For as long as I can remember, I have been responding to the name Benjamin. A lot of people say that my mother loved her Bible lessons more than she did her own culture. So, inasmuch as I was born at midday instead of according me the name Ochieng’ she instead named me Benjamin and added in my father’s last name Ooko so people could know who I belonged to.

This seemed to please Reverend Father Augustus but never my father or his people and sometimes when I think back to everything that I have experienced, it seems that lighting started striking me the moment she gave me that name.

My Father, Ooko, what of him? Well, on the day I got tired of staying enclosed in my mother’s stomach, he was deep inside Nya Lela, his new wife who reminded the thing between his legs of how stiff it still could be. I remember all the men singing praises of Nya Lela as the only woman whose breasts remained firm even after bringing forth four children with my father, one after the other, you would think it was like eating and dispelling ground nuts.

As word would have it, my father saw me when I started making use of my feet. There are things that to this date do not seem like truth but if you’d have been born in that home, under the rule of Senior Chief Ooko, then you too would believe me.

When my mother told me about this, I laughed, sometimes when she would want to cry about the way he ignored her, she would go into her kitchen and carelessly adjust the logs that she fed the fire.

I tucked away any question I had for her with every tear she shed. Sometimes she would say that the worst thing that happened on this earth was how easy it was to cage women, to bind their throats, hands and legs so much so that everything from their head to their feet being at the mercy of men.

She would say these things when we walked to the lake to wash clothes every Saturday. What I could not fathom was how this woman could be so sad yet she would smile at every greeting, give to others the very thing she lacked.

The only regret I have is that I never saw her one last time and over the years I convinced myself that she set me free because she couldn’t flee.

Excerpt from The Longest Way Home (Work in Progress)