by Paul Theroux
Such nightmares occur in the novel based on his experience. The worst ones in the book are of rape and beatings and violent crash-landings, but the nightmares are preferable to the reality of imprisonment. Wahome wrote of Chipota, ‘Then a flash of light and he woke up from the nightmare to realize that he was still within the walls of the cell … He wished he could go back to the nightmare.’
Craving to be returned to the nightmare was exactly how he had felt, he told me. He was desolated to wake from a bad dream to see himself ankle deep in water and shivering, pissing and shitting in the water, not able either to stand or sit.
I said, ‘Where did the Kenyans learn this torture technique?’
‘Maybe from Romania. They were friendly to us then.’
‘What about your family? Did they know where you were?’
‘They had no idea. I was thirty-five at the time, with two young children. They didn’t know I was in the middle of Nairobi, in a dark torture cell at Nyayo House. After five or six days I got to recognize daytime from the noise above me.’
‘Weren’t you tempted to confess?’ I asked.
Again he smiled the crooked smile and said, ‘Before I was arrested I had been amazed by all the people who had confessed to crimes. I had no idea why they said they were guilty – I knew they weren’t but they said they were. Now I knew. I was in the dark, in water. My feet were rotting. I was on the point of breakdown. I thought of suicide. When a week passed they must have thought I was dying, because they put me in a dry cell.’
But the interrogation continued. He was blindfolded and taken to the twenty-second floor of Nyayo House and locked in a room with his interrogator, always the same man, always the same questions: ‘When did you join MwaKenya?’ MwaKenya was an underground movement opposing the government. ‘Who recruited you?’ ‘What books have you read?’
He denied being a member of any underground movement. When he said he had read Mother, by Maxim Gorky, the interrogator (‘He was very moody’) screamed, ‘That’s a recruitment manual!’
This went on for an hour or so, and then he was returned to his cell in the basement. But he knew he was weakening, on the point of breakdown, and he still felt suicidal. It was not limbo, he assured me, but ‘a hell of suspense.’
He said that his happiest time was when he was given a chance to wash the prisoners’ dinner plates. ‘That was my highest moment. There was a mirror in the room. I looked at my face. The washing took no more than five or ten minutes, but I loved it. I was doing something. That was great.’
Wahome realized that the suspense was weakening him and that he preferred to serve a specific sentence than suffer not knowing when his confinement would end.
He said, ‘I told them this. They gave me three options – various crimes I could confess to. I chose the third - sedition, the sentence was the shortest. So they photographed me.’
He paused in this awful story and shook his head, remembering a detail – a Kafkaesque moment in a Kafka-like story.
‘I was smiling when they took my picture,’ he said, flashing me the same smile. ‘I was happy.’
He was taken to court in the evening, so as not to attract attention. His family still had no idea where he was. He had no lawyer. He was in handcuffs, in the dock.
‘The prosecuting attorney was Bernard Chunga,’ Wahome said. ‘You might see his name in the paper. He was rewarded. He spoke as though he knew my crime.
‘ “The accused is an intelligent man. He knew a crime was being committed and he chose not to report the offense to the lawful authority” – blah-blah-blah. The judge, H. H. Buch, was a Muhindi’ – an Indian. ‘The whole trial took about seven minutes. But I was happy! I was given fifteen months. It was something definite – not torture anymore.’
He said that this sort of arrest was very common in Kenya into the early 1990s. Altogether, he was in three prisons, all of them in rural areas, places where there were nearby villages, and wild game, the colorful Kenya of the tourist trade and postcard pictures of smiling highly ornamented tribespeople.
He was in solitary confinement most of the time, denied paper and pencils. He found a copy of The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence, and read it ten or twelve times. ‘Funnily enough, I can’t remember a thing about it!’ He found another book, Spanish Made Easy In the short period in the exercise yard he taught the others some Spanish, but the guards suspected they were being whispered about, and the book was confiscated. He spent the time daydreaming. He contracted malaria and seemed to suffer a weekly attack of fever.
On his release, he went home and back to his job on the newspaper. ‘I didn’t hate my captors. I thought, They should feel ashamed.’ He was not alone in his experience, or even in his book. Many Kenyans have been imprisoned on trumped-up charges, many have written similar accounts of detention and torture. Books such as Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Detained had helped prepare him; Darkness at Noon, which Wahome read later, he loved for its accuracy in detailing the particularities of prison life.
‘I went on writing. The government wanted to break me. I wanted to prove they were wrong. Prison was a sort of baptism for me, but for others I knew it was horrible. They never recovered. They were traumatized. Even now they are broken. But I wanted to survive. It was difficult. When I got out my friends were afraid of me.’
‘But those policemen and interrogators must still be around,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Wahome said. That ironic smile again. ‘A few years ago I was sitting on a bus. I looked across the aisle and saw the man who had interrogated me. “Who recruited you?” Him! When he saw me he pretended to be asleep.’
‘Weren’t you angry?’
‘No. I was scared. I was paranoid. I got off the bus.’
The torturer, homeward bound, jogging along on the city bus with the other commuters, became for me one of the enduring images of urban Kenya.
Wahome Mutahi, whom I saw as a hero, not a victim, became my friend, my rafiki. Walking around Nairobi he talked about the past and his family, he showed me the good bookstores and coffee shops, the streets to avoid, what remained of the old market town. We looked at what was left of the US Embassy which had been bombed in 1998 – most of the area, near the railway station, was still wrecked. Wahome advised me on buying the things I would need for my onward journey to western Kenya and the Ugandan border. In one bookstore I bought him a copy of The Mosquito Coast and he bought me his prison book. He inscribed his To Bwana Theroux, and we said kwaheri and promised to stay in touch.
A few days later, reading The Nation, I saw the name of the man who had prosecuted Wahome after his confession under torture. Chief Justice Bernard Chunga, now dispensing sanctimony, ‘appealed to organizations caring for juveniles to ensure that they handled them in accordance with international standards.’
High-mindedness was a theme in Kenyan speeches that month, because the US ambassador, Mr Carson, had delivered a stern warning in a pep talk to Kenyan businessmen that Kenya was in danger of losing its preferential trade status. To help feeble African economies, the US Congress had passed the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which provides a visa system for these countries to ship goods to the United States without having to observe quotas. The charitable idea was intended to encourage local industries, but all it did was encourage local criminality. In Kenya this by-pass had become a huge moneymaking scam. After paying some backhanders to high-ranking Kenyans, Chinese and Indian manufacturers were labeling their goods ‘Made in Kenya,’ and transshipping them to the States through Kenya.
‘The signs are not positive,’ Ambassador Carson said, referring to the textile scams. He went on to say that unless Kenya curbed corruption, respected the rule of law and human rights, and pursued sound economic policies, this preferential deal would end. The diplomat’s scolding and finger-wagging was quite different from the patronizing noises about negritude Kenyans had heard from past ambassadors. But this was a different Kenya, a different Nairobi, crime-ridden and corrupt. I did not long fo
r the past, I longed for the hinterland again, the simpler happier bush.
It was easy enough to leave Nairobi. Rail service to Kampala had been suspended, but there were plenty of buses to the border. They left in the early morning from the neighborhood that was associated with danger – especially dangerous in the pre-dawn darkness when the buses left. I was warned, ‘Take a taxi.’ I followed the advice, took a taxi three blocks with a driver named Bildad, who went on warning me, filling me with dread, until just before the bus left.
We set off in darkness and at sun-up we were traveling through the Great Rift Valley, among smallholdings. The valley that had once been a vast green empty and curved expanse, deepening to the northwest, with yellow flat-topped forests of thorn trees and beneath them antelope or bush buck nibbling grass, was now overgrazed and deforested and filled with mobs of idle people and masses of ugly huts.
Longonot Crater, a dark burned out volcano, was a reminder that the whole of the Rift Valley was a series of fault lines, stretching in an irregular rent from the Dead Sea to the Shire River valley in Mozambique. The Rift was created by an intense epoch of vulcanism that had torn open the heart of Africa with massive eruptions and lava flows. One controversial theory held that the two different climate zones created by the Rift Valley had influenced human evolution: the tropical forests to the west had become a home for apes, while hominids had had to adapt to the openness of the eastern savannah. Certainly the oldest hominid fossils in the world had been found in this eastern portion of the Rift.
Mount Lengai in Rwanda was still erupting and displacing villagers. Kilimanjaro was dormant, and so were the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda and the twenty-mile-wide caldera which was the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. Some of the titanic cracks opened by the eruptions had filled with water and become Lake Victoria, Lake Tanzania, Lake Malawi. Most of what was visible as landscape – the high Mau Escarpment just to the west of Longonot, for example – was the result of those early volcanoes and the plate shift.
The town of Naivasha looked quiet enough, pretty and purple with its jacarandas in bloom and a thickness of petals on its streets. Like many places in Kenya Naivasha had a murky past and a just as murky present. Everyone in Nairobi knew the story of Father Kaiser, a Catholic priest from Minnesota, who had served in a church near Naivasha. He had been a missionary in Kenya for more than thirty years and, alarmed by growing ethnic and tribal hatred, he began to collect information on specific acts of violence, which he suspected were politically inspired. No one else was keeping a record – not the police and certainly not the government which denied the accusations, denied even that AIDS was a problem in Kenya. Father Kaiser, now scorned as a scaremonger but in fact a serious threat to the government’s credibility, had a growing file on the subject of rape and murder
Knowing that the police would be indifferent, because a politician was involved, two young girls came to Father Kaiser in great distress and reported that they had been raped by a government minister. The minister was well known, a member of the ruling party, KANU – Kenyatta’s party, Moi’s party, the party that had ruled Kenya for forty years; still in power.
Father Kaiser went to various high officials and raised the matter of the rapes as well as details of some of the other crimes. He was at first rebuffed, and then came under pressure to cease in his publicizing of the facts. When he kept at it, he was denied a work permit and told to leave the country Still he resisted, calling attention to the high crime rate and especially the government denials. In August 2000, Father Kaiser’s corpse was found by the side of the road. He had been murdered. As I was passing the scene of the crime the murderer still had not been found, though the man accused of rape was still sitting in his ministerial chair, in Moi’s cabinet.
‘Kenya has a stable government,’ an agent from a prestigious London-based safari company insisted when, inquiring about game viewing, I raised my doubts about security. She denied the government was corrupt and unreliable, and warned me, not of crime but of her company’s safari prices. ‘I must tell you we are incredibly high-end – we tailor each safari to the client, designing the safaris to the clients’ comfort and interests.’
‘Authoritarian’ is not the same as ‘stable,’ but anyway the safari client is mainly interested in big game, not politics. It is possible, using helicopters and armed guards and tight security, to assure a client’s safety in Kenya. And the client must not stray from the narrow itinerary.
I mentioned to a white Kenyan that I had traveled south by road, from the Ethiopian border to Marsabit and Isiolo. He was a tough man who had traveled throughout Kenya. He had one of the most powerful Land-Rovers I had ever seen – the newest model, with a BMW engine. He had never taken that road.
He said, ‘No one goes on that road.’
The shallow and corrosive soda lakes near Naivasha and Nakuru were justifiably famous for their flamingos. Lesser flamingos flocked to Lake Nakuru, the greater flamingo to Lake Natron. I could see big pink patches on Lake Elmenteita, thousands of the birds. They were feeding in the shallows of the lake, heads down, swinging their graceful necks, feeding by dragging their beaks through the lake, sluicing the water, straining the food.
Tourists would see only those lovely birds and know nothing of Father Kaiser or the dark forces in Kenya that had undone him.
We stopped at Nakuru for food and drink, for the revolting toilets. Nakuru had grown from a small market town with an agreeable climate to an enormous unplanned settlement of tin-roofed huts, with a newer community of the sort of tidy high-priced houses that have only just started to appear within commuting distance to Nairobi. ‘Middle management,’ I was told: Africans who had jobs with banks and insurance companies and car dealerships and import – export firms and foreign charities and donors. Old sun-faded signs were still visible on some shop facades of defunct colonial-era general stores, advertising patent medicine and cattle feed, and across one wall, U-Like-Me Porridge Oats.
Hawkers – coastal people mostly, Africans in skullcaps and galabiehs – were pushing trays of sunglasses and cheap watches at the circulating passengers. Improvised stalls were offering ice cream and fruit, hot dogs and fried chicken.
Half the bus passengers were African, little families that looked Ugandan; the other half were Indian, bigger families in the back and boisterous because they were in a group – carping men, silent women, squawking little girls and boorish boys with baseball caps on backwards. The African woman seated in front of me was reading Wayne Dyer’s Your Sacred Self, the chapter entitled, ‘Making the Decision to be Free.’
In an earlier time – the sixties, say: years I could verify – a drive to Nakuru and Kericho and Kisumu, where we were headed, would have been a spin in the countryside. Narrow roads, almost no traffic, Africans on bikes, cattle grazing on hillsides, now and then a farmhouse, the occasional herd of antelope. A green and empty land under a big sky. Places that had been little towns and truck stops were now large sprawling settlements; the sparsely inhabited bush had become populous and visibly nasty.
That was the way of the world, but it seemed an African peculiarity that whenever a town or city grew bigger it got uglier, messier, more dangerous, an effect of bad planning, underfunding and theft. And a feature of every settlement was the sight of African men standing under trees, congregated in the shade. They were not waiting for buses, they were just killing time, because they had no jobs. They must have had gardens – most people did – but the farm work of planting and hoeing was presumably done by their womenfolk. In Kenya, whenever I saw a well-formed tree near a village or town, I saw men under it, doing nothing, looking phlegmatic and abstracted.
Even the most prosperous towns in this part of Kenya had the bright signboards and relief agencies, the offices and supply depots – people doling out advice and food and condoms. The merchandise of the gang of virtue. This was true in Kericho, its large leafy tea estates softening its green hills and valleys. Maybe such places attracted missionaries and a
gents of virtue because they were so pleasant to live in? Maybe communications were better here than in the remote bush? Whenever I saw a town that looked tidy and habitable I saw the evidence of foreign charities – Oxfam, Project Hope, the Hunger Project, Food for Africa, SOS Children’s Villages, Caritas, many others, with saintly names and a new white Land-Rover or Land Cruiser parked in front.
As this was a coffee-growing area, any one of these vehicles could have belonged to the satirical figure of Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby and her African Project. She had said, ‘We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha.’
Mine is not a complaint, merely an observation, because hearing horror stories about uneducated starving Africans, most Americans or Europeans become indignant and say, Why doesn’t someone do something about it? But much was apparently being done – more than I had ever imagined. Since the Kenyan government cared so little about the well-being of its people, concerns such as health and education had been taken up by sympathetic foreigners. The charities were well established. Between the Bata Shoes retail store and the local Indian shop, you would find the office of World Vision or Save the Children – ‘Blurred Vision’ and ‘Shave the Children’ to the cynics. These organizations had grown out of disaster relief agencies but had become national institutions, permanent fixtures of welfare and services.
I wondered – seriously wondered – why this was all a foreign effort, why Africans were not involved in helping themselves. And also, since I had been a volunteer teacher myself, why, after forty years, had so little progress been made?
An entire library of worthy books describes at best the uselessness, at worst the serious harm, brought about by aid agencies. Some of the books are personal accounts, others are scientific and scholarly. The findings are the same.
