Consult God’s instruction and the testimony of warning. If anyone does not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn.

—Isaiah 8:20

I was born in southeastern Kenya into a family of devout Roman Catholics in a rural community of what was then known as Machakos District (now in Makũenĩ County). This is part of what is called Ũkamba—the land of the ethnic Akamba.

My father and paternal grandmother were keen to let me understand that I was a Mũoinĩ by clan, that is to say, a member of the witching clan. Literally, that meant I was a member of a clan of witches. I never understood how come my father—a former Roman Catholic seminarian and one of the most devout men I have ever known—did not see the irony of this. My father was very proud of being a Mũoinĩ, and my grandmother, whose observance of Roman Catholic liturgy and rites made her even more endearing to me, was equally insistent on our not forgetting this.

There was a reason for it. For generations, there had been a schism and a resulting rivalry within the clan. Some called themselves Aoinĩ (plural for Mũoinĩ); whilst the others called themselves Aiĩnĩ (the plainspeople; plural for Mũiĩnĩ). Both sides agreed that one of the two sides was descended from an unmarried daughter who had been banished to the gates of the village for having children out of wedlock. She never got married. But she had many children with many strangers. Because her children had been born to a daughter of the clan, they were accepted but only partially. They were kept at arm’s length. Over time, it was no longer clear who was and wasn’t “descended from the daughter.”

In later life I would wonder what the implications of my being part of the “witching people” might mean. As if to confirm my fears, the “witching people,” also called Mbaa Ndune (that is, the “red people,” so called because of our light complexion), were concentrated in a part of Ũkamba reputed for witchcraft. That was in the neighboring district of Kĩtui (now Kĩtui County). In Kenya the Akamba are feared for their witchcraft. Among the Akamba themselves, it is the people of Kĩtui who are feared for their witchcraft. The majority of my clansmen were from this part of Ũkamba.

My parents belonged to a generation of Africans who had to make the giant transition from the ancient traditions to modern, Christian living. Both of my parents—brilliant pupils and students in their heyday—were schoolteachers and leaders in the church. Both topped their classes for most of the years that they went to school. But they had both been frustrated in their efforts to seek higher education. My father and my mother had also considered becoming a priest and a nun, respectively.

My father had never intended to get married. His desire was to become a priest. However, when his own father died, he was forced to give up school and go home to take care of his mother and three sisters. What is worse, he was illegally dispossessed of his considerable inheritance upon the death of his father. His mother had been the second wife, and his stepbrothers from the other branch of the family dispossessed him. It did not help he was his father’s favorite son.

My father refused to give up on his dream. Using his considerable language skills, he convinced the colonial authorities to give him a tender to provide various supplies to prison camps in the frontier district. From being an impoverished farmhand and living from hand-to-mouth, my father was able to make a small fortune. He became one of the richest men in the frontier district. Others came to him for advice on how to start businesses. But his heart was set on attending seminary and becoming a priest. In those days you had to raise your own school fees to attend seminary. My father had raised enough money by this time to take care of his school fees as well as his mother and three sisters. Leaving the business in the hands of a brother-in-law, he left for seminary.

His time at seminary was short-lived. It turned out his brother-in-law did not have the same business acumen as my father. He ran down the business to the extent that my father, who remained the titular owner of the business, was soon deeply in debt. He had to leave seminary to go home and sort the mess. That is when he became a schoolteacher—partly as a way to raise the funds he needed to repay his debts. At that time, it began to dawn on him that he would not be becoming a priest. He began to look for a wife.

As I have already mentioned, my parents were leading lights in the local Roman Catholic parish. In fact, when my oldest brother died in his infancy, the diocesan bishop came to bury him. This was a big deal. It meant that my parents were held in high regard in the Roman Catholic community. As a parish priest, this same man had joined my parents in matrimony. Because my parents were also pioneer schoolteachers, my family had a special place in the local community. We were expected to behave in a certain way much like the children of a pastor because of our parents’ leadership roles within the church. The pressure was always great and so also were the envy and the bullying at school and elsewhere. I do not know of any of my siblings who were never bullied or otherwise victimized on account of our parents’ social and religious roles.

My father was a well-read man. He loved to read. He never stopped reading. He maintained a small personal library. As the years went by, my mother and older siblings swelled its size.

Among other things, my father’s library contained volumes on the lives of canonized Roman Catholic saints. As a child, I loved to read about the heroic deeds of these great men and women of yore. Later on I would begin to question some of the aspects of the stories. I began to believe some of them may have been embellished. The idea of saints “made in the Vatican” began to bother me the more I read the Bible after converting to Bible-based Christianity in my late teens. However, as a child and an adolescent, I was greatly inspired by the stories of these men and women who defied convention and the very laws of nature in the pursuit of a triumphant faith. In the Name of Jesus, they healed the sick and raised the dead; they conversed with the animals of the field and the birds of the air; they were flayed, burnt at the stake, and quartered in public squares; and they turned the hearts of many toward God.

Many were the times when I sat quietly and reminisced about these wonderful events in a time gone by. I longed to be a hero and a saint like these great men and women. I can still remember one day when, as a child with my little hand in my mother’s own, I went to escort the man who was at the time my favorite Catholic priest. As he spoke with my mother, I looked up into heaven and imagined it opening and angels going up and down a staircase. I was recreating a scene from a story about a saint whose name I now forget. It was not the patriarch Jacob. In my little heart, I earnestly longed to see such things happening to me. I had great faith, the sort children are usually blessed with. In those days I was convinced I would become a Roman Catholic priest like my flesh-and-blood hero: the man who sat on his motorbike speaking with my mother.