Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  I brushed off my unfounded imaginings. Nairobi was crowded, after all. Years later, already known as a writer and academic, I met two people in a bar, and after they had greeted me warmly, one of them smiled. “You are very lucky,” he said.

  Ngũgĩ with Hilary Ng’weno

  “Why?”

  “You used to work for the Nation, right?”

  “Yes, a long time ago.”

  “Do you recall a day you attended a Waiyaki rally?”

  “Yes.”

  “We thought you were a government agent, an informer; you were taking down every word the doctor said. So we followed you. We were going to off you. You were saved only by entering the Nation offices. It was then we realized you were from the newspapers.”

  Hilary Ng’weno was the other reporter whom I first met in my last temp days. I think he was also checking out the Nation. We were the same age, born in 1938, he in Busia, and I in Limuru. We attended rival high schools, Mang’u in his case and I, Alliance. I was about to graduate from Makerere in English; he had already graduated from Harvard with a degree in nuclear physics. He had seen the big world; I had never left the borders of Kenya and Uganda. I had had a longer association with the Nation, but now he was permanent, whereas I was a temp. Bernth Lindfors, one of the first batch of Teachers for East Africa, who now taught in Gusii in Western Kenya, took a picture of Hilary and me outside the Ambassador Hotel. Ng’weno was taller than I, but it was a picture of two young intellectuals at ease with themselves and getting ready for a future in a Kenya about to doff its colonial habit.

  II

  The future was now here, and I looked forward to working full-time for the Nation. It would be like returning to a family. I was a little disappointed not to see Hilary Ng’weno: I assumed that he had gone back to Harvard. After all, what would a nuclear physicist be doing in a newspaper office? But the others were there, and they received me warmly, a reunion of sorts. After a week, I went to the editor’s office for something, expecting to see Michael Curtis.

  Hilary Ng’weno welcomed me and offered me a seat. He sat back in the chair the way I had once seen Jack Ensoll do. He must have seen the surprise on my face. He explained that he had taken over from Michael Curtis, who was now group managing editor or something. He was cordial without being overfamiliar. It was incredible how editorial authority became him, and so quickly—the first African editor of the Daily Nation or any English newspaper in the country. In years to come, he would trail-blaze in journalism and television, including owning and running his own influential journal, the Weekly Review, but at that time he was the new editor. I was truly proud of his rise to the top, another sign of the new times.

  My lowest moments were working in the law courts. There was so much wretchedness in the corridors of law and justice, and it was always Africans in chains, with white or Indian magistrates sitting in judgment. I had to cover all the courts, and I lived in fear of missing a dramatic case that my competitors from the rival daily had covered. My rivals were suffering similar anxieties, so we made a pact; we alerted each other on the more interesting cases. We also made friends with the court clerks, who would show us files of cases whose hearing we had missed.

  Once, in an Indian-against-Indian murder case, I witnessed a most dramatic confrontation between a witness and a defense lawyer, a high-ranking European advocate. At one point, a witness for the state answered the defense lawyer’s questions with a series of sarcastic yeses as if to say the questions were not even worth a serious denial. I understood her. In the culture I grew up in, a sarcastic response could be understood as denial. But this was a court of law and the records simply put down her sarcastic yeses as whole sentences. When she realized what her temper had made her do, she broke down.

  The magistrate said the court would visit the scene of the alleged crime later in the day. I rushed back to the office happy that my competitors were not in the room at the time. I had scooped them. The following morning, the news editor asked to see me. Spread on his desk were two newspapers, our rival’s and ours. Alas, the reporter from the East African Standard must have gotten a tip about the afternoon session: it carried a big picture of the entire court at the scene of alleged crime. My story was just words, cold words on paper. The news editor was patient in explaining that a picture spoke more than a thousand words, and mine were not even a thousand.

  I was the reporter on duty one Sunday in the old offices of the Nation newspapers when a call came from Gatundu, the home of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, asking for coverage of a very important event. The news editor assigned me the task. “What’s the event?” I asked. A ceremony: some people have brought donations for the victims of the floods in Kano Plains in Nyanza.

  Jomo Kenyatta and his vice president, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, were standing in the compound surrounded not by the big donors of my imagination but by a crowd of ordinary men and women, who had come all the way from Mũrang’a to contribute whatever they had toward the amelioration of suffering of fellow Kenyans in Nyanza. I had never met either of these two legendary leaders of Kenya’s anticolonial politics that led to our independence in 1963. My cameraman managed to capture the only picture ever of Jomo Kenyatta, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, and me together.

  Ngũgĩ interviewing Kenyatta and Odinga for the Nation at Gatundu

  III

  I began to settle into a rhythm in my new job, but I dwelt in a liminal space between belonging and not belonging, between past and future. A state of impermanence had haunted my life since I first left my father’s large family for a single-parent homestead, only to have it demolished, forcing us to move to the new strategic villages. Even with the end of the Emergency, and despite land resettlements going on, it was clear that the villages were here to stay.

  With my pay, I helped my younger brother, Njinjũ, then working at the Bata shoe factory, acquire some land near Kĩnyogori, quite a distance from Kamĩrĩthũ. There I built a three-room house for my mother. She had never come to terms with the new village, and she always loved independence and making things grow. She now had a place in which she could root herself. Her smile of satisfaction was sunshine in my heart. I’ll never be able to pay back what she gave me. How can one put a price on a dream? The dream for school and knowledge had been hers before it became mine, and she had given it to me.3

  Nyambura and I still lived in a rented house in Kamĩrĩthũ. After settling my mother in her new house, I bought a plot in Kamĩrĩthũ. It was a quarter of an acre, but it felt like a ranch. It was a strange sensation, owning a piece of earth. For this whites and blacks in Kenya had fought it out: for this thousands had been tortured, maimed, killed. Do we ever own the land? Only its use, for a time; for in the end, the earth owns us, and we return to it, our common mother. We built a house, not a mansion but a dwelling place, for my family. I could hardly believe this. I enjoyed the special feeling of owning a house without a mortgage and having the use of land on which we could grow a small orchard, plums mostly. Nyambura came from a large landowning family, so the piece of the earth may not have evoked similar emotions in her, but it felt good for us to settle in a place we could call our own. Unlike me, my children will be able to point to a home, a place in which they grew up. I had finally put down roots, in Kamĩrĩthũ, the new village, in the Limuru region.

  Nevertheless, the future seemed unclear. I was waiting for something to happen on the academic and literary fronts.

  IV

  It’s hard to capture in words the sensation at seeing an advance copy of my first novel to be published: Weep Not, Child. I rushed home to show it to my mother and Nyambura and my immediate brothers and sisters. The kids, Thiong’o and Kĩmunya, were too young to care, but I showed them anyway and made them hold it. My mother wanted to know if that was the best I could have done and was satisfied when I told her I had done my best. I didn’t know how the neighbors would take it. The image of a successful graduate was a black gown, a flat cap with tassels, and a rolled something
in his hands, not a guy in regular wear holding a book in his hands, claiming authorship. But they received it well, and though they could not read it, they touched it reverently.

  My father’s family now lived in Gĩtithia, where they had moved in 1962. They were some of the many landless people settled under the new independence dispensation. It was some miles away, but I went there, book in hand, to show it to Wabia particularly. She was my half-sister. She was disadvantaged in every possible way but had remained optimistic about life, dwelling in the world of songs and stories, becoming the collective memory of the community. I grew up with her stories. She was the only one who could conjure them up in daytime.4 She could not see the daylight; she felt it in her trembling hands. She had molded my world in ways that only I could understand. She had made me want to become a dream weaver.

  There was no formal launch, just a date for the release. My very first interview as the first East African novelist was by John de Villiers, a colleague at the Nation. He reminded me of the incident with Jack Ensoll at the Sunday Post three years earlier when he told me that my future lay between hard covers. Obviously, Ensoll must have talked about his prediction to the journalistic fraternity. Otherwise how would de Villiers have known about what had transpired in the privacy of an editorial office? Yes, I recalled the assessment. I had hated it, for I had needed a job right then more than a hardcover tomorrow, but now I was able to value his uncanny insight.

  Weep Not, Child signing

  A Nairobi bookshop run by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye arranged for me to sign books, and I couldn’t believe that people would actually line up to have me sign their copies of Weep Not, Child.

  V

  Soon I received artwork for the paperback edition of Weep Not, Child, which meant it would soon follow the hardback. The publishers, Heinemann Educational Books, had commissioned the painting from the Ugandan artist Eli Kyeyune.

  Kyeyune, brother of Elvania Zirimu née Namukwaya, was my contemporary. He and I had already worked together on the production of The Black Hermit. He was a graduate of the Makerere School of Art, founded by Margaret Trowell in 1937. She was a missionary with a vision of emancipation through art, but the marks of the school’s colonial origins plagued it from time to time. The story is told of how the clay for sculpture used to be imported from Europe, Uganda clay being deemed too poor to sustain sculpture. The famous slogan by Elimo Njau, “Copying puts God to sleep,” and his advice “Let the children paint,” with its emphasis on local materials, were in part a response to that history.

  Elimo Njau was the student who once accompanied another product of the Trowell school, Sam Ntiro, to Alliance High School, where, to our shock and disbelief, they talked about a black Jesus.5 Despite its colonial beginnings, the School of Art had produced legendary painters and artists, among them Gregory Maloba and Francis Nnaggenda, as well as Ntiro and Njau. Glen Dias, who designed the poster for The Black Hermit, Pat Creole-Rees, who designed the costumes, and Laban Nyirenda, with whom I discussed art many times, were also graduates of the school.

  Despite my association with the school, or because of it, I criticized it for its European bent in my last formal speech at a Northcote Hall dinner. On looking back, I see that my criticism was too harsh and clearly belied by the products of the school and what it had done for art in East and Central Africa. History does not unfold in a straight line with predictable results. The school could be judged only by what its artists did and not by the history that produced it. The dictum that people make history, but not under circumstances chosen by them, applies to art and artists as well. Because Kyeyune designed the cover of Weep Not, Child and later that of The River Between,6 he and I were now bound together in books and the world of imagination.

  Poster for The Black Hermit by Glen Dias (redrawn from memory)

  First British edition (1964) of Weep Not, Child

  Author photo from Weep Not, Child

  A week after the drama of signing books and sitting for interviews, I heard from London again. I had passed my BA Honors in English in the Upper Second Division. Bahadur Tejani, one of the animating spirits in the production of The Black Hermit, was the only other one in that coveted category that year.

  VI

  I became a writer, which, to quite a few people, meant an owner of books. Wherever I went, members of the new political class would ask me to give them copies. It took a while for some people to realize that an author doesn’t actually own the books that bear his name.

  Chemchemi Cultural Centre, founded by Ezekiel (Esk’ia) Mphahlele, was one of the first to invite me to read and talk about the book. This was very gratifying. Chemchemi had become a place where young aspiring writers gathered under his tutelage. Mphahlele also traveled widely to schools to stimulate interest in writing among the youth. I was glad to be part of that effort and also a living example that it was possible.

  One day I was invited to Pumwani Secondary School to speak to the Form Four class about writing. Khaki-clad boys behind dilapidated desks packed the room. I could hardly believe my eyes. In their midst, similarly clad in khaki, sharing a desk, sat E. Carey Francis. But for his age and white skin, he could have been one of the boys. I had completely forgotten that he had retired as principal of Alliance High School in 1962, only to become an ordinary teacher in Pumwani.

  Way back in the 1920s, he used his free time to work with the children of British poor, in defiance of what was expected of a Cambridge don. He then extended his services to the poor of Africa, first as headmaster of a primary school for ten years before his stint as principal of Alliance for twenty-four years. Now, in 1964, he was back among the lowly in defiance of what was expected of the retired principal of the most outstanding school in the country.

  I was really glad to see him, because our last confrontation in Makerere had left a nasty taste in my mouth. Among the hands raised in question time was Carey Francis’s. Nothing about missionaries, Christianity, priests, or imperialism. He wanted me to expand on what moved me to write. What tips could I pass on to the intending writer? How did a writer balance the demands of his imagination and those of the political moment? I pondered the questions. The only real loyalty a writer has is to the imagination, the muse. Writers must find the time for her, obey her when she calls, and exert the sinews of their being in her service.

  In an entry for November 5 in the diary I had started and then abandoned, I had written down an observation on Virginia Woolf’s work habits. “Just learnt that Virginia Woolf would write one passage 15 times. Seems my fault. I am so impatient.” Today I have reduced this to a formula that I tell any who ask me for tips: Write, write, write, and write again; you’ll get it right. Writing is work, is devotion. But in that was it really different from any other calling, even that of a missionary?

  Right from his arrival in Kenya, Carey Francis was always aware that he was preparing the leaders of tomorrow, although he may have imagined the future as one of enlightened English empire. In one respect, his vision of molding tomorrow’s leaders had been fulfilled. The independence cabinet and administration were packed with graduates of Alliance.

  But how many of the new postcolonial elite were going to give themselves fully to the lowly of all the communities the way he had done? Already some of his pupils, ministers and permanent secretaries in the new independent Kenya, were beginning to demand their 5 percent from the people they had sworn to serve. They were nicknamed Messrs. Five Percent. If I wrote another novel, what would I say about these five-percenters vis-à-vis people in the streets?

  I answered his questions as well as I could. A writer’s quest is truth; his guide, social conscience. But I should have added that reference to Virginia Woolf ’s work ethic.

  13

  Notes and Notebooks

  I

  My future at the Nation was all but assured, but in time, for reasons I failed to fathom fully, journalism began to lose its luster. I had pinned my hope on my opinion page, but now I wasn’t seeing it the way
I used to see it. There was no quid pro quo between investment and return, it seemed. I didn’t want to quit, but the question of the five-percenters versus the rest began to bother me.

  The question hadn’t begun with the latest encounter with Francis. In an article I had published in The Makererean of August 24, 1963, under the title “The Writer and the Public,” I had talked about the impending changes and then asked a series of rhetorical questions:

  What effects have the changes had on the lives of ordinary people, the man who daily rides his bicycle to the factory, the woman who daily trudges to her little shamba (garden) to coax it to yield the day’s meal? Is there a new awareness, a new consciousness broadening the experiences and expectations of the peasant? Is there a conflict between the peasant’s hopes and the plans of his government? I also posed questions about the Makerere graduate, “a man who has been brought up in an educational system wholly colonial, with all its prejudices and intellectual slant in favor of the West.”

  These questions would not cease. There were others. Who were the prime movers of the military mutinies? How come they took place at the same time in the same month in multiple countries? What were the implications of a continued British military presence in Kenya? Why were there echoes of the Congo in the chaos, and what did they signify?

  II

  Before my finals, I had filled out applications for postgraduate studies. Memories of Alliance High School affected my choice of schools. I had the chance to go to Cambridge on a scholarship given for outstanding performance at Makerere. Despite my appreciation of Carey Francis’s many positive qualities, I still remembered that he once told us he believed that no African student could enter Cambridge on merit, except one, Doctor Wasawo, now Makerere’s vice principal. Francis’s Anglo-chauvinism was the weakest part of his character, and it blurred his vision at times. Although I didn’t take his prejudice as truth, I still never wanted to be admitted anywhere as an academic favor or to be haunted by its shadow.