Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  My first discovery of blackness was not the time when as a child I saw Europeans in the streets or saw the road-building Italian prisoners of war in our villages buying eggs and seeking sex. Their color was clearly outside the norm, and those who once called the incomers mzungu, skinless spirits, may have looked at them with the unjudgmental eyes of children. A norm is not discovered; it is taken for granted, needing neither affirmation nor refutation. My first real discovery was when a young armed white officer, a machine gun slung from the shoulder, temporarily blinded me with a blow to my face and I could not respond in kind, as my manhood, newly earned by undergoing circumcision, would otherwise have made mandatory.3

  The second was after graduating from high school, when I was incarcerated on the orders of a white officer hardly older or more schooled than me.4 I saw grown men cower at his word, reminding me of King Lear’s saying that even a dog is obeyed in office. White was the color of power. White would always checkmate black until black also expressed power. Black power was the only real answer to white power. Only then could a dialogue between equals emerge.

  My third discovery of blackness came from my encounters with a whiteness different from the missionary type at Alliance, the bureaucratic and settler kind in the Kenyan streets and farmlands, or the cap-and-gown crowd at Makerere. It was a type that looked as if it lived out of time and out of place. One could not quite describe it; one had to have worked at the EAAFRO, acronym for East Africa Agriculture and Forestry Research Organization, to see and assess it.

  The organization, stationed at Muguga, halfway between Nairobi and Limuru, off the Nairobi–Naivasha road, was the result of rival imperialisms with roots in the nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa. After the 1884 Berlin conference, the Germans ended up with Tanganyika and Mount Kilimanjaro. In 1902 they built a research station in the Amani region of the East Usambara Mountains. With the defeat of the Germans in World War I, Tanganyika changed hands. In 1928, the new colonial owners, the British, named the Amani institution the East African Agricultural Research Station and in 1948 moved it to Muguga, Kenya, to form the East African Agricultural and Forestry Research Organization (EAAFRO), mandated to meet the research needs common to the three British colonial possessions of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.

  I was driven there by the need for a job. The Makerere academic year had three breaks, during which students went home. At the height of the State of Emergency, some Kenyans sought to stay at Makerere with special permission. But with the formal end of the Emergency in 1960, we took every opportunity to go home. At first it felt good traveling back and forth in second-class rail coaches, but after the novelty wore off, we found the buses, though less comfortable, much quicker. If one had a job, the sooner one started on it, the better.

  The wages from vacation jobs supplemented the meager student allowances, but the jobs were not easy to come by. One sent applications everywhere, and it was a lucky day when one got acknowledgment of the effort. So I felt blessed when, early in my first year, I was called to EAAFRO to work in its library division.

  The station was about thirteen miles from Limuru, and often I went there on foot. But even when I was lucky and got into the buses of uncertain regularity, I still had to walk the last two miles off the main Naivasha–Nairobi road to the station, hidden deep in the forest.

  At first it was a novelty: I looked forward to working for scientists, researchers, serious thinkers, people whose lives were dedicated to what the Makerere oath stood for: rigorous pursuit of truth. They were guided by facts, not fiction, and reason, not emotion.

  Lady Viviana5 was the head of the library division. Under her was a white deputy, Mrs. Smart Ogletree,6 and under them, an African assistant, Moses Wainaina.7 Moses was obsequiousness made flesh when it came to any of the white officers. In their presence, he would stand at attention, becoming visibly invisible, until they had passed or, in the case of Lady V. and Smart O., till they had completed their instructions. As they left, he became visibly visible slowly and surely in proportion to the distance between him and them. Moses was completely the opposite when it came to the staff under him. He expected them to be equally obsequious to him, and when they would not, he became intolerant, mistreated them and finally drove them out and got a new batch. Each time he would lecture them on the correct decorum when in front of white people, and if they didn’t meet his standards in work or manners, he would feel that they were doing things slovenly in order to get him fired. He hated with equal fervor any who tried to endear themselves to Lady V. The turnover of the subordinate staff was high, making temporary jobs always available. Moses tolerated me because I came from Makerere and because I was there only for vacations, three weeks in most cases, except for the three-month break. I think he also liked it that a Makererean was working under him. One day he became very alarmed when he found out that I was going to the bathroom frequented by the whites. That one is for white people, he told me. But I replied that it wasn’t written anywhere that it was whites-only.

  The researchers had lived for so long in a world of test tubes, greenhouses, and viruses that they had come to think of their black underlings as some kind of plant or animal blight to be handled with gloved care. They reminded me of George Eliot’s Casaubon, living with the dead while he looked for the keys to all mysteries.

  Things were happening around them. MacMillan’s wind was blowing across Africa, but these people seemed oblivious of history on the move. The Happy Valley—the interwar settler society of British aristocrats enjoying the lush life from the labor of blacks—was the only memory of Kenya’s past they seemed to know and cherish, and they tried to emulate and replicate it. They would emerge out of their greenhouses and labs to savage each other over their spouses, the aggrieved parties chasing each other in cars or with guns drawn. Once three of them became entangled in a love triangle. They entered the annual East Africa safari-car rally that used to start at Nairobi, winding through dirt, mud, and rain across the three countries. Lady V. was the pilot to her lover in one car, her husband following behind in another. It turned out to be a race between the two cars, the husband trying to knock the other car off the road. Somehow, according to Moses, they survived, and the love triangle survived the race intact.

  Lady V. was at the center of the Muguga replication of the Happy Valley. Moses regaled me with every salacious saga he had encountered. When she and one of her lovers locked themselves in her office, they didn’t see him as a presence. Nevertheless, despite his apparent fear, Moses was wily enough to occasionally knock at the door innocently and enjoy the reaction of muffled voices or complete silence.

  It was only when detailing such episodes that Moses smiled or laughed. It was as if they had allowed him to peep at the dirty secrets of their joy.

  Otherwise Moses seemed afflicted by an anti-nationalism virus. He thought that all the talk about freedom and black rule was pure ignorance and stupidity. Black people were incompetent. Black people would ruin standards. He seemed genuinely terrified of the very possibility of black rule, and one of a new batch who knew him from home hinted that Moses may have acted as one of the hooded men who outed LFA suspects to execution or concentration camps.

  For some reason, I never actually met anybody in the bathroom, and this seemed to relax Moses. But one day, during one of the vacations, I went to the bathroom, and as I came out, an officer, whom I later learned was the general administrative officer, happened to enter. At first he passed me but then suddenly stopped and looked back as if he couldn’t believe what he had just seen. When I told Moses about the encounter, he became visibly shaken. For the rest of the day, he wouldn’t speak to me. Every time Lady V. called him to the office, he would tremble all over: this was it, he was going to pay for my shitting ways. He relaxed only after it seemed he would not be held accountable. He begged me on his knees to please not jeopardize his career by visiting the white bathrooms. My position remained the same: it was not written that the bathrooms were segregated. I was b
eing legalistic!

  Another white officer who met me in the bathroom another time reacted with the same surprised incomprehension as the first. Eventually, Lady V. called me to her office. I was holding a book, The Greeks, by H.D.F. Kitto, in my hands. She first glanced and then asked to look at it, surprised that I was reading such a book, probably the first time it registered that I was a college student. She then tried to tell me that those bathroom facilities were for the officers only, that I could use the others. She didn’t seem to know the location of the “others”; she just gestured vaguely. But those others were very far, I said, too few for too many people. Besides, there was no sign saying they were for white people. She corrected me: “No, no, officers.” She seemed embarrassed to be arguing about bathrooms, and I left it at that.

  But the saga of two nails dwarfed that of the bathroom. It so happened that one day Lady V. asked me to run to the workshop and get her two nails. The workshop served the entire station. I had to walk across a quadrangle of grass to get there. The Indian carpenter would not part with two nails without written permission from the clerk of works, a white man. So I walked into his office. He was a fairly short man, very fond of hats; he had different hats for different clothes. Would he give me two nails for Lady V.? He growled at me: kwenda leta barua. What? Go back and get a letter? He couldn’t trust me with two nails without a letter from my boss?

  Lady V. picked up the phone, said something, and then duly gave me a chit. It was back to the clerk of works. He literally snatched the letter from my hands and then walked into the workshop, I following. All of a sudden, he turned around and roared at me: toa mkono mfuko. Take my hands out of my pockets? I refused. The man tried to take them out physically, forcefully. I had to restrain myself to avoid a physical altercation. I simply walked away without the nails. I reported the incident to Lady V. “I will see to it” was all she said, and I never heard about the matter again. Whatever her personal life was, Lady V. was actually very nice, and I never heard her utter racially offensive words, to my face, at least, but the signal was clear: it was time I left EAAFRO, vacation jobs or not.

  A couple of weeks before I left the place for good, I saw a sign near the bathrooms: FOR OFFICERS ONLY. There was not a single African officer at the time.

  Years later, the location and the people I encountered would appear a fictitious place and as characters in my novel A Grain of Wheat, and one reviewer in Canada who had lived in Kenya expected a libel suit against me. He claimed that anybody who had lived in the country at the time would recognize the real persons behind the mask of fiction.

  It was during my EAAFRO period that I dreamed up various stories, among them “The Village Priest,” “And the Rain Came Down,” and “The Black Bird.” These stories had nothing to do with EAAFRO directly, but the lone walk through the awesome singing silence of the thick forest set in motion images close to the sacred.

  The stories were published in various issues of Penpoint and in other regional magazines, like Nilotica. Some, including “The Black Bird,” were adapted for radio in 1962, along with the one-act drama The Rebels,8 and broadcast by the Uganda Radio. Miles Lee, head of the Drama Department, with the help of the indefatigable David Cook, gave national forum to the literary production around Penpoint.

  A mystery man, Miles Lee had a successful past freelancing for the BBC, fortune-telling at the Goose Fair in Nottingham, stage-directing for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and running his own company, the Belgravia Mews Puppet Theatre in Edinburgh. I never knew how he came to abandon his real love, puppetry, for radio in Uganda, because he hinted at it more than he spoke about it. He seemed uncomfortable at parties at Makerere but luxuriated in his own at Kololo Hill, an upscale residential neighborhood beloved of expatriates and civil servants. The white people who came to his party looked haunted, as if they were fugitives from wherever in the outposts of the British Empire they had once served. Though very different from the EAAFRO crowd, they all looked like figures lifted from the pages of Conrad, ex-dwellers in outer stations somewhere in the Congo or the Far East.

  A goodly number of these had black mistresses or wives, and apart from Miles, who seemed deeply and genuinely in love with his wife, the others seemed to treat them as erotic toys for social display, almost a kind of proof that they had no race prejudice.

  At one of his parties, I met the mustached Bob Astles, who, years later, would figure prominently as advisor to Idi Amin. An alleged British spy, he was first sent to Uganda in 1949 for “special duties.” His droopy mustache, so ordinary that it almost stood out, was more impressive than his intellectual presence—hence my surprise at the role he later came to play in Uganda’s fate.

  III

  My third discovery of blackness was literary. In an article in Penpoint, Gerald Moore introduced the poetry of the Négritude literary movement to Makerere. Cambridge educated and director of the Makerere Extra-Mural Department, Moore was then one of three European scholars, the others being Ulli Beier and Janheinz Jahn, who took a serious look at the emerging literature from the continent.

  The three men were linked by their relationship to the work of Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal. Jahn met Senghor in Frankfurt in 1951, heard of black poetry for the first time, and became a student and translator of this new thing. In 1958, he published his own anthology of contemporary African and African-American poetry, Black Orpheus, the same title given by Jean-Paul Sartre to an essay originally published in 1948 as the preface to the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie negre et malgache de langue francaise, edited by Senghor, one of the three founders of Négritude. Léon Damas, from then French Guiana, and Aimé Césaire, from Martinique, were the other two.

  Ulli Beier first met Senghor in 1956 in Paris at the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists. He was awestruck by the new work, and he became its student and translator. He founded the Nigeria-based journal Black Orpheus in 1961. Gerald Moore was also a translator of Senghor and the new African writing into English. Years later, he and Ulli Beier would put together an influential collection, The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry,9 with the poetry of Senghor and Négritude at the center of it.

  I read and reread with astonishment the lyrical rendering of blackness, the music coming through even in Moore’s translation.

  Black mask, red mask, you black and white masks,

  Rectangular masks through whom the spirit breathes,

  I greet you in silence!10

  Likewise his address to the black woman:

  Naked woman, black woman

  Clothed with your colour which is life,

  with your form which is beauty!11

  Reading the poetry of Négritude was like seeing my face in a mirror for the first time, whereas before I had seen only other faces reflected there. Theirs was a literary mirror of blackness as color, history, and active being. I recalled the arguments I’d had in school about black Jesus, the color of God, and here was a poetry affirming blackness as an active value and force in history.

  In time, however, I started to react against the overemphasis on an undifferentiated blackness, principally in an article submitted in 1961 but published in The Undergraduate of May 1962 under the title “Give Me My Black Dolls: The African Dilemma.” The title was taken from the fourth stanza of the poem “Borders,” by Léon Damas:

  Give me back my black dolls to play

  the simple games of my instincts

  to rest in the shadow of their laws

  to recover my courage

  my boldness

  to feel myself myself

  a new self from the one I was yesterday

  yesterday

  without complications

  yesterday

  when the hour of uprooting came.12

  I critiqued the nostalgia, what I then saw as an uncritical longing for a past that would never come back, ending the article with a call for some kind of synthesis of the positive elements from the three ways of life in East Africa�
��Asian, European, and African. I am not sure how different this was from Senghor’s call for a similar synthesis of what, years later, Ali Mazrui, following Edward Blyden and Kwame Nkrumah, would call “the triple heritage.” With time, I have come to admire the literature of Négritude, recognizing that it had a variety of voices. Reacting to the few poems that came through then, I had sinned in seeing it as uniform.

  An adaptation of the article, a critique of Négritude, was my first piece of cultural journalism, appearing in the May 12, 1961, issue of the now defunct Sunday Post. I cited Wole Soyinka’s famous quip about the tiger not needing to roar its tigritude. Soyinka had, of course, added the positive: it pounces.

  IV

  Frustration with EAAFRO had made me look to the pen for an alternative source of extra cash. But I also felt that I was developing ideas beyond those demanded by my class papers, ones that I could not readily translate into fiction. I had a viewpoint, the language to express it, and the energy to sustain the effort.

  I published a few more pieces in the Sunday Post, on cultural themes, mainly, while also working on “The Black Messiah” for the competition. Though they didn’t change the content of my articles, the editors would sometimes give them headlines that didn’t reflect the content and form of the article. I soon learned that writers of stories and features in newspapers had no control over the headline and subheadings. An editorial frame could at times clash with the content and intent of one’s piece.

  Publication emboldened me to try for an actual job at a newspaper office. During one vacation in the second half of my first year at college, I walked into the offices of the Sunday Post and sought to see the editor. It was then an all-white office, and I don’t know what kind of figure I struck, but the receptionist took my name, and after a while, I was led into the editor’s office.

  He introduced himself as Jack Ensoll and offered me a seat on the opposite side of a huge mahogany table. I noticed little else, so nervous I was, but in the friendly manner of his reception, I read, “You’ve got a job.” He knew my name, from the note the receptionist had scribbled or maybe from my contribution, probably the first African they had ever published. He went through the preliminaries. What was I doing, how was I doing it? I thought that my being in my second year at college would work against me, so I kept on assuring him that all I wanted was a vacation job. He wanted to know what I wanted to do after college. My eventual goal was to become a journalist.