Depending on what you read, books make us smarter. They help us recognise familiar patterns before we become trapped by them. [iStockphoto]
It is said that in every village there is a madman. Well, I know we should be sensitive and treat mentally challenged people more empathetically, but we are yet to turn that corner as a society.
Indeed, there is a popular story in Kenyan politics, popularised by a famous politician, about a madman who found another man bathing in a river. It so happened that the man bathing in the river had left his clothes on the riverbank. On seeing the madman wearing his clothes, the man bathing in the river hopped out of the water and chased the madman all the way to the market, where people, mouths agape, saw not a madman being chased by another man whose clothes he had stolen. The crowd saw instead a madman chasing another man. The story, often but erroneously attributed to a Kenyan politician, actually appears in Chinua Achebe's Girls at War and Other Stories, a collection of short stories.
I found myself thinking about this story in a week when a debate on our poor reading culture was touched off by my literary psychoanalysis teacher, Prof Egara Kabaji, who writes the column across the page spread. It is unfortunate that we still associate reading widely, especially reading fiction, with elitist affectations.
In high school, there was that odd boy who sported an afro, walked at what we would call an academic angle and always clutched a voluminous novel. When schools closed, you would see the young man, usually in the company of a college girl, speaking a lot of English, the voluminous novel tucked somewhere on his person and an air of exaggerated self-importance completing the picture. I came to realise that such people carried books around for show and never really read.
Reading, however, was for us not something for the world outside to acknowledge or be wowed by. Indeed, we never initially read books that you would associate with academics or highbrow literature. That came much later in life. Those who started out reading The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew for boys and girls respectively will admit that these kinds of books made one feel extremely street smart.
When we graduated to James Hadley Chase, Sidney Sheldon and Robert Ludlum, we really felt like world-beating sleuths out to save the world. I remember reading a collection of stories entitled Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection, edited by Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert. It had stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Morrison, Grant Allen and Ernest Bramah, among others. After reading the book I felt drawn to a career among those who have now come to be associated with Subarus, balaclavas and masked registration plates. All this after reading only one book borrowed from an uncle who was then a young but senior police officer.
Books are that powerful. Psychologically, I have come to appreciate that we do not like works of fiction because we want to sound “all of a sudden very clever”, as some recently highly hubristic Kenyan politicians would put it. Neither do we read widely because someone is watching or praising us for it.