My mum’s friend Annah, a wonderful singer, had sung to me while I was in the womb. She had held my mum’s stomach and said, ‘This child is going to be great.’ My mum and dad named me Annah after her and this was later changed to Anne. My African name is Naliaka, which means ‘born during the weeding season’.
The language spoken in the village is Luhya, which is also the name of a big tribe in the region. My family belongs to the Bukusu clan, a section of the Luhya tribe.
I’m the fourth born of eight. First came Alice, then Kennedy, Jane, me, Evans and Victoria, who are twins, Goddard and Geoffrey. I also have three step-siblings, Irene, Melvin and Arthur. Kennedy, my oldest brother, was named after the US President Kennedy. My dad said he hoped he would rise up and be at least as great as Kennedy. Evans’ middle name is Lincoln, after Abraham Lincoln, and Victoria was named after Queen Victoria. Geoffrey was named after Geoffrey De Freitas, a British ambassador who became a Labour MP. Goddard was named after a British judge my dad admired.
My dad started life as a Muslim, Athumani Wafula, but later converted to Christianity and changed his name to George Paul. He is a very well-educated man and has always had a mind wide open to new challenges and ideas. He has always understood the possibilities the world holds for his children and has pushed us to strive to be the best we can possibly be. He admires the British way of doing things and is very well read in British and American history. He is a very fair, loving and upstanding man. I couldn’t wish for better.
When I was born he was a warrant officer in the Kenyan African Rifles and it was more than a month before he was able to return home to see me.
‘I was hoping for a son,’ he said, grinning and looking lovingly into my eyes. ‘But I’m just as happy to have a girl. She’s so beautiful.’
‘Yes, this one is the strongest of all our babies,’ my mum said proudly.
My mum was called Nekesa Ruth. Nekesa means ‘born during the harvesting season’. With Kenyan names, people can roughly guess when your birthday is.
My mother’s parents were very devout Quakers. My mum herself was a friendly and generous person and also strikingly beautiful. My dad often tells me that he fell in love with her as soon as he saw her and asked her parents there and then if he could marry her.
Our home was simple, but to us it was beautiful. The floor and walls were made of mud and cow dung, and a certain type of reed that grew near the river made a cool and shady roof. We had five rooms, so it was quite a grand place by village standards. We had no electricity, but used kerosene lamps to read by in the evening. Our entertainment was a radio and a battery-operated record player. We listened to Voice of Kenya, which began its broadcasts at 5.55 every morning.
My dad played lots of old Motown records and early James Brown. I still remember my older brother and sisters and my cousins wearing bell bottoms and platforms in an attempt to look like the singers on the record covers and dancing to the soul routines. We younger ones weren’t allowed to join in, but we used to peep through the door, enviously looking at them having fun. We would also make up words in Swahili that sounded about the same as the English words.
Life in the village was very traditional, with people looking after their animals and cultivating small pieces of land. A father would share his land with his sons and it would be passed down the generations. At that time people grew just enough food to feed their families and took very little to market to sell. But now things are slowly starting to change. Increasingly, sugarcane is grown to sell because it fetches a good price. My dad used to grow maize, cassava, potatoes and bananas, but now he, too, is growing sugarcane.
When I was a child, food was always plentiful because my mum and my grandmother were out working hard in the fields. Any surplus was given to our neighbours. Sharing, especially of food, is a concept deeply ingrained in African life.
Water was collected from the river in a very organised way. There was one part of the river where the water was pure enough for drinking and another part where clothes were washed and the animals would drink. It’s the same today.
When I was born many children in the village didn’t go to school. But for my dad education was a priority. He had trained as a teacher before he joined the army and he valued learning for its own sake as well as a passport to a better life. ‘Education is the key to everything,’ he would often say, and he encouraged all of us to learn at every opportunity.
He also loved imparting knowledge to me and my brothers and sisters. He used to read a lot and was particularly impressed with the history of ancient Greece and the strength of its people. He explained to us that all the strong sportspeople used to gather at Mount Olympus. Because I was such a strong and healthy child when I was born, he gave me Olympia as a middle name. He thought this would suit me. Even as a small baby, if I kicked against his stomach when he picked me up, he said he could really feel the power of my foot.
‘Olympia is a good name for you,’ he told me. ‘You are going to be a very strong and special girl. I believe you will achieve great things.’
Tradition was a very important part of life for our clan, as it is to this day. Bukusus believe in many things that Westerners would find strange. Most of the people who have never been to school believe in black magic. They call it ‘African science’. When someone has died mysteriously, people say, ‘Oh, we think African science was involved.’
When I was just a few months old, the women from our family went out to our farm. It was the harvesting season, Nekesa. My mum placed me carefully under the shade of a tree on an animal skin and some cloth. A little while later she came to check on me and screamed in horror: a black mamba was coiled around me.
These snakes are common in our village. Once my grandmother walked all the way back from the bush to the village with one wrapped in her bundle of firewood. She felt something tapping her on the back and thought it was one of the branches, but when she got home she discovered it was in fact a lethal snake. She carefully unloaded her bundle and called on someone in the village to kill the snake.
Faced with a snake wrapped around her precious baby, my mum fell to her knees and, with tears rolling down her cheeks, started begging the snake, ‘Please leave my child alone.’
My grandmother walked up calmly and hushed her. ‘This snake would have killed the baby by now if that’s what it wanted to do,’ she said quietly. She started praying softly and whispering something under her breath. The snake was obviously listening, because it lazily uncoiled itself and slithered away, leaving me unharmed. The tree where I lay is still there today.
At the time there was an old woman in the village who had a reputation as a witch, and the villagers started whispering that she had sent the snake to curse me because she was envious of my strength and beauty. No one could understand how I had survived such a thing unscathed.
In many ways I was a very lucky child. I was happy, lively, healthy, tall for my age and by the time I was nine months old I was already running around. Unlike my brothers and sisters, I’d never even needed to have any herbs gathered in the bush and boiled to cure various ills. In the first two-and-a-half years of my life, as I scampered around energetically on the soft earth, exploring my village and learning new words every day, none of us had any idea of the shadow that was about to descend.
Chapter Two The Day My Life Changed
I was too young to remember what happened next, but my family have told me the terrible story many times. As swiftly as a rainy season downpour drenches the earth, my happy, carefree life in the village ended.
My dad was away trying to stop the Shiftas, Somalian bandits, from crossing the border into Kenya and stealing