Whispers aka The Son of the Soil

ChifuMbitika · July 21, 2018, 5:08pm

His son was my senior in high school. Sad to say that he once bullied me. Whispers is a legendary though.

patco · July 21, 2018, 6:01pm

Hehe. Yes I remember that enmity. But nakumbuka pia Gado drew the cartoon I first saw. Hio naona ilikuwa Gado. But I have access to a few old papers nitaangalia. And I believe almost if not all the cartoonists of that era must’ve drawn a few Whispers cartoons. Walikuwa wanaexchange every few months. Here are a few Whispers cartoons done by Gado…

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Evelyn Wanjugu, Whispers Jr (Patrick Mutahi) and Pajero the Investment (Caroline Muthoni)

https://www.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/weekend/The-Whispers-characters-10-years-later-/1220-1920170-kstw88z/index.html

To more serious matters now. Besides working hard to give his (Mutahi’s) children a decent life, he afforded them the best education they could attain. He made it clear that every one of them had to go university.
He did not expect them to have ‘arrow root’ for brains.
He is not around to witness their progress, but he would certainly have been proud of their achievements in the 10 years since he departed.
Patrick went on to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from Daystar University. He later proceeded to the University of Witswatersrand for a Masters’ degree in human rights and governance. He is currently a senior programmes officer with Article 19. He also writes commentaries in the local media.
Caroline holds a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from United States International University and an honours degree from the University of Witwatersrand. She has worked for the Standard newspapers as a writer and editor.
She is currently working as a communications officer with Plan International while at the same time pursuing Masters degree at a local university.
Eva is the non-journalist in the family. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Catholic University. Currently she is a marketer with Kick Start International.
Plus, Eva is the entrepreneur of the family. Besides her regular job, she owns The Party Factory, a company that plans and organises parties for children.
These are not the crazy kids of the ‘Whispers’ column.

[ATTACH=full]185043[/ATTACH]Thatcher (Ricarda Njoki). Apparently she dragged him kicking and screaming to the alter after years of procrastination. https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2000018131/the-day-whispers-wedded

[ATTACH=full]185044[/ATTACH]Thatcher and Pajero after they lost the compensation case following their husband/father’s demise from negligence at a govt. hospital. Its peculiar that the Nation couldn’t persue this matter on their behalf despite all the years Mutahi had given that company! Like Francis Mburu the mbirionea said recently, journalists should really be paid better.

https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2000159553/wahome-mutahi-family-loses-compensation-case

patco · July 21, 2018, 7:32pm

Hizi article mbili nimepata without looking too hard. There should be many more.

Twists of the new post-Beijing ‘newspeak’ | Nation

Whis in line of fire in day of mayhem | Nation

patco · July 21, 2018, 7:35pm

hehehe… excerpt

[I]After many years of walking up and down the streets in the name of sex care provision, Jane will certainly become chronologically gifted.

That is the new way of saying that the subject called Jane has become old. When she gets chronologically gifted, she will of course become cosmetically different.

This is to say that she will become ugly.

Finally, you can therefore say of Jane: “Jane, who has been a sex care provider for many years, has now become a self-employed outdoor monetary solicitor.

This is because she is now chronologically gifted and is of alternative dentation after chewing too much miraa.[/I]

Kigui · July 22, 2018, 8:04pm

Adambole:

Bubudiu read in the eyes of Maddo of Madd, Madd World.

Much of my professional life has featured Wahome Mutahi in one way or the other. Indeed, he is one of the people who yanked me off the streets where I imagined I was comfortable as a “freelance” artist, having ditched employment with the publishers of the now defunct Viva Magazine.

I walked into the old Nation House and promptly became buddies with Whispers — as he was known to all. We had a common bond; we were both stone broke!

I knew right from the start that I was in partnership with a serious artist. Wahome, similarly, respected my work. So a formidable team was born in the mid-1980s.

We quickly figured out that we would bore our audience if we carried our friendship into our columns and so presented ourselves to our readers as a pair at war.

Naturally, as human watchers, we took the most outstanding features that we bore in order to “attack” each other. Wahome zeroed in on the size of my eyes and I became Crocodilus Niloticus with several relatives in Lake Turkana and the Tana River. I responded in my weekly composite cartoon feature, It’s a Madd, Madd World, by harping on his receding hairline which I saw as an “airport”.

I would taunt him about planes that had lost their way in the night seeking him out with search lights and trying to land on his balding patch. The “rivalry” made us very popular at the time and some were “shocked” to find us having a swallow together at Rhoda’s (the popular, tall barmaid who became a permanent character in our features. She passed away a few years ago). This is the pub where we also became very close to long-time broadcaster Alfred Mike Mureithi aka Ching Boy, completing the “trio majeshi”. Mike joined in by also throwing barbs at us on his radio show, which we adequately fended off with pen, typewriter and paper.

We painted ourselves as people who loved their drink, but in actual fact, though we did, it was not as messy as we put it. If we lived our characters’ lives we wouldn’t have kept our jobs! It was all tuned to observing society with a humorous eye.

It is Mike who came up with that piece of noise, which meant nothing, but had readers baffled; bubudiu. Wahome and I picked it up and used it as a general substitute for words we were too tired to write. For example, we’d write “he was so bubudiued, he couldn’t get home, the next day he was feeling bubudiu mbovu”.

Readers wrote in to ask what on earth the word meant (they did, of course, understand sentences in which the “word” was used). Finally, our overall boss, George Mbugguss, got mad with us he decided to run all the mail. That day there were only two subjects on the readers’ mail page; bubudiu and the rain-making serpent called Omieri.

Mbugguss asked us to explain in a brief note below the letters and we did, thus, “We are still trying to bubudiu the meaning of bubudiu” — and the matter was put to rest.

Many might not know it, but I did write a couple of Whispers columns, once when he had to travel urgently and once when I had to complete a half written column after he suffered the writer’s block!

One day, at the height of the sham Mwakenya persecutions, I went to borrow a ‘pound’ from Wahome, this time not in the loo. He was writing his column and had done a paragraph and a half. As he was giving me a hundred reasons why he wasn’t going to part with the then coveted blue note, the receptionist rang. There was a guy or two to see him. He went downstairs and we never saw him again for the next 13 months.

He had fallen victim to the government’s paranoid crackdown on imagined enemies. I survived, I’ve been told, because cartoonists weren’t regarded as “much of a threat”. The half done Whispers was published later.

Wahome left prison a year later (he was in the dreaded Nyayo House dungeons for a month), frail but full of life and ready to resume what he loved most, writing.

He was thrown into a scare once, though, when that famous Nyayo House torturer (was he Onyango?) came to the editorial room one day to see a journalist I won’t name. I didn’t know Onyango, but it was I he approached and asked for his friend. I nodded and pointed at the journalist across the newsroom. As fate would have it, Wahome was sitting not far from our colleague and he thought Maddo was telling Onyango where to find him — again! He almost fainted.

In 1992, Whispers and I formed Views Limited with some shareholding by Lonrho. The media company sold articles and artwork to publications with the East African Standard being our biggest client. Our “war” was revived. We also worked closely on several projects at the time.

Times were changing then and we had become bolder in our work. That was the year that saw the then President Moi appear as a cartoon caricature on the cover of Society magazine. It was also then that Wahome re-entered the world of theatre more seriously, appearing on stage and writing scripts. I managed to appear alongside my great friend on stage once with only one line made up of three words to deliver. Since I found cramming those three simple words into my head absolute torture, I “quit” the stage, leaving Wahome to pursue what he was naturally born for.

Whispers also introduced me to Central Kenya, which I now know very well (after Kiboswa City). I met his mum, Octavia, or “Appep”, in Nyeri — the slopes of Mt Kenya — and was introduced to his young family that was staying in Murang’a then. Ricarda, “Thatcher”, turned out to be a professional nurse and I rebuked her husband for having painted a different picture of her to his readers. Another surprise was in store for me. In the early days of Whispers, the Son of the Soil had only two offspring, “Junior” (Patrick) and the “Investment” (Caroline). I met someone else, Evelyn, who was tiny then. She was later introduced into the semi-fictional account by this great writer as the “Pajero”.

We eventually drifted apart with his re-joining Sunday Nation while I remained at the East African Standard though we were to remain friends and business associates.

I found Wahome intelligent, brilliant even, vibrant and highly innovative — one of those people said to occur in a country only once in a century.

The country has suffered a blow. But Wahome Mutahi’s life has not been in vain. He has bequeathed the youth of Kenya a strong and powerful heritage. Literature is what has built other nations and their cultures. Certainly ours will be great one day, and one of the blocks in that foundation will be this great writer and thinker.

Chief, I salute you. Crocodilus Niloticus! I’m sorry Roda passed on. I will inbox you if you don’t mind.

Adambole · July 23, 2018, 5:27pm

By the way the post is credited to “Life Magazine” way back in 2003 where Maddo was paying tribute to Whispers.

Liberty · July 19, 2019, 12:42pm

:D:D:D:D:D @Makonika