aFRica

Something Else
Not Violence
Keguro Macharia
I have been trying to write about this
Something Else Not Violence for a few
days, now. It frightens me. It frightens
me because I do not know.
Eastleigh (1977-1990)
Until his death in 1990, my father was an
obstetrician-gynecologist with a practice
in Pangani-Eastleigh. As I understood and
continue to understand his work, he
brought children into the world through a
complex magic that ensured both
mothers and their children survived and
thrived. Many, if not most, of his patients
were Somali. When I visited him at work,
I was always impressed by his
tenderness, his amazing ability to make
his patients—mothers, fathers, children—
love him. And love him they did.
Eastleigh, my father‘s Eastleigh, taught
me how to think about life and death,
about kinship and labor, about cultural
exchange based on mutual reciprocity.
I learned to think about what it meant to
make life, to enable living, to incarnate
promise as, in, and through my father‘s
Somali clients, patients, friends. For me,
the very notion of life and living is
incarnated as Somali.
Eastleigh (1994-1995)
From May 1994 through July 1995, I
worked at the family business, as a lowlevel
clerk. Business is not quite the right
word when one works in and around
medicine: one is confronted with the
quotidian business of life and death, birth
and demise. It was one thing to watch
my father with his clients, patients,
friends; it was another thing to interact
with them in his absence.
Saraba | Issue 13 | Africa 13