I always wondered where my father got endless materials to talk to us for hours throughout our lives. Now I know. It was a full life well lived, with all its pain, joy, frustration, success, failure, places he had been, people he had met and what he learnt from all that.
He was preparing us for life. Real life, not the utopia we envisioned in our young minds after reading “Mills and Boon”, “Sydney Sheldon” and “Danielle Steel” novels. We had not yet been to the places he talked about and we had not yet met the kind of people he had, but his talks were a warning shot into our future. He was letting us know that life will take us to similar places and we will meet similar kind of people like those he already met in his life. They may have different names, but those human characteristics he experienced, we were going to meet them too in our own lives, so we better be prepared.
And just as our father told us, we have met those people and we have been to those happy places and the dark scary places he talked to us about. We are still experiencing all that, only difference is that, we are not shocked because our father shared his experiences, preparing us to meet the good, the bad and the ugly. For that I am eternally grateful to my father.
I know what the sharing of his words of wisdom has done for our lives, and that is why I purposed myself to do the same for my children and anybody else who cares to listen.
Was my father the greatest of all time? Is that the reason I want his wisdom passed down to future generations? I will tell you here and now. My father was not any greater than the hundreds of thousands of fathers just like him, who lived a selfless, fearless life, laying their lives down for a country they loved so much, they were ready to die to liberate it or die trying. I know those fathers are out there, or they were, before they took their eternal rest, and majority of you reading this were raised by one just like mine. I have the opportunity to talk about mine and I know I speak for many.
I did not start out thinking my parents were great or they had anything important to say. But with the passage of time, experience in my growing years taught me and confirmed exactly what my parents had so desperately tried to teach us, but we took them for granted. Experience is the best teacher, and experience builds on itself, consolidating into wisdom, that finally points you back to the great wisdom you heard from your parents and teachers. That is the point when you confirm and shout to the world how great your parents are, or sometimes sadly, how great they were. When you get to that point, you do not wish the lessons taught by them going to waste. That is why you want to hand down those lessons, even to a reluctant generation. We think its hard talking to our DotCom generation. Think about this for a moment. Our parents were illiterate or semi illiterate. They had every reason to feel intimidated by our education and high profile jobs and the good living that came with it. But they did not shy away from talking to us. They sat us down every opportunity they got and hammered common sense and life lessons to us, as highly educated and sophisticated we thought we were. We were born in an independent country, rendering their struggles irrelevant to our lives. But they made them relevant and applicable to our current lives and into the future, whatever it will look like. Their struggle to free the country will forever be relevant if we are to stand proudly as a nation, value and guard jealously the freedoms and peace they fought so hard to achieve. Our failure to recognize those attributes is what will leave us vulnerable to loosing those vital foundations of our country’s independence, to an eventual collapse of the nation. Does any of us wish that for our children and the future generations? Their only weapon is knowledge of the history of their country and the struggles of their forefathers. Their forefathers did their part by telling us the story of the struggle for independence. If that story is not told to our children for them to carry it into the future, then we will have not only failed our parents, but our children and future generations. Lets start talking. Lets hold our “Kamukunji’s” any way we can to keep this story alive and relevant. Our parents were / are great. Let us be greater, so our children can be the greatest. In that way, we will know the future our parents dreamed for our country will endure for centuries to come.
