I came to Kenya for love of Africa and a handsome man

SUNDAY NATION FEBRUARY 19 2017

By ELVIS ONDIEKI and TOM ODHIAMBO

Susan Wamucii holds her first-ever published book. PHOTO | NATION 

In Summary

• Susan Wamucii had dreamed of travelling to Africa since she was a teenager and her dream turned into love for Kenya, especially after she met a Kenyan student on a train in London. She came back with him here in 1975 and was charmed by the local culture. 
• Susan Wamucii has been living in the country since 1975 and has written about the love that led her to Africa, the romance that made her stay and the passion that has kept her going. Susan tells her remarkable story in a new book.
• Titled Life is a Gift, the book is poised to place Susan in the league of the late Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, a Southampton-born woman who travelled to Kenya as a missionary in 1954, became a Kenyan citizen in 1960, then later married a Luo man, learnt Dholuo and penned a number of literary works.

When Susan Wamucii Kungu’s book is launched in Nairobi on Thursday, the world will finally get to understand why she quit her job and a bright future that lay ahead of her in northern England in 1975, then aged 26, to come and settle in Kenya.

With the book out, residents of Uthiru in Kiambu County will have a chance to know what motivates this woman from faraway, who married a man from Ndeiya and had three children with him, who speaks fluent Kikuyu and who lived among them in a wooden house for 18 years.

If you are among the residents who bought sukuma wiki (kales) from a white woman in that area in the 1980s – may be out of curiosity, may be out of necessity – you probably don’t know that you helped Susan make ends meet when her family’s fortunes had hit rock-bottom, as she explains in the 248-page autobiography.

Kenyans who saw advertisements for the 2009 government census might have been curious about a white woman who would declare “nipo, natambulika” in a television announcement that featured people from various backgrounds. The autobiography explains how Susan got to be part of the campaign.

Somewhere in the autobiography, a group that was stoning cars during the Saba Saba riots of July 7, 1997 will get to understand why one shaken “foreigner” was forced to drive on the wrong side of the road in southern Nairobi. In the book, Susan explains how she accelerated frenetically while carrying her daughter from school as a mob rained stones on motorists.

Also, a conductor of a Nairobi matatu that ferried passengers from Adams Arcade to Karen one day in 2001 will get to understand why Susan alighted from his van without paying fare after he said unsavoury things about her in Kikuyu.

Titled Life is a Gift, the book is poised to place Susan in the league of the late Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, a Southampton-born woman who travelled to Kenya as a missionary in 1954, became a Kenyan citizen in 1960, then later married a Luo man, learnt Dholuo and penned a number of literary works.

Susan came to Kenya in 1975, obtained citizenship in 1984 then got to integrate so well into the culture of her husband that in early 2000s, while living in Karen, an elderly woman in the neighbourhood called her Wamucii (the one who belongs to the home). She has been using the nickname since.

Susan Wamucii with her father (centre) and brothers after the burial of her mother in 1998. 

DREAM DESTINATION

“I felt that when an old lady gives you a name, then it means something,” she told Lifestyle on Friday. “I find it to be a very complimentary name because it is saying, ‘We accept you’. That’s why I like it.”

Even in the book’s blurb, she makes a bold statement about her Kikuyuness.

“Ndi mugikuyu, no rangi tu (I’m Kikuyu. ignore the colour),” she writes.

Susan’s autobiography, to be launched at the Goethe Institut, will be her first book. But this will not be the last as the performing artiste plans to release a collection of stories to further her narration skills.

“Writing a book is part of storytelling really. I actually started writing my stories, the ones that I perform, and then I got side-tracked and decided to write my story. I’ve been concentrating on that but eventually, I’ll put my stories into a book as well,” she told Lifestyle.

In her autobiography, she portrays herself as a woman who was passionate about visiting Africa from as early as the age of 14. The urge was ignited when she heard a talk by Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican bishop.

“It was from this day that I knew I wanted to go to that continent. I believed at the time that I was going to become a missionary. It was my calling!” she writes.

Africa in general captured her imagination then, making her enrol for German courses in her quest to become a missionary.

Later, Kenya in particular would become her dream destination. This happened when she spoke with a classmate when she was in her Sixth Form in England in 1965. The girl had been born in Kenya.

“She was full of tales of her childhood in Maseno (where her father had taught agriculture) and her family’s travels around the region. She it was who zoned my longing for Africa to a longing for Kenya,” Susan writes.

Out of her desire to explore Africa, Susan chose to pursue anthropology in university. Her dissertation was titled African Ways of Thinking. “I got quite a good grade for it,” she writes.

In her obsession with Kenya, at one time she contemplated travelling through France in 1974 via Greece, across the Mediterranean to Egypt then through River Nile to Kenya. But she did not take that long, arduous route.

She met a Kenyan man right at the heart of London and this would later see her travel to Kenya by air, carrying his child.

The meeting happened as she was planning her trip to Africa with a friend. That day, staff at British Rail were on a go-slow. She instead decided to take the tube, which used to be very crowded then.

Her husband-to-be, a Kenyan man who was in England as a student, was also crammed in the tube.

Susan Wamucii holds her first-ever published book. PHOTO | NATION

BED OF THORNS

“So, there I was, a young, unattached girl, planning a trip to Kenya, and besotted with ‘Africa’! Suddenly I find myself squeezed up next to a handsome, if rather serious and soberly dressed, young African on the train. Am I going to turn away? No, of course not! Rather, make myself more comfortable!” she cheekily writes about their first meeting.

The “squeeze-up” in the train saw them later exchange contacts and that started a relationship.

Susan told Lifestyle that they met in late 1973 and interacted a lot “until the time he had to return to Kenya when his student visa expired”.

She does not mention his name throughout the book — calling him W when it is absolutely necessary — because she said he had not seen what she had written.

By the time he left London, she was pregnant with his child and she could not travel with him.

“It was a bit late for me to travel; so I came the next year,” she said.

Susan landed in Nairobi on March 27, 1975 when the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport was called the Embakasi Airport.

“Tears came to my eyes, as the wheels of the plane I was travelling on, hit the tarmac at Nairobi’s Embakasi Airport … For that day in 1975 was a culmination of 13 years of focusing on ‘going to Africa’ – defined as going to Kenya. For half my life, in fact, I had carried a longing to come to this part of the world,” she writes.

Her husband was then working with the British American Tobacco (BAT).

“I lived with him in Nairobi West. We lived for quite a few years, up to 1981 when he left BAT. That’s when he built us a wooden house in Uthiru where we stayed for 18 years,” she told Lifestyle.

This union was not to be a bed of roses and, to make matters worse, she had come to Kenya on a visitor’s pass which she had to renew every three months.

After the third and final renewal, she decided to quit the marriage.

“I wasn’t prepared to marry this man, whom I had by now decided was too domineering,” she writes.

She went back to her motherland in 1976, leaving their firstborn daughter, Mwara, with her father. This would later see her return in July 1977.

While she was still in Britain, her husband travelled there after being sent by his employer. They got a chance to formalise their marriage.

“I returned to continue what I had begun in Kenya,” she writes. “I knew I had started something which could not be abandoned halfway. I wanted more children, I wanted to live in Kenya.”

On their reunion, two more children were born: Nyakio, the second-born daughter, then Ng’ung’ui, a boy.

But the friction in the family did not end until they finally divorced in 2001 in messy circumstances that forced her to go to court to seek a share of matrimonial property. The marriage had broken down by 1999.

“So the W … refers to my husband, hoping he will forgive me for my honesty about our failure to find the appropriate rhyme,” she writes in the preface of the book.

Between her return to Kenya and the divorce, Susan endured various difficult conditions especially after her husband lost his job.

She depicts her husband as a person who made poor investment decisions using borrowed money.

This saw lenders come for the family car and put up the house for auction but, luckily, they did not lose property. At times, Susan’s relatives chipped in with money for school fees for the children.

HARD TIMES

In the 1980s, Susan had to cultivate maize, beans, potatoes and sukumawiki which she would sell to earn some money.

“One day, in the eighties, I sold sukuma worth Sh15. I remember I had one shilling in the house and so, with that grand total of Sh16, I was able to buy two kilogrammes of sugar. Well, eventually he [the husband] did get a well-paying job, but there were still the loans to be paid off,” she writes.

Some of the activities she has engaged in include teaching at various schools, singing, playing the piano in church, being a member of performance groups in the city among others.

Susan Wamucii is also the founder of Kikwata Storytellers, a firm whose headquarters is at her residence at Ngong Hills that has been her home since 2013. The residence is also home to the Kikwata Picnic Site. PHOTO | COURTESY

In her book, she weaves her story around events that have defined Kenya’s history, like noting that the top news item when she arrived was the assassination of JM Kariuki. She also brings to the fore the tensions between Kenya and Uganda that saw the closing of the border, paints a picture of the ugly side of the Saba Saba protests during the reign of President Daniel arap Moi, and even attempts to show how prices of goods have risen over the years.

In the end, she shows that she actually fulfilled her anthropology dream of living with people in a foreign land and understanding their language and culture.

To learn Kikuyu, she writes, she had to use many tricks but eventually she knew the language, and her fluency could shock some people.

“When I’d lived in Uthiru for a few years, people didn’t express any surprise at my knowledge of the language any more, and it has been the same wherever I’ve lived ever since then: people discover very quickly that I speak their language, and readily address me in Kikuyu,” she writes.

The transition from the English countryside to the harsh conditions in Uthiru is a daring act. But she explains that there is no much difference.

“I don’t think the living conditions cause me suffering. I think I enjoyed the challenge. In fact, it was far from impossible to cope with, once you got down to, and no different, after all, from the way the vast majority of people in the developing countries still live,” she writes.

She has also faced the question of risky conditions in Kenya, which she addresses in her book.

“Visitors to Kenya often ask me if I feel safe in this country. It’s true that I have experienced a few incidents: bag snatching, losing mobile phones, house workers stealing money and other things … but I have a tendency to forget about them as soon as they are over. I certainly don’t take pleasure in relating them to other people,” she writes.

Coming up with the book, which will sell at Sh1,500 during the launch, was out of pleadings from her friends who found her story worth sharing.

“People have always seemed to have found my life interesting. When I tell them about my childhood or when I came to Kenya, they seem to find it interesting. So, that’s what made me think of writing it,” she said when asked what made her write the book.

She added: “Since I’ve written it and people have started reading it, some people have told me it’s also inspirational to hear about the different things I’ve done; that I’ve attempted things which might be difficult.”

Marketing the book will now be an added responsibility to her role as the founder of Kikwata Storytellers, a firm whose headquarters is at her residence at Ngong Hills that has been her home since 2013. The residence is also home to the Kikwata Picnic Site, a commercial recreation spot for those seeking relaxation at a tranquil place.

“For the time being, I like performing. I stopped full-time teaching now, and I run the picnic site, the campsite, I do storytelling or things like that,” she told Lifestyle.

Susan is a sigana (story) mistress, thrilling children and adults with tales. These stories also create a community of friends, listeners, and fellow storytellers, a community she feels is very important in the growth of the young into stable adults. Life, she believes, is a gift.