Mwangi Gicheru crosses the bridge to big screen

Mr Mwangi Gicheru at his home in Mtwapa, Mombasa, on Monday. He plans to turn his most popular book, Across the Bridge, into a film. 

By JULIUS SIGEI jsigei@ke.nationmedia.com,May 10  2013  

 

  

In Summary

• When he puts pen to paper, his knives and forks take a back seat, giving room for his literary gems.

midst the whistling slender and towering coconut fronds and the sultry, salty oceanic breeze, there is a man who juggles knives and forks alongside pen and paper.

To any ordinary eye, he is just but another god-father cap-donning hotelier who worries about his clients and whether their food is peppered to the right taste.

Beneath this business of eking out a living as a hotelier in the North Coastal tourist resort township of Mtwapa, however, is one of Kenya’s literary icons.

When he puts pen to paper, his knives and forks take a back seat, giving room for his literary gems.

Meet Samuel Mwangi Gicheru, the author of Across the Bridge, that near-steamy novel that wowed young people in the 1970s, through the 1980s and 1990s. 

Alongside such writers as Charles Mangua, Meja Mwangi, David Maillu, Mwangi Ruheni and John Kiriamiti, Gicheru is credited with watering Kenya’s literary scene after Sudanese scholar Taban Lo Liyong dismissed the country as a literary desert. And while Across the Bridge was not his first published work, it thrust Mr Gicheru into national fame soon after its publication in 1976.

We tracked him down this week to Animo County Retreat, off the Mombasa-Kilifi road, and sought to know what he was doing to help whet readers’ appetites, seeing that it was quite some time since he wrote his last novel (The Mixers came out in 1990).

And as we bathed in sunshine at a tent outside his makuti-thatched house, sipping tea for him and a cold Coca-Cola for me, he revealed that he has finished writing the movie script of Across the Bridge.

“I have been avoiding the media because I had nothing new to say. Now we can talk because I have this film — it can be a soap opera,” said the tall, wiry writer.

“I hear people don’t like reading, but I have never stopped reprinting my books — five for adults and one for children. All the same, those who don’t like reading will now watch Across the Bridge on screen.”

He hinted that the film would clear the suspense at the end of the novel, plus answer such questions as what Caroline does when she is separated from Chuma after he is jailed for robbery in his attempt to “cross the bridge.”

But first things first. How did he conjure up this novel with so vivid and memorable characters?

“I was idle and broke. That is the reason I started writing. You know the mind works better when your wallet is thin. It was in 1973 and after my restless job-hopping; I left employment altogether not knowing what to do next. I came to Mombasa in 1974 with a young family having married a year earlier. At some point I was really a hustler on the streets.”

He had worked as a clerk in the ministry of Lands after leaving St Mary’s High School in Nyeri but “I left after eight months because they gave me the accounts section. Mathematics was the cause of my anguish in school, perhaps the source of my smoking, which I started in 1965 while in Form Three,” he said.

He then joined the East African Airways, then Air France and later the British Airways.

His first novel was The Ivory Merchant, which he says was accepted in the first draft. But it was really Across the Bridge which brought him fame.

Its beginning lines: “Hail jail! The house for all. The only house where a government minister and a pickpocket dine together, work together and discuss matters on equal terms,” are poignant.

“There was this girl who left her comfortable home to be with her husband. We were neighbours in Nyeri and she came from a very prominent family. She is Caroline in the story. Then there was this boy called Chuma in my school. He very much looked like the hero of Across the Bridge.”

Won’t use dirty language

He, however, regrets using some words in the novel, though he admits they were fashionable at the time.

“If you told me to write Across the Bridge now I would not. The novel has dirty language which I would be uncomfortable with now.”

This attitude contrasts with that of Charles Mangua, the irreverent economist-author of Son of Woman, whom literary connoisseurs have described as Kenya’s most emotionally honest author.
“I have not found her. Just write that… Do not let us not go back to the story,” he suddenly blurts this out, seemingly out of the blue.

With this, he turns melancholic, his sorrow screaming through the wrinkles on his 66-year-old face.

He was referring to his daughter, who went missing in 1978. She is the subject of his novel Two in One, the story of a barren woman who steals three babies.

But unlike the novel, efforts to find Gicheru’s daughter have not borne fruit. Not even with the running of Poromoko – an adaptation of Two in One in the coastal towns of Mariakani, Mombasa and Kilifi for several months.

One of his latest writing projects is Samuel Mbugua Githere: A Handful of ‘Terere’, a biography which was published in 2009.

“It is my proudest achievement. Pulling it through was the most challenging engagement in my writing career,” said the farmer, hotelier and trader. Beside his hotel business and writing, Gicheru grows potatoes and engages in agro-forestry in Nanyuki.

He credits his listless life to a disturbed early life. “I joined Kiamwangi in 1956 during the emergency, and so my formative years were very disturbed. Perhaps this is why I have always had a restless life.”

He explains that he has moved into children’s literature and that his debut, A Ring in the Bush, has been very successful.

“It now sells the most among my works. I am writing one on this tree,” he points to a fig tree known among the Giriama as Mgadi.

“Locals consider it sacred and a source of luck. The irony is that when misfortune strikes, they also blame it on the tree,” says the author who also rears rabbits in the two-and-half acres of land on which the hotel sits.

So, at Sh3,000 per rabbit, and sometimes selling as many as 500 of them, does he consider agriculture more lucrative than writing or the hotel business?

“Writing pays me the most. If I get a penny from writing, I appreciate it more than a shilling from farming,” he says, avoiding to tell how much he earns from his books.

How does he organise his writing? “I don’t plot when writing. I allow my stories to run their course. I allow the plot to tell the twists and turns.”

So, does he have any regrets? “Selling rockets and human parts are, perhaps, the only things I have not tried out, and so I am contented. But on a more serious note, I would have loved to write 50 books,” says the admirer of Ernest Hemmingway.

On the local literary scene he likes Henry ole Kulet’s books as “they are both popular and serious.”

Identifies three roblems

“I like the way he uses language simply to make his works popular while at the same time addressing serious issues.”

He names three problems ailing fiction writing in Kenya.

“The first is the publisher who takes up to a year to respond to aspiring writers. If I write a book now, they are likely to touch it sooner than they would an aspiring writer’s, yet he or she could have done a masterpiece.”

The other, he says, is the digital technology which is “taking reading away from books.”

“The media does not promote the reading of books. Until recently when you (Saturday Nation) started this forum, and apart from some small space in sections of the media, writers have been given a wide berth.”

But a conversation with Mwangi Gicheru could not be complete without his take on other Kenyan writers he has met.
“The late Wahome Mutahi was a frequent visitor here. Sometimes he would come broke in a Mercedes and he would design ways of surviving. He would tell me to sit on the back left and make me the boss so that I could buy him beer.”

Then there is John Kiriamiti of My Life in Crime fame.  “When he came from prison, we had not known each other, but he looked for me saying I had inspired him. At some point, I let him run this place for six months and he was very popular with waiters and patrons.”

But was this a good business decision seeing as Kiriamiti was known for some of the most violent robberies in the region? “When Kiriamiti was managing my business, he recovered a stolen bicycle easily,” chuckled the father of two grown up daughters — one a banker in Canada and the other a beautician in Nairobi.

However, his dalliance with his writer friends did come with heavy costs.

“My association with Kiriamiti and Mutahi made me a target of Special Branch during the Mwakenya days. You know Kiriamiti took cover in my place without telling me he was in trouble. Both were jailed and I was tipped that Special Branch were interested in me, too. I took cover for three months.”

Then came the request. “When you get back, please find a way of differentiating me from Meja Mwangi and Mwangi Ruheni. Many are the times when someone comes up and tell me: Hi. I really enjoyed your Going Down River Road,” he said.

The novel was written by author-turned film maker Meja Mwangi, while Mwangi Ruheni (the former chief government chemist whose real name is Nicholas Muraguri) is best known for The Minister’s Daughter.

So what next?  “I intend to clear four unfinished manuscripts. I want to spend the rest of my life in art-film or children writing. A writer never ages nor dies. There is no former writer. We are immortal.”