Avid debater who pulled no punches

Prof William Ochieng. Prof. Ochieng was the most combative scholar of our time, but behind the punches sat a master of metaphor. PHOTO/JACOB OWITI 

In Summary

• Ochieng once wondered aloud why we seemed to be getting rid of a British curriculum couched in their language, English, and not our own. “Hypocritical” was his conclusion.
• While famous for deploying animal imagery in praise-names in public places and personal letters, he is not known to have used Dholuo to pen a publication. He once wrote me a letter and signed it as, W.R Ochieng Tong Wang Nyang’ (W.R Ochieng’, The Crocodile’s Eyeball).
  I failed to convince him to write a book in his mother tongue, considering he was doing well in praise-names.
• He always read lecture notes to his students. As undergraduate teachers, most dons don’t write legible notes. They pretend all the information is in their heads. Prof Ochieng’ termed this irresponsible.
• Despite this undying belief in snail mail and legible hand writing, his production of knowledge is unequalled by most of the digital generation he died without joining.

By PETER AMUKA
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In humanistic scholarship in Kenya and beyond, the late Prof William Robert Ochieng stood out like the elephant in the Yoruba saying: When you see an elephant, you don’t say I saw something; you say I saw an elephant.

Such were the words used to describe Wole Soyinka when he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986. And they are befitting words for Ochieng as an historian fascinated by ideas well beyond his discipline: at 70 years and a few months, he had reached and surpassed the optimum Biblical age and contributed more than his share of historical scholarship.

In his early to late 20s, he published articles critical of long-established scholars, among them his PhD supervisor Bethwell Ogot at the University of Nairobi.

“When a visiting professor from Uganda thanked me for my daring views, I realised I had matured into a bull elephant in my own right.

Elders had recognised my bellowing and its substantive worth. The literati in East Africa insist on worshipping Ngugi and Okot and avoid wrestling them to the ground.

You treat them like untouchable gods. Nobody will recognise you if you remain in that sycophantic mode,” he once told me in the mid-1970s.

Those were the days I and a few compatriots used the media, particularly the defunct Weekly Review, used to champion the cause of Afrocentric literature with oral literature at the core of the then Kenyan high school curriculum.

FOREIGN LANGUAGES

As expected, the British Council and their agents opposed the syllabus despite its eventual implementation.

Ochieng once wondered aloud why we seemed to be getting rid of a British curriculum couched in their language, English, and not our own. “Hypocritical” was his conclusion.

Yet he was, at the same time, very passionate about the value of indigenous Kenyan languages. His argument was that, sometime between 1959 and 1964, a schoolmate broke Alliance High school rules and cried and cursed in his mother-tongue.

Wasike, if I remember his name correctly, was badly injured in a football match at the school. Mother tongue was forbidden at all times in Kenyan high schools, but Wasike wailed aloud in it.

In special circumstances like this, a foreign language (English) disappeared from the mouth and the “spontaneous, natural one,” as he described Wasike’s linguistic return home, took over.

Perhaps the most memorable addition to his high school experience was his guess that anyone who claims English is a Kenyan language would be shocked were they to witness and record the multiplicity of tongues spoken by victims of road accidents.

As far as the hypothesis went, pain could only be articulated in the mother tongue.

Quite contradictory from a man who, unlike Taban lo Liyong, the self proclaimed master of prose, always wrote some of the most lucid essays, books, journals and newspaper articles in what one may call the Queen’s English. Whereas he remained fluent in his mother tongue, he did not write or publish in it.

While famous for deploying animal imagery in praise-names in public places and personal letters, he is not known to have used Dholuo to pen a publication.

He once wrote me a letter and signed it as, W.R Ochieng Tong Wang Nyang’ (W.R Ochieng’, The Crocodile’s Eyeball).

I failed to convince him to write a book in his mother tongue, considering he was doing well in praise-names.

He implied, in response, that the language was largely for private and oral communication.

KSH5 FOR CHRISTIAN NAME

Why should a person who enjoyed and used his local language so much and coined praise-names from it insist on using two English names rather than replace them with indigenous ones?

His terse comment was that he bought the name (William Robert) for Sh5 from a Christian church as part of his cultural identity and heritage and would never drop it.

Which stance leads me to his view of the colonial history of Kenya and Africa.

Contrary to what the likes of Walter Rodney argued, that Europe under-developed Africa, Ochieng thought the continent was too technologically backward to resist European conquest and exploitation.

He once quipped to me that Okot P Bitek’s Lawino in Song of Lawino symbolised the useless noises Marxist scholars were busy making against the ravenous capitalist world.

Hers were the laments of the helpless and defeated. She had to uplift herself intellectually and catch up with the urbanised if she desired global recognition.

HIDE IN A BOOK

He, interestingly, sounded Marxist when he associated nomadic peasants with rural idiocy and underdevelopment.

Another thing he detested in peasants was the character of Nyakinyua in Petals of Blood when she relieves herself in Munira’s compound and leaves behind a huge mound of poop.

“I hid the book somewhere in the house so that my daughters didn’t catch the stench,” he often joked.

Apart from his concern that Ngugi belittled and did not understand historical discourse, he thought the image of human dung in the novel was disgusting and uncultured.

In a 1974 Kenya Historical Review article titled Under-civilization in Black Africa he pointedly argues that it is not enough to “glorify the African past” with a few examples of development when the truth is that the continent is wallowing in “utter stagnation.”

And it is this absence of advanced technology that Ochieng blames for the defeat of the Mau Mau revolt by the British in publications and public speeches.

Some of his detractors, including me, accused him of tribalism and labelled him a neo-colonial lackey.

Of course, his personal answer to me as a student of Ngugi was that critical thinking was lacking in the novelist and that I was like a foolish bull that insists on sucking milk from the mother forever without any creative thought and attempt to be ideologically independent.

He complained to me many times that most of Ngugi’ students, like me, were believers (in him) rather than scholars.

The upshot of all this was that Ochieng was an avid public and private debater and detested friends and foes who could not openly take contrary opinions.

LAZY, IRRESPONSIBLE DONS

Whether you bought him or he bought you beer as a dear friend or casual acquaintance, he loved no holds-barred intellectual battles and interactions.

It was out of such encounters that he often formulated his ideas and plunged in to research and penned the mountains of quality publications few can equal among his peers.

And for university dons like me who scribbled lecture notes and do not write full papers before classes, Ocheing’ believed we were lazy and presumptuous.

His strength was in the rare ability to give lectures that were almost always ready for or very close to publication.

He called my kind presumptuous because, we would never have any other chance to write or marshal ideas if we did not utilise the lecture preparation time.

This he confessed, he learnt from Prof. Ogot, his mentor. In this he has died without any known followers despite many words of encouragement to do so. 

He always read lecture notes to his students. As undergraduate teachers, most dons don’t write legible notes. They pretend all the information is in their heads. Prof Ochieng’ termed this irresponsible.
That is why most university lecturers rarely have anything to publish — or so Ochieng’ argued.


Interestingly the Ochieng’ I knew was below analogue, handwrote and didn’t have an email address nor did he want one. Ruled paper was too restrictive and he used bic biro pen on plain paper.
Despite this undying belief in snail mail and legible hand writing, his production of knowledge is unequalled by most of the digital generation he died without joining.