One Who Dreams Is Called A Prophet by Sultan Somjee

Abstract

Written over a period of fifteen years but really the distillation of four decades of work, One Who Dreams Is Called a Prophet is an extraordinary summation of an extraordinary career.1 The story is about the epic walk of Alama, a pastoralist elder from northern Kenya, who is an alter-ego of the author; his arduous pilgrimage to find the source of peace is a journey that Dr. Somjee has also undertaken. Somjee lived among various pastoralist communities during his field work at the University of Nairobi in the 1970s. He then helped to introduce material culture into the Kenyan school art curriculum as part of the 1985 educational reforms, wrote a guidebook for art teachers on how to teach African material culture, served as Head of Ethnography at the National Museums of Kenya (1994–2000), and from 1994 established sixteen village peace museums based partly on principles derived from the acclaimed Kamirithu Community Theater and Education Center that was destroyed in 1977 (for an overview of Somjee’s work, see Somjee 2008). This project has evolved into the Community Peace Museums Heritage Foundation (CPMHF) and has spread from Kenya into Uganda and South Sudan. The museums affirm the role indigenous languages and the visual arts play in establishing peace in and across communities—contact information and a list of twenty-nine current peace museums and their curators are included at the end of the book. These methods of reconciliation have been threatened by colonialist and post-independence atrocities, but they are not extinguished, and remain more effective than conflict resolution methodologies imported from Euro-American academic traditions (see Somjee 2018).2 This is one of many insights embedded in One Who Dreams for a deeper understanding of African art. Somjee’s literary development was spurred when he left Kenya for exile in Canada in 2003 and he is now an accomplished historical novelist. One Who Dreams is a companion of sorts to his Bead Bai (2012) and Home Between Crossings (2016), even though its origins precede them. Alama is a very different narrator to embroidery artist and beader Sakina/Moti Bai, whose story unfolds in the other two novels, but all three are linked by their emphasis on reciprocal exchange and dynamic relationality in enunciating profound understandings of the art of East African personal adornment. Indeed, the art of the personal is illuminated by Somjee as the art of the “interpersonal” and in this respect, One Who Dreams does for walking sticks and leketyo (beaded waist belts that support pregnancies) what the earlier stories did for bandhani, emankeeki, and kanga (see Pandurang 2018). Yet “historical novel” is an inadequate term for the complex interweaving of personal memory, communal biography, parable, history, fiction, and poetry in all three books; Somjee’s writing has been linked to such genre-bending labels as “ethnographic creative nonfiction,” but even this falls short of conveying its potent blending (see Munos 2020). The rhythmic patterns of words oscillate between sparse and dense, simple and complex, poetic and prosaic, allusive and elusive, gentle and incantatory carried by elliptical loops (Somjee 2012: 316–22). This melding of storytelling genres facilitates both an expansion of the audience for written explorations of the visual arts of Africa and a novel means through which to illuminate them. The rhythmic loops of Somjee’s writing style adds to the disorientating way time functions in the book. Temporal coordinates kaleidoscopically fold and unfold with references to recent conflicts in Kenya and Sudan, allusions to the Mau-Mau struggles, the “deep time” of pastoralist wisdom encoded in songs, proverbs, and riddles, and distilled memories of Somjee’s own journeys across the East African landscape spanning thirty years, yet all are held together by the passage of each day as understood through “Swahili time,” highlighted by the list of hours of the day at the start of the book (p. viii). Throughout the story, the passage of time is experienced through the impact of the sun on the land and the body; for example, “the sixth hour of daylight when the shadows walk between the legs” (p. 44). One of the effects of this is an unmooring of the reader’s conventional grip on historical and narrative progression, facilitating a deeply meditative immersion and a slowing of urgency which is critical to Somjee’s hypnotic invocation of pastoralist life rooted into the landscape. Yet the poetic licenses of the book are themselves tethered— and rooted—in real physical objects and the profound work they accomplish. The story is structured around the exchange of ten walking sticks that are carried during Alama’s journey across northern Kenya and that Somjee looks after today (they have been glimpsed in the background of various Zoom conferences connected to the publication of the book). The walking sticks