CONFUSED IDENTITY

It was a tough time for my mum when I was born. My father had just entered the club of polygamous men. It was on 10th August 1992. My name was to be Dickson Anyumba, a name I was christened after a famous man in the village who was a civil servant and had just passed away. Actually, that name still exist to date and am sometimes referred that way by some people in the village. My father, being a scholar and a lover of politics, and having gone through a collage at the Mombasa polytechnic which is now Technical University of Mombasa (TUM), knew this great United State of America ambassador to Kenya, Mr Smith Hempstone, he used to be very common in Mombasa at that time when dad was at the collage. The late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was a very good friend of Mr Smith Hempstone by then and my father, having possessed the name Oginga, became a great fan of Mr Smith Hempstone. When I was born, my father was not at home. He came after I have been given a name. Being the man of the house and having the supreme authority over mum and the entire family, he refuted the name Dickson and demanded that I be named Hempstone. That is how I possessed that name. My uncle the late Mr William Okoth was a brother and a good friend of my father. I do hear that he was a man of honor and was well respected and loved by the entire villagers. He died five years before I was born and my aunties, due to the love they had for their brother, they persuaded my father to name me after him. Mr William was alcoholic and used to boast a lot like many Luos do. He used to call Himself “Away Man”, Aman who is coming from far. To this date many people do commonly call me Away Man or William Okoth. My sir name has remained to be Hempstone while a few people also still believe that am Dickson Anyumba and they call me that way. The reason why I have tried to explain the origin of the different names that I possess is because as a young boy, I was very confused and had serious difficulty in knowing who I was because I was being called different names by different people. I remember when I started schooling, I had problems with teachers because I didn’t know which name, I was to tell them to write in the class register. Actually, I didn’t know how to write my name for a very long time and it is something which has come to haunt me to date. Teachers used to write Hempstone with a very unique spelling “Hemston”. Because I myself I didn’t know the exact name I should be referred to, I didn’t bother or was not very keen in knowing how the name should be spelled. Mother being submissive to her husband like many married women do, she actually accepted everything that dad wanted in regards to my name. But there is one thing I remember vividly, the most common name am being referred to by many people who knows me since my childhood, ‘Away Man’, did not go well with mother. This was simply because of the character of the man. Mum was afraid I would possess the characters of Mr William especially the negative ones. Mr William was a left-handed man, tall, dark and handsome man who used to comb his hair neatly. In short, he was a pimp. The problem he had was that he could not settle with any of the ladies he used to enter engage into different relationship which could not successfully lead to marriage regardless of how handsome he was. He was also very addictive to alcohol and alcohol took the better time of his and huge chunks of his money. Sadly, Mr William died as a bachelor and he never left any of his heir behind. Mum was a highly religious woman who wanted her children to have good moral standards and set good example to other children in the village. So according to her, being named after someone who never lived according to Christ teaching was not the right thing but she had no otherwise but to accept it. She tried as much as she could to make that name disappear but her efforts bore no fruits. Nevertheless, I can give her credit for trying so hard to make sure that the character of Mr William did not appear in me. For instance, I was born left-handed and she used severe punishment to make me use my right hand to date. Am also a strong believer in the word of God and Christ His son just the way mum wanted. It is and it was not part of my idea to make you sad or show a sense of sympathy to me in any way but the truth of the matter is that my life or the story of my life has not been a good one. Just to brief you, I have been thinking about writing this novel as early as when I was in my primary school and one what I have learned is that the more I buy time, the more the story continues and so I think if I continue to waste more time, I may end up writing a long book of many pages which may be very boring to the reader.