A Dreamer’s Paradise

David Karanja

David Karanja’s second novel, A Dreamer’s Paradise (2001), was published locally by Kwela. Quite a slow-moving narrative in its first half, it could be described as a sort of Bildungsroman of a particularly wry kind. The narrative arc that it traces is very wide — it begins in ordinary (even innocuously) realistic style, in a rural family setting, with the sentence “Mathina was the fourth child to be born to his parents”, and it concentrates throughout on the family setting and its joys and sorrows. From very early on, Mathina is made conscious of the tug of war between his parents — his mother being an intensely committed and increasingly zealous Christian, and his father a fierce traditionalist. Since the siblings who preceded him all died young, both parents focus their hopes — and their ideological commitments — on Mathina, who does his best to appease both his parents. The best way to do this, he discovers, is to excel at school — which he does, with an unbroken record of brilliant performances, always as the top achiever in his class.

Mathina’s mother matters immensely to him and he detests the beatings to which, with increasing frequency, his father subjects her; nevertheless, the moments that stand out in his early childhood are associated with his father. The first of these is the visit (despite his mother’s disapproval) to a traditional seer; a strange yet impressive man to whom his father takes him in order to be given the reassurance that this child will survive into adulthood. On the second of these memorable occasions, Mathina’s father takes him into the pub. He is immensely proud of his son’s impressive study record. Heartily received by his father’s friends, Mathina is questioned about the book prizes he has been given over the years — texts by Shakespeare, Dickens and so on — and then is asked: “Have they ever given you a book written in Africa?” He had not, until that moment, known “that Africans also wrote novels” (31). This point is not merely a coy piece of metatextual byplay, as the explanation involves (as does this entire text) far more than the “traditional” indictment of colonialism, and includes factors uncomfortably central to the post-colonial tyranny that the novel gradually reveals.

This slowly-growing recognition of the real state of affairs in his country (the “republic of Bururi”) is strongly associated, for Mathina, with what his favourite teacher, Mr Muhindi, teaches him outside of school — for instance, that most of his compatriots “are still slaves of the mind” (27). Mr Muhindi seeks to enlighten the mind of the boy, too young as yet to take in his meaning, with comments such as his point that the speeches of African politicians “always seek to canonize the liberation struggle”, but that only when Africans’ intellectual assessments and political criticisms of their own societies are allowed to be heard and given recognition will it have been understood that “the real liberation is that of the mind” (32). Mr Muhindi, we learn later, has a doctorate in history, but was forced to work almost incognito as a low-paid intermediary school teacher because he was considered a dangerous dissident.

Intertwined with this process of learning is Mathina’s sense of his father’s deterioration, even disintegration. (There are now two younger children in the family.) The father’s drinking bouts worsen, as does his conduct within the family, so that the marital bitterness between Mathina’s parents intensifies, for his mother refuses to feed a husband who provides nothing while she has to slave to get food on the table. Not long after Mathina’s father (predictably) loses his job, he responds to his ostracism by his family members by leaving their home — “he opened the door and staggered out into the night”, leaving behind a “silence, so stony and so soiled you could hold it in the air” (95).

One of the other important narrative strands in this novel is the arrival, in the village, of a new family headed by a brutal, wealthy snob who seems to have come to the village only to display his disdain towards the generally poor families who live there. The wall this man erects around his home represents his assumption that all the villagers are potential thieves lusting after his shiny possessions. Gitonga (as the rich man is called) has a son, his only child, who (despite Gitonga’s determination to thwart such an association) becomes Mathina’s best friend. Gitonga’s hatred and persecution of Mathina represents, one assumes, the nouveaux riches who show no trace of social solidarity or responsibility — yet Gitonga continues to gain wealth and power, whilst he was the person responsible for Mathina’s father’s loss of his steady employment. Gitonga also cruelly (and falsely) accuse Mathina of having stolen his son’s bicycle, which costs the boy a beating-up by the police.

Mathina’s next terrifying brush with the police service of his country occurs in the wake of a wave of political persecution of the main (clandestine) opposition movement in the country — a time when his favourite teacher, Mr Muhindi, is also arrested. Mathina, too, is terrorised, but released — plagued ever afterwards by terrifying nightmares. By now, the initially sunny tone of the text has of course become increasingly bitter and dark, and the reader is conscious of a growing unease in this society.

And yet, despite these various forms of persecution, Mathina persists in his studies, achieving the highest percentage among all the final-year pupils in the country. As the news of this triumph comes to the by now fatherless family (Mathina’s father having died in the meantime), he “found himself in a circle with everyone embracing him”, and he experiences “the liquid warmth of family unity” (149). This moment of sweetness, love and triumph is soon shattered, though.

After a blatantly rigged election that unfairly makes the corrupt and unpopular Gitonga the MP for their region, the villagers riot. Mathina’s mother is grievously injured and dies after horrible suffering, since ineptitude has replaced medical skill and medical supplies are unavailable to a country whose leadership has needlessly defied and foolishly insulted the Western countries who formerly aided them. Following this catastrophe, the novel moves swiftly to its final disaster. Unable, now that his mother has died, to take up the scholarship that would have supported him at university, Mathina moves to the city to try and find a job to support his orphaned siblings. There he is arrested on charges of sedition because he had, by accident, found and read some pamphlets denouncing the government. Tricked into pleading guilty, Mathina is jailed for twenty-five years. At last the novel returns us to what the Prologue tells the reader: that the middle-aged Mathina, released at last, is a broken man unable to resume normal life. He sits all day in a tree and repeats, over and over, only two sentences: “My name is Mathina. I cannot understand.” He is killed when lightning strikes the tree under which he slept.

The convincing, parable-like simplicity of this narrative is (one gradually discovers) its great strength; Karanja has provided us with a political fable as fiercely denunciatory of post-colonial betrayal as it is a poignant lamentation decrying the waste of African talent by corrupt, tyrannical leadership. One recognises in many details allusions to conditions and events in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Burundi, and so on — but this powerful, ironic text hits harder than many newspaper reports. The weary, suffering, sad face on the back cover of the text (perhaps the author’s portrait) is an icon utterly appropriate to the moving tale that this novel tells.

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