“A sack of coffee beans felt heavy on Kinoti’s shoulders in that scorching Monday afternoon. The earthen road was like the middle of his mother’s three cooking stones. Kinoti cursed under his breath. His jigger-infested feet burned too from the recent encounter with his classmates …” This is the beginning of the story of The Line of One, narrated in the characteristic moving style of Anne Kajuju Ikiara, the author who brought to you the tale of The Humanitarian Lynching Tree. At a glance, you will see the beginning of the outline of a proverbial rags-to-riches tale fashioned in post-independence African cultural ambience. But this one glance is just a slit portal to a riveting epic that spans generations of two feuding clans whose divide and antagonism comes into vivid play in two families in the aftermath of the colonial departure from Kenya.
Kinoti here is a standard five pupil caught in the tangles of poverty and torture in a home being run, or could we say, on the verge of being run down, by an extremely abusive and alcoholic father, a member of the Kiruma, an Ameru clan, that is staunchly rooted in the traditional way of life and very much averse to change, especially to education and anything Western as being propagated by the newly established African government. Kinoti, an only male child in his family, even at this stage, must toil under the sweltering heat and other dire conditions on daily basis to help his mother feed the family – his father, herself, Kinoti himself and his two sisters – as well as to support himself in school.
The owner of the coffee bag that Kinoti is carrying to the factory during the school lunch break, as well as the owner of a neighbouring wealthy homestead that Kinoti toils on daily basis even when school is in session to earn a living, is the rich, well-educated and prosperous businessman, Gitonga. Gitonga despite being of the same traditional Kiruma clan, had long rebelled against his own mother to marry an educated girl from the other side of the feud, the Abothina clan. Yes, Kiruma and Abothina clans do not mingle or even intermarry. Gitonga’s wife is Kinoti’s teacher, and the couple have been blessed with, or we can still say, if we allow the belief of the Kiruma clan, the couple have been cursed with a one daughter, the beautiful Kiende, the curse of the line of one, for his rebellion to marry an uncircumcised, educated woman from the Abothina “clan of witches”.
The Gitonga’s aside, the conflict in young Kinoti’s family, between himself and his cruel alcoholic father pushes Kinoti into rebellion until he discover a family secret that comes to open his mind and change his heart as well as his attitude against his father, but will this amend the ills of the time?
It is in this backdrop that this narrative is set. But as the story picks up, the reader is soon opened up into a very romantic tale of love and rebellion like it has never been told in any African cultural settings. More lines of one will soon sprout even as the families and clans involved get deep into dirty, bareknuckle battles, drawing into the crucible the whole community as well as the administration of the time, which is seen to be sympathetic to the ways of the white man.
As the line of one replicates itself in the next generation, and a new battleground opens abroad, far away from the country, more issues will come into play and take the form of alienation, racism, temptations, drug abuse, violence, betrayal. And the battleground will shift back in the country, as the characters take the reader into a thrilling, movie-like suspense; with police chase, the courts, prisons and remand centres, prisons break, and back to prison, until the survival of the family line appears to hang in the balance.
On the positive note, and that’s when this tale becomes significant, the story of love and romance will triumph – a thrilling great cost. But, equally riveting, it will put to test the continuity of the family. Will the line of one survive and triumph?
