Wrestling with the Devil Read online

  Good security is expensive, but the cost of no security is higher. Awareness of this fact has resulted in the proliferation of over 90 security firms throughout Kenya that employ no fewer than 20,000 people—as home guards, factory guards, guards for business premises and guards who escort cash in transit.

  Even though these firms might never be able to guarantee absolute security of property from theft, the call for guards grows. Home guards have even become a much-sought-after status symbol among affluent Kenyans. Not surprisingly many security firms tend to concentrate their home-guard services in Nairobi’s posh residential areas to satisfy the high demand. But residents in a number of housing estates in the city also pool their resources to hire watchmen.

  Securicor (Kenya) Limited is the biggest such organization. It was formed in 1969 when it acquired a number of small local security firms complete with staff and assets. In those days operations were confined to Nairobi and Mombasa and the Securicor pay-roll contained about 2,000 names. Today the company employs more than 4,500 people and has 19 branches in different parts of Kenya. . . . Securicor Kenya is part of the British Securicor group, the largest industrial security organization in Great Britain and one of the biggest on the whole of the European continent.

  Foreign-run private armies to protect foreigners and a handful of Kenyans from real or imagined wrath of fellow Kenyans: what an irony of history!

  The culture of silence and fear had achieved a dialectically opposite effect. Kenyan people had rejected the view of history that the colonial and neocolonial gods had tried to impose on rebellious Sisyphus. Why should I accept it?

  2

  In my cell, number 6, continuously thinking about the beauty of our history, I became more and more convinced that in their vindictive agitation for the banning of our theater efforts at Kamĩrĩthũ and in their feverish clamor for my incarceration, Kenya’s rulers and their foreign friends had been driven by fear. True to their colonial cultural inheritance, they were mortally scared of peasants and workers who showed no fear in their eyes and no submissiveness in their bearing, who proclaimed their history with unashamed pride and denounced its betrayal with courage. Yes, like their colonial counterparts, the rulers had become mortally afraid of the slightest manifestation of a people’s outspoken culture of heroism and courage.

  Eliud Njenga, the Kĩambu district commissioner who presided over the banning of the public performances of our play, Ngaahika Ndeenda, voiced the general panic of this class when, in an interview with the Nairobi Times, he claimed that on top of the play raising the best-be-forgotten issues of the nationalistic role of the soldiers of Kenya Land and Freedom Army, and the traitorous role of African members of the British Auxiliary Army (Home Guards) during the struggle for Kenya’s independence, it was also calling for a class struggle.

  He was, of course, wrong about the latter charge. The play, as afterward I tried to explain to the Detainee’s Review Tribunal (chaired by a British ex-judge) of July 1978, could never have called into being what was already there. Classes and class struggle were the very essence of Kenyan history. The play didn’t invent that history. It merely reflected it—correctly.

  But the D.C. was expressing a deeper fear: the Kenyan ruling elite believed in the magic omnipotence of an imperialist colonial culture, but here were ordinary peasants and workers at Kamĩrĩthũ showing up the emptiness of borrowed culture and the potency of a people-based culture. Moreover, they were acting it out to thunderous applause from appreciative thousands who trekked on foot and in hired matatu and buses from all parts of the country. Was Kamĩrĩthũ becoming a revolutionary shrine?

  3

  Kamĩrĩthũ! It is difficult for me to conjure up in adequate literary terms the different images I have of Kamĩrĩthũ. The name is a diminutive form of Mĩrĩthũ, meaning a flat place on which rests a pool of water defiant to drought.4 Little Mĩrĩthũ is bound by three sloping ridges that make it look like a rectangular trough, which is open on one of its smaller sides facing the Manguũ marshes. In my youth, all the sloping ridges were strips of cultivated fields with a few people’s homesteads scattered about. A few Swahili majengo-tin-roofed type houses were built on the flat murram trough, away from the pool. It was a path through Kamĩrĩthũ that, starting in 1947, I followed daily to Kamandũra school, about two miles from home.

  It was at Kamĩrĩthũ that I first saw Nyambura. I thought her the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and I vowed then and there that she would one day be my wife. That this came to pass several years after I am sure had nothing to do with that boy’s vow but everything to do with the fact that in the new Kamĩrĩthũ our two homes were separated by only a street, and I had not planned it. Njoki, my daughter whose photograph kept me company in prison, was named after Nyambura’s mother, but the Kamĩrĩthũ peasants called the child Wamũingĩ, meaning that she belonged to them, she belonged to all Kamĩrĩthũ.

  As part of Limuru, Kamĩrĩthũ is crucial to Kenya’s history of struggle. Some Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) leaders, like Johana Wakĩraka, came from that area. The lands at Tigoni and Kanyawa, where in the 1920s people were ejected by force to make room for more European settlement, are only a few yards away from Kamĩrĩthũ. A railway line divided the stolen lands—where the settlers soon set up the Limuru Hunt, the Limuru Golf Course, the Limuru Racecourse, and the Limuru Farmers Corner, all high-class cultural rendezvous—from the African reservations, reservoirs of cheap labor and sex. I have tried to describe the landscape in Weep Not, Child, where Kipanga town stands for Limuru, or Rũngai, as the town was popularly known. One of the valleys described in Weep Not, Child originates from Kamĩrĩthũ.

  When in 1948 I left the mission-run Kamandũra for the Gĩkũyũ Karĩng’a School at Manguũ, I never visited Kamĩrĩthũ except once briefly in 1953, when as a newly circumcised youth complete with my initiate’s robe of white cloth decorated with several safety pins and one-cent pieces, I went across it, through the cultivated fields on one of the ridge slopes, and on to Tharũni and Ndeiya on the edges of Maasailand to visit other rika initiates to sing and dance the stick dance called waine.

  That was in fact my very last impression of old Kamĩrĩthũ when in 1955 I went from my home village overlooking Limuru town to Alliance High School, Kikuyu, hidden in the guardroom of a goods train through the friendly efforts of Chris Kahara, then a railway official.5 The year before, my elder brother, Wallace Mwangi wa Thiong’o, had joined the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) after a dramatic escape from police custody. Many Home Guard loyalists would never forgive me for what some thought a miscarriage of educational justice: a brother of a Kenya Land and Freedom Army “terrorist” securing a place in one of the top African schools in colonial Kenya!

  I came back after the first term and confidently walked back to my old village.6 My home was now only a pile of dry mudstones, bits of grass, charcoal, and ashes. Nothing remained, not even crops, except for a lone pear tree that slightly swayed in sun and wind. I stood there bewildered. Not only my home, but also the old village with its culture, its memories, and its warmth had been razed. Mwangi, who used to work for the Kahahu family next door, told me what had happened and pointed vaguely up the ridge. I walked up the ridge not knowing where I was headed until I met a solitary old woman. “Go to Kamĩrĩthũ,” she told me and pointed the way*.

  Kamĩrĩthũ was now no longer the name of a trough with a defiant pool of water surrounded by a few Swahili houses, but instead the name of a new “emergency village” on one of the sloping ridges next to the path I used to follow on my way to Kamandũra. I walked through the new village asking people for my new home and passed through the present site of Kamĩrĩthũ Community Theatre. All around me, I saw women and children on rooftops with hammers and nails and poles and thatch, building the new homes because their men were in concentration camps or away with the people’s guerrilla army. Many critics have noted the dominance of the theme of return in my novels, plays, and short stories, particularly i
n A Grain of Wheat. But none has known the origins of the emotion behind the theme. It is deeply rooted in my return to Kamĩrĩthũ in 1955. The return of Kenya Land and Freedom Army political prisoners was to come later.

  Initially, the village was a riotous mass of smoking straw-topped mushrooms. Later, in 1956 or 1957, when the decision was taken to turn the emergency concentration villages into permanent features to facilitate the creation of an African landed middle class through land consolidation and the enclosure system, while retaining the villages as permanent reservoirs of cheap labor for both the whites’ highlands and the new African landlords, the village was expanded with slightly better planning. The yeomen were later allowed to build homes in their enclosures, and they quit the villages. The landless remained. Four acres of land were set aside for a youth center. A mud-walled barracks-type building was put up there. That was all.

  Kamĩrĩthũ has not changed much from its emergency origins. Poverty is still the king. Many families live in shacks beside the village paths. And of course Kamĩrĩthũ is still a reservoir of cheap labor for the new Kenyan landlords and the Euro-American multinationals who at independence replaced the former British landlords in the sprawling green fields of tea and coffee around Tigoni and beyond. To be wealthy in Kenya today is incomplete without land in Limuru. The golf course and the racecourse remain. The Limuru Hunt is still the big event of the year. Every weekend, a troupe of unemployed youth from Kamĩrĩthũ go to the Tigoni Golf Club to offer their services as caddies for the local and foreign golf-playing tycoons.

  During the Emergency, the youth center at Kamĩrĩthũ was the meeting place for boys and girls to dance erithi and nyangwĩcũ and other dances of the period. After independence, the center came under the Limuru Area Council, and a few carpentry classes were started. In 1974, the Limuru Area Council was disbanded. The center had now nobody to look after it. But it remained, a four-classroom barracks with broken walls, occupying about a quarter of an acre, the other four and three-quarters making a grazing ground for a few lonely cows and goats. The village children also found the site a good common ground for wrestling and throwing dice. They also used it for craps in a different sense—as a toilet—and the stench was overpowering. There has never been any health program for this village of more than ten thousand souls.

  The only major cultural activity on this grass in Kamĩrĩthũ occurred in 1976 when the University of Nairobi Free Travelling Theatre, run by the Department of Literature, performed some plays, including extracts from The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, written by Mĩcere Mũgo and me. Otherwise the center was dead to organized performance culture.

  It was through the tireless efforts of a community development officer, Njeri wa Amoni, that a new committee made up of concerned villagers was formed to revive the center and run it on a self-help basis. That was how I came to join the new management committee under the chairmanship of Adolf Kamau, a peasant farmer, and later Ngigĩ Mwaũra, then a sales director with a motor vehicle company.7 Karanja, a primary-school teacher from the village, was the secretary. But the majority of the committee members were peasants and workers from the village.

  The committee changed the name of the youth center to Kamĩrĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre, reflecting a new ambitious program for uplifting the place and changing the lives of the villagers through what we called a harambee of sweat. The committee decided that money was not the basis of development. Human hands and brains were the basis. Cooperative labor, not money and harambee charity handouts, was going to develop the center along several broad lines and phases: adult education (adult literacy, continuing education, etc.), cultural development (music, dance, drama, etc.), material culture (furniture, basketry, leatherwork, music crafts—the making of all the material objects daily used by the community), and health. The center was going to be run on a democratic collective decision-making basis, all of us drawing on our different experiences in identifying and tackling problems. Each problem area would have a subcommittee. Initially, two subcommittees were set up, for education and culture, with provision for two more to deal with community health and material culture.

  I was elected the chairman of the cultural committee, and Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ, a researcher in adult literacy at the University of Nairobi, the chairman of the education committee. The first program was literacy; the center started with a class of fifty-five workers and peasants in June 1976, and by the end of the year, all could read and write in Gĩkũyũ language. We had established roots.

  We were now ready to venture into cultural activities. Here most of the peasants and workers were quite clear as to what they wanted. Some had already participated in or seen concerts and playlets by a group of workers at Saint Lwanga Catholic Church at Kamĩrĩthũ. Others had seen the plays of the University of Nairobi Free Travelling Theatre. Yet others had been to the controversial Kenya National Theatre in Nairobi in October 1976 and had seen the Kenya Festac ’77 Drama Group’s performance of the complete version of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi as brilliantly directed by Seth Adagala. Now they wanted similar efforts at Kamĩrĩthũ!

  Plays would serve three main purposes. They would serve as entertainment and collective self-education; they would serve as follow-up reading material for the new literates; and they would raise money to finance the other programs and meet the day-to-day expenses like chalk, writing materials, and electricity bills.

  That was how in December 1976 Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ and I came to be given the task of producing a working script. The script had to be ready by March 1977.

  We couldn’t meet the March deadline. But by April 1977, an outline of the script of Ngaahika Ndeenda was ready. For the next two months, the peasants added to the script, altering this and that. Reading of the final working script and rehearsals started on June 5, 1977. The performances commenced on October 2, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the declaration of the State of Emergency and the beginning of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army’s armed struggle.

  The six months between June and November 1977 were the most exciting in my life and the true beginning of my education. I learned my language anew. I rediscovered the creative nature and power of collective work.

  Work, oh yes, work! Work, from each according to his ability for a collective vision, was the great democratic equalizer. Not money, not book education, but work. Not three-piece suits with carnations and gloves, not tongues of honey, but work. Not birth, not palaces, but work. Not globetrotting, not the knowledge of foreign tongues and foreign lands, not dinners at foreign Inns of Court, but work. Not religions, not good intentions, but work. Work and yet more work, with collective democratic decisions on the basis of frank criticisms and self-criticism, was the organizing principle, which gradually became the cornerstone of our activities.

  Although the overall direction of the play was under Kĩmani Gecau, the whole project became a collective community effort as peasants and workers took more and more initiative in revising and adding to the script, in directing dance movements on the stage, and in the general organization.

  I saw with my own eyes an incredible discipline emerge in keeping time and in cutting down negative social practices. Drinking alcohol, for instance. It was the women’s group, led by Gaceri wa Waiganjo, who imposed on themselves a ban on drinking alcohol, even a glass, when coming to work at the center. This spread to all the other groups, including the audience. By the time we came to perform, it was generally understood and accepted that drunkenness was not allowed at the center. For a village known for drunken brawls, it was a remarkable achievement of collective self-discipline that we never had a single incident of fighting or a single drunken disruption for all the six months of public rehearsals and performances.

  I saw with my own eyes peasants, some of whom had never once been inside a theater in their lives, design and construct an open-air theater complete with a raised stage, roofed dressing rooms and storerooms, and an auditorium with a seating capacity of more than two thousand persons. Under a
production team led by Gatonye wa Mũgoiyo, an office messenger, they experimented with matchsticks on the ground before building a small working model on which they based the final complex.

  The rehearsals, arranged to fit in with the working rhythms of the village, which meant mostly Saturday and Sunday afternoons, were all in the open, attracting an ever increasing crowd of spectators and an equally great volume of running appreciative or critical commentaries. The whole process of play acting and production had been demystified, and the actors and the show were the gainers for it. The dress rehearsal on Sunday, September 25, 1977, attracted one of the biggest crowds I have ever seen for a similar occasion, and the same level of high attendance was maintained for the next four Saturdays and six Sundays.

  The effort unleashed a torrent of talents hitherto unsuspected even by the owners. Thus before the play was over, we had already received three scripts of plays in the Gĩkũyũ language, two written by a worker, and one by a primary-school teacher. One unemployed youth, who had tried to commit suicide four times because he thought his life was useless, now suddenly discovered that he had a tremendous voice, which, when raised in a song, kept its listeners on dramatic tenterhooks. None of the actors had ever been on a stage before, yet they kept the audiences glued to their seats, even when it was raining.

  One of the most insulting compliments came from a critic who wrote that the orchestra was professional and had been hired from Nairobi. Another such compliment came from those who heatedly argued that simple villagers could never attain that level of excellence, that the actors were all university students dressed in the tattered clothes of peasants. Another equally insulting compliment came from a university lecturer in literature who argued that the apparent effortless ease of the acting was spontaneous: after all, the villagers were acting themselves. The fact was that all the actors and musicians, men, women and children, came from the village, and they put in more than four months of conscious disciplined work. Some of our university lecturers and those other critics, in their petit bourgeois blindness, simply couldn’t conceive of peasants as being capable of sustained, disciplined intellectual efforts.