Part 1: Telling the Truth

One afternoon in the early '90s when I was a small boy, my mother, who ran a shop in my hometown of Kiserian, sent me to buy potatoes in a nearby market. I went and saw one trader selling some nice-looking bananas. Wanting to taste them, I decided to buy potatoes of lesser amount than what Mum required and use the remaining money to buy the bananas which I planned to eat hurriedly before going back to her, thinking that she wouldn't realize what I had done.

Guess what! The trader from whom I was buying potatoes and bananas sensed I was engaging in a mischief. He asked me to take him to my mother. I did.

When we reached Mum's shop, the trader talked with her and they both realized that I had intended to buy some bananas instead of potatoes. Mum thanked him for letting her know of my mischief. After he left, she scolded me and gave me a good spanking for what I had done.

I guess it's from that experience that I later on developed an instinctive feeling that there is always a more intelligent being who discerns all my actions. That feeling has haunted me in my adult life for the lies I have told.

One evening in 2010 or 2011 for instance, I became consumed with guilt over a speech I had plagiarized from a book and shared it on Facebook as if I was its genuine author. The guilt led me to think that a former schoolmate of mine at Starehe Boys' Centre named Bugei Nyaosi discerned that I had lifted the speech from a book and edited some parts to make it appear my genuine work while it wasn't.

I don't know how that thought of Bugei Nyaosi came into my mind since he probably never came across the speech on his Facebook news feed. Maybe it's because of the way I used to hear about how exceedingly brilliant he was during my years at Starehe where I had my high school and college education.

When the 2008 KCSE exams which Bugei had sat for were getting released in March 2009, I told my kid brother Symo to expect hearing Bugei Nyaosi's name as the Minister of Education prepared to announce the list of top students in a ceremony that was being aired live on TV. How right I was! Bugei emerged as the second-best student nationally.

Later on, I heard that Bugei was accepted at the prestigious Stanford University in April 2009. What I found remarkable about his admission to Stanford was that he had applied to the university when he was still in high school and gotten accepted.

Imagine I applied to Stanford when I was in Starehe College in 2006, then again when I was a first-year student at JKUAT in 2007, and then again in 2009 after I dropped out of JKUAT and got rejected in all those three times. And here was Bugei getting accepted at Stanford straight from high school. What a brilliant fellow!

I didn't get to interact with Bugei during my time in Starehe because we didn't board in the same house and he was three years my junior. But I got in touch with him via email in 2009 when I was applying to Stanford for the third time. He pleased me for replying to my emails with courtesy even though he was an academic heavyweight.

It must have been due to the way I had come to respect Bugei for his brilliance that I felt guilty that evening in 2010 or 2011 when I thought he had discerned the speech I had shared on Facebook was a product of plagiarism. Such instinctive feeling I have had that there is always a more intelligent being who discerns all my actions is what has led me to post truthful stories on this blog.

The policy I follow as I write and edit my stories is: tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Should my writings survive for many years to come like the Abraham Lincoln's have, I don't want future scholars to discredit me after figuring out a lie or an inconsistency in even three stories.

Lincoln had it right when he quipped, "You can fool all the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time." So I better keep telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.