Wrestling with the Devil Page 7
In fact, only the terminology changed. The Preservation of Public Security Act retained all the cardinal vices of the colonial detention laws—the unaccountability of the governor to the legislature, the waiving of the normal democratic assumption of a person’s innocence until proven guilty, the provision that these regulations promulgated without the legislature are effective notwithstanding anything in the constitution or in any other law inconsistent therewith, and the assumption of a Kenyan’s guilt for crimes of thought and intention.
By 1966 all the repressive colonial laws were back on the books. “Arise, Colonial Lazarus” was the neocolonials’ celebratory call to divine worship at the holy shrines of imperialism:
Our father in Euromerican heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come.
Thy will be done
In our wealthy Africa now
As it was done in the colonial past.
Give us this day our daily dollar,
And forgive us our failures.
Help us triumph over those that challenge you and us,
And give us aid and the grace and the power to be meek and grateful
Forever and ever. Amen.
4
The Culture of Silence and Fear
1
Colonial Lazarus raised from the dead: this putrid specter of our recent history daily haunted us at Kamĩtĩ Prison. It hovered over us, its shadow looming larger and larger on our consciousness as days and nights rolled away without discernible end to our sufferings. We discussed its various shades and aspects, drawing on our personal experiences, often arriving at clashing interpretations and conclusions. Who raised colonial Lazarus from the dead to once again foul the fresh air of Kenya’s dawn?
To a mistaken few, this was proof that human nature, white, black, or yellow, never changes; it remains evil. To others, it was a case of the mysterious biological nature of the ruling nationality, what they called tribe. Yet they could not explain how or why, apart from the Kenyan Somalis, the majority of the other prisoners came from the same community as some of those holding leadership in government. To a few, “Shauri ya Mungu tu” (It was merely an act of God), as Mzee Duale Roble Hussein used to put it during our walks on the prison-yard side-pavements. Yet to others, it was a case of civilian weakness and indiscipline: if only the military . . . ? For a few others, it was clear that this was one other result of the battle of classes and their interests, the fundamental feature behind all the vicissitudes of Kenyan history, more so after the European conquest and the establishment of colonial capitalism.
But we all shared a common feeling: something beautiful, something like the promise of a new dawn had been betrayed, and our presence and situation at Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison was a logical outcome of that historical betrayal.
Irretrievable loss! Had we really come to this? Was prison our destiny as a Kenyan people? Fated always to plunge back to the days of the colony only hours after being tantalized with glimpses of new dawns? What of the million dead and maimed? Was it only to enable a depraved few to carry on the colonial philosophy for which the lives of countless poor men, women, and children had been sacrificed?
In the cell, each political prisoner would struggle against mounting despair—the inevitable outcome of bitter reflections churned over and over in the mind. For here one had no helper except one’s own experiences and history. That, I would say, was the real loneliness of prison life. In the silence of one’s cell, one had to fight, all alone, against a thousand demons struggling for the mastery of one’s soul. Their dominant method was to show continually that there was only one way of looking at things, that there was only one history and culture, which moved in circles, so that the beginning and the end were the same. You moved only to find yourself back on the same spot. What was the point of making the effort? We were all the children of Sisyphus fated forever to roll the heavy stone of tyranny up the steep hill of struggle, only to see it roll back to the bottom.
But wait, I shouted back at the demons of despair. The African Sisyphus had another history, a beautiful history, a glorious history, and most Kenyan people were its best illustration. It is the history of a people ceaselessly struggling against feudal Arab slave dealers and against the Portuguese marauders who opened up Africa to her four hundred years of devastating European domination topped off by British predators embracing Kenya with bloody claws and fangs. Yes, it’s the history of Kenyan people waging a protracted guerrilla war against a much better armed British imperialist power that used to boast of its invincibility to man and God. It’s the history of Kenyan resistance culture, a revolutionary culture of courage and heroism, of the defiant Koitalel and Kĩmathi. It’s a creative, fight-back culture unleashing tremendous energies among the Kenyan people.
Economically, this energy found its creative expression in the many industries set up by Kenyan people in times of national crisis. The Lumboko and Chetambe fortifications, built by the Bukusu people around Mount Elgon during their resistance against the British invasion of their country, still stand to this day as a living memorial to their courage and genius.
The KLFA set up underground clothing and armament industries in the cities and upon the mountains. People who only the other day were just carpenters, plumbers, and bicycle repairers now turned their skills into manufacturing pistols, rifles, and bombs under very difficult forest conditions. And they triumphed. The soldiers of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army broke the back of imperialism in Africa!
Politically, this energy found creative expression in the organizational efforts that enabled Koitalel to sustain a ten-year guerrilla struggle against vastly superior British might, a feat repeated by Kĩmathi in the 1950s. What is fascinating is how quickly the needs of the struggle compelled such leaders to see the imperative of greater unity among the various nationalities. Koitalel tried to forge a political alliance with the Luo and Baluhya peoples; Me Katilili’s oath was an attempt to unify coastal nationalities and clans; and Kĩmathi attempted a grand political alliance of Kenyan people to oust the imperialist enemy.
In the arts, resistance energy found expression in songs, poems, plays, and dances, giving rise to a great progressive literary tradition of Kenyan poetry and theater. There was, for instance, the Ituĩka, a revolutionary cultural festival of music, dance, poetry, and theater among the Agĩkũyũ, which was enacted every twenty-five years, both as a ceremony transferring power from one generation to the other and as a communal renewal of commitment to struggle against tyrants as their forefathers, the Iregi1 generation, had done.
During the 1930s, Mũthĩrĩgũ dances and songs made fun of the missionaries and voiced people’s rejection of forced labor, their disgust with cultural imperialism, their uncompromising opposition to political oppression, and their strong condemnation of Kenyan collaborators with colonialist enemy occupation. The songs and dances were banned, and many Mũthĩrĩgũ artists were hounded to prison. But even behind prison bars, they went on singing their poetry of protest and commitment to freedom, ending with the chorus:
Gĩthaka, Gĩthaka gĩkĩ
Gĩthaka, Gĩthaka gĩkĩ
Twatigĩirwo nĩ Iregi.
Land, this land
Land, this land
We inherited it from the revolutionaries.
The Mumboist anti-imperialist movement among the Luo and Gusii nationalities and the anti-imperialist religious movement called Dini ya Musambwa also gave rise to poetry and song, and many of the singers and composers were jailed or hounded to death. But they kept on creating new songs and new dances. Even the graphic artist Mabiro Kimolai of Sibou was arrested in 1913 when his silent art took up the cry of the people.
Finally, nearly the whole writing and publishing industry in the 1940s and 1950s supported the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. Volumes of songs, poems, and prose were published. Many more were simply committed to memory and were sung and recited in most homes or wherever two or more people had gathered. A people’s th
eater flourished away from the stifling confines of walls, sets, and fixed stages.
Once again, the colonial overlords banned these publications; they banished the authors, composers, and publishers to concentration camps, prisons, and cruel deaths. But even behind the barbed wire and stone walls of the colonial Jericho, they went on composing new songs and singing out a collective defiance that finally brought those walls tumbling down:
Tũtiũragia gũthamio
Kana gũtwarwo Njera
Kana gũtwarwo icigĩrĩra
Tondũ tũtigatiga
Gũtetera ithaka/Wĩyathi
Kenya nĩ bũrũri wa andũ airũ.
We are not afraid of detention
Being sent to prison
Banished to remote islands
For we shall never give up
Our struggle for Land/Freedom
Kenya is an African people’s country.
The period produced some romantic figures, like the legendary Maranga wa Gĩtonga, who would not leave his guitar behind as he went to fight in the forest.2
This culture generated courage, not fear; defiance of oppression, not submission; pride in self and in one’s country, not cowardly acceptance of national humiliation; loyalty to Kenya, not its betrayal to imperialism. And it was precisely in reaction to the people’s history of change and revolutionary culture that the colonial rulers had tried to humiliate Africa’s Sisyphus into accepting the oppressor’s view of history—that all efforts to change this reality would be futile.
Hardinge’s philosophy of the sword and the bullet was a reactionary response to the people’s resistance against foreign occupation. Would Hardinge have called for bullets if there had been no armed resistance? Would he have tried to force submission if there had been no defiance? The Ituĩka revolutionary cultural festival and the Mũthĩrĩgũ dances and songs were suppressed because they lauded struggle to change an oppressive status quo. In their turn, the foreign missionary churches intensified efforts to promulgate colonial religions and cultures that glorified the beauty of accepting, even reveling in, one’s own enslavement—to foreign gods and, by extension, to foreign masters, both of whom know what’s best and only want to help you. After suppressing native people’s own institutions of learning, like Gĩthũngũri Teachers’ College and the Kikuyu Karĩng’a independent schools movement, which taught pride in self and country, the colonial regime built more church and government schools to propagate unchallenged the godly ideals of glory in submissive obedience.
Finally, the institution of British theater in Kenya in the 1950s was a reactionary response to the resurgence of popular dance and theater following the return of embittered Kenyan soldiers from the European-generated Second World War. The colonial regime had cause for alarm. The anti-imperialist Mũthuũ dances had spread in central Kenya like fire across a dry plain. In Nyeri, Kĩmathi had started the Gĩcamu theater movement with its base in Karũna-inĩ. Dance and theater had become a common feature in all of the people’s own schools.
The British countered by starting theater clubs for British plays and players: the Little Theatre in Mombasa in 1948, the Donovan Maule Theatre in Nairobi in 1949, and similar clubs in Nakuru, Eldoret, and Kitale in the same period. In 1952 the colonial regime, in concert with the British Council, started the Kenya National Theatre. Here an annual schools’ English drama festival was started, with the British Council as the main donor of prizes for deserving African children. During the same period, a European drama and music officer was appointed to control the growth of African theater in all Kenyan schools. In places like Alliance High School, the performance of Shakespeare became an annual ritual attended by colonial governors and applauding administrators.
In Race Against Time, Richard Frost,3 former head of the Empire Information Service and the British Council’s first representative in East Africa, offers fantastic revelations about the deliberate manner in which the whole imperialist cultural program was put into force. Frost writes that the Kenya National Theatre was built under direct instruction from the Colonial Office to meet the urgent need for fostering improved race relations through an organization which would aim, in the first place, at establishing primarily cultural facilities:
The National Theatre was built where it was because those who planned the scheme, including Thornly Dyer, the architect who designed the Parliament Building and conceived the master plan for Nairobi, wanted to build the National Theatre in the “snob” centre of Nairobi. The instruction given by the Secretary of State to the British Council Representative was to build a National Theatre and Cultural Centre where people of culture and position could meet. At that time no Africans were able to live anywhere near the site which was selected, but that site was chosen because it was hoped that in due time the residential apartheid would be brought to an end and Muthaiga, Westlands, the Hill and other areas, which were then open only to Europeans, would become districts where leading people of all races would live.
On the Kenya Drama Festival, Richard Frost is even more forthright about its being a cultural factory for manufacturing a multiracial Kenyan elite:
The Kenya Drama Festival, which has an offshoot in the Schools Drama Festival, was the result of a plan put into operation in 1951. The British Council had to win the goodwill of Europeans and do what it could to help them to keep at a high standard the cultural heritage of Britain. Drama was a cultural activity enjoyed by both actors and audiences and it was also an activity in which Africans and Asians engaged. It was hoped that through the theatre the goodwill of the European community could be gained, European cultural standards could be helped, and, later on, members of the different races could be brought together by participation in a common pursuit which they all enjoyed.
Apart from schools, the Moral Re-Armament team toured concentration camps showing films with themes of wicked characters who find moral balance by rejecting the company of the wicked. At the same time, they tried to organize theater groups among the political prisoners to stage nice Christian plays about prodigal sons and forgiving fathers. They even recruited writers from among the political prisoners. In Mau Mau Detainee, J.M. Kariũki has described the emptiness of such theatre and writing:
Benjamin was a very clever and able man and an expert at writing booklets in Kikuyu. He was a co-operator, but a most subtle one. He never beat anyone and he always treated the other political prisoners well. He composed a skilful pamphlet on “confession” which was given to us all. He also produced sketches and plays in which the man who had confessed was always richer or surpassed in some way the man who remained hardcore. The warders and the softcore liked these very much. We condemned them as the Wamarebe Plays.
Empty Tins Theatre: what an apt description of imperialist culture! Except that, unless countered, the cumulative effect of the repetition of the values of surrender can begin to make dents in the moral resolution of the recipients.
Kenyan people’s theater survived this reactionary onslaught. In Nyeri, Theuri started a theater group on the ruins of those banned by the British. He staged plays in the Gĩkũyũ language. In schools like the Alliance High School, some students rebelled against the cult of Shakespeare and started writing their own plays in Kiswahili. They took them to the villages and locations around Nairobi and Nakuru, the heartland of settler culture. In the forests and the mountains, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) guerrillas continued their dances, songs, and theater with one main theme: death to British imperialism—and their black auxiliary army, the so-called Home Guards.
See now the dialectical workings of history: it was the British invaders who actually became terrified of the people’s vigorous culture of revolutionary courage and optimistic determination. The indomitable strength and resilience of Kenyan popular culture had spread panic among the foreign settlers, who felt stalked by naked insecurity on every side. They now ate, drank, and even made love in their uniforms with newly sharpened bayonets and nailed boots. By the 1950s, in the high noon of th
eir settler reactionary culture, their homes had become virtual fortifications, complete with ramparts, moats, spikes, sirens, and drawbridges, while bloodhounds, mbwa kali, kept guard at the gates of the erstwhile paradise.
Raise colonial Lazarus from the dead? The fact is that his heirs, the postcolonial ruling class, have also been caught in the dialectical net of history. Thus in Kenya today, the Kenya of colonial Lazarus resurrected, it is not the peasants and workers who walk about in abject terror. Why should they? They possess no stolen property to disturb their nightly sleep lest the owner should knock at the door. Their sole fear is that the police or the General Service Unit (GSU) will molest them.
On the contrary, it is the minority propertied class and its foreign friends who now walk the streets stalked by naked insecurity from every side. Their homes, like those of the settler minority whose culture they have chosen to emulate, have become virtual forts complete with guns, sirens, electronic surveillance, and bloodhounds, mbwa kali!
The neocolonial resurgence of this mbwa kali culture was concretely demonstrated in 1979, when the guards of the American-owned Del Monte fruit company in Thika set their dogs on a couple of innocent Kenyan children, killing one girl and maiming the other. Their fear is such that they cannot even fully trust the coercive machinery of their state for total security. Might not that soldier or that police officer one day remember that he too is a worker of peasant origin, now earning a miserable Judas pay to suppress members of his own class? So they go for supplementary protection from foreigners. Foreign-owned security companies, like the London-based Securicor or the Israeli-run Ossica, are doing a lucrative business in Kenya as hired security officers in a vast ministry of fear. The Weekly Review of January 11, 1980 says: