Day Nine in Bayreuth: Rethinking the Worlds We Inhabit

My ninth day as a Chronicler at the University of Bayreuth began with an emotional message from a Kenyan colleague reflecting on motherhood and the exhaustion that sometimes accompanies raising children. Her reflections took me back to an encounter at Lurambi market, near Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology, about twenty years ago. I had stopped to buy vegetables from a woman vendor and jokingly complained about the cost of raising my many children. Her response has never left me: “Young man, every child who comes to this world comes with her or his plate and luck. Here, I added you three bunches. Never regret.”

Her words inspired the idea of a play I imagined calling The Good Woman of Lurambi, in conversation with Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan. I have never forgotten that encounter as a reflection on generosity, survival and the burdens carried by people expected to keep giving. My thoughts also turned to Franz Kafka and the silence that followed the end of my tenure as a chief executive. The experience made me reflect on how quickly attention can disappear when one’s position changes.

These experiences brought me back to the Africa Multiple Cluster’s guiding idea of worldmaking from the vantage point of Africa. How do our worlds value people, and how might we create worlds that care for those who serve and sacrifice?

Egara Kabaji