Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits: An anthology
by Rasna Warah
Author House, 2008

There is a new, East African book, edited by the excellent Kenyan columnist Rasna Warah, that for us here in the region articulates postdevelopmentalist concerns from a more relevant, specific and local perspective – indeed, in exemplary fashion employing the sort of local and grassroots perspective that such thinkers and activists claim that classical developmentalism too frequently ignores.

Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits is an anthology that brings together some of the region’s best and best-loved writers, whose individual essays enable a kaleidoscopic view of developmentalism in East Africa, its discontents, its hubris, its smugness, its ability to kill through often genuine and well-meant kindness.

In it, as the editor states in her very accessible introduction, we find young and established writers who are, if you like, reformed developmentalists and former NGOers themselves, who are diasporans who can see the industry from the ‘external’ perspective of the donors, leftists who can penetrate the sinister economic motives behind certain forms of development, fiction writers who bring a knowing wit to the debate, investigative journalists who know how to hunt down and express the real suffering of individuals and communities. And the names of the writers are those we know, as East Africans, we can respect. Among others, we have Rasna Warah, Binyavanga Wainaina, Parselelo Kantai, Sunny Bindra, Onyango Oloo, Kalundi Serumaga, Issa Shivji and Firoze Manji.

*Stephen Derwent Partington, is the Kwani? poetry editor and a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.

*Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

(i.m. Aimé Césaire, Négritudist)

The windward waves are storming:
black.
The basalt of Pelée is black.
The mourners' blown umbrellas: black.
The massing clouds above them: black.
Umbrella bolls of cotton: black.
The acres of vanilla pods:
all black.

The freshly-mounded soil is black.
The grave's great mouth is shaded:
black.
The ink across your elegies:
jet black.
This too is heaven.

*Stephen Derwent Partington, is the Kwani? poetry editor and a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.

**Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

There she is, dead again,

that grandma with her jowls

and battered cardigan,

her headscarf and her

grainy backstreet photograph.

From week to week

her image stares to haunt us.

It’s the text that brings her

sharply into focus:

Loving mother of…

The grandma of…

An in-law through some cousin

to a councillor from such

and such a ward…

And, yes, the family will meet

at somewhere rural

and the hearse will leave

from such and such a Home

at 10a.m. (not prompt), proceed

to some small church

where she will Rest in Peace

Forever be Remembered

when Promoted to His Glory…

For us all, the same old story.

But her age in days like these,

her stunning age. Indeed,

the obit’s whole normality

earns which: our envy? Praise?.

*Stephen Derwent Partington, is the Kwani? poetry editor and a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.

**Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Rewrite this sentence as a question:

I should kill you.

Next, correct this split infinitive:

To clearly know what’s wrong.

Reverse the pronouns in this sentence:

You’ll forgive me.

The infinitive of Love is:

Love; To Love; Be Loved; Despise?

Note down five synonyms for Neighbour

and five antonyms for Hate.

Select a word from those in brackets

and insert it in this sentence:

I _______ my fellow humans

(Murder; Rape; Displace; Respect.)

Last: if a Person is the key to peace

determine if it’s I or You or S/He

(tick any one, or two, or three.)

*Stephen Derwent Partington, is the Kwani? poetry editor and a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

When peace erupted, none of us was ready.
You remember how the sticks above our heads
were gently lowered, how our riot gear
was sloughed-off like a skin? We rubbed our chins.
And yet, the dead, they didn’t rise.

Do you recall the day the grandmas of the Rift
embraced the grandsons of Nyeri,
when the youth were given grants to raise
manyattas they had razed? We rubbed our eyes.
But still, the dead maintained their peace.

Think back: the way the Lake and Ocean rose to kiss Mount Kenya’s
peak?

The glossy adverts in the Nation and the Standard:
We congratulate our leaders for restoring
Peace and Unity, and all is well in Neverland?
The dead began to wake.

Do you remember how they asked us to forget?
In 4-by-4s, Big Men from each and every province
drove a web across the land, their shining
megaphones proclaiming: Back to work!
The dead were spinning.

And the bishops and the diplomats, the councillors
and businessmen, they gathered for a conference
outside the new Grand Regency and told us
It was all a dream, an error, so now nothing needs be done,
some things just die, are best forgotten. No? Come on!!
You must remember how the landless and the jobless dead
erupted from their coffins with a shriek?
You don’t remember?! Let me help you.
Hold this gun. I have a cutting. Take a peek.

*Stephen Partington, is the Kwani? poetry editor and a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

We praise the man who,
though he held the match between
his finger and his thumb,
beheld the terror of its tiny drop of phosphorous,
its brown and globoid smoothness
like a charred and tiny skull
and so returned it to its box.

So too, we hail the youth who,
though he took his panga on the march,
perceived it odd within his fist
when there was neither scrub
nor firewood to be felled,
so laid it down.

An acclamation for the man who,
though he saw the woman running, clothing torn,
and though he lusted,
saw his mother in her youth,
restrained his colleagues
and withdrew.

We pay our homage to the man who,
though his heart was like a stone
and though he took a stone to cast,
could feel its hardness in the softness of his palm
and grasped the brittleness of bone,
so let it drop.

We laud the man who,
though he snatched to scrutinise
the passenger’s I.D.,
saw not the name – instead, the face –
and slid it back
as any friend might slide his hand to shake a friend’s.

And to the rest of us,
a blessing:
may you never have to be that man,
but if you have to,
BE!

*Stephen Partington, is the Kwani? poetry editor and a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

What does dug earth care at all about ethnicity?
A Mwangi fits a six-foot hole
as snugly as Owuor.

And tell me, where's the corpse that anyone
can teargas with success?
Or did you do it to augment the tears of mourners,
out of kindness?

Can you tell a foe from how he skins a cow
or peels a spud
or guts a fish?
Are these enough to skin his hide?
Perhaps it's speech, the way she shrubs?
And who's the carrier, his mother or his dad?
Can we locate the gene for Enemy?
Today, can we condone the fact
Kikamba's only got one word for 'enemy',
'Masai'?

Reflect: that family you killed,
it had as little land as you.
Or did you see the old machete used to cut you?
Dented, rusty, cheap, like yours.
Reflect on this.

This warped deflection of your anger
isn't justice:
it's a coffinful of shit.

*Stephen Derwent Partington is a Kenyan poet.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org