Kiheenda Muoyo [Worries of the Heart] is a historical gift-book to Logooli Community.

Kenda Mutongi is a gifted story teller. In her book, Worries of the heart (2007), she breathes new life into the way we marry indigenous knowledge with academic dig ups. Her Maragoli storying refrain, “worries of the heart”, capitalizing on widows, to someone who was reading the book in Ululogooli (advantaged with the plot in mind), creates a new thinking where native knowledge, in different lights, births understanding from which our lives in general can be reflected and be bettered.

pic: Lung'afa at Saniaga Home. The book is a gift from Andiah Kisia from Kidundu (now in USA)

In 1995 when Mutongi was sitting down with respondents, my grandmother was only 3 years a widow. Having been married to an ideal Quakerman, my grandfather, she would have been an equally resourceful respondent to Mutongi’s questioning. For many years she served at church and till today, she carries that virgin hope of a saviour in heaven, praying all time. What would be like had the missionaries never stepped on our land?

These, as Mutongi’s, are the works we applaud. Her sacrifice to secure the tales and knowledge for us adds to the needed collection of Logooli history and documentation, much necessary for our self-introspect. A blog post as this is to keep the discussion on, appreciating the efforts and knowledge 

Speaking of widows, 34 years later, alive and well, Guuku has more than enough from any widow’s mouth. She may not have gone through the public ‘worrying of the heart themes’ that Mutongi writes, but she has nonetheless had lots of hearty worries (viheenda muoyo) if I am to document her right.  

Mutongi writes how Logooli widows courted and even beat the system in colonial and post-colonial times. They had the patriarchy work for them in cases of raising their children and having their rights as inheritance. In their worries of the heart they went on with life, like others, raising able children like the famous Yohana Amugune.

Yet they keep losing in the long-run, these Logooli widows. Or is it a survival claim? For Mutongi finishes the book with a statement, “No matter who was making the decisions, the widows of Maragoli paid dearly”. Has my grandmother won and lost? 

The book swiftly searches the widow’s children, their education, discipline, growth and maturity. It also gets to their deaths, where widows lose abundantly when sons could not live to expectations or GBS daughters discontinue being their bread winners after a gold-dig at cash bride-price. For when her first daughter-in-law died in 2002, a favourite son (materialled) in 2002, another favourite (last born) in 2007 and another in 2011 (somehow favourite), my grandmother was joined in family by 3 widows and 1 widower. In 2020 her step son, elder to all also died. For the latter, her heart may have been hardened by Viheenda mioyo unlike in 2007, when her last-born, barely 40, left 5 infants. 

The book has its limits because it just stopped with widows and their marriageable daughters and sons. In late 1980’s and 1990’s, after Gold Mines, Kenya African Rifles and Civil Servants stealing sons from widows, an ugly disease was spreading its jaws to the very hearts that these Logooli women worried for. More widows were birthed, widowed grandmothothers forced to worry more, as a result of HIV/AIDS.  Whose tales would keep Mutongi less hearing if colonial days were better or not, a sub-theme of the book.

Taking care of grandchildren by widows is not included in Mutongi’s Kiheenda muoyo. Today, many adults, not necessarily of widowed mothers, attest to having been raised by their grandmothers. With no public spaces where grandmothers can pour their appeals, their suffering in seeing that little grandchildren grow responsibly and get educated must have weighed heavily on them. I have cousins who look at Guuku Edani as more of their mother than their mothers. 

If Mutongi gave room to two more pages of only pictures we would have benefited from much, top of widows in their worries. The few images well illustrated the traditional houses and dress-codes. Did she not come across Christian villages images (ziliini) that we wish to see how they looked? Or what about the capturing of the letter referred to on page 175 (as done by documenting widow’s  songs on pages 34, 38 and 92) that would assist in Ululogooli language study, “Writing in some of the best Luragoli I have ever read, Mise told Kibisu that she had been widowed for six years and no one was helping her with her kehenda mwoyo.”