinary events. Over the four decades of our friendship, she became the foundational spring from which so much of my writing drew its life. There was something else. She was a good example of resilience. She understood that life does not always serve us what we desire. When life handed her lemons, she made the best lemonade. She faced life's challenges with courage and accepted what she could not change. That was one of her greatest lessons to me.

The news of her passing was broken to me through a phone call on Saturday last week. I remember it was at 4:00 AM Germany time, but it was 6:00 AM in Kenya. In Bayreuth, the German night was utterly silent. I was in bed when the sudden, sharp vibration of my phone shattered the room's solitude. Glowing in the dark, the screen displayed a familiar name, MK, that of my wife. She was calling from Kenya at an odd hour, thousands of miles away.

I picked up the call, and before a word could be spoken, the darkness was filled with the sound of weeping. On the other side of the world, in Africa, my wife was crying. It was an agonising, instinctual grief that needed no translation. In that singular, suspended moment, the physical miles between Germany and Kenya dissolved, leaving only the devastating announcement: Mum is dead.

I felt helpless. I couldn’t reach across the globe to hold my weeping wife. It was a painful reality. One world was motionless, cold and orderly; the other was shattered in mourning. Spatial distance in that hour became an unbearable weight. I was forced to process an overwhelming loss in the quiet isolation of a foreign city.

I have come to realise that to experience the loss of a loved one while abroad is to endure acute spatial and emotional displacement. I could not immediately gather with the family. I couldn’t sit among the mourners at the homestead and could not participate in the immediate physical rituals of grief. I was left alone with memory in a foreign city. So, what have I done? I have been forced to process profound personal bereavement through the reflective discipline of the chronicler's craft.

That is why I am starting to think about the conventional paradigms that hold that traditional women in rural or domestic spaces are passive informants. They are assumed to be suppliers of raw cultural data for external interpretation. But my relationship with my mother-in-law fundamentally refutes this stance. She was not a passive subject. No. She was a living epistemic archive. She was, to me, a primary custodian of moral philosophy and human psychology.

And that is why she was the motivation behind my proposition of what I have come to call the Narrative Transformation Model (NTM). Why? I would take the stories and social observations she shared with me, subject them to imaginative transformation and sculpt them into literature.

Her spirit was explicitly immortalised in my novel, A Journey to Becoming, which was honoured as second runner-up for the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature. The central character of Deresi was directly inspired by her resilience and her sharp social insights.

Since her death, I have been revisiting the closing scenes of that novel. This has filled me with a quiet, lingering awe. In the closing scenes of the novel, I wrote that Deresi breathed her last while cradled in the hands of her beloved daughter. What a coincidence! As her cortege prepares to move from Kenyatta University Mortuary in Nairobi to Musingu Village in Kakamega County, where she will be laid to rest beside her husband, that fictional scene has transcended the printed page to become living reality. I think life and fiction have intersected in a way I could never have anticipated. This confirms that through literature, I had already granted her a permanent place of honour.

This takes me back to Remembering, the core research section of the Africa Multiple Cluster, which operationalises memory as an active, generative site for African theory-making. For me, remembering means that African memory is not lost to the grave. It is reconstructed into enduring philosophical and aesthetic knowledge that continues to speak to the world. My collaboration with Jane confirms to me that storytelling is never a solitary enterprise. In fact, it is fundamentally relational. It exists in the space between the custodian of memory and the scribe who commits it to paper. For forty years, she provided the lived texture and the cultural context, while I provided the parchment.

As her cortege leaves Nairobi for Musingu Village to lay her to rest, I am here in Bayreuth, fulfilling my duty as a chronicler. But I also recognise that this chronicle is itself an act of narrative validation. It confirms that her legacy is not confined to mourning. It lives on through the stories she inspired and the literature she helped shape. Through narrative transformation, the storyteller’s matriarch lives on. Her voice echoes across oceans, and her soul will be remembered eternally.

END