Wrestling with the Devil Read online

  The priest sensed the uncertainty in his quarry. He now took out his spiritual dagger and went for the kill.

  “Let us kneel down and ask God for forgiveness for all our sins,” he commanded—but in a voice tear-bathed in infinite pity and compassion.

  Then suddenly, from somewhere in the depths of my being, rose a strong rebellious voice. It said, “Wake up from your spiritual lethargy and intellectual torpor. Don’t let them drug you with this stuff; don’t let them poison your system with it. It was to make you acutely hunger and thirst for a compassionate human voice that they have kept you near and yet far from human company. If you let him get away with this, you are going to be his prisoner for the rest of your stay here and possibly forever.”

  I felt life stir.

  “Hold it!” I cried out. “Who needs your prayers, your Bibles, your leaves of holiness—all manufactured and packaged in America? Why do you always preach humility and acceptance of sins to the victims of oppression? Why is it that you never preach to the oppressor? Go. Take your Bibles, your prayers, your leaves of holiness to them who have chained us in this dungeon. Have you read Ngaahika Ndeenda? Did you ever go to see the play? What was wrong with it? Tell me! What was wrong with Kamĩrĩthũ peasants and workers wanting to change their lives through their own collective efforts instead of always being made passive recipients of harambee, the-all-pull-together-slogan of charity meant to buy peace and sleep for uneasy heads? Tell me truthfully: what drove you people to suppress the collective effort of a whole village? What has your Christianity to say to oppression and exploitation of ordinary people?”

  I was getting worked up. A few guards crowded the door, but I didn’t care. I flayed, right to its rotten roots, his spiritual dependence on imperial foreigners. What had made him bring me tracts written by Billy Graham? Didn’t he know that this was the same man who used to bless American soldiers on their missions to napalm, bomb, murder, and massacre Vietnamese men, women, and children in the name of an anti-communist holy crusade? Were there no Kenyans who could write sermons? Why hadn’t he at least paid homage to Kenya’s spiritual independence by bringing into prison sermons by the likes of Reverend John Gatũ18 and Bishop Henry Okullu, men whose liberal sincerity and concern had led them to a measure of patriotism?

  My denunciatory vehemence shook him. He became defensive. The moral certainty had gone. Avoiding the earthly issues of oppression, exploitation, and foreign control, he said that as a man of God he never indulged in politics. To justify that stand, he quoted the Biblical exhortation to believers to “render unto Caesar things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” I quickly quoted back to him the Biblical scene in which Jesus whipped out of God’s earthly temple the Pharisee and Sadducee collaborators with Caesar’s oppressive rule.

  A little game started. He would refer me to Biblical passages that talked of faith, sin, salvation, grace, and life after death; I would in turn refer him to alternative passages in which God is cited as having sent his prophets to denounce earthly misrule and oppression of innocents.

  He abruptly cut short the heated exchange. “Anyway, we could go on arguing forever, but I have others to see. You educated people like arguments too much. But remember that you cannot argue your way to Heaven.”

  He stood up, took back the two huge Bibles and the bundle of Billy Graham, and staggered toward cell 11, where Martin Shikuku was on a hunger strike.

  The second verbal “victim” was a guard. He was on leave when I was brought to Kamĩtĩ. This was his first shift since resuming work. Suddenly, out of the blue, he shouted at me and accused me of dragging my feet in returning to my cell. “We know what you’re trying to do, but don’t be too clever. This is not the university,” he added, wagging a warning finger at me. This was soon after our supper, usually eaten at 3:00 p.m.

  The political prisoners and even the other guards turned their heads toward us.

  They knew that he had deliberately picked on me as an object on which to display his talents in bullying. Total silence in Kamĩtĩ. Everybody froze into his position to better absorb the drama as it unfolded.

  The kind of lethargy I had earlier felt before the spiritual warder again crept in, to still my trembling anger: “I am new in this place. . . . Shouldn’t I buy peace by simply swallowing my anger and pride and slink into my cell? I am down. I must avoid confrontation.”

  But another voice, the other voice, quickly intervened: “You may be down now, but you must always struggle to rise. Struggle for your rights. If you don’t pick up the glove, if you don’t stand to your full height now and stare injustice in the face, you’ll never be able to raise your head in this place. It’s now or never!”

  I stood up. But instead of going back to the cell, I walked toward the new guard in slow, measured steps. I tried to speak in a controlled voice but loud enough for everybody to hear. I wanted to be firm without shouting.

  “You know very well that you did not tell me to go back to my cell. You also know that it is not yet time to go in. To me, even a second of my ration of sunshine is precious and it is my right. I am not begging for more than my due, and I have no intention of doing so in future. But whatever the case, never, never shout at me or abuse me. If I have broken any regulation, do your duty and tell me so politely. I will hear. If I refuse to obey, you should report me to your superiors: the corporal, the sergeant, the chief, officer one, the superintendent, or the senior superintendent. But don’t add tyranny to the insult and injury of lies and falsehoods.”

  He looked about him for support from the other guards. No voice or gesture came to his rescue. Suddenly noise and movement returned to the compound. We severally went back to our cells. It was an unwritten rule among political prisoners never to loudly comment on the results of a showdown between a political prisoner and a guard, especially when the political prisoner had won, for fear of uniting the guards into a common determination of vengeance. But I knew from the relaxed tone of their voices and the ease of their laughter that they were happy I had stood up to him.

  “That warder is a well-known bully.” In fact, Koigi wa Wamwere told me later, “If you hadn’t answered back, he would have gone on to spit at you and shit on you. I would like you to watch how he treats political prisoner X, who, in order to avoid conflict, dances to their every whim and caprice.”

  Those two small incidents, and my own internal struggles to know how to react, brought home to me the real message behind what Wasonga Sijeyo had told me about my not letting them break me. They also showed me the tactical meaning behind all those mystificatory rituals.

  It is this: prison and conditions in there, including the constant reminder of one’s isolation, are meant to make former patriots feel that they have been completely forgotten, that all their former words and actions linked to people’s struggles were futile gestures and senseless acts of a meaningless individual martyrdom. Every aspect of prison is devised to reduce them to a condition in which they finally think, The masses have betrayed me. Why should I sacrifice myself for them?

  For a detained patriot, breaking through the double walls of gray silence, attempting even a symbolic link with the outside world, is an act of resistance. And resistance—even at the level of merely asserting one’s rights, of maintaining one’s ideological beliefs in the face of a programmed onslaught—is in fact the only way political prisoners can maintain their sanity and humanity. Resistance is the only means of trying to prevent a breakdown. The difficulty lies in the fact that in this effort one must rely first and foremost on one’s own resources (writing defiance on toilet paper for instance), and nobody can teach one how to do it.

  All messages of solidarity, even through a silent photograph or an unwritten word in a letter, are important contributions to the struggle to stay afloat. To a person condemned to isolation, such messages from the outside sound like Joshua’s trumpets, which brought down the legendary walls of Jericho.

  True for me, too: Njoki, with a pic
ture sent through the mail, and Warĩnga, with an image created on rationed toilet paper, have been more than a thousand trumpets silently breaking down the fortified walls of Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison to assure me that I am not alone. Warĩnga, by constantly making me conscious of my connection with history, and Njoki, by constantly making me aware that I am now in prison because of Kamĩrĩthũ and its people, buoyed up my sagging spirits.

  Warĩnga and Njoki also keep reminding me that my imprisonment without trial is not a personal affair. It’s part of the wider history of attempts to bring up the Kenyan people in a reactionary culture of silence and fear, and of the Kenyan people’s fierce struggle against them to create a people’s revolutionary culture of outspoken courage and heroism. Despite independence, our status was still colonial. Well, a colonial affair.

  2

  Parasites in Paradise

  1

  The phrase a colonial affair carries hints of the Happy Valley period of the pioneering white settler between the 1920s and 1940s, which once provoked the sexually suggestive question, in Britain at least, “Are you married, or do you live in Kenya?” The words keep intruding into the literary flow of my mind . . . a colonial affair in an independent Kenya. . . . It is as if the phrase has followed me inside Kamĩtĩ Prison to mock me.

  In 1967, just before returning home from my three years at Leeds University, England, I signed a contract with William Heinemann to write a book on the social life of European settlers in Kenya. The literary agent who negotiated the contract—he was also the originator of the idea—put it this way: “Theirs is a world which has forever vanished, but for that very reason, many readers will find an account of it still interesting.”

  “A Colonial Affair” was the title under which I signed the contract. It was his, not mine, but it felt right.

  I agreed to do the book because I strongly held that the settlers were part of the history of the country: we could not ignore the seventy years of their destructive alien presence. I tried hard to come to terms with the task. I dug up old newspapers and settlers’ memoirs to get an authentic feel of the times as the settlers lived it. The more I dug up the sordid details of their Happy Valley lifestyle, the more it disturbed me.

  The Happy Valley was an actual area, Wanjohi Valley, around Naivasha, between Nairobi and Nakuru towns, but the name also described the lifestyle of a white landed idle class that killed boredom with hunting, alcohol, other drugs, temporary marriages, divorce, wife swapping, murders, and suicides. As a lifestyle, it encompassed the entire geographic area of initial white settlement, from Baron Delamere’s Soysambu Ranch in Naivasha, thence forty miles to Nyeri, and another fifty or so to the Mũthaiga Country Club, the Norfolk Hotel, and the Karen District in Nairobi.

  At the center of the Happy Valley crowd around Naivasha was one Josslyn Hay, twenty-second Earl of Erroll, whose company was sought by both men and women. All of the white women, particularly the married ones, wanted to bed him. In 1934, he joined the British Union of Fascists, which had been founded in 1932 by Sir Oswald Mosley, a friend and admirer of Benito Mussolini. In 1936, the BUF changed its name to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists to more explicitly signal its alliance with Hitler, who was an honored guest at Mosley’s wedding. Hay was BUF representative in Kenya, while simultaneously being the president of the settler policy body, the Convention of Associations. In his person and among the Happy Valley crowd, fascism and white settler supremacy became policy and way of life. As his family’s peerage dated back to 1453, Hay truly brought “real royalty” to settler fascism in Kenya.

  His affair with Lady Diana Delves Broughton ended with his murder in January 1941. Sir Jock Delves Broughton, Lady Diana’s husband, was accused of murdering Hay. He was acquitted, however, only to commit suicide a year or so later. Lady Diana, who quickly divorced Broughton, ended up as Lady Diana Delamere, after she married Thomas Pitt Hamilton Cholmondeley, fourth Baron Delamere of Vale Royal. She outlived the members of the original set long enough to witness the transition of the country from white highlands to an independent black African country. In marrying Lord Delamere, inserting herself at the center of the royal family of white settlerdom, she ensured that the Happy Valley image1 would outlive the colonial era into the postcolonial.2

  In the end, despite the research, I was unable to write the book. I couldn’t quite find the right tone. The difficulty lay in more than my uncertainty as to whether or not “their world” had really vanished. I couldn’t just write about their debauchery and endless blood lust and leave it there. An account of their social life would have to include a section on culture, and I was by then convinced that a Draculan idle class could never produce a culture.

  White settlers in Kenya were really parasites in paradise. The Right Honorable Hugh Cholmondeley, third Baron Delamere, Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George—the father of “Tom” Delamere—best exemplifies this bloodsuckery. This lord transformed himself from a White Hunter of lions into a White Hunter of other people’s lands. In 1903, he bagged a hundred thousand acres at Njoro, which he renamed Equator Ranch, and then fifty thousand more in and around Naivasha, which he renamed Soysambu. The words lord, lion, land, and loot begin with the same letter. Thus the knight commander of two saintly orders was the founding spirit of mass land robbery and of the not-too-saintly Happy Valley lifestyle. Maybe saints and sinners are two sides of the same coin. To him and those who followed him, Kenya was a huge winter home for English aristocracy, a place for big-game hunting and living it up on the backs of a million field and domestic slaves on lands stolen from them.3

  “No one coming into a new country,” Lord Cranworth wrote in his 1939 Kenya Chronicles, “could desire a more attractive welcome. . . . We were rowed ashore in a small boat and came to land on the shoulders of sturdy Swahili natives.” Coming ashore into Kenya meant literally riding on the backs of black workers into a white tropical paradise, and this was true for the titled and the untitled alike.

  By setting foot on Kenyan soil at Mombasa, every European, even those soldiers resettled on stolen lands after the First World War, was instantly transformed into a blue-blooded aristocrat. An attractive welcome: before him, stretching beyond the ken of his eyes, lay a vast valley garden of endless physical leisure and pleasure that he must have once read about in the Arabian Nights stories. The dream in fairy tales was now his in practice. No work, no winter, no physical or mental exertion. Here he would set up his own fiefdom.

  Life in these fiefdoms is well captured in Gerald Henley’s novels Consul at Sunset and Drinkers of Darkness. Whoring, hunting, drinking—why worry? Work on the land was done by gangs of African “boys.” But these books are fiction, of course.

  Documentary evidence comes from the records of a traveler. In her 1929–1930 diaries, later published together under the title East African Journey, Margery Perham described the same life in minute detail:

  We drove out past the last scattered houses of suburban Nairobi, houses very much like their opposite numbers in England. But here ordinary people can live in sunlight; get their golf and their tennis more easily and cheaply than at home; keep three or four black servants; revel in a social freedom that often turns, by all accounts, into licence, and have the intoxicating sense of belonging to a small ruling aristocracy. . . . Certainly, on the surface, life is very charming in Nairobi, and very sociable with unlimited entertaining; all the shooting, games and bridge anyone could want. And in many houses a table loaded with drinks, upon which you can begin at any hour from 10.00am onwards, and with real concentration from 6.00pm.

  Beyond drinking whisky, drugging themselves into sexual fantasies, whoring each other’s spouses, and gunning lions and natives for pleasure in this vast Happy Valley, the settlers produced little. No art, no literature, no culture, just the making of a little dominion marred only by niggers too many to exterminate, the way they did in America, New Zealand, and Australia, and threatened by upstart “African a
gitators.”

  The one who reached highest in creative literature was perhaps Elspeth Huxley, but she is better known as the literary apologist for white settlement with her voluminous historical polemic, White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya. The most creative things about her writing are her titles—The Flame Trees of Thika and The Mottled Lizard, for instance—because in them she allows herself to be inspired by native life and landscape. Beyond the title and the glossy covers, there is only defense of oppression, and defense of human oppression has never been a subject for great literature.

  Their theater, professional and amateur, never went beyond crude imitation and desperate attempts to keep up with the West End and Broadway. The settlers never produced a single original script or actor or critic.

  In science, they could of course display Louis Leakey, undoubtedly a great archaeologist. Leakey’s specialty was in digging up, dating, and classifying old skulls. Like George Eliot’s Casaubon, he was happier living with the dead. To the Leakeys, it often seemed that the archaeological ancestors of Africans were more lovable and noble than the current ones—an apparent case of regressive evolution. Colonel Leakey, and even Louis Leakey, readily proposed ways of killing off African nationalism, while praising skulls of dead Africans as precursors of humanity. L.S.B. Leakey is the author of two antiliberation polemics—Mau Mau and the Kikuyu and Defeating Mau Mau (i.e., the Kenya Land and Freedom Army.)

  In art, the settler class’s highest achievement was the murals on the walls of the Lord Delamere bar in the Norfolk Hotel, Nairobi.4 The murals stand to this day, and they still attract hordes of tourists who come to enjoy racist aesthetics in art. Their artistic mediocrity only enhances their revealing historical realism.

  On one wall are depicted scenes drawn from the English countryside: fourteen different postures for the proper deportment of an English gentleman; fox-hunting with gentlemen and ladies on horseback surrounded on all sides by well-fed hounds panting and wagging tails in anticipation of the kill to come; and of course the different pubs, from the White Hart to the Royal Oak, waiting to quench the thirst of the ladies and the gentlemen after their blood sports. Kenya is England away from England, with this difference: Kenya is an England of endless summer tempered by an eternal spring of sprouting green life.