When he was a toddler in the early 1950s, Pius Kamau recounts in his lyrical new memoir Running with Lions, one of his aunts died in childbirth in their Kenyan village. Kamau was too young to understand death, but deeply connected with his mother's grief.
My friend Kamau’s desire to be a doctor was born then, and later nourished when he saw the respect his father gained when he came home from the big city of Mombasa with antibiotic pills he used to cure neighbors' ailments.
I’ve found Kamau’s sensitivity in the work of other doctors who also are writers – among my favorites are Nawal El Saadawi of Egypt, Walker Percy of the United States and Anton Chekhov of Russia, the latter likely everyone’s favorite. In reading the memoir of a physician-author I happen to know, I considered the healing power of story.
Before racist colonial rule ended in Kenya in 1963, most Black Kenyans could not aspire to be doctors. But the elder Kamau, a laborer, regularly visited a friend who worked as an orderly at the hospital designated for Black patients in Mombasa, and both carefully observed what the doctors and nurses did there.
In his memoir, the younger Kamau shows how the scientific observation gives a writer what is needed to envelop the reader, engaging all the senses.
When Kamau was about four years old, his father, convinced that education is the key to his son’s future, brought him to Mombasa to attend school. Father and son start out for Mombasa from their village on foot, and later board a bus, then a train.
“With excitement, I look out of the window, unable to sleep as the train winds its way across the African savanna like a long, steel snake,” Kamau writes. “The head of the imagined snake is some distance from where I stand, and its tail is far to the rear. What if the head snaps off and leaves the rest of us behind? I wonder. The engine’s acrid, black smoke is blown back at us in gales. The distinct smell of a mechanical engine is the smell of civilization.”
In an earlier passage, Kamau describes his mother fording a raging river with him on her back. They both would have drowned had she slipped. She focused not on the danger, but on her goal of harvesting food for her family in fields beyond the river.
Kamau pursues the education that his father, who works in Mombasa loading and unloading goods onto trains, wants for him. And, time after time, Kamau follows his mother’s example, even as his goals become more ambitious.
Over a catfish sandwich at a soul food restaurant in Denver, where Kamau now lives, he joked to me that his memoir is about the "challenge of getting an education when they're trying to kill you."
"They" include British soldiers suspicious he might be a rebel, and racist Arabs in Sudan who keep him from reaching the Russian Embassy in Khartoum. He had hoped to secure a scholarship to Moscow's Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, named for the Congolese premier who was assassinated in 1961.
“They” also are leopards. The first time Kamau encountered a feline predator in the wild, he was with his mother, who cautions him to “never show a wild animal you are afraid,” and slowly pulls him to safety.
I saw in Running with Lions similarities to Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s autobiographical novel L'Aventure ambiguë. Kane is another young man who set out from Africa to study in Europe. His book, published in 1961, a year after Senegal’s independence from France, is a mournful and philosophical interrogation of all that colonialism and racism stripped from Africa.
As I read my East African friend’s memoir published 65 years after L'Aventure ambiguë, I wondered what the West African would have made of how much remained the same. But I found hope in the legacy of resilience to which Kamau is heir.
The Senegalese Kane references Socrates, Pascal, Descartes, Shakespeare and Nietzsche, but also the 15th century Malian historian Mahmoud al-Kati and, above all, the Quran. Kane’s hero Samba Diallo, closely modeled on the author, brings a sophisticated understanding of religion to his studies of philosophy at the Sorbonne.
The adventure of Kane’s novel is intellectual, contrasting with the action of Kamau’s Running with Lions. Kane contemplates loss. Kamau is focused on the future and the possibilities brought by liberation from colonialism, though he is clear-eyed about the challenges.
Kamau told me he was unfamiliar with Kane’s work. Kamau, after all, had a colonial education in Kenya, which shows in references in his memoir to such Western writers as Chaucer, Tennyson and Shakespeare. The French West Indian Franz Fanon gets a mention, but not Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o who, like Kamau, is Kikuyu, or other African writers such as Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.
Much of Kamau's memoir takes place in Europe. Kamau ended up studying medicine in Spain, not Russia, and traveled and worked in France and the United Kingdom.
In the United Kingdom, Kamau describes in his memoir, he is invited to a holiday meal at which his host insists on the erroneous narrative that colonists found vast unpopulated land to improve in Africa and left the continent better than they found it.
Kamau did not argue. Instead, he writes, "Most of what I do is listen, for it is through observation that I survive. And I never lose sight of my goal: I am here to learn."
Senegalese Kane’s L'Aventure ambiguë also has a pivotal scene at dinner in the West. In his book it is a French host with firm ideas about what Africa lacks. Kane’s hero does not keep silent. He declares, that “if I were in charge of my country, I would accept your doctors and engineers only with great reluctance, and I don't know if I wouldn't have fought them off at first sight.”
Anger and anguish roil behind the impassivity Kamau cultivates. He has been shaped by a history of British soldiers torturing and killing Kikuyu and other freedom fighters.
After he returned from Spain, Kamau heard Jomo Kenyatta, who had become prime minister at independence in 1963, deliver a speech in "a booming, well-fed voice to the emaciated people who are so hungry for good news. He tells them that they are free, now that the devil white man has relinquished his grip on power. Freedom is in the air they breathe, the soil they till, the trees about them, and the rivers they drink from."
Kamau had been treating impoverished patients -- among them a veteran of the war against the empire who was castrated by English soldiers and feels forgotten by Kenyatta -- at a neglected provincial hospital. He listened to Kenyatta with the same silence he'd maintained in Europe. Then he kept moving.
Kamau ends Running with Lions by telling readers that after ethnic rivalries kept him from advancing in Kenya, he went to the United States, where he practiced as a surgeon for three decades in the Denver area.
This physician-memoirist also became a novelist and a columnist on such subjects as higher education and opportunities for minorities.
And he remains concerned with the persistence of injustice in the world. He is co-founder of the Africa America Higher Education Partnership, which matches African women pursuing graduate degrees in technology and science with research institutions and individual researchers in Ph.D programs around the world.
Perhaps the young women he connects to mentors and opportunities remind him of his mother, who gave him his first life lessons.