Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  And then came the short-fiction session on East Africa. My short story, “The Return,” recently published in Transition, became the subject of a discussion led by Bloke Modisane, then in the midst of writing his autobiography, Blame Me on History. Modisane was unsparing in his assessment of my craftsmanship. He found my hero’s reactions to the dramatic events and crisis in his life unsatisfactory. “It lacks emotional motivation; the dialogue is used not to heighten the drama but to explain the events.” I listened to the various comments, thrilled that my own creation was on the table and generating polite critical evaluation.

  Soyinka dominated the drama session, as much for his already considerable body of work—including the plays The Swamp Dwellers, A Dance of the Forests, and The Lion and the Jewel—as for his criticism of nationalistic euphoria in some of the writings of the time. All our sensibilities had been shaped by our experiences of colonialism, apartheid, and anticolonial nationalism. Despite differences of craft and personal politics, we were also united by a vision of a different future for Africa. Ever the realist, Soyinka had already punched holes in any starry-eyed dream of that future with his play A Dance of the Forests, itself the subject of heated discussions at the conference. He had cautioned against tendencies in some Négritude poetry to typify the African past as glorious and conflict-free. Because of the stories preceding him, I expected him to stand up and recite “Telephone Conversation,” the poem that Gerald Moore would always talk about, or play the guitar, as Moore had described him doing in his place in Ibadan. He did neither. But I did see him once at the Top Life Nightclub, the most famous nightspot in Kampala at the time, dancing the cha-cha-cha, and even some of the other dancing pairs paused to stare and enjoy his moves.

  Kampala nightlife was as much part of the conference as the sober daylight of Northcote Hall. Because the conference took place during the long vacation, it didn’t have an immediate impact on the Hill and the student body to compare with that of the American invasion. But some of the writers from abroad did create social havoc in Kampala; they attracted groupies, women—white, black, Asian, married or not—who swooned at their company. Some of the writers left a trail of broken hearts and also a few broken homes.

  The conference received good press coverage, in Africa and abroad. Writing in the Guardian of August 8, 1962, Lewis Nkosi described the writers as “mostly young, impatient, sardonic, talking endlessly about the problems of creation, and looking, while doing so, as though they were amazed that fate had entrusted them with the task of interpreting a continent to the world.” It was Nkosi in the same article who pointed out the ultimate irony, that “what linked the various African peoples on the continent was the nature and depth of colonial experience: . . . colonialism had not only delivered them unto themselves, but had delivered them unto each other, had provided them . . . with a common language and an African consciousness, for out of rejection had come an affirmation.”

  It would be left to Obi Wali to question the premises, assumptions, and implications of Nkosi’s affirmation when, in a scathing attack in Transition number 10, he concluded that African literature could be written only in African languages.

  III

  The person I really wanted to meet was Chinua Achebe. I had met him briefly the year before when he visited Makerere and talked with English students. I may have mentioned “The Fig Tree” to him, but I didn’t recall our having had a one-on-one. But now I had a big reason for wanting to talk to him face-to-face, outside the formal seminars and plenary sessions. It had to do with a new work, which would later bear the title Weep Not, Child.

  As soon as I handed in the manuscript of “The Black Messiah” for the East African novel-writing competition at the end of December 1961, something had happened to me. The story about the contemporary Kenya situation that I had tried and failed to write suddenly started knocking at the door of my imagination furiously. In my diary entry of the third of February 1962, I wrote that I had “been thinking of writing some reminiscences, some of my impressions during the Emergency. I don’t know as yet where to begin, but I will.”

  Four days later, I am recording a mix of euphoria and anxiety, which I capture in the entry of February 7, 1962:

  I am in a mood of uneasy expectations. Only last week (on Tuesday / January 30), I sent my collection of short stories to Jonathan Cape. Waiting anxiously for reply. Yet I do fear rejection. Also I am waiting for the outcome of the EA novel-writing competition, “The Black Messiah,” completed Oct. last year. Handed it in on 28th Dec. Still, I am fearing the outcome. Yet cannot do much till those results are out. I would like to write another novel. I shall call it “And This Day, Tomorrow.” It will depict a suffering yet persevering Kikuyu woman during the Emergency. I shall divide it in 3 sections.

  1. The woman [burning of house, village]

  2. The daughter [the murder of—to death]

  3. The son [the son’s return]

  On February 19, 1962, I recorded my first receipt of a rejection slip:

  Received a letter from Jonathan Cape Ltd. in reply to my short stories which I sent them. Said they, “regret that after careful consideration we have decided not to make you an offer . . . we do not believe the collection would be easily saleable in this country at the present time.” It was like an electric needle. Could not read. Never been in a worse situation in my life. Not even 30 cts to buy a stamp. No job for vacation. And Minneh needs support. My studies. Guild work. Which I find so boring. I wish I had never taken it on. Will not give up. Will strive. I’ll immediately begin a new novel. This will deal with a detainee. He is arrested—had not taken the oath—but at the camp he is corrupted by the admn and a man from the forest. Takes the oath to revenge the detainees. The other detainee dies(?). Our hero talks to another who tells him his wife is dead . . .

  These ideas and plots would come and vanish. And this outline remained just that, a plan on paper. As it happened, the first line of what would later become Weep Not, Child came unexpectedly.

  It came during a talk by the visiting Ghanaian sociologist K.A. Busia, a distinguished scholar and academic but also a politician, leader of the United Party, which opposed Kwame Nkrumah’s ruling Convention People’s Party. His talk, though, remained focused on what he called the travails of education. My mind drifted from the talk. The word education took me back to the day my mother sent me to school.

  IV

  I am back in my village in Kenya. Outside of the demands for land and freedom, there is nothing that gripped people’s minds more than dreams of school. I know I have dealt with this in my novel “The Black Messiah,” still unpublished, but that dealt with the beginnings of the Independent Schools Movement, which was before my time. What now comes back are images of the children I went to school with: the games, the laughter, the hunger, the ten-mile walk to school and back.

  A distinct sentence steals into my mind: Nyokabi called him. I scribble this on the piece of paper in front of me. But who is the him? Her fictional son, of course. Name? Njoroge. The name of the man who taught my brother carpentry was Njoroge. But this is not him; this is a boy, and his mother is offering him a chance to go to school. Nyokabi and her words are suspiciously identical with the words my mother once told me. Nyokabi, my mother, and Njoroge, me?

  I wake up to big applause. It’s the end of Busia’s talk. I don’t even remember the conclusion, but I join the applause. There’s something personal about my applause: I am really saying thank you from deep inside me. I leave Busia’s talk in a daze.

  In the next weeks and months, I have companions whom nobody can see. Other characters have appeared. They are rooted in my experience. Oh yes, Njoroge and Nyokabi, are like my birth mother, Wanjikũ, and me. Really? There are a few discernible differences. I came from a polygamous household—four mothers, one father, and several siblings. Njoroge has only two mothers, one father, and three siblings, one of whom is a carpenter, just like the brother I followed, and another ended up in the mountains, a guerilla fight
er, just like the same brother. It’s as if my real brother, Good Wallace, has given birth to two of himself, each phase of his life becoming a separate fictional existence. Finally, I went through primary and secondary school and then to college; Njoroge does not go to college. The story is not about me, but the images that form have echoes of my own experience.

  Why had this story refused to form when I had needed it for the monetary award? Why now with no prize in the horizon? The story may not be about me directly, but it’s helping me clarify the nightmare that had been my life in Kenya; it makes me feel at one with the land of my birth.

  I am living the inner world of my characters when I get the invitation to the Makerere conference. Another prize offers itself: a chance to show the manuscript to Achebe.

  This desire becomes insistent, day and night. I have to finish the first draft, at least. I make a lot of progress, the story unfolding effortlessly, following its own logic, but the inevitable happens. I get stuck. But I have written enough not to feel embarrassed about asking somebody to look at it. It is presumptuous of me, but it never occurs to me that Achebe might simply not want to read it or even not have the time to do so.

  I choose a moment after we have discussed his work Things Fall Apart, and La Guma’s A Walk in the Night. I give him the handwritten manuscript, my second. He will read it, he says. I wait.

  V

  Langston Hughes asked me to take him on a tour of the city. Me, take this icon on a tour of the city I loved? I tried to map out the route.

  Where to start? With what I loved. Kampala is the Anglicized form of Akasozi K’empala, the Hill of the Impala, originally the royal hunting ground of the kings of Buganda, a continuous lineage going back to the thirteenth century. The British were deliberately echoing the seven hills on which Rome was built when they touted Kampala as also built on seven hills, on which monuments to history were erected. The Catholic Saint Mary’s Cathedral, known as Rubaga Cathedral, on Lubaga Hill, literally faced the Protestant Saint Paul’s Cathedral, on Namirembe Hill. Between them was Mengo Hill, on which lay the palace of Kabaka, king of Buganda. Kasubi Hill housed royal tombs. From atop Kibuli Hill shone minarets of the Muslim mosque. Namirembe, Lubaga, Kasubi, and Mengo tell the colonial history of Uganda. Since the mid-nineteenth century, they have been sites of a bloody power struggle among Islam, Catholicism, and Anglicanism for the domination of the Ugandan soul.

  What I feared were the stories of the remnants of that history of blood. Older Kenyan students claimed that once, walking back to Makerere from Mengo at night, they had passed through Old Kampala, the site of fierce battles between the colonial factions Franza and Ingleza, when suddenly, in the dark, they found a band of skeletons barring the way. The students took flight; the bones followed them to the gates of Makerere. There were variations on the story, the scene changing to the Namugongo Shrine to the twenty-two Ugandan martyrs burned to death by order of Kabaka Mwanga II in 1887. This time it was the ghost of Charles Lwanga confronting students. Lwanga had often sided with Mwanga in the name of nationalism. As if to clear its good name, the ghost ran after them trying to convince them that he and the band of the converts to the new religion were not colonial agents but faithful followers of Christ, but the students didn’t wait to argue with the ghost.

  The encounter between the West and Africa in the court of the kabaka had always captured the imagination of Makerere students, to great effect in David Rubadiri’s poem “Stanley Meets Mutesa,” which ends ominously with Mwanga’s father, Mutesa I, welcoming Stanley to his court:

  “Mtu Mweupe Karibu”

  white man you are welcome.

  The gate of polished reed closes behind them

  And the West is let in.3

  I would spare Langston Hughes stories of blood, martyrs, and ghosts. I would show him palaces, cathedrals, mosques, the Baha’i temple, and the other monuments to the modern in the elegant residential areas of Nakasero and Kololo. Mulago Hospital attracted researchers from all over the world. A lot, I thought, to feed the eyes and ears of Langston Hughes.

  Not knowing how I was going to accomplish all this with uncertain public transport, we walked down the Hill and turned left on Makerere Hill Road to Wandegeya, where I hoped we would catch a taxi or bus to the city center. Wandegeya, literally next door to the college, was a rundown area with a cacophony of sounds from the multitude of artisans hammering scrap iron and aluminum into different shapes to make household utensils and from human voices of ragged-trousered clients in and out of numerous tiny bars that sold matoke, beer, and waragi, any distilled hard liquor.

  And everywhere radios were blaring a melody so captivating that even those of us who didn’t know Luganda could still hum it and mumble the words:

  Yadde oba onooleeta abo

  Abalina ssente ennyingi

  Nze ono yekka gwensiimye

  Ka ntwale talanta yange

  It was “Talanta Yange,” a popular song by Elly Wamala, in which a daughter pleads with her father to let her marry the man of her choice. He may be poor, unlike all the rich suitors her father brings to her, but he is the choice of her heart, her destiny.

  Even though you will bring forward

  Those with lots of money

  For me, this is the only one I want

  Let me embrace my destiny

  This milling crowd, its wails and shouts and ribald laughter, and the voice of Elly Wamala rising above them seemed to fascinate Langston Hughes, and no talk of monuments would dislodge him from there. In his casual wear, he blended into the scene more than I did, with my gray gabardine trousers and black blazer.

  He tasted the waragi brew, just a sip, and the matoke, just a taste; otherwise for the one hour that we roamed from shop to shop, one pile of goods to another in the open-air street market, bumping against one drunk and another, he seemed more interested in absorbing the atmosphere of harmony in dissonance that surrounded us, perhaps reminding him of his Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz.

  Strange, I thought, as we walked back for the evening sessions: the slum had similarly fascinated me. I signed my early articles for the student information newspaper as Wandegeya Correspondent, the signature I hoped to use in my write-up on Langston Hughes and the conference.

  VI

  Toward the end of the conference, Achebe returned my manuscript. He hadn’t finished the whole draft of Weep Not, Child but he had read enough to see that I had a tendency to pile up on a point already made, like flogging a dead horse. The comments were brief but went right to the heart of the matter. Then he added that he had already shown the manuscript to Van Milne of Heinemann. Milne later asked if I could send the manuscript when I had finished revising it.

  In 1966 it would emerge that the CIA, or rather its money, was behind the conference through the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom, though the leading lights of the conference, Esk’ia Mphahlele among them, were not aware of it. This secret manipulation was typical of the Cold War environment in which the conference and the decolonization of Africa took place.

  For me and the other participants, it was simply a gathering of writers. At the time, what I most cherished from the conference was the fact that a publisher had expressed interest in the book. I didn’t know that Achebe had already accepted the post of editorial adviser for what would later become the Heinemann African Writers series, and Weep Not, Child would be the fifth in the series, following two titles by Achebe, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy, and Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia Shall Be Free.

  The letter of acceptance would come to me when I was already immersed in the cultural politics of The Wound in the Heart. In my diary earlier in the year, I had written, “Will not give up. Will strive.” This spirit would later help me stare down disaster and somehow survive to fight another day. The letter of acceptance would give me even more energy and determination to meet Peter Kĩnyanjui’s challenge for a major play to celebrate Uganda’s independence.

  9
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  Boxers and Black Hermits

  I

  On the streets of Nairobi, I once bumped into Moses Wainaina, the blackaphobic library assistant at EAAFRO. I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was smiling, or rather the permanent scowl on his face had scaled down to a grin. At first I flattered myself that it was the memory of our work together, making labels for the various scientific journals on agronomy or arranging and rearranging them on the shelves, that had effected this revolution on his face. I didn’t have to coax the reason out of him. Lady V. had sent him for a crash course in librarianship; a successful completion would put him in line for promotion to assistant librarian to replace Mrs. Smart O., who had eloped with a lover. That would put him in the direct line of succession, should things change. I knew that Moses was prone to embellishing his stories, particularly those having to do with the sexual adventures of his white superiors, but it was clear that thoughts of impending changes no longer bred in him fear of the unknown. Even then he could not bring himself to utter the Swahili word for freedom, Uhuru.

  But elsewhere in the country people were talking about Uhuru. The allegiance of the population in Kenya became split between the Kenya African National Union (KANU), whose slogan was uhuru sasa (freedom now), and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), proposing uhuru bado (freedom with caution). The sasa and bado ideological lines were also ethnic, KADU’s following coming largely from the pastoral communities and KANU’s largely from the cities, with the rural agricultural population divided between the two. This division gave rise to talk of large versus small communities, a split reflected in the politics of the Kenyan students at Makerere. Some Kenyans tried to bridge the two by forming the Kenya Students Discussion Group, led by Bethuel Kurutu.