Dust: Archiving Haunted Silences
The necessity of (un)knowing
I struggled to organize my thoughts while writing this post because I keep returning to Dust and finding new complexities and haunted silences. Forgive my meandering. I would start at the beginning if I could locate it.
Published in 2014, Dust is Kenyan author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s debut novel. The novel—and Kenya—turns on the assassination of Tom Mboya in 1969, while he was serving as Kenya’s Minister for Economic Planning and Development. His assassination sparked riots and national mourning; he had embodied the tenuous hopes of a young, wounded nation.
Tom Mboya is more myth than man: a brilliant pan-African socialist, dedicated trade union leader, and charismatic father of the nation looming over us all. From 1959 to 1963, he arranged a series of airlifts to send promising East African students—primarily Kenyans—to universities in the US and Canada. Notable beneficiaries of the airlifts include Wangarĩ Muta Maathai, founder of the environmental grassroots organization The Green Belt Movement and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
It’s difficult for me—born more than 30 years after his death—to discern Mboya’s humanness, to understand him as he was, to delineate how his Kenya differs from mine. I can only rely on the memories of others, so I find myself gravitating to writers. Through literature, I listen to my elders. News of his assassination leaves the characters in Dust in disbelief: “It is a lie. Nobody would kill Tom. Nobody would dare kill Tom, because it means they would be willing to kill Kenya.”
Perhaps it’s inaccurate to say that Dust turns on Tom Mboya’s death because his death is tangled with all the other deaths in the novel, including the endless deaths and rebirths of Kenya itself, as Owuor writes:
Nyipir had lost his Kenya on July 6, 1969, in Nairobi, when Tom Mboya was assassinated. The murder was the culmination of fears, swirling rumors, the meaning of clandestine oaths that made the rest of the country enemy territory to be owned. It was the purpose of the silences that had started before.
The cause of Tom Mboya’s death—“the silences that had started before”—lies in the 1950s, amid the armed struggle for Kenyan independence from British colonial rule. (Don’t worry: we will meander back to Nyipir and the Kenya he lost eventually.) From 1952 to 1960, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KFLA), also referred to as the Mau Mau, waged a guerilla war against British settlers and African loyalists. Considered one of Britain’s bloodiest post-war conflicts, the atrocities committed by British settlers, Kenyan police, the army, and the freedom fighters are remarkably well recorded. Historian David Anderson notes in Histories of the Hanged that “what is astonishing about Kenya’s dirty war is not that it remained secret at the time but that it was so well known and so thoroughly documented.”
(To save space, I’ve oversimplified the situation. I encourage you to be suspicious of my bloodless summarization of complex histories.)
Yet thorough documentation cannot fully capture the scale of the violence foundational to the Kenyan state. I remember learning about the Mau Mau rebellion in primary school. We memorized the dates of the armed struggle and absorbed sanitized histories myths concerning the most famous Mau Mau fighters—including Dedan Kimathi, General China, Stanley Mathenge, and Field-Marshal Muthoni—in a way that suggested we should care about the past, but not too much. We never discussed that some Mau Mau members, and non-members tortured on suspicion of being Mau Mau, are still alive and have successfully sued the British government for damages. The official history of Kenya draws a straight line from heroic anti-colonial struggle to triumphant post-colonial self-determination; a hasty, sterile remembrance that is really a kind of forgetting.
Dust undertakes a more complex type of documentation, and thus facilitates a visceral way of (un)knowing. In a 2022 special issue of the journal Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies dedicated to Yvonne Owuor’s work, Christopher Odhiambo Joseph argues that Dust adopts a rhizomic narrative structure, such that “it has neither beginning, nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and spills.” This rhizomic structure exposes the interconnected traumatic traces of history.
Dust suggests a historical entanglement of (at times unspoken) oaths of silence echoing through the colonial state and the post/neo-colonial state. How Tom Mboya’s assassination dashed hopes for a better Kenya post-independence emerges in the repressed stories of torture and murder underpinning pre-independence Kenya and lives on in present-day state capture, corruption, and state-sponsored violence. None of these events are hidden per se; many atrocities are discoverable. But there is a gap between truncated factual knowledge—eagerly relegated to “the past” or dismissed with “it is what it is”—and the kind of deep, visceral knowing that can lead to reconciliation and national healing.
To explore how the novel’s rhizomic structure facilitates deeper knowing, let’s return to Nyipir and the Kenya he lost. Nyipir Oganda is the patriarch of the fictional Oganda family; the novel follows his family and their secrets in pre- and post-independence Kenya. Dust begins in 2008 as the police chase and gun down Nyipir’s son, Moses Odidi Oganda, for conducting a botched robbery. Odidi’s forays into crime begin after he refuses to silt crucial dams so that his engineering company, and the government, can profit off the resulting power shortages. His integrity costs him his company, wealth, and place in society.
Christopher Odhiambo Joseph identifies Odidi’s death in the first few pages of the Dust as the novel’s middle, “where the narratives of both the Kenyan nation and his own family converge and diverge.” It is through dealing with Odidi’s death that Nyipir confronts the secrets that have been haunting him and the nation, particularly another death in the 1950s: Aloys Kamau. As Nyipir and his daughter Ajany dig Odidi’s grave, he tries and fails to explain his choices to her:
Nyipir chooses what he will not say. “Long, long, ago, I saw a young man. A catechist. He was dead.” Meandering thoughts. Nyipir sees the coagulating wound that is Aloys Kamau. How it seeps, spreads, and becomes a subterranean stream of blood in Kenya, and how its tentacles reach even the newborn, and how the wound won’t close until its existence is spoken aloud, but not one person dares to.
Aloys Kamau was a catechist who rejected the Mau Mau oath—a commitment to aiding the freedom fighters and staying silent about their activities—and intervened when seven men tried to kill another teacher in front of his students. Aloys’ act of self-sacrifice is ultimately futile, but his death haunts Nyipir. Numb, Nyipir “gathered everything he could that was once Aloys—pieces of body in the sack.” This action echoes Nyipir’s job during the Mau Mau rebellion: burying the dismembered bodies of people who died after interrogation by government officials on suspicion of being Mau Mau members or sympathizers.
Although official state history acknowledges the torture and violence used to enforce silence during the Mau Mau rebellion, it cannot encompass the complexities of a country at war with its own people. The tenderness of Nyipir’s gesture, his desperate collection of “everything … that was once Aloys,” brings into sharp relief his decision to remain an agent of the state—as a grave digger, a torturer, a personal aide to a British settler, then a policeman—until 1969. Aloys Kamau did not simply die during the Mau Mau Rebellion: he dies over and over in Nyipir’s guilty memories.
In 1969, after Tom Mboya’s assassination, Nyipir insults a fellow policeman of a different ethnicity during a heated Ajua game. Mboya’s death had inflamed ethnic tensions, making it a dangerous time to speak freely. Owuor writes, “After Mboya, Kenya’s official languages: English, Kiswahili, and Silence. There was also memory.” Nyipir is fired for “indiscipline, insubordination, and criminal activity” and “protracting military conflict” among other unstated crimes.
A few days later, he is captured and tortured. His torturers assure him that they will stop once he swears loyalty to the president. Defeated, Nyipir nods yes but cannot bring himself to utter the oath: “He had opened his mouth to confirm his assent, but his voice screamed, Aloys Kamau, and afterward he could not speak.” Aloys Kamau’s haunting death—repressed for a decade—prevents Nyipir from uttering a false oath that would save his life. The compounding psychoaffective mutilations of all the deaths Nyipir witnesses throughout his life make obedience and loyalty impossible. He loses his faith in the unknowable, precious, collective hallucination that is the nation-state.
Nyipir’s story is also Kenya’s story: how much death can a nation contain before it erupts? How many eruptions can a people endure?
I have not yet lost my Kenya. Perhaps my youth blinds me to the inherently compromised “reality” of nation-building (but this “reality” is someone else’s construction—why should I accept it as inevitable?), the necessity of making “sacrifices” to ensure the “safety” of one’s country. Perhaps growing old will expose the sweetness of forgetting. In 2030 or 2057 or 2082 I may long to banish the haunted silences.
When one of Nyipir’s torturers, Petrus Keah, finally releases him—despite Nyipir’s refusal to swear an oath of loyalty to the president—he commands Nyipir to forget:
Petrus had asked, So, who’s this Aloys Kamau? And Nyipir said, A catechist. He was murdered. Petrus said, You’d sacrifice your life for a dead preacher? Nyipir had stared back, numb. Petrus had lit a cigarette, given it to Nyipir, who inhaled deeply. When he gave the cigarette back to Petrus, the smoke formed an arc between them. Nyipir told Petrus that he used to collect shriveled human testicles and clean up brain matter. He told Petrus that Aloys’s blood and its story were written in silence. Petrus had told Nyipir, You are mad. Then he added, Kenya will survive us. Before Nyipir could reply, Petrus added, Amnesia is also medicine.
I share Petrus’ certainty but reject his bitter cynicism: Kenya will survive us.
I repeat, an incantation: Kenya will survive us.
Kenya will survive the uncertain present, the haunted past, the hazy future. At every moment someone somewhere is stealing, giving life, taking life, dreaming, fighting, crafting a new future, erasing a fraught past. The country forms and unravels and reforms.
I remain optimistic because critical hope is my vernacular—I see no way we can live without hope long-term. As Paulo Freire writes in Pedagogy of Hope:
I do not mean that, because I am hopeful, I attribute this hope of mine the power to transform reality all by itself … my hope is necessary, but it is not enough. Alone, it does not win. But without it, my struggle will be weak and wobbly. We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water.
My optimism is not a denial of reality but a refusal to let material conditions in the present constrain our ability to imagine and actualize better futures. Perversely, I draw encouragement from the unrelenting energy of people dedicated to making the world worse: they never give up, even in the face of significant societal progress. Why should I?
Perhaps trying to write about Dust in a focused way, trying to unravel and claim mastery over a novel that eschews linearity, instead betrays the spirit of the novel. So much of Dust is fragmentary and elliptical, an exploration of what a family, and the Kenyan people, cannot bring themselves to say. And yet the haunted silences repeat and the truth—the unresolved trauma foundational to the story of Kenya, foundational to the stories that encompass all of us—infects the present even as it remains, at best, half-acknowledged.
I wonder what it means to live an ethical life, to nurture a militant national consciousness (following Frantz Fanon), to see the world both as it is and as it could be. I don’t have good answers—or even bad answers—to these questions. But Dust demonstrates the necessity of posing these questions and archiving haunted silences by breaking them. By tangling the national, personal, past, present, and future, Dust opens a discursive space to confront the convenient stories we tell about ourselves.
(My use of “we” here and throughout this post is also a convenience. “We” disguises heterogeneity and unfairly distributes responsibility.)
What do I know? There will always be more to know: more secrets, more hopes, more “new” beginnings.
What don’t I know? What a nation is. How a nation heals. How to discover and inhabit the gaps in history.
I can only end by asking you a question Dust poses over and over: what endures?
W.V. Buluma writes The Editorial Section.
Eloquent, moving, deeply disturbing and important.
Beautifully written, both sad and hopeful. The novel sounds fascinating