Author: Rasna Warah
Publ: Author House, USA, 2011. ISBN 9781456777241
Reviewer: Stephen Derwent Partington

The title of Rasna Warah’s new collection of journalistic articles alludes to the famous red soils of Tsavo.  For those of us who enjoy reading, it perhaps alludes specifically to M.G. Visram’s book, Red Soils of Tsavo, which charts two brothers’ attempts to run a huge Kenyan sisal plantation in the 1950s.  Red Soils of Tsavo contains all the usual tics of settler writing: Africa as an ‘untamed’ wilderness; big game hunting; funny natives who dance to make rain.

When I finished Warah’s Red Soil and Roasted Maize, it was clear to me that her title’s allusion drew attention to real differences with the earlier book, and not similarities, for Warah’s book is as engaged with the Kenyan social world as Visram’s book seems distanced from it.  Perhaps the addition of ‘Roasted Maize’ to her title is a reminder that Warah’s book will be grounded in the quotidian realities of Kenyan life, rather than being obsessed with settler fantasies.

Rasna Warah, who has written for The Nation amongst other publications, is one of our most talented newspaper columnists.  This is not only because she has a habit of articulate plain-speaking that demonstrates real respect for the immediate reader, but also because there is a thoroughgoing consistency to her voice and conscience, from article to article, even if the topics are so gloriously wide-ranging as to always surprise.  Contrary to the politicians (and certain other journalists) whose capriciousness she questions in several of her articles, the reader can always rest assured that Warah will never compromise her beliefs or pull her punches for the sake of pandering to a fickle public opinion, or to fear.  During the complex socio-political years of the late Moi and Kibaki regimes, such a dependably solid voice has been greatly welcome, and is something to admire.  Perhaps we might also use the word ‘brave’ for someone who is willing, week after week, to air her views and our dirty laundry in so visibly public a venue as a mass-circulation daily newspaper.

Now it is time for this anthology of her articles, from The Nation and elsewhere, to gain an equally large circulation, for it is a book that, page after page, articulates something that is gloriously, irreverently responsible.

Irreverent because, in so many of her articles, Warah speaks truth to power, demonstrating that she has little time for that nonsensical type of sycophancy which holds that we must all respect our leaders regardless of their words and actions.  Time after time, Warah’s articles ask the reader to thumb his/her nose at irresponsible power, to question the motives of those who’d set Kenyan against Kenyan, and to act responsibly for the good of others;  often others who we will never meet, be they from different ethnic groups, different ‘races’, different and less privileged classes.  At times it does this by not only criticising distant ‘elites’, but also by scathingly telling us off – all of us, the ‘big and small’.

In articles ranging from the art of writing, to the hypocrisy of leaders, to gender relations, to our attitudes toward Obama, to ‘tribalism’, to sexual politics, to slums, to the patronising counter-productiveness of foreign aid, to religious hypocrisy, to the PEV, to all manner of other topics; Warah writes eloquently about our Kenyan State and our state as citizens, drawing attention to the injustice of material inequalities in our society.  While some commentators, as Warah herself concedes, complain that she has ‘chosen to highlight the worst, rather than the best, of Kenya’, she responds that this is because she believes that ‘it is only when we examine our failures that we can move on to work towards a better society’.  The problem with Warah’s response to her critics here is that it accepts that, yes, her writing is unremittingly dark.  However, I profoundly disagree.
I’d argue that Red Soil and Roasted Maize is one of the most joyful reads I’ve had for some time.  This is firstly because of Warah’s honesty, sincerity and consistency-of-conscience, to which I’ve already alluded, but is also because some of the articles are among the most beautifully moving personal accounts of human love that I have read.  For example, an article on her mother’s death drips with hard-nosed compassion from every line.  Hard-nosed because Warah – let’s call her ‘Rasna’ from now on, since articles such as this one invite us to be friends – honestly admits both how aloof her mother could be when younger and how genuinely difficult it could be to care for her when she fell ill.  Rasna comes across, then, not as some disembodied, mythified angel of the Florence Nightingale type, but rather as a rounded human being struggling to perform her duty toward a close relative, and who in the process comes to reflect more profoundly upon the relationship, upon the need for love and compassion, and upon the power of personal forgiveness.  In the process, both Rasna and her mother become deeply admirable human beings.

This particular article is an important one, for it shows how Rasna’s articles, while often seeming to focus on grand and high politics, in fact insist on always wedding such concerns with more personal matters.  Politicians and politics are never elevated as being ‘over there’, out of reach on some plane beyond our own world: what they do affects us directly, and how we choose to act as citizens in turn affects them and us.  So, while citizens have rights, we are shown to also have responsibilities toward each other, whether we are of the same family, ethnic group, sexual orientation, religion, or not.  And just as Rasna found that her dutiful service to her mother surprised her because of the genuine compassion and love it revealed, so too, it is implied, we might just find as Kenyan citizens that by acting responsibly towards each other and catering for each others’ material needs, we get along, that we come to enjoy that ‘everyday conviviality’ which many theorists are beginning to suggest could be the building blocks of achievable, lived nationhood.

So, whether you find that you are a pessimist with regard to our country, or whether you are a dyed-in-the-wool optimist, you might just want to pop to the bookshop – out of duty or desire – and buy this remarkable anthology.  You might just find that both the optimist and the pessimist can get along.  More importantly, how we can – all of us.