Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  Hola was a concentration camp in Garissa, in Eastern Kenya. It housed those LFA (“Mau Mau”) captives who were deemed hardcore, the British label for those who were most consistent in their resistance to the entire system of concentration and British colonial rule. They voiced their grievances. Forced to work on some irrigation schemes, they refused and demanded to be treated as political prisoners, not slaves. They demanded better food and better medical care.

  Cowan’s plan was put into practice on March 3, 1959. About a hundred LFA political prisoners were selected for moral surgery through forced labor. Two senior officers, the prison’s superintendent, Michael Sullivan, and his deputy, Walter Coutts, oversaw the operation, actions planned even “at the risk of someone getting hurt or killed.”7 Eleven men were bludgeoned to death and dozens more maimed in what became known as the Hola Massacre.

  The horror! The horror! Even Conrad’s Kurtz could see the horror he had wrought in the heart of darkness. But for the colonial regime, the real horror of Hola lay in being caught with blood on its hands. The prison officers had failed to be cautious: “If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly.”8 That advice was given in a 1957 letter from Eric Griffith-Jones, the colony’s attorney general, to his boss, Governor Evelyn Baring. The fifty-six-year-old Baring—scion of a banking family who a year later would emerge from this heroic ordeal as the First Baron of Howick of Glendale, KG, GCMG, KCVO—concocted the cover-up. His bureaucratic underlings, all the way down to lowest rank and file, took the cue from the top and repeated the white lie. The victims had drunk contaminated water. They were susceptible to scurvy. And the injuries? British torturers are trained Christian surgeons: they butcher to heal, not to kill. In fact, the men did not succumb to bruises and broken skulls. At an inquiry later, Walter Coutts, one of the two overseers of torture, summed it up: the men had willed themselves to death. Blixen, the gentle baroness from Denmark, had said it happens to creatures of the wild.

  The theory had worked as a cover-up for countless cases before but not for the Hola Massacre of March 3, 1959. It became the subject of parliamentary debate in Britain. Even London acknowledged that British officers had done it. Governor Baring, author of the contaminated-water fable, was eventually forced to admit that the injuries had come from the surgical tools of heavy sticks, batons, and boots. But Kenyans did not need the debate to know. Nearly every family in Central Kenya had a “hardcore” relative or neighbor.

  In our own, we had one who carried the label. His name was Gĩcini Ngũgĩ. He was my uncle; he had looked after me in the days of my first elementary school, Kamandũra. He was older than me and dropped out of school into the world of a settler colony. He and my brother Mwangi, aka Good Wallace, had been arrested trying to procure bullets for guerrilla fighters of the Land and Freedom Army. Good Wallace escaped into the mountains.9 Gĩcini escaped mandatory death because of his youth, but he was locked up in a concentration camp. Like the hundreds of others, he would not accept that he was afflicted with dangerous desires, that he needed therapy. He was labeled hardcore, but he was not among the eleven men bludgeoned to death.

  In William Shakespeare, soon after Macbeth has murdered King Banquo, Lady Macbeth lures her distraught husband back to bed with the assurance: “A little water clears us of this deed: How easy is it, then!”10 The Macbeths try to wash away the evidence of their guilt with a little water. The colonial state tried to wash away the evidence of its guilt by changing the name of the place from Hola to Galore. The simple turned complex: the Hola Massacre unmasked the facade of law, order, and civilization the colony had put up for the world to see. Still the state tried to soldier on as if indeed a little water had washed away the blood on the hand.

  But Hola did mark a movement of sorts. On April 14, Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of the political wing of the anticolonial resistance, who in 1952 had been convicted of managing Mau Mau and imprisoned for eight years in Laukitang, was now moved to Lodwar. Was this step a harbinger of changes to come? The gesture replaced Hola in the headlines, but it didn’t halt the horror or the nightmare that stalked the land.

  II

  The nightmare was embodied in one figure, a kind of bogeyman of children’s stories, only he was real, and he was white, and he was British, and adults feared him. Ubiquitous, able to make simultaneous appearances in different places at the same time, he was a rogue demon, a law unto himself.

  Nobody seemed to know his real English name. Everyone knew him as Waitina and spoke of him in the same breath with the white officers commanding administrative police and Home Guards.

  The Home Guard was a British creation, a low-paid auxiliary fighting force made up of natives. In January 1953, Major General Sir William Loony Hinde put the auxiliary force under district officers, the lowest white administrative rank deployed in every district. Thus Hinde had given himself an army of vigilantes outside the direct command of the regular army. Was the lawless lawman a district officer and Waitina his generic name or that of the soldiers under him?

  Clearly it was not a generic name for every district officer or every British soldier. The British soldier was known as Njoni for Johnny; and the district officer, Ndiũũ, for DO. The solution to the mystery lay in the nickname: Waitina is sometimes translated as “one with big buttocks,” but the name literally means “the one related to asshole” or “a relative of anus.” Waitina referred to a white boss who took men and women by force. It was the name for a sodomist, most likely a district officer or police officer, because these were there in every district in Kenya.

  Rape was a weapon of war; it may have been a sin, but who cared as long as the sinner sinned quietly and the sinned against were too traumatized to proclaim their sexual victimhood openly? But the victims could put out a warning through the generic Waitina.

  It was said that Waitina, the ubiquitous lawless lawman, collected body parts of his victims: hands, ears, eyes, male genitals. Or rather his underlings brought them to him in baskets or even in sisal bags. Proof of the kill, it was said, but there were hints that he did more sinister things with the body parts.

  The collection of body parts as proof of the kill was not confined to the white Waitina, whoever he was. Years later it would emerge that one black soldier in the King’s African Rifles, but originally from Uganda, distinguished himself not by his height of six feet four inches but by the quantity of body parts he regularly brought to his British superiors. He took no prisoners; their decapitated heads were more valuable than the words their mouths might tell. His zeal against LFA soldiers or suspects earned quick promotions; he rose from private through corporal to sergeant. His name was Idi Amin. The British relocated their man from Kenya back to Uganda in 1959.

  Three years before, another Ugandan who had moved to Kenya, in 1950 after expulsion from Makerere College for his anticolonial activities, had also returned to Uganda. His name was Apollo Obote. In Kenya, he had worked his way from laborer for Mowlem Construction Company to a salesman for an oil company, worked with trade unions, and then returned home in 1956 to join the anticolonial Uganda National Congress.

  The Congress was formed in 1952 by Ignatius Musazi following the ban of the Uganda Farmers Union in 1949, after it was accused of organizing the riots of the same year over the Asian monopoly of cotton ginning, among other grievances. The simmering effects might have been part of what fueled the 1958 Baganda boycott of Asian shops, two years after the return of the Anti-British Makerere Man and one year before that of the Pro-British Military Man.

  The lives of the two men had shadowed each other. Idi Amin Dada was born in Koboko, West Nile, Northern Uganda, in August 1925; Obote, in Akokoro, Lango, Northern Uganda, in December 1925. Lango and West Nile neighbored each other. Both men had worked in Kenya but on the opposite sides of the struggle: Obote with the pro-LFA Kenya African Union; Amin, with the anti-LFA British forces. The two men, with their different experiences of Kenya, had returned to Uganda at about the same time.

  In 1959 the British promote
d Idi Amin yet again, to warrant officer, the highest military rank for an African in the British Army at the time. The same year, Obote split with the Uganda National Congress and formed the more militant Uganda People’s Congress.

  The year may have seen this and even more dramatic events that played out publicly on the world stage—the ouster of Batista in Cuba and the rise of Fidel Castro; Hawaii incorporated as the fiftieth state of the United States; Leakey’s discovery of Zinjanthropus, the 1.75-million-year-old skull of a human ancestor, at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania; Charles de Gaulle’s coming into power in France, dogged by Algerian politics—but for me, it was the year that I, a subject from British colonized Kenya, got on a train bound for Makerere, in neighboring British Protected Uganda. Both were colonies, of course. Only that one, mine, was a wounded land, while Uganda, though exploited, had not been wounded by white settlerdom.

  3

  Reds and Blacks

  I

  It is the end of June 1959, and it’s like a dream. I board the train at Limuru, the same station that four years back had seen me shed tears of despair when the officials would not let me get on the train bound for Alliance High School because I did not have a permit to travel to another region as then required by the martial laws that regulated African travel within. I had to be smuggled into another train by a sympathetic lower ranking officer. Now, four years later, I am boarding another train bound, not for any region within the country but for the neighboring territory. And as in the past, my mother remains my anchor. Ever since she first sent me to school twelve years back, she has always wanted me to venture, to see what’s out there.

  I am leaving the colonial Kenya of terror and uncertainty but also the country of my private dreams and desires. Among the many who have come to see me off is Minneh Nyambura, whose smiling eyes make my heart beat so loudly I think people around me can hear the boom. A week or so earlier, we had made a secret soul pact.

  II

  On the first of July I woke up from the liminal space between private dreams and public nightmares into that of a moving train1 that hooted ESCAPE, AT LAST, ESCAPE, in my mind at least. My previous train journeys had been between my home in Limuru and my high school in Kikuyu, and I traveled third class. Now I was in second class, going from the known to an unknown, but the unknown felt more welcoming than the known. Besides, I had the company of others with whom I had schooled at the Alliance High.

  Some, like me, knew college only as a dream, but others, who had graduated from Alliance to Makerere before us, had already experienced its life and seemed eager to display their college ways to the neophytes. Alcohol was the rite of passage from the rawness of school to the ripeness of college. The transformation was remarkable, in a way. Those whom I had known as pious and exemplary dwellers of Alliance would open beer bottles with the insouciance of seasoned drinkers.

  There was a performance element to it, the opening salvo in the pressure to conform. For it soon became apparent that it was not enough for them to display the fact that within a year of college, they had left their high school life behind them; they seemed more eager to use the occasion of a second-class passenger train to initiate the novices into life.

  They passed the beer around, some of my fellow neophytes eagerly draining the glasses. I had never tasted brewed beer in my life. The only taste of alcohol I had had was of the homemade mũratina, a kind of wine made from honey and yeast. I declined their offer. Just taste it, one of them asked me. Njĩhia had been a year ahead of me at Alliance but now behaved as if he had seen the light by simply having done a year at college and was on a mission to rescue me from Plato’s cave. The more I refused to see the light of the alcohol, the more insistent Njĩhia became, alternating his praises to the beer, which left a moustache of white foam above his upper lip, with mockery of my pretense at innocence and accusations that I was trying to appear holier than they. You are out of school, no longer a baby under headmaster Carey Francis. Still I refused to touch the glass even.

  Stung by my continued refusal, Njĩhia suddenly rose from his seat and tried to force the drink on me. It spilled on my clothes. It now became a physical altercation. The others separated us. It was not the most pleasant way of experiencing second-class travel as a prospective college student, but I was glad I had stood my ground. My mother had brought me up to withstand any peer pressure that called on me to do that which otherwise revolted me. This trait would later help me to stand up for what I thought was right despite pressure to succumb to the current and popular. When later in college I drank, it was to satisfy my social needs, not to prove anything to my peers.

  Freed from participating in the alcohol-mediated merriment, I sat by the window and looked out. The window framed the view of a continually vanishing presence. It was a series of landscape paintings of infinite varieties of color, size, and shape, from hills, valleys, rocks, thickets, and forests to the sprawling white-settler ranches, wheat fields, and coffee plantations.

  And then it struck me. It was this very railway that had opened this rich and varied land to the white settlement. The stations and towns we passed, from Limuru through Nakuru and Eldoret to those near the border between Kenya and Uganda, came with the railway line built from 1899 to 1903. Blood had been spilt by proponents and opponents of the railway. The Koitalel-led Nandi resistance to the construction of the railway line and the colonial army suppressing the resistance were harbingers of the current LFA-led armed struggle of which my brother Good Wallace and Uncle Gĩcini Ngũgĩ were part. The sprawling rolling hills and fields of coffee and wheat the railway line generated spoke of white presence, but they also spoke eloquently of African loss. I was benefiting from a history that had come to negate my history.

  At Tororo we crossed from terror-ridden Kenya on one side to a kind of promised land on the other side of the border town.

  III

  Even the land we entered after crossing the border into Uganda seemed enwrapped in a nimbus. The tidy manicured tea plantations of Limuru and Kericho in Kenya were replaced by Uganda coffee plants and bananas that seemed to grow in the freedom of the wild and yet carried full bunches. The vast verdure before us, all African owned, was breathtaking in its extravagant display of untrimmed tropical luxuriance.

  Such must have been the scenery that greeted writer Winston Churchill when, in 1908, on his first African journey, he finally left the Kenya of cantankerous British colonial settlerdom and crossed into the British-protected African kingdom: “Uganda is from end to end a ‘beautiful garden’ where the ‘staple food’ of the people grows almost without labour. . . . Does it not sound like a paradise on earth?”2 And in summary, “Uganda is the pearl (of Africa).”3

  The only interregnum to my view of the wild verdure was the Indian Madhvani’s sugar plantations in Jinja, but even these, seen through the windows of the second-class coaches, came across as green blades dancing in the wind. It was also my first encounter with an Indian-owned and -managed plantation. In Kenya, Indians, by law, were not allowed to own land—this despite their having helped build the railway from Mombasa to Kampala. But in Uganda, it was a different story as evidenced by the Madhvanis. Past the sugar, it was a sudden reentry into the rich tropical lushness, a continuation of Churchill’s beautiful garden.

  Churchill had erased human presence from the Ugandan landscape. But when fifty years later I reemerged from the garden into the city at the railway station in Kibuli, it was into a human bustle and hustle of black presence selling matokes, potatoes, peanuts, clearly the fruits of their hands on their own soil. Black Baganda women in flowing busutis and black men in white kanzus and regular Western attire dominated the streets. Even the sight of Indians outside their shops along either side of the city streets added rather than took way from this incredible sight of black people who did not walk as if they were strangers in their city. Kenyan cities and towns always gave off an air of segregation and tension. Here there seemed more ease in the urban racial mingling, among the Asians and Afric
ans particularly. There were no visible effects of the trade boycott of the year before. Absent, even among the few white bodies, was the armed swagger of the Kenya settler.

  It was my first encounter with a modern city dominated by black presence, and it was strangely exhilarating. More personal, I had finally entered the capital of a country about which, for as early as I could recall, I had sung, To-Uga-nda, in rhythm with sounds of metal on metal of the trains bound for Kampala and the Baganda Kingdom.

  Years later the train and its sounds would still ring in the prose of my fictional world, in the novel A Grain of Wheat, in particular. The fact is, the railway, built in the 1890s, the high noon of the imperial Scramble for Africa, had an impact on the economy, politics, culture, and life of the region so profound as to make it inseparable from the history of modern East Africa. A product of British imperial dreams, the train had landed me in the city of my dreams.

  The bus from Wadegeya was a slow-motion climb to a biblical city on a hill, except that this city was here and now, and it had a real name, Makerere University College.

  IV

  Red greeted us on Makerere Hill. Red flowing in the wind. Red-gowned students on all the paths across the campus. I was assigned to Northcote Hall for residency, and even there, I was greeted by men in red. Sir Geoffrey Northcote, after whom the hall was named on its completion in 1952, was former governor of Hong Kong and had been chairman of the University Council at the time of his death in 1948.

  Makerere was several times bigger than the Alliance High School campus in Kikuyu, which I had known for the last four years. But it was the red gown, not the buildings, that dominated the visual landscape. Occasionally black gowns would flit across, breaking the uniform red, but these were few and far between. The black gowns signaled professors—lecturers, as they were called. For me both the red and the black signaled learning itself.