AND THEN THEY SAID THAT I WAS MAD ..... EPISODE 6

AND THEN THEY SAID THAT I WAS MAD

PART SIX

By Njonjo Mue

The journey so far…

At the end of SEASON ONE, I had just miraculously gotten a job in November 1992 upon my discharge from hospital. This marked an important milestone as I thought I had finally overcome depression. Indeed, my doctor herself told me during one of the review visits to her clinic that I had made a remarkable recovery.

But what I could not have known at the time was that what I had was not really simple depression, but bipolar disorder, and that my remarkable recovery was just part of the journey out of the valley of despair before ascending the mountains of mania.

SEASON TWO will tell of my life on these mountains. But first, let's fill in this break by going back to a time before Oxford.

PREQUEL ONE

WAY BACK WHEN LIFE WAS NORMAL

Long before I went to Law School, I knew that I did not want to practice law. Please don’t get me wrong. I am not one of those kids whose parents forced them to do a particular subject. I was passionate about studying law. I just did not want to practice it in our courts.

My first exposure to the courts and our criminal justice system was when I was in lower Primary School. My elder brother, Mwaura, together with his best friend Peter, often got themselves into trouble with the law. My parents and elder siblings being too busy with work and school, I was usually the one dispatched to the Thika courthouse to listen in on their case and bring back a report as to how much fine they would have to pay. My brother Kamau would then go and pay the fine to secure my brother’s freedom.

Even at that early stage, I could notice how the system worked against the poor who were being processed like meat on a conveyer belt without due regard to a proper delivery of justice.

And then there was the case of Frank Sandstrom. In 1980 when I was in Standard 7, this American sailor was arrested in Mombasa and charged with killing a Kenyan girl, Monica Njeri who was alleged to have been a sex worker. He was prosecuted in record time by an all white court – White Magistrate, White Prosecutor and white defence lawyer. Within two days, a verdict had been delivered and the sailor handed over to his mother to take him back home to America. The sentence? A fine of KSh. 500. Five hundred shillings for taking a human life!

By this time, I had come to realise that our courts were little more than bastions of injustice and that things needed to change. And despite my passion for the law, I couldn’t contribute to that change by practicing in the same courts.

By the time I was approaching the end of my degree programme at the University of Nairobi early 1990, I had made up my mind that the only way to escape the corridors of injustice and yet make a contribution using the law as a tool for social change was to acquire a graduate degree.

I knew I could not, for the life of me, raise the money to support myself through graduate school, and so acquiring a graduate degree was fully dependent on obtaining a full scholarship. I really wanted to go to America. Therefore, shortly after I graduated from Parklands Campus in early 1990, I visited the offices of American Cultural Centre at the back of the National Bank Building and obtained the addresses of close to 100 universities and colleges in all the 50 states.

I wrote the same letter of inquiry to each of them seeking to know if they had a graduate law programme and also if they offered any form of financial assistance. I got all sorts of responses – we do not have a law programme; we do not have a graduate programme; we do not have financial aid for foreign students; we are a women only college.

In the end, my earnest prayer to enroll for a graduate programme was answered in an unexpected way.

In June 1990, as I was receiving this string of bad news from the US, I chanced upon an advert in the Daily Nation inviting applications for the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. England was really not my first choice for studies, but what harm would it do to try? I knew it was a long shot. There was only one Rhodes Scholarship offered annually. But I also knew that if the servants at the wedding in Cana of Galilee had not filled the jars with water, the Master would have had nothing to turn into wine. And so, I still put in my application.

In mid-November, I received an invitation to interview for the Scholarship on December 6 at the boardroom of Hamilton, Harrison and Matthews Advocates in ICEA Building, where the Secretary of the Selection Panel, JDM Sylvester was Senior Partner. The day after the interview, at the Library of Kaplan & Stratton Advocates where I was doing my pupillage, I received a letter informing me that I had been elected Rhodes Scholar for Kenya for 1991.

I also received that year’s Oxford University prospectus, which contained pristine pictures of the colleges taken during various seasons of the year. Some looked like modern day postcards, others like paintings straight out of Victorian England.

I could hardly believe that soon, I would be calling this place home as I immersed myself in learning with all this history standing in silent witness, cheering me on to a future that could only be destined for greatness.

I could already see myself walking or riding my bicycle along these old beautiful streets amid the famous dreaming spires of Oxford. During warmer weather, I would be punting along the River Isis, with newly acquired friends from diverse countries, and eating strawberries and cream as we watched cricket (which I now determined to learn how to watch), and generally having a grand time, both working hard and playing hard. I could hardly wait for this new season of my life to start. I was elated.

Elated.

Yes, I knew what that word meant at the time, before the switch responsible for regulating my moods was apparently permanently switched off at the onset my bipolar diagnosis. After this, I had to navigate my way through life, aided by medicines, always second-guessing my moods.

In those days, I was able to experience the whole range of human emotions that normal people do – happiness and sadness, frustration and anger, fear and anxiety. I was able to understand the causes and effects of these emotions and, more importantly, I knew how to handle them.

But that was way back when life was normal.