A Blog Has No Name

I’ve always been fascinated by the book of Ecclesiastes.

This may seem strange, coming from a self-professed heathen.

But, this is a heathen who also happens to like reading and there is no book which I find more fascinating than this one. There’s a degree of honesty with which its author, presumed to be an aged King Solomon, confronts the nature of life, death, and all that comes in between.

As I was thinking of what approach to take with this last blog post, I found myself continuously going back to the book. I read one of the more interesting bits of the book, that section where The Preacher professes that:

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A a time to heal, and a time to kill.

This, I thought, communicated whatever I wanted to write in this blog post. You see, unlike the preceding 68 blogs, with this one I had no particular plan. All I knew was that this is a time to kill.

It is a season to kill that which I birthed a year ago when I published that very first blog, ‘Atula O., 1st of his Name’. However, what exactly I am killing with this article is also unknown. All I know is that I had planned to write a particular series of blogs and got done with it.

Whereas the others had a particular story arch leading to thoughts on an agricultural topic, this one does not. I intended it to be a memoir of my experience over the past year. What I have learnt and unlearned and relearned over that period. And there are many of those. To kill all of them would be tasking.

There were many aspects to it, just as diverse as the number of topics I have handled over the course of these blog posts. That is why I struggled with coming up with a title for this blog. I could not find any particular heading that could fully summarize what I intended to communicate.

I, therefore, thought some more.

If, as The Preacher of Ecclesiastes says, it really is a time to kill, and this blog intends to kill all the preceding ones, then it had to become the best in the game. It had to assume the identity of the best killers I know of:

Look, I am a fan of George RR Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series. Therefore, I thought, that for this blog to serve the many-faced god that is death, it must become a Faceless Blog. It had to be made into an assassin worthy of killing all the preceding story lines in one fell swoop.

And to achieve this, it had to be stripped of all identity.

That is the first thing that is done to someone who intends to serve the god of death. The assassin must reject their sense of self. It’s why Jaqen H’ghar refers to himself as ‘No One’. It is why Arya Stark referred became ‘A Girl with no Name’.

In the same vein, this article has no particular title that leads to something specific. Its just about making the three kills that matter.

Just flow with me, shall we?

Welcome, to a Blog Has No Name.

Now, let’s kill the first thing.

What made me write these blogs?

When I started this blog I knew that I would do it for only a year. Seeing that I had taken a hiatus from school, I thought that I should utilize that time in various ways, one of which included blogging.

I, therefore, set up a 3-month calendar with a tentative number of blog agricultural series that I was to work on. This was after testing the waters with a week-long run of blogs that I wrote based on my experiences from a trip outside the country.

For vain reasons, I named the first series, “The Riverside Series”. It was because the idea for it first came to me on the banks of Athi River’s 14 Falls on December 30th 2017. I had been there with a good friend to close off the year and was disgusted at the pollution that is going on there. It still does.

I did some research and that series ended up touching on various environmental issues affecting water bodies around the country. This gave me a hint of the approach to come and with that, I set out to serialize the rest of the blogs. I thought this would be an appropriate way of handling the issues I wanted to tackle.

By the end of it all, I did some 10 series of blogs, with some being as few as three articles long and others going up to 12. I had series on agritech, food processing, breeding, orphan crops, among others. There are some, such as those on conservation agriculture, which I ran out of time before starting.

However, the ones I’d say are most important to me are the last two: One was a series titled “The Tales of Death and Dementia” and “The Resurrection Series“. With the former, I wanted to show what is ailing the industry in Kenya and in most other African countries. With the latter, I intended to illustrate how some of these ailments could be cured.

Whether I achieved that or not, only time will tell.

There comes a faceless assassin, the angel of death riding on a pale horse. It’s about time…

On to the second kill.

What prompted my manner of writing?

To start with, I intended to write straight forward blog posts that went directly to the point. If you, say, wanted to learn about how to plant a tomato, then this would be the place to go. That was the intention, but it just did not work out.

I thought that would be a bit boring to the kind of audience I wanted to pull in. I wanted to bait a crowd that just enjoys reading and does not necessarily care about agriculture. The bait would be the promise of a story, which would ultimately lead to the message I intended to pass.

This worked out just fine, and I am glad it did.

If you are a frequent reader of these blog posts, you must have noticed that I took an unconventional approach in the manner in which the blogs were written. None of my blog posts went straight to the point, regardless of the agricultural issue I wanted to tackle.

They were progressively built up using, among other things, but especially, personal experiences, books and music. I wanted to use the messages I had learnt from these various sources to fabricate the stories into something else. These are the posts I enjoyed writing most.

I enjoyed the idea of starting from scratch without an idea of how the story line would end up but still go with it. Stories such as ‘Dear Rose...’, ‘Mutiso & the Flying Matatus’, and ‘Crop Breeding: From Svalbard to Zuhura’, were a joy to write. The last one especially, it forced me to spend a lot of time researching on disparate things in order to bring them all together into a logically flowing article. That, was enjoyable.

I particularly enjoyed creating the character Sambo Lera whose perspective drove almost all the articles in the last 2 series. I created him on the fly and over time he has evolved, including the emergence of his wife and both their backstories. The idea of coming up with something that even I did not know how it’ll end pushed me to write continuously.

Some stories, such as ‘Standards Bodies for Agriculture in Kenya‘ , ‘The Hills & valleys of Machakos‘, and ‘The Man who Bred Bread‘ are some of the ones based on my personal experiences. I am proud of them because they also act as some sort of diary, and I can read between the lines. I have fabricated some of the events and characters but also understand why. Sometimes its to protect some identities, and at times it is just to make the stories more enjoyable.

On the books, music and movies I used, I can only say that this was a vanity project of sorts. I wanted to see how far I could stretch myself and build on what has been done with the works of those artists and authors whose works I enjoy.

Borrowing from The Preacher of Ecclestiastes once more, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun.” Hence, I built on what has been done by, among others:

Muhammed Said Abdulla, J.K Rowling, Prof. Katama Mkangi, Edgar Allan Poe, Enya, Nas and Damian Marley, Charles Dickens, King Kaka, Markus Zusak, Octopizzo, Prof. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Khadja Nin, C.M Mureithi, Peter Tosh, Prof. Mary Abukutsa, Okot p’Bitek, Buju Banton, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Franco Luambo, Kendrick Lamar, Gabriel García Márquez, and The Notorius B.I.G.

I thank them for providing the fodder material for my own stories.

Lastly, the third kill.

What did I learn from this experience?

With this one, Imm’a keep is short and sweet. I learnt three important things.

One of these is that tomorrow is not promised. Do the most you can when you can, for no one knows whether they’ll be here come tomorrow. When I was writing ‘A Tale of 2 Peanuts’, my dad was alive and we spoke that week.

By the time I was writing ‘Nigerian Funeral, Kenyan Wedding‘, a week later, he was dead.

That article was actually a thinly veiled message on his death, written after struggling with whether to do it or not. I attended no Nigerian funeral, it is my own father’s I was anticipating.

I wrote ‘King Lalibela’s Jerusalem‘ in the village, while still engaged in the funeral arrangements. Two days after I publishing the post, we buried him. He had done what he could for us and I am forever grateful for the sacrifices he made to get us here, where we are now.

Even this blog, I intended to rope in a song by either Oliver Mtukudzi or Ayub Ogada. I still have the drafts I wrote for them in early January. But, even before those materialized into actual posts, they were gone. Forever. I decided not to use those drafts.

They are gone, but, their works live on, growing, in our souls.

The second thing I learnt was that no plans will ever work out as you envisioned them. And that is perfectly okay.

The manner of my writing, and how the stories have evolved over time, were not in my plan. For instance, there are times I have had to expand blog series to accommodate stories that just emerged from the woodwork. Examples include ‘The Tales From Toi, and ‘The Taste of Clay‘.

I have also been surprised in that the blog posts that I thought would attract the least attention actually overcoming my expectations. Those two blog posts on legalization, ‘On Cannabis, Culture & Colonialism’, and ‘On Marijuana, Medicine and Monies‘, are to date the most read and shared articles to date in spite of their political incorrectness.

Thirdly, I learnt that this agricultural industry is vast and full of potential. Despite the numerous challenges I have mentioned in most of the blogs, there still are multiple opportunities to plug into.

Whether you want to do so from the production end, or the processing end, it’s all open. You can also embrace agri-tech, or logistics, regardless there is a vast economic opportunity waiting to be tapped into.

As for me, I am going back to school to complete my course work. I will not publish anything at least till August. Till then, have a great time.

Thank you for your time.

Regards,

Owade.