Ngũgĩ

By insisting on high performance on the playing field and in the classroom, Carey Francis produced self-confident, college-prepared, intellectual minds. By the time I left Alliance, I felt that academically I could go toe to toe with the best that any European or Asian schools could produce.

I was puzzled. Not trying to be clever or correct him, I raised my hand and said that Jesus did not speak English: the Bible was a translation. My comment elicited laughter from the class and a sheepish silence from Smith. Then he gave us a short sermon on willingness to learn. Remember you have come here to learn, not to teach. Or do you want to change places with me? he asked, holding out the chalk to me. There was tense silence. He now explained that he was talking about the King James–authorized translation of the Bible, which had inspired many writers of English prose and poetry. It had excellent English, for those who wanted to learn. Smith’s testy response froze questions and differing perspectives.

He held a book in his hands, and my eyes fell on the title: Tell Freedom by Peter Abrahams. I was transfixed. The words seemed to speak of a world beyond the walls of the Alliance.

Villagization, the innocuous name the colonial state gave to the forced internal displacement, was sprung on the Kenyan people in 1955, in the middle of my first term at Alliance, but living within the walls of the school, I had not heard about the agents of the state bulldozing people’s homes or torching them when the owners refused to participate in the demolition. Mau Mau suspects or not, everybody had to relocate to a common site. In some regions, the state forced people to dig a moat around the new collective settlement, leaving only one exit and entrance. The whole of central Kenya was displaced, and the old order of life destroyed, in the name of isolating and starving the anticolonial guerrillas in the mountains.

The most visible of these features was the watchtower, usually built on the highest ground, and from which the Union Jack fluttered its symbol of conquest and control. Under constant surveillance, the inmates of the camp and the village, loyal or not, were likely to be stopped and searched at any time of day or night. For all practical purposes, the line between the prison, the concentration camp, and the village had been erased.

I was going to live out my life in a home that reminded me of the loss of home and a school that offered shelter but not the certainty of home. Both, ironically, were colonial constructs, but I feared that even they might clash at any moment and crush my dreams.

In the story of colonial settlements in Africa and America, only the Spanish and German rivals wallowed in blood, while the English overcame challenges of nature and man. Even in the story of the slave trade, the English, with their antislavery legal enactments, emerged as the heroes of the abolition movement and not the villains of its earlier expansion.

Years later, Elimo Njau would become one of the leading artists in Africa; he founded the famous Paa ya Paa art gallery, still active today.

Balancing thoughts of an uncertain future with those of how far I had come, Johnson Oatman’s hymn that we sang in the chapel seemed to speak to my situation:

When upon life’s billows you are tempest tossed,

When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,

Count your many blessings, name them one by one,

And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.

Mwaniki was shy, but when it came to playing the piano, he was very expressive. He did not have formal training in music; he just picked up his piano knowledge from his two predecessors, reinforcing my positive attitude toward learning from one’s peers. I got more Kiswahili from David Mzigo than from Dollymore, the master who taught Swahili. Mzigo was a native speaker; Dollymore had picked it up while stationed in Mombasa as a soldier during the Second World War. Discussions and arguments on history and literature that I held with friends, and the math exercises that I did outside the classroom, greatly added to my insights, sometimes proving useful in tests and exams.

She touched her heart in blessing. These days there’s no Luo or Gĩkũyũ, she said. We are all the children of Kenya.

We are all the children of Kenya. All the children of Africa. All the children of the world. Even though she has long passed on, I remember her words and looks and smile. It was another case of wisdom and enrichment from the street. Knowledge gained inside and outside a formal setting impacted my life equally.

Looking back, I can see that Haggard and other popular writers, when it came to my continent, were penning from the same dictum: imperialism was normal, resistance to it immoral. Africa and its peoples were the background that enabled European self-realization, the same theme that ran through our history lessons. The fast pace, turns, twists, mystery, and denouement sucked me into those adventures, but soon even these elements could not blind me completely to the negative implications of certain images and groupings of characters. Even in fiction I was not going to escape the theme of empire building. But then I stumbled into the crime thriller and detective category, and I thought, just maybe, I might finally escape into the realm of pure, untainted fiction.

Then one day I happened to pick up Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, the subject of one of Carey Francis’s talks. It may not have been a thriller or a detective novel, but the story of Pastor Stephen Kumalo going into the city to look for his sister Gertrude and his own prodigal son, Absalom, could just as easily have unfolded in Kenya. The theme reminded me of the plot line in Kenneth’s unfinished book. I even wondered if Alan Paton was black: how else could he capture so well the tone and the imagery of African speech? Cry, the Beloved Country whetted my appetite for books that reflected my social reality, but the library did not meet my needs. On further search, I found several copies of Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. It was my first autobiography. The similarities between the situation in the nineteenth-century American South and Kenya were eerily captured in Washington’s story.

I looked in vain for writings that I could identify with fully. The choice, it seemed, was between the imperial narratives that disfigured my body and soul, and the liberal ones that restored my body but still disfigured my soul. I was not sure if I really did want to read all the books in the school library.

Talk of comedy! Yesterday, Friday, I was here in Kĩambu to collect the largest wages of my life. I was with friends. Now I am back in the same town, without the money, and nobody knows me. The prison guards shake their heads to every question concerning the fate that awaits us. A Saturday in ruins, I note in my mental diary.

He has a few words for me, the only thing he can give. He says: Be prepared for the worst, but always hope for the best. See you in court tomorrow. He leaves as the guards are herding us back to our cells. The hope that the court tomorrow will end my misery buoys my spirits. I whisper to one inmate what I have learned. Soon everybody has the same news about the court tomorrow.

It’s so easy to plead guilty, pay a fine, and then continue with life. But in pleading guilty, I would be telling a lie, ensuring that their lies become a permanent truth about me. I am still wrestling with doubts and indecision as dawn comes and they take me back to the courtroom.

I am relentless. I feel a new power, the power of telling the truth. I can be consistent; he cannot. Through questions, my story unfolds up to and including their attempts to ask me to plead guilty. No, no, they were simply asking me to tell the truth. The court is so silent that one can hear a pin drop. When I finish, there is applause, which is met with a stern rebuke from the court.