I shall begin by telling you that Limpopo was born in Kilimani, an area of Nairobi that we could define as previously middle-class and now definitely well-off, close to Ngong Road and Argwings Kodhek Road, and although his young mother could have chosen between the National Hospital and the Aga Khan, both very close, she decided to give birth in her own home, a two-story wooden building with a porch, facing north toward the famous hills of Ngong so often spoken of by Karen Blixen, whose mansion, as you know, is today one of the attractions of the capital. In the mornings, a very cool air blows through the city from the mountains and is one of its subtler vices. Whoever has breathed it, enjoying it in silence, will find it difficult to leave it behind and Nairobi will be impregnated forever in his memory, he will remain irrationally trapped in that plain and his imagination, his pleasures, will be marked by the memory of those cool mornings, still damp with the night rain, when a slight mist rises and the red earth of the streets is like a mirror in which the children sink their feet as they run to school. It could also be the image of a lost innocence that refuses to disappear.
During the 1960s, one of those children was a boy running to the Presbyterian school of Newshenwood with a bag tied around his neck and his head seething with dreams, with constellations of dreams that might begin with the most distant star and end with one of the hummingbirds he could see from his window. His father, Clarence Limpopo, was Professor of World History at the National University of Kenya, and his mother, Evelyn, who had studied to be a teacher, taught biology at the English College. Young Elmord was an only child, so the attention of these two intellectuals, fascinated by independence and the socialist ideal of a dignified, self-sufficient country, as represented by Jomo Kenyatta, was entirely focused on him.
When he was nine, his father read to him aloud from the poetry of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost. He explained to him why Africa had to unite in a single great nation and recover its dignity before the white man, who should not, however, be hated, because what was hateful was the system imposed by a series of white nations which, with the shameful complicity of Africans, had come to Africa to steal its wealth, rape its women, and confine its men in labor camps or, in the best of cases, to give them ridiculous uniforms, with epaulettes and boots, and make them serve in their houses and clubs.
But according to Elmord’s father, all that was over. With Jomo Kenyatta at the helm, his country could lift its head high and look with dignity at the other nations of the globe. Now they were independent, masters of their lives and destinies. They had to educate themselves, work hard to obtain the benefits of freedom, and make sure these reached the whole population, not only a few privileged people, as used to happen, and as had happened to him, Clarence Limpopo, who had gone to university and graduated in contemporary history, a destiny that had come about by chance, as he had been born on a farm owned by an old Englishman who had decided for some mysterious reason to give him an education, perhaps out of philanthropy or a feeling of guilt, he never knew which, because his mother, who might have known why, died when he was a child, so Clarence Limpopo had gone to university and was now a professor, and that was why his son, Elmord, had to have the best, had to be privileged so that he could be first in line and show the way to his countrymen who had not had the same luck, those Kenyans who died of malaria or typhoid, who lived in the slums of Nairobi, near the railroad tracks, feeding themselves on something similar to ugali, but without proteins, a crust of hard bread in water, hence the huge bellies of the children, the absent eyes of malaria, the high fevers, anyway, that was the great luck of Clarence and later of young Elmord, who by the age of ten was already mentioning in his poems the grave injustice of God, so grave, he wrote, that it deserved human judgment, a Nuremberg trial, or at least the same legal process that was given to any of his brothers when they were caught stealing or killing, because that serious crime had caused death and humiliation and was the midwife of great violence. “My God, I don’t know how anyone can still believe in you,” was the conclusion of young Elmord Limpopo’s poem.
At the English College, his poems were regarded with a degree of anxiety, but because he was the son of a teacher none of the staff took much notice. Not even when at the age of twelve he presented in the English literature class a poem that said:
Yesterday, in the midst of sleep,
I saw trees on fire in Nairobi,
rivers of forest where before there were streets
and specters of ash weeping on the sidewalks.
A group of lone men were climbing a hill
crowned by a church,
climbing in the midst of pain,
death and ashes
led by a strange being.
But before reaching the church,
all the way up there,
something exploded in the blackest part of night.
A burst of gunfire stopped the silent group
and threw it in the dust,
in the ashes.
It was pure chance that this and other poems came to the attention of Dr. Growsery, an elderly English entomologist now retired from the university and a great lover of poetry, who read them with great interest up to a dozen times and finally delivered his verdict: a great poet has arrived, but I don’t know if we are ready for what he has to say.
It is worth pointing out that this had all come about by chance. On Wednesdays, Dr. Growsery would come to Westlands to pick up his grandson from the English College. He was waiting in the cafeteria when he found a small case that somebody had left behind and, in order to find out who it belonged to, opened it and found the young man’s poems. Then, when he had located the owner, who of course was Elmord, and went to give it back to him, he said, I saw there are poems in your case, whose are they? and Elmord replied, they’re mine, sir. Although surprised, the old man asked, but are they yours in the sense that they belong to you or in the sense that you are the author? The young man said, I’m the author, sir, I wrote them.