Me And The Boy Who Ate A Hyena!

Reading came naturally to me. I never had to put an effort into it. It’s only now, when I look back that I realize ‘why’. My mother being a kindergarten teacher, started teaching me way before I could speak. Although our native language was Luganda, a dialect spoken by the people of  Uganda. My mother often taught me in English. A language I would later discover is only rivaled by Chinese for the top spoken language on the globe. She herself read what I saw then as huge thick books. After words, she would read small English books to me. Before I would give it much thought I was reading for myself and I could clearly understand what I was reading. A skill that earned me admiration and hate in equal measures from my peers who found reading a hard nut to cruck

Most of the books I read were European and American. I started off with small books like Cinderella, little red riding hood, snow white and the seven dwarves. I would be transported from European/American fairy tales to their more realistic stories, thus a boy who grew up fetching water from the village stream and collecting firewood to help fuel in the cooking of food would imagine but not quite understand tall buildings, blocks of buildings, baseball (a common game in many books then), sleep overs and phones.

The first African book I read was “THE BOY WHO ATE A HYENA”. I don’t remember how I came by it; I don’t even remember how old I was when I came by it, also I neither remember the author nor the protagonist name though I clearly remember the title and vaguely the contents of the book.

I grew older and I read larger books with a thirst I will never be able to explain. I drunk in the three musketeers, David Copperfield, a tale of two cities, the adventures of tom sawyer, treasure island among others. Before long I caught up with my greatest inspiration, my mother. I also started reading huge thick books. I read lord of the rings, the hobbit, the bourn series, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci, angels and demons and my all-time favourite, Harry Potter. I read European history, the world wars, America’s great men biographies like Abraham Lincoln and many more

These books where great and I enjoyed reading them thoroughly, but something was missing, at least at the time. I could not relate to these stories easily. They talked about places far away or imagined. They talked about cultures and systems of a different time and place. I wanted to read about something I could relate to easily. It’s a different feeling reading a book, fiction or not of say about Massachusetts, Boston that I know well to reading a book about Tokyo-Japan, A place I have never been. I started searching for African literature. I wanted to know how it feels seeing a world I know from the eyes of someone else.  

My search was not to be rewarded easily, up until that time, a 14-year-old boy. The only memorable African book I had read was “The boy who ate a hyena”. I went through the school library and it was full of American/European books. I searched book shops (online shopping was not a thing at the time), their stock only included, you guessed right foreign books. Even for scholarly classes like chemistry, biology and math, schools insisted on using foreign books.

A deeper search brought me to some painful realizations, It wasn’t that good African literature did not exist, it’s just that Africans did not read and those who read, did not demand for African literature for reasons best known to them. They preferred western Literature. Because of this the people who invested in the writing industry only invested in what the market demanded and so, one had to search like for a pin in a hey sack to get a good African book.

In recent years schools have tried to incorporate some really nice books in their syllabus. Books like God’s bits of wood, the beautiful ones are not yet born, Mine boy, No longer at ease, weep not child, on this mountain I walk, things fall apart and a long walk to freedom are being read for discussion in schools and conferences. Am yet to see households around the world buying an African book just for the joy of it like we do for the likes of ‘song of ice’. After reading a few African books, the difference between them and their counter parts in the west was clear. Up to this day I have not read, later on seen an African book I would describe as huge and thick and the number of written books in Africa was so little it could be hard to fill up a small library.

Coming to America did not help matters, I had grown up reading their literature, so they had nothing new to offer me in terms of books. I turned to the African living in America, how were they telling their story. You guessed right; they were not. No one was taking the initiative to. I was confused, Africans and Africans living outside of Africa had so many great stories. why was no one telling them?

Talking to Americans born and raised in America, I discovered many loved to know what was happening in Africa, they would gladly take that journey into the forest to collect firewood with a good writer, in-fact many needed to be educated about Africa the way Africans are educated about the rest of the world. Nothing a good thick huge book could not fix.

The inexistence of or my lack of finding a “good huge thick book” made me appreciate that what African needed was to do more writing and promote it and I Appreciate Aphrika Magazine for taking up part of this mantle. A lot of work will be needed from everyone else, speakers, writers, film makers, photographers, gamers and anyone in position to tell a story especially to a crowd.

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