Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  Or maybe it was a bit later, when I learned to read and I lost myself among the biblical characters of Abraham, Cain, Abel, Isaac, Rachel and Leah, Goliath and David, his sling not too dissimilar to the one I used to scare away the hawk who swooped down from the sky and snatched chicks from a mother hen or meat from the hands of a baby? Was it when I was held captive by David’s harp strings, which time and again calmed the unpredictable tempests in the soul of King Saul? Maybe it started when I was first struck by the wonder that chalk marks on blackboards and pencil marks on paper could conjure up images that carried the combined power of the sling and the string.

  Sometimes I think it came from a stint with Jim Hawkins on the high seas hunting for treasure on tiny islands in the Pacific or from escapes with Oliver Twist in the London streets of begging and hunger. I was continually amazed that I could travel to lands and seas far away and long ago while squarely ensconced in my Limuru rural outpost, thus attesting to the truth of the words that my classmate Kenneth Mbũgua and I recited to each other: Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side. We found these words in the Dent editions of Everyman’s Library. Kenneth and I made the saying our own. We argued endlessly about the meaning of the phrase “every man,” whether it actually meant everyone, including women and children.

  Or maybe it happened at the house of my maternal grandfather, Ngũgĩ wa Gĩkonyo. I was named after him, and at times my mother would playfully call me her father. My grandfather had turned me into his scribe, writing his letters, and he would make me read them over and over again until I had gotten the tone, words, and imagery right.

  At other times, I think it all began at Alliance High, where, without a Kenneth to argue with about phrases and the license to write, I first beheld Peter Abrahams’s Tell Freedom, read Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and dwelt in Tolstoy’s Youth. Maybe I was conceived in the pages of Brontë and Tolstoy.

  There had been other moments. There was the improvised drama in my village, with help from some Alliance boys, a dramatic mix of Christmas carols and freedom spirituals at Kamandũra Church. There was a similar mix at Kahũgũinĩ, where I was a temporary teacher. But those moments, though I was responding to the communal call and need, had not involved a written response to a challenge.

  Or was it the day I took the Makerere Oath in July 1959, a gown with the color of blood hanging from my shoulders, and committed myself to a life of quest?

  But there was indeed another day, I remember, when I faced a writing challenge: I was in my first year at Makerere when one of the English honors students stopped me in Queen’s Court. “You must be the James Ngũgĩ we’ve been hearing about,” he said.

  He knew me? Heard about me? Me, a first-year? It was the first time I was hearing about my essays being read by anybody.

  “My name is Jonathan Kariara,” he added, and then told me that Peter Dane had read one of my essays to the honors group as an example of how to write an academic paper, especially as to judicious use of citations, comparisons, and contrast to develop an argument.

  Kariara was then in his last year at college and was one of the stars in creative writing, having published some poems and stories in Penpoint, the signature product of the Department of English at Makerere. In years to come, he would establish himself as an editor in the Kenya branch of Oxford University Press, but he remained ever the stylist, as in the stories he wrote for Penpoint.

  II

  The inaugural issue came out in 1958 under the title The Magazine of the English Department through the initiative of Alan Warner, professor and chair. In the next issue, it became Penpoint, because a writer uses the point of a pen to make a point, the image Kĩnyanjui would later echo in his dramatic challenge to me. The founding editorial board was made up of three students—Michael Woolman, Michael Kaggwa, and Peter Nazareth—and one faculty adviser, Murray Carlin. In 1959, Peter Nazareth was the editor and Peter Dane the faculty adviser.

  I was most amazed not that students edited the magazine but that they wrote all those beautiful stories, poems, essays, and plays. Among the pieces I most liked was a short fiction, “And This at Last,” by John Nagenda. A journalist, a product of the modern colonial school, goes back to his village to interview an old man about his life. Cocooned in his modernity, the journalist is arrogant, condescending, and takes as a given that he can teach the old man a thing or two about modern ways. By the end of the interview, it is the journalist who weeps, realizing how little of life he knows. The journalist character, with his attitudes toward the village and his general artificiality, could have been any one of us at Makerere.

  Penpoint reawakened the desire to write, which I once experienced at Alliance, momentarily, but I had not yet done anything about it. And here I was face-to-face with Jonathan Kariara, one of the magazine’s luminaries!

  III

  I stood there in awe. I wanted to talk with him further, but I didn’t know what say. Talk of one’s mouth drying up! We went our different ways, I feeling that there was something, whatever it was, I should have said but didn’t.

  A few days later, I bumped into him outside the Main Hall. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I blurted out the first words from my mouth.

  “Excuse me, I have written a short story, would you care to look at it?”

  “Yes, give it to me, anytime,” he said without hesitation, and left. After a few steps, he stopped and looked back: “Do you have it with you?”

  “Oh, I am putting on the finishing touches—tomorrow, perhaps.”

  “Take your time.”

  I should have said that I’d been thinking about writing rather than that I had started doing it; I had transformed a vague desire into a fact that had yet to be actualized. I must now produce the fact; otherwise, how would I face him the next time?

  I went back to my room in Northcote and immediately began the draft of my first short story, “The Fig Tree.” It’s the story of a woman in a polygamous household, a victim of domestic violence. She is childless; this would seem to be the problem between husband and wife. My character cannot take it anymore, and she decides to leave him. I was able to capture the senseless violence I had seen in my father’s house against my mother, years ago. I wrote feverishly. I had not realized that I still carried the heaviness of the past. It was a relief when it all came out.

  Kariara read the draft, returned it, and praised the quality of the writing but also talked about the difference between an episode and a story. I had merely described an event. “You cannot simply say, ‘I went to Nairobi and back.’ What happened there and why? Did the experience change the character in any way, even a small way?” He talked of irony, change, the invisible logic behind fiction where nothing happens by chance or coincidence. “The woman is beaten. She runs away. So what?”

  I went back and worked on it, not one draft, but several. The woman still runs away, but finds refuge under the mũgumo, a sacred fig tree, where she seems to undergo some kind of spiritual experience, but in reality she simply realizes that she’s already pregnant. Does she go away for good? But where to in a society where life is lived in close communion with the land and the community? Return? Given the new life she carries in her, she opts to return, hoping that this time the marriage will work.

  Though the story and the domestic violence are based on my experience at home, there are important departures from the biographical. My mother had children, six in all, and when she finally left my father and went back to her father’s place, she never returned. The fictional resolution of the conflict is not satisfactory, for it is not clear that anything has changed on the part of the man, but I put a lot into the evocation of the land, the spiritual transformation, and a sense of self, implying that the woman’s self-knowledge may make her assert herself more in the relationship.

  Penpoint collage by Barbara Caldwell from copies of Penpoint

  “The Fig Tree” appeared in Penpoint number 5, December 1960, my first published work o
f fiction outside of “I Try Witchcraft,” which had appeared in the Alliance High School magazine. I continued publishing stories in Penpoint, six in all, enough for me to have looked into their possible publication in book form.

  A reference letter that my personal tutor, Mr. B.S. Hoyle, wrote on November 13, 1961, at the beginning of the first term in my first year in the English honors program, mentions this attempt. Noting that I was not a sportsman, that “his enunciation of English is not too good,” but that my essays were always interesting to read, Hoyle also emphasized that I had spent my spare time writing stories and other contributions to Penpoint, adding, “He is endeavoring to arrange the publication of a selection of short stories he has written.”

  I had in fact sent all my short stories, including the juvenilia from Alliance, to some publishing houses, including Jonathan Cape, which rejected them. However, the reply from Hutchinson in London added that if I ever wrote a novel, the editors hoped that I would show it to them. Looking back, I knew I would be grateful forever that they had rejected the volume, because the uneven mix of the mature and the juvenile would have been a very unfortunate introduction to the world of books and book people.

  But I was happy someone had made reference to a novel I might write. As 1960 turned into 1961, I embarked on a journey full of twists and turns, a literary awakening, which would impact my life profoundly.

  6

  Writing for the Money of It

  I

  The motive for the new venture was the announcement of a novel-writing competition open to all East Africans with a prize of one thousand shillings, equivalent to fifty British pounds at the time, to be administered by the East African Literature Bureau. The bureau was set up in 1947 by the British High Commission that regulated the interterritorial institutions of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika. It published a lot of books in African languages, mainly school readers. The books were shorn of politics and issues that questioned the colonial order, but the bureau was important in making texts and readers available in African languages. The competition, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, was the bureau’s first project that went outside its norm and tradition.

  It was Joe Mũtiga, a resident of New Hall next door, a budding poet, and a fellow contributor to Penpoint, who lit the flames of my ambition. New Hall may have been spoken of as a colony of Northcote, but when Mũtiga came to me, it was as a discoverer letting an ignorant native know that there was a world beyond the Makerere of the English Department, Penpoint, and interhall rivalries. In that world, there were fortunes to be made and glories to be won. Lady Fortune, who ruled that world, didn’t care if her supplicants were faculty or students, black or white, just so they were brave and daring. Let’s dare, he challenged. I didn’t need the challenge to motivate me: a thousand shillings in the pocket of a poor colonial student was beckoning me at the horizon. I fantasized the many things I would do with the unbelievable fortune.

  II

  I am in a dream. While others may be in it for literary glory, I am in it for gold, literally. But where do I start prospecting? Write about what?

  The writers I have read for my English classes roll out in my mind: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence. Can I follow in their footsteps? I have memories of my old favorite, Stevenson, who wrote of adventures in search of treasures.

  But then I have recently come across Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart and Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City. These two have dared: they have seen print. Did they also write for money?

  There is Peter Abrahams also; his world of black and white in conflict is closer to mine in Kenya. Besides, he is not a stranger. I know he was friends with Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, W.E.B. Du Bois. They were together at the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, in 1945, the turning point in anticolonial resistance. The others returned home—Kenyatta to Kenya to be jailed as a Mau Mau leader, at this time still languishing in prison; Nkrumah to be jailed as an agitator and then emerge from prison to become prime minister; and Du Bois to the United States to be tried as an enemy agent for his socialism and peace activism, his passport confiscated even though the charges were dismissed. Abrahams, the exile, driven from the South Africa he loved, well, he remained in England, trying to follow in the footsteps of Shakespeare. He went on to write for The Observer, sketches that later became Return to Goli, an account of a visit to South Africa. This man can write: Paths of Thunder, A Wreath for Udomo, and Tell Freedom. The last title mesmerized me at Alliance when I first beheld it in the hands of Allan Ogot, but I have rediscovered it in the Makerere library. Peter Abrahams always dreamed of becoming a professional writer. He wrote for money.

  And then I have just read George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin. A history teacher, Cheryl Gertzel, has let me delve into her home library. Lamming is from Babardos. How can this be, a Caribbean world speaking to me in ways so compelling that I want to do the same thing? Write about a village in Kenya. Write about Limuru. Write about my going to school under a hail of bullets. Write about life in an endless nightmare. Write about a community awakening to new life.

  Easier thought than done. Nothing forms in my mind. No story. My Limuru and Kenya remain a land from which I have escaped, but I want to write about it; I want to make sense of it. I want to write about the women who are arrested and taken to the Home Guard post, who, when they come back, are silent about what happened. One can see that they are no longer the same, but they don’t talk about it. There are only few whispers here and there, and sometimes one or two who are so crazed by the experience that they talk—of torture, bottles into their vaginas—but they don’t give details. Only in their crazed state can they admit it in public. Men too, sodomized with bottles; some, their testicles crushed, nor can they talk about it, except when the “craziness” overtakes them.

  I scribble a few words here and there, but nothing forms. I am upset. I have lived in the landscape of fear,1 but I am unable to write about it. I know terror, but I can find no words to express it. I have seen villages razed, but I cannot find the image to capture the desolation. I seem helpless in the face of a reality that I have lived, that is still being lived by thousands in concentration camps and villages. How can the word fail me in my hour of need?

  But Joe Mũtiga is writing; he reads me bits and pieces of what seems to be a folktale, but mostly he tells me the story. When I raise concerns, he says they didn’t say that a fable couldn’t be a novel. He is so confident; I can already see him, the happy supplicant, on whom Lady Fortune will surely smile. But I want her to smile on me, too, and Joe is so encouraging. This is strange, because I am the one who has already written and published a story, “The Fig Tree,” and he’s talking to me as though he has been there before, a literary veteran.

  And then one night I hear a melody, then the words. In daytime, it follows me across the yard dividing Northcote and New Hall, up the path by the library, past the Main Hall, and into my classes in Queen’s Court. It haunts me. I sing it, or rather, it sings in my mind, the melody and the lyrics.

  My father my mother

  If these were the days of our ancestors

  I would ask you for cows and goats

  Now I ask you to send me to school

  My father my mother

  Yesterday’s heroes called for spears to defend the nation

  Today’s heroes demand pen and slate to save the nation

  That’s why I ask you to send me to school

  We used to sing the song or variations of it in Manguo in the early 1950s, before the school, one of the many independently built and run by Africans, was shut down by the colonial state and reopened as a government-controlled institution.2 The state banned the songs because they talked about the struggle for land, freedom, and education. I am aware that the ban is still in place, but I am in Uganda, a protectorate, a colony with no visible gun-toting settlers. Not that there’s absolute safety anywhere for me, a member of the
Gĩkũyũ, Embu, and Meru communities. It has not happened to me; no white man has stopped me on the streets of Kampala demanding to see my ID, but I know that early in 1952, teams of screeners had visited Makerere to ferret out any students already infected by the “Mau Mau.” Some of them were disappeared; others lost their places. But that was then, not recently. In Kenya, the songs can still get me into trouble, but even there no power can stop a melody in the mind. The lyrics come back to me, subversive music from the underground—or is it from history? It’s a history the colony tries to bury in a heap of white-skinned lies. My imagination digs up the history. It’s a living history.

  So memories come back: the daily walk to my primary schools, miles away; teachers dressed no better than some of the students, also walking to and from school, except the lucky one who possessed an old bicycle; buildings with leaking roofs; landowners like Kieya giving up portions of their land so that a school for the common good can be built; and yes, ordinary men and the women digging deep into their pockets, donating chickens, goats, cows, anything to come up with wages for the teachers or money needed to put up new buildings or buy material for desks. In some schools, the students make the desks and chairs as part of the classes in carpentry. A collective sacrifice to create our space for school.

  Corfield denigrated this. Corfield scorned this. Corfield just consigned these people to the realm of the tree and the beast. African people contributed the major part toward the state treasury by way of poll or hut taxes; the colonial government spent the major portion of the treasury to beef up schools for the Europeans. African taxes built and maintained those schools; then the same Africans resorted to self-help and self-reliance to build their own schools. It was a double sacrifice: for European welfare and then their own survival. The Independent Schools Movement produced the first-ever teachers college in Kenya—Gĩthũngũri. Oh, Gĩthũngũri, now turned into a gallows center, a slaughterhouse of those who built it! But the dream?