Kirinyaga
By Mike Resnick
Published by Blackstone Audio
Read by Paul Michael Garcia
The Book:
I got about halfway through this one before realizing I had probably listened to it before. Then I decided that since I have been relistening to some other titles, I might as well go through this one again and see if my opinions had changed. I think they have.
This is the story of an older man living in Kenya some centuries from now who, in spite of his education at Cambridge and Yale Universities, wants to help settle a new world with his tribe, the Kikuyu, and live in the ancient traditional manner his people lived before European contact. It’s a noble goal, I suppose, but this man, Koriba, is a strict cultural fundamentalist and strives to keep his people on the straight and narrow as their tribe had lived back then. But there are problems he must deal with and a lot of them.
Back in college and grad school I studied Anthropology. Admittedly I specialized in Archaeology, but in most American universities that still means taking a fair number of classes in Cultural and Physical Anthropology and, where I went to school, I was also required to have some credits in Anthropological Linguistics. (As a side note, my favorite class from all my time in school was in my freshman year when I attended a class in Physical Anthropology taught by Dr. Donald Johanson, perhaps best known for his discovery of the Australopithecine afarensis fossil known as “Lucy.” NB: this was shortly before he found Lucy.)
However, while most of my credits were in archaeology classes, I had quite a few in cultural anthropology as well. So, when I first read this book it was as an anthropologist might have. While I did not know very much about the Kikuyu, I understood them in general and when Koriba acted as the mundumugo, which for so-called Europeans meant witch doctor (NB: I was more inclined to translate that as “shaman,” which for the most part does not have the pejorative shadings of “witch doctor.”) I saw him as acting in the role of religious and spiritual leader as well as a healer, However, I could not help, even from the start of the book, but wonder where this was going to go.
Early on, there is a story a precocious young girl in his tribe who finds a wounded bird and begs Koriba to heal that bird. Nothing for nothing is normal in most cultures and to pay for his service Koriba demands that she clean his hut, carry water to it and a variety of other tasks on top of the usual chores she did for her own family. While working in his hut, she finds the computer with which he speaks to “Maintenance,” the agency who makes sure the climate on this new world is to order as well as transporting people to it and off, should they choose to leave. The computer is a voice activated AI and with it she teaches herself to read, something only a few on the world of Kirinyaga are allowed to do, and no women at all are. When Koriba learns this he imposes a punishment and order the computer to no longer communicate with her in “any known language.” The clever young girl invents a language all her own and teaches it to the computer, thereby enabling her to continue learning with it. He eventually catches on and, demands the computer not communicate with her at all. In the meantime the bird she rescued dies (he explains that the bird died because it was no longer able to fly) but her agreement was to serve Koriba for whatever length of time they had agreed to nonetheless and she attempts to honor that agreement, but cut off from the computer and a chance to learn she soon loses the will to live herself and commits suicide.
It may be the most heart-breaking story in the book, but it comes too early to feel it (or too early for me) since I could see this as typical of some cultures similar to the Kikuyu and at the time I read the book, I thought it was a shame that the Kikuyu did not have some sort of accommodation ceremony that would have redefined the young girl and a young boy and thus made her studies acceptable. Such accommodations exist in some cultures, but apparently not the Kikuyu. As I say, it was a shame as I expected Koriba to perform such a ceremony and then take her on as a mundumugu in training.
Indeed, in this book happy endings are few and far between; even the ones that go well turn out to be at the cost of grave damage to the people, but the final straw for Koriba comes when the other stop fearing him and his “magic” and start asking Maintenance to heal their injuries and fix other problems. The issue here is that, according to Koriba, they had come to this world to live a distinctly and historically accurate Kikuyu way of life. However, along the way we learn that they never really have (for example, before European contact, indeed, before the Maumau Uprising, the Kikuyu had not lived in villages – that villages were the “Europeans’ way of dealing with them after the troubles).
Eventually Koriba decides that he too must leave Kirinyaga as it is no longer the Utopia he had sought to establish there and he returns disillusioned by what has happened to Kenya on Earth. This hardly ends his personal problems, but you can read the epilogue for yourselves. But I will say that I would have expected that man as well-educated as Koriba was should have realized that no culture is stagnant so long as it is still alive. Even in isolation, and Kirinyaga’s isolation was far from perfect, things will change, people will find new ways of doing things. They might go long time between changes but changes will come nonetheless.
Koriba had a picture in his mind as to what a perfect Kikuyu world might look like but it was one that was stagnated in a fictional “Anthropological Present.” For those who have not had an anthropology class, we generally learn from various studies and ethnographies which, in turn are snapshots of individual cultures at a specific time. When discussing those cultures we frequently do so in the present tense as though nothing has changed there since the people were studied. In truth these cultures almost always demonstrate changes over time, sometimes slowly but frequently very rapidly, but unless a follow up study is done we will still discuss them as we found them in the ethnographies. We know things have changed since then, but the point is to understand such cultures as they were at the time of the study. If a follow-up is done we will study that too and compare the results, but sometimes all we have is the initial study which is still a valid picture of a people at a specific point in time… just don’t depend on it as you might a tourist brochure should you happen to be in that part of the world anytime these days.
Koriba, therefore was trying to impress his own anthropological present on the people of his world. I found myself wondering toward the end where these mostly illiterate people had come from. All the original settlers had arrived at the same time Koriba had and while some had, indeed, died since then, it seemed to me that there were still quite a few who remembered living on Earth in Kenya, and yet none of them, except for Koriba, seems to ever say anything indicating they remember why they left. The next generation were still very young when thy left and the even younger people had never known life elsewhere, but there were still enough who should have remembered and compared what they had here to what they had on Earth.
Sure, anyone who was dissatisfied could leave Kirinyaga whenever they liked, but I got the impression that we saw the few who did in the various stories. Oh well, it is fiction after all, and maybe we’re only hearing about some of Koriba’s problems.
So, is it a good book? I have read the reviews of others and seen both raves and complaints. Most o the complaints were that Mike Resnick was too in love with all things African. However, while I took great exception to Koriba and many of his decisions as to how to handle the various issues he faced, I fully understood why he behaved the way he did and that he truly believed the world of Kirinyaga could be the Kikuyu Utopia. My complaints, therefore, are not about Resnick’s writing which, I think, is pretty good, but with Koriba and his faulty belief that he and he alone knew what would make his people the happiest and his indomitable inflexibility in how that might be achieved.
I think Resnick accurately showed that the concept of Utopia is fleeting at best and one which is bound to evolve and change even as the people living in such a system do as well.
The Audiobook:
I am not sure how I acquired this edition. It is no longer available on the Blackstone Audio website, but I think I prefer the way Paul Michael Garcia reads it to the recording by Janis Ian available from Audible. Not that I am criticizing Ian’s reading. I have not listened to all of it. I just like Garcia’s way to reading to what I have heard of Ian’s. He just sounds more like an old man with a high-level education, trying to act like a shaman.
So, the book had it’s highs, but I felt more lows as I went from siding, at first, with Koriba to understanding while not agreeing with his decisions to seeing he was complete wrong and all too out of touch with the reality he was living in. I do not mean he was insane, not by a long shot, but in total denial of any mistakes he made and just irrational enough to think he could impress his lifestyle on everyone else, whether on Kirinyaga or back in Kenya. I did enjoy the reading of it, however.
Next: Time to start reading the Murderbot Diaries in All Systems Red by Martha Wells
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