Kayira, Legson 1942–

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Legson Kayira 1942–

Author

Born into Poverty

Attended Livingstonia Secondary School

Began Walking to America

Accepted at Skagit Valley College

Arrived in America as a Celebrity

Became a Writer

Selected writings

Sources

Legson Kayira was a large infant. When his young and inexperienced mother found him too heavy to carry, she threw him into the Didimu River and walked away. After a village woman rescued him and returned him to his mother, he was called Didimu. Later, while attending a Scottish missionary school, Kayira wanted an English-sounding name, so he coined the name Legson, becoming Legson Didimu Kayira. After finishing secondary school in his native Nyasaland, now Malawi, Kayira decided to attend college in America. So he set off walking across Africa. He later recounted the story of his traditional East African childhood and his incredible journey to the United States in his autobiography, I Will Try. He also is the author of five novels set in Africa.

Born into Poverty

In his autobiography Kayira said that he was born in the late 1930s or early 1940s, during the harvest in May or June. He eventually chose May 10, 1942, as his date of birth. His father, Timothy Mwenekanyonyo Mwamalopa Arinani Chikowoka Kayira, and mother, Ziya Nyakawonga, were members of the Tumbuka tribe in the small hill village of Mpale in the Karonga district of northern Nyasaland, which at the time was a British protectorate federated with Rhodesia. They were poor and illiterate. Kayira would later write that he came from “one of the poorest families that God ever created since the beginning of time.” Timothy Kayira had never learned a trade and owned no cows, so the family ate from their 20-acre garden. As a child, Kayira used a forked stick to till maize, millet, and peanuts. Of Kayira’s eight younger siblings, only one set of twins, a boy and a girl, survived childhood.

Kayira looked after his grandfather’s cows and slept in a barn with the other village boys. On Saturdays the boys hunted for wild pigs with spears. At night they listened to their grandmothers’ stories.

Around 1946 Kayira began attending a Church of Scotland missionary school three miles from his home. It took several months for his parents to sell enough groundnuts to pay his year’s tuition of six pennies. The school had no paper, pencils, or books. In addition to the tuition, the students were expected to bring the teachers food and work in their gardens. For a time they spent most their school days building a road. Most of the village boys preferred to tend cattle, rather than go to school. Kayira wanted to quit as well, but his parents made him stay since they had paid the year’s fees.

Attended Livingstonia Secondary School

Kayira’s junior primary school, the Wenya mission school, was about eight miles away. It was a difficult walk, particularly in the rainy season. He later told Reader’s Digest that he was sent back home on the first day of school because “They said I was naked.” After passing his exams, Kayira applied to teachers college but was told he was too young.

Although he had no money for secondary school, the district school superintendent arranged for Kayira to

At a Glance…

Born Didimu Kayira, c. May 10, 1942, in Mpala, Nyasaland; son of Timothy Kayira and Ziya Nyakawonga; married Carol Lawson; one daughter. Education: Livingstonia Secondary School, Karonga, Nyasaland, junior leaving certificate, 1958; Skagit Valley College, Mt. Vernon, WA, AA, political science, 1963; University of Washington, Seattle, BA, political science, 1965; St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge University, 1965-66. Religion: Presbyterian.

Career; Author. 1967–; probation officer.

Awards: Northwest Non-Fiction Prize for I Will Try.

Address: Home —16 Clare Gardens, W11 1NX London, UK.

enter the old, famous Livingstonia Secondary School in Karonga. About 200 miles from his village, it was one of only four secondary schools in the country. Kayira’s father had died and his mother and most of the other villagers thought that he was wrong to continue his education. But Kayira saw it as his way out of poverty. He did very well in school, reading every book he could find, especially those about America. The life of Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery were his favorites.

In all, Kayira attended school in Nyasaland for eleven years. After graduating with his junior leaving certificate, it was expected that he would enter Domasi Teachers Training School. But Kayira had other ideas. He had just gone to a rally in support of his country’s independence, where he heard Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda speak. Kayira wrote in his autobiography: “I saw the land of Lincoln as the place where one literally went to get the freedom and independence that one thought and knew was due him. One day I would also go there, I would also go to school there, and I would also return home to do my share in the fight against colonialism.” Later Kayira told Time magazine, “We have 3,000,000 people in Nyasaland and only 22 university graduates. Nobody has ever earned a degree from an American college. I want to be the first.” He also told Reader’s Digest, “Young men grow up with no schooling, no work, and they become thieves and damage the country. I wanted to do better.”

Began Walking to America

Kayira announced to his village that he was going to walk to America on the following Tuesday—October 14, 1958. Since no one in the village knew where America was, his mother sent him off with enough flour for a five-day journey. Dressed in his school uniform, barefoot, and penniless, he carried a small ax, a blanket, a map of Africa, a map of the world, and two books—an English Bible and a copy of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. The latter had been sent to him by a correspondent in England. Although most travelers carried spears, Kayira was afraid that a weapon would frighten or provoke strangers. His plan was to make his way north to Port Said or Alexandria in Egypt where he would find work on a ship headed for New York.

Within three days Kayira had crossed the border and begun his trek through Tanganyika (now Tanzania). He walked through the dry and wet seasons, through dust storms and thick jungles, making friends in villages along the way. Sometimes he followed roads or trails from village to village. Other times he followed the railroad tracks, wishing he had money to take the train. Often the people he met could not give him directions. “I was constantly reminding myself that north was on my right,” he said in his autobiography.

Kayira learned Swahili and, as he passed through each new region, he tried to learn the words for food, water, and job in the local language. Often he was hired to carry bricks, earning enough money to buy bananas. Occasionally he was able to send money home for his brother and sister’s school fees, as he had promised his mother. When he ran out of food, he drank sugar water. He bought boxes of matches, since starting a fire by rubbing sticks together, as they did at home, gave him blisters. Kayira was startled when he first saw a jet plane in the sky and it was another year before he learned what he had seen.

Sometimes discouraged and depressed, particularly when he was sick or injured, Kayira would consider turning back. When he reached a city and saw a newspaper, he learned that Banda had been arrested and that there were civil disturbances in northern Nyasaland. He worried about his family’s safety.

Accepted at Skagit Valley College

In July of 1959 Kayira reached Mwanza on Lake Victoria. There he worked for six months to earn the steamer fare to Kampala in the Protectorate of Uganda. After more than a year and 1,000 miles of travel, mostly on foot, he reached Kampala on January 19, 1960. He sneaked through customs with a group of school children, since he had no papers.

In Kampala Kayira carried bricks for houses, earning two-fifths of a cent for every 80 bricks. He studied a physics book and learned Luganda, the language of Uganda. After he found that the United States Information Service (USIS) in Kampala had a free library, he began going there often. One day Kayira happened upon a directory of American junior colleges. The first entry he saw was for Skagit Valley College, a two-year school in Mount Vernon, Washington, 60 miles north of Seattle. He wrote to them and within two weeks he received a reply, offering him a full scholarship and help finding a job. But Kayira had to wait in Kampala until the following August, when he finally obtained a Nyasaland passport and a visa to enter Sudan.

After buying his first pair of shoes, Kayira set out again on foot. Sometimes he hitched rides in cars or on bicycles. Reaching Juba, Sudan, he took a White Nile steamer downriver to Khartoum, sharing space in the hold with convicts. An American tourist on the boat gave him food. In Khartoum the U.S. vice-consul, Emmett M. Coxson, informed Kayira that in order to get a foreign student visa, he had to have either money or a sponsor and return passage. However, Coxson was so impressed with Kayira that he contacted Skagit Valley College himself. While Kayira studied algebra at the USIS library in Khartoum, Skagit Valley College students and the community of Mount Vernon raised the money to bring Kayira to Washington State. A Mount Vernon family offered him a home.

Arrived in America as a Celebrity

On December 16, 1960, in a suit of clothes provided by embassy personnel, Kayira boarded a flight for New York, politely asking the flight attendant for a parachute. In Khartoum Kayira had told his story to a Time magazine reporter: “When I go back to Nyasaland, I will be a teacher. Then I enter politics. When I get defeated, I go back to teaching. You can always trust education.” Because of the story in Time, Kayira found himself surrounded by reporters at the New York, Washington, D.C., and Seattle airports. A reporter even accompanied him on the drive to Mount Vernon. The entire college came out to greet him and that night Kayira saw himself on local television. The following morning, the newspaper headlines read: “LONG TREK TO GLORY OR DEATH ENDS.”

Kayira became a minor celebrity. He appeared on national television and an article in Reader’s Digest brought him as many as 85 letters a day from all over the world, sometimes with money enclosed. Kayira was much in demand as a speaker although, as a full-time student, he had to turn down about half of the requests. His first summer in the United States, he went on a speaking tour to various cities and the resulting honoraria helped pay for his education. He was invited to attend a beauty contest in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was presented with a $1000 scholarship. Soon Kayira was helping other African students come to the United States to study.

Kayira rode his bicycle to Seattle. He was given a motorbike that he rode to Portland, Oregon. He tried skiing but decided, on his first trip up the Mt. Baker chairlift, to ride the chair back down. In the summer he worked as a counselor at a YMCA camp in Wenatchee, Washington.

Became a Writer

Initially Kayira majored in physics, but he switched to political science, earning his A.A. degree from Skagit Valley in 1963. His autobiography grew out of papers he wrote for his English classes at the University of Washington in Seattle, where Kayira graduated with a B.A. in political science in 1965.

Six years after leaving his village, Kayira returned home in the company of a Seattle Times reporter, just in time to witness Nyasaland’s independence as the nation of Malawi. As he finished the last chapters of his autobiography, the villagers told him that he should stay home, start working, and get married. Instead he went to England on a two-year scholarship, for graduate studies at St. Catharine’s College of Cambridge University.

I Will Try was published in 1965 and won a Northwest Nonfiction Prize for autobiography. Its title was the motto of the Livingstonia Secondary School. I Will Try was published in paperback in 1967 and reissued in 1969, in an abridged and simplified version for middle school students. It is still cited often as a particularly inspirational story.

Kayira went on to write and publish five novels, dealing with the social, cultural, and political issues facing post-colonial Africa. Much of his first novel, The Looming Shadow, was written while he sat on his mother’s verandah in Malawi, observing village life. The story centers on a feud between two villagers that escalates into accusations of witchcraft and attempted murder, which bring fear and violence to the village. Jingala is the story of conflict between a father, who wants to keep his 18-year-old son in their remote village, and the son who wants to become a Catholic priest. The intergenerational conflict reflects the larger conflicts between the millennia-old African way-of-life and the social and political turmoil of the twentieth century. The Civil Servant is a story of adultery and Kayira’s fifth novel, The Detainee, deals with dictatorship and tyranny. The latter was published as part of the African Writers Series. Kayira’s writings have been translated into various languages.

Ironically, Kayira’s writings were banned in Malawi after Banda became president-for-life. However, teachers who were members of the Malawi Writers Group clandestinely introduced his work to students, as part of their attempt to revive Malawian culture. Kayira settled in London where he continued to write while working as a probation officer.