Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  Then it hits me—the dedication, the collective will. That’s what I want to write about. The collective mania for education, the collective dreams for a meaningful tomorrow—I want to tell how it all began, that struggle for school. The barefoot teacher was at the center of the dream. He is the interpreter of the world; he brings the world to the people; he is the prophet of a tomorrow. I want to write about this so bad, it’s like a fever that has seized me again and intensified. An outline of a teacher character begins to form in my mind. He takes on a name, Waiyaki. How? Why this among hundreds of possible names? But Waiyaki is not just any name; it resonates among Agĩkũyũ. It is the name of a legend. It is the name of history.

  Waiyaki made a blood peace pact with Frederick Lugard, an agent of the Imperial British East Africa Company, on October 11, 1890. The Agĩkũyũ would supply the British caravans with food—fair trade. But Lugard and those who followed him, Eric Smith and William J. Purkiss in particular, had other ideas, and peace was not among them. They wanted armed pacification, white conquest for white settlement. Fort Smith was built in Dagoretti for that purpose. Waiyaki and his men stormed the citadel. Eventually Waiyaki was wounded and captured. He was marched to the coast. He died and was buried at a place called Kibwezi. Legend says he was buried alive, upside down, head pointing toward the bowels of the earth. His death taught us what it meant to desire land, freedom, and education.

  My fictional Waiyaki is not the same historical figure. He is teacher, but a kind of avatar of the first, only that for a spear he holds a pen. The pen is mightier than the sword, they say. I borrow the name for my fictional character as a tribute to the historical Waiyaki. And the name takes me back to an earlier phase of Kenyan history: to understand the present, my present, I must first face the past, my past. The present is born of the power plays of the past.

  Land, freedom, and education were the main themes in the politics that followed Waiyaki’s defeat and the European and missionary settlement. Then the question of female circumcision became a battlefield of politics. In the 1920s, the missionaries, who now controlled African education, decreed that no student would be admitted into their schools unless the parents denounced the practice. Teachers, too, had to denounce it. Moreover, students, teachers, and their parents had to sign papers, kĩrore, affirming that they would never be members of nationalist organizations, like those led by Harry Thuku and Jomo Kenyatta after him, only of missionary- and state-approved associations. This insistence let people know that the real target was not the rite of passage3 but anticolonial nationalism.

  I think about the rite. It was one of many rites of passage in a society where legal, administrative, and political life was based on an age system. Circumcision was the boundary a person had to cross from childhood to adulthood. It determined the allocation of duties, responsibilities, and accountability.

  But there’s nothing sacred about any particular custom. Customs and practices that go with it change in the light of new knowledge. The Jews used to sacrifice human beings, but the story of Abraham and Isaac tells us there came a time when they substituted animal for human sacrifice. Many other societies have gone the same way. I have problems with customs that have outlived their initial basis of being.

  Later in a newspaper column, I would describe the practice as brutal, a custom that African societies could well do without, and added that “it must be attacked mercilessly from all sides.” This must have represented my thinking at the time, but I was also clear, on looking back to the political and cultural clashes over the issue, that it is wrong to use legitimate medical concerns to suppress legitimate political demands. Separate the two, then educate, but do not use a campaign against an oppressive rite to achieve an oppressive political agenda. But I have not figured this out yet; I want to explore it. Let’s have a female character who is a victim of the rite. This is the starting point of my fictional exploration.

  Another outline of a character emerges. She comes to me as an image from the past. I was in school at Manguo; she was the girl I was trying to impress when I once jumped over a barbed-wire fence, trying to fly over it with the insouciance of a champion. I fell and hurt my leg; she glanced in my direction briefly and went away. But the look, the enigma between amusement, arrogance, and puzzlement, stayed with me long after I had forgotten her physical features and my pain. The silhouette acquires a name: Mũthoni, in-law, the shy one who knows herself, the one who looks with detachment, pride, and a desire to know why. I don’t know which is which, but the character intrigues me.

  Mũthoni demands a sister, her opposite, the one who conforms rather than confronting, but they love and care for each other. Her silhouette emerges in the shape of a name, Nyambura, she who brings rain. She is one of the nine daughters of the legendary founders of the Agĩkũyũ.

  Her other name is Mwĩthaga, mother of the Ethaga clan, but Nyambura who brings rain sounds more right as the older sister of Mũthoni, the shy one.

  It’s also the name of a living Nyambura. Her father, Kĩmunya, is the second son of her grandfather, Mũkoma wa Njiriri, the subject of nationalist lore. A colonial-appointed chief, Mũkoma was stripped of the dubious honor of being a colonial chief for leading an anticolonial resistance to the British takeover of the lands around Tigoni, Ithaka cia Kanyawa, for a white soldier settlement. His houses were among those torched by colonial police. He and others were forced to move to Ndeiya, but people never forgot his courage and defiance, and he became the subject of songs. Some of the songs ironically compared Mũkoma to Kĩnyanjui, the heroic chief of Karen Blixen’s memoirs but a loathsome figure of nationalist memory, asking sarcastically which of the two was greater:

  Nyambura, 1960

  Mũkoma son of Njiriri

  And Kĩnyanjui son of Gathirimũ

  Who of the two is the greater leader

  It has to be Kĩnyanjui

  He does whatever the whites tell him

  Nyambura being the eldest daughter of Kĩmunya, the son of Mũkoma would have been named after her paternal grandmother; from all sides the name belongs to legends.

  I am three years older than she, but Nyambura and I grew up within a mile or so of each other; we had the same childhood friends; went to the same schools, Kamandũra and then Kĩnyogori. I continued into high school; she did not. But the more our paths parted, the more rapidly our hearts drifted toward each other, and by the time I went to Makerere in 1959, we had entered into a soul pact we always knew was coming.

  The living on earth and the living on a page merge into a living image; they share the name and the quality of making rainfall. From as far as my memory went, rain had been part of it. We always welcomed it with lyric variations of the same melody:

  Rain pour on

  I offer you a calf for sacrifice

  One and another

  With bells around the neck

  Ding-dong-ding-dong4

  Nyambura is mythic and historical, whereas Waiyaki is historical and mythic. Nyambura and Mũthoni demand a father. Joshua is an amalgam of the various fire-and-brimstone Protestant preachers I knew.

  And suddenly, out of the four-legged stool of Joshua, Nyambura, Mũthoni, and Waiyaki, a story of struggle over the soul of the land emerges. I set it in the space of the early European colonial ventures into the interior. It’s a time before I was born, but it feels very right. I can even see the landscape; it has all the features of the one I once beheld in Mũrang’a on my way to Nyeri to honor Baden Powell—the land of sleeping lions on either side of the Thagana River, lions with the potential of roaring to life. I see everything in the mist of time, and it ignites my imagination.

  I am trembling inside. I jot a few lines, but the trembling won’t stop. I so badly want to see everything in all its clarity, but the mist hides the sharp edges of the connections yet also makes them more alluring. Like magic. It is magic. Imagination is the magic that makes possible connections across time and space.

  Years later, Dinwiddy would tell the story of how
one evening I knocked at the door of their house, my demeanor serious, my face concerned. He invited me in and, thinking it an emergency, took me aside to the veranda, away from the piano-playing Yvonne, to hear me out in private.

  “I am afraid I have started writing a novel,” I blurted out, trusting he would understand.

  Actually I had written to him a shy note earlier telling him about my literary intent, and I may have turned to him, despite the awkward hour, because I assumed he already knew. In the course of writing it, I went to him at many awkward hours, but he didn’t complain.

  But that first time was important. I don’t remember the exact words. He offered me fruit juice, maybe hoping to coax out the real reason of my visit, but I didn’t add another word to the confession. I felt a little foolish. He looked bemused. Writing a novel was not such a bad idea, he assured me, and once done, I could always show it to him. “Do you have a title?” he asked.

  “Yes, ‘Wrestling with God.’”

  III

  It’s a working title. It comes from Genesis 32:24–26 (quoted here in the English Standard Version), where Jacob wrestles with an angel after he has safely seen his household across a stream at night.

  And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.

  It’s an unforgettable image of a human wrestling with a superhuman force. It has the somber but pleading balance of demand, deference, and defiance. It creates a certain mood in me, in harmony with my struggle in my room alone, trying to do something that has not been done in Makerere. Word has spread that Mũtiga and I are writing novels. The news evokes from my fellow students not admiration but sniggers of mockery, at least from some. “I understand you’re writing a book, eh? You’re barely into your second year, and you think you can do what even our professors can’t do?”

  It’s as if they have already forgotten the Makerere oath. Hierarchy cannot stand in the way of the search for truth, at least in the commitment to it. Even a child can point out that the emperor has no clothes. Besides, others have done it, in ages past and different nations and regions. What one can do, another can also, I urge myself. These are words I once heard from one of my teachers in Manguo Elementary School. He used to say it more dramatically. What one man can do, another man can do. But I need the blessing of the muse.

  Occasionally I get curious voices of genuine fascination with the possibility. Bethuel Kiplagat, whose room is next door, calls on me from time to time. He is always the encouraging prefect of our days at Alliance. He is a year ahead of me. His curiosity is always a shot in the arm.

  For months on end throughout 1961, stealing moments from my other college commitments, I struggle with the novel. Suddenly one day I come to a block, and no amount of Jacob wrestling with the angel and pleading with the muse not to pass me by will make anything click. I’m stuck. The little voice of despair whispers soothingly, Why are you doing this, anyway? It isn’t going to make you perform better or worse in the exams. You want an academic degree, not a literary pedigree. I succumb. I don’t want to go on.

  In my next meeting with Joe Mũtiga to discuss the Novelists’ Progress, I report despair. Mũtiga is upbeat. He talks about the award. The haul of one thousand shillings! Keep your eye on the prize. He is great. We’re competitors, and yet he’s so encouraging. OK, I’ll try. I will confront the block.

  And the muse comes back. For a few more months, I ride on incredible waves of pure exhilaration, as the mists of time begin to clear. I go back to Mũtiga to report spectacular progress. Alas, he is now stuck. He wants to give up, claiming that he’s satisfied with being a poet. No, I urge him, literally throwing his words back at him: keep your eye on the prize, the shine of notes worth a thousand shillings, some with King George’s head, others with Queen Elizabeth’s head. Imagine the wealth awaiting the victor. I keep at it for days, but he doesn’t respond with “I’ll try” or anything about riding on new waves of desire. No matter how hard I try, he will not clutch at the literary rope. I know it’s hopeless, because he no longer seeks me out to show me his stuff or to know about mine. I feel lonelier than before.

  The living Nyambura comes into the picture. She is expecting. I miss her. I want to be with her; our moments together whenever I go home for holidays are never long enough for me. But through my fictional Nyambura, I can feel the living presence of the other, who is also carrying another life. Of course, the fictional Nyambura is not modeled on the real one, who is just the inspiration, but the nominal resemblance, though fleeting, is enough to spur me on. Sometimes it’s simply the thought of her smile at finding her name inhabited by a character in a book that adds to the call of the muse.

  On September 10, Nyambura the living gives birth to our son Thiong’o, named after my father. From now on, I shall have two lives: a family man in Kenya, an academic man in Makerere. The family will affect how I organize my academic and literary life: provide a focus, palpable reason, motive, and purpose for doing whatever I do with pen and paper.

  Somehow I am able to plod through to some form of a draft. I give Dinwiddy the handwritten manuscript. The fact of showing somebody the completed draft of a novel, my first ever, makes me do something that I keep telling myself I should do but never do! Write a diary. The first entry has the date: November 3, 1961.

  Have decided to start a diary. Been toying with the idea for quite a long time. But tonight the idea forcibly came back after a glance of Somerset Maugham’s writer’s notebook. That was at Mr. Dinwiddy’s house. We were sitting in his study. Full of books. His wife was playing the piano. Mr. Dinwiddy was discussing my first novel with me. I don’t know why I feel guilty when I call it my novel. But it is. “The Black Messiah.” Mr. Dinwiddy is kind. How can he take so much trouble? Sometimes I was not listening to what he said. His wife was playing the piano beautifully. I think I like piano music. Then she stopped. Silence. Went on discussing. . . .

  He makes useful comments, something about telling it in images. Instead of saying that a character is tall and thin, why not more descriptive words like lanky and gangly? I can see he’s trying hard not to overdisplay his emotions, but the bottom line—he likes it. I am happy.

  At home in Kenya during the December holidays, when not hugging the new life, I find the time to work on the manuscript revisions in the light of Dinwiddy’s comments. I have dared do something that has not been done in Kenya or East Africa: write a novel. I know, I know—there has been some fiction written by European writers who claim to be Kenyan. Elspeth Huxley leads the pack with such titles as Murder at Government House (1937), The Red Strangers (1938), and A Thing to Love (1954). Then there’s the American, Robert Ruark, with his Something of Value. But they write about adventures of white heroes in Africa, with black people as decorative background along with fauna and flora.

  But now I feel that I’m part of something in the air. It’s not only the new reality in my life. Everywhere in the country, there’s something that we have not seen in years. Hope. Optimism. We were making things happen; we were making history.

  We now live in the post-Emergency era, martial law having been lifted in 1960. There is the glow from Kenyatta’s release on August 21 and Tanzania’s independence on December 9, 1961. I know the meaning of the glow: hope for a new dawn—for the country, for me as a writer. Hope for a future for the life that Nyambura has brought to earth. Hope for the birth of a new nation.

  I am in time to meet the deadline. But I don’t want to post the handwritten manuscript to the bureau. It’s the only copy I have. Suppose it gets lost in the mail?

  Accompanied by my younger brother, Njinjũ, I take a bus to Nairobi and walk to the offices of the East African Literature Bureau, where on December 28, 1961, I deliver the manuscript. The title
has morphed from “Wrestling with God” to “The Black Messiah,” and years later it will be published as The River Between.

  Njinjũ, Ngũgĩ’s younger brother

  7

  Black Dolls and Black Masks

  I

  I had thought, when I first arrived in the city, that living in Kampala, where blackness was the dominant visual norm, would ensure my final escape from the black-and-white consciousness that had defined my reality and history in a white-settler-dominated society. I soon realized that every black person must at some time discover his blackness in a twentieth-century world whose problem W.E.B. Du Bois once described as that of the color line. In Kenya we called it the color bar, the term entering African languages as variations of karambaa. “We reject color bar” was Jomo Kenyatta’s clarion call when, in 1946, after fifteen years away, he returned to the country to lead the Kenya African Union (KAU)1 in the struggle for land and freedom.

  “Kenya was the land of black people,” we sang in opposition to the European settlers’ claims that Kenya was the White Highlands. Their claims had been given literary immortality in the work of Elspeth Huxley. The colonial state sided with the literary, but the oral was the voice of a people, and even after the state banned FLA songs and poetry, song and dance inspired defiance in those herded in barbed-wired trucks into concentration camps. They sang:

  Deport us to concentration camps

  Or lock us up in prisons

  Or exile us on remote islands

  We shall never cease to struggle for freedom

  Kenya is the land of black people2

  The song expressed defiance and a collective discovery of blackness. But there was also a personal discovery of blackness, and sometimes one had to find it not once but several times.

  II