Kenyan journalist Irungu Thatiah starts his latest book Hard Tackle: The Life of Uhuru Kenyatta with the words, “It was a glorious sunny Saturday afternoon. Sporadic showers of rain and wafting beams had been competing for space in the city for three days. At the Bomas of Kenya, it was raining nerves.

Whatever was happening in this city in the sun was no laughing matter. Men of good sense had lost their reason, the strong ones had made weak moves, and those who should have known better swore they didn’t know what was happening. The minutes crawled slower than glue, the seconds at the speed of snails.”

Kenyans were waiting for the 2013 presidential election results. There is a great deal of controversy over Irungu’s memoir. Some politicians and their advisers are complaining that he “misrepresented” facts.

Social scientists argue that reality is sometimes a construct of the mind. A political adviser may consider their boss a genius, and a biographer may see the subject as a cold, calculating political animal. The political adviser would then probably complain that his boss is being painted in negative light. However, it could be a simple issue of semantics and different versions of reality.

In his memoir No Easy Day: The Navy Seal Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden, American Navy Seal Mark Owen writes about a daring and dangerous special operation mission. The reader feels as if they are with the Navy Seals as they swoop down in their helicopters into the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. The memoir takes readers through experiences they may never go through high adventure, or cold blooded murder.

Some biographers tell outright lies, and sometimes they are crucified for telling the truth and showing the wrinkles of their subjects. Autobiographies are usually sanitised because naturally people don’t paint themselves in a negative light knowing that they will be read for many years to come as their legacy.

In Bill Clinton’s, My Life, the Monica Lewinsky affair was mentioned in just a few lines. However, some biographers have written volumes about Bill Clinton’s alleged misadventures with the White House intern.

Memoirs are controversial and Thatiah has waded into a minefield, but he should be commended for his courage.

As New Yorker writer Daniel Mendelsohn wrote, “Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness; memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction)—spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends—motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the centre of attention.

Even when the most distinguished writers and thinkers have turned to autobiography, they have found themselves accused of literary exhibitionism — when they can bring themselves to put on a show at all”.

However, even for all the bashing of the genre, we need memoirs. It has always amazed me why great men and women in Kenya do not write their own stories and control their narratives. However, when someone else does, with great difficulty because it’s hard to gather personal information, the same people complain that their personal stories were not told as they should have been. Who else can tell his own story than our presidents, governors and leaders.

US President Barack Obama, long before he ran for the presidency, wrote Dreams from My Father. In that book, Obama laid it as bare as he could, warts and all; even saying that he once smoked (and inhaled!) marijuana. When the Republicans tried to use the warts to draw a negative narrative, it wouldn’t stick because it was he had already written about it. If Obama hadn’t written the book, the Republican propaganda against him could have scared many more voters away!

Perhaps politicians should hire writers they can narrate their stories to, so that voters can see their human side.
If politicians don’t want to read other people’s versions of their own lives, let them give us their stories.

The writer is the CEO of Phoenix Publishers. [email protected]