Thought for the week: Stanley Chagala Ngesa’s dual heritage
‘Naming her son after the people who had robbed her was an act of unbelievable forgiveness.’
The Maragoli are a Bantu-speaking people who farm the Maragoli Hills in Western Kenya. They have lived in their present location for centuries, they say, after having originally followed the Nile upstream from Egypt.
The Maragoli are also known as the Mulembe people, the Maragoli word for ‘peace’. Their pacifist inclinations were well known throughout East Africa even before the arrival of Quaker missionaries in 1902. As both a fourth-generation Kenyan Quaker and an initiated Maragoli shaman, I have been fascinated by the history of the meeting of these two cultures. Amazingly, as if providentially, they have blended without one erasing the other.
Much of the responsibility for this blending may lie with the extraordinary character of the early Quaker convert Dorika Bweyenda, my great-grandmother and my initiator into the Maragoli shamanic tradition. Dorika was about twenty-nine years old when the missionaries came. Her husband Mmboga was the village shaman, having been trained and initiated by his father, Votega. Mmboga and Dorika were among the first convinced Quakers in the mission.
Long unable to conceive a child, Dorika at last became pregnant on the eve of the first world war. Three months into her pregnancy, Mmboga was conscripted by the occupying British into the King’s African Rifles. Notwithstanding his Maragoli and Quaker pacifist principles, Mmboga, with many other young Maragoli men, was drafted to fight in a war about which he knew nothing. He and the other Maragoli never returned home. To this day, nothing is known about their fate. Had they been British lads killed in action, the Crown would never have allowed their records to be lost, but such was the colonisers’ attitude toward the peoples they had subjugated; they were not seen as fully human.
When Dorika gave birth to her son, my grandfather, in 1914, she named him Ngeresa, ‘English’, after the occupiers who had kidnapped her partner. Naming her son after the people who had robbed her of her husband – and the child’s father – was an act of unbelievable forgiveness. The village elders proposed that she be made the next shaman and she was initiated by Votega.
Dorika lived to be about 110 years old; I was born when she was ninety-two. One day I asked her why she had named my grandfather ‘Ngeresa’. She looked me straight in the eye and answered: ‘As a shaman, I know that no one can crush a person. I gave your grandfather that name to remind myself of that. They took away [my husband’s] body, but his spirit still lives right here, where we are. His spirit lives in me, and’ – she pointed directly at me – ‘his spirit lives in you’.
Stanley is from Pacific Yearly Meeting.
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