Wrestling with the Devil

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

  But it is also true that nobody writes under one’s chosen conditions with one’s chosen material. Writers can only seize the time to select from material handed to them by history and by whomever and whatever is around them. So my case now: I had not chosen prison; I was forced into it, but now that I’m there, I will try to turn the double-walled enclosure into a special school where, like Shakespeare’s Richard II, I will study how I might compare:

  This prison where I live unto the world, . . .

  My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,

  My soul the father; and history and these two beget

  A generation of still-breeding thoughts,

  And these same thoughts people this little world,

  In humours like the people of this world,

  For no thought is contented.

  In this literary target, I am lucky to have for teachers the other political prisoners and a few guards, who are cooperative and very generous in sharing their different mines of information and experience. But mostly I pick a lot from ordinary meandering conversations, when in groups we talk of women of various careers—barmaids, secretaries, teachers, and engineers—as well as different aspects of social life and bourgeois rivalry in Nairobi. Women may be absent from the block, but they sure dominate regular talk among us, mostly as absent actors in titillating narratives of strange encounters, rejections, broken hearts, and conquests.

  Not only discussions, direct inquiries, and riveting dramas of the heart, but also whispers of happenings outside the walls often provide me with material that I weave into the fabric of the novel. In fact, hints of the main theme and story line emerged when I learned of two members of parliament serving sentences after being convicted of coffee theft. Tidbits about the South African heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard’s3 visit and his racist pro-apartheid views, promulgated on public platforms his Kenyan hosts had generously provided him, have prompted the philosophical discussion in a matatu about “life to come” and the problem of rival claims to the same heart on the day of resurrection. These bits of news also have led to my satirical depiction of one robber character who longs for a world in which the wealthy few gain immortality by buying spare organs, leaving death as the sole prerogative of the poor.

  In the daytime, I take hasty notes on empty spaces of the Bible, one of the books freely allowed in the cells. I scribble notes on the bare walls of my cell, and in the evening try to put it all together on toilet paper.

  Sometimes the bug of literary boredom and despair bites me, and I experience those painful moments when writers begin to doubt the value of what they are scribbling or the possibility of ever completing the task in hand—those moments when writers restrain themselves with difficulty from setting the thing on fire, or tearing it into pieces, or abandoning it all to dust and cobwebs. These moments—the writer’s block—are worse in prison because here, in this desolate place, there are no distractions to massage the tired imagination: a glass of beer, a sound of music, or a long walk in sun and wind or under a calm starry sky.

  But at those very moments, I remind myself that the state has sent me here for my brain to melt into a rotten mess, and suddenly I feel the call to a spiritual battle against its bestial purposes. Time and again, the defiance charges me with new energy and determination: I must cheat them out of that last laugh; I must let my imagination loose over the kind of society that those in this class, in nakedly treacherous alliance with imperialism, are building in our country, in cynical disregard of the wishes of many millions of Kenyans.

  Because women are the most exploited and oppressed of all working people, I would create a picture of a strong, determined woman with a will to resist and struggle against her present conditions. Had I not seen glimpses of this type in real life among the women of Kamĩrĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre, with whom I worked to produce the play Ngaahika Ndeenda?4 Isn’t Kenyan history replete with this type of woman?—Me Katilili wa Menza,5 Muraa wa Ngiti,6 Mary Mũthoni Nyanjirũ,7 and the women soldiers of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army? Warĩnga will be the fictional reflection of the spirit of women’s resistance and resilience in Kenyan history.

  Warĩnga ngatha ya wĩra, Warĩnga heroine of toil . . . there she walks haughtily carrying her freedom in her own hands. . . .

  Now I am on the last chapter. I have given myself December 25, 1978, as the deadline. The date has a special significance for me. In February or early March, I had told the other political prisoners that we would all “eat Christmas” at home. I even invited them to a Christmas nyama choma party at my home in Gĩtogothi, Bibirioni, Limuru. Like so many other prison wagers related to dreams of eventual liberty, the goat-meat roasting party at Christmas was announced half in jest, but I secretly believed in it and inwardly clung to the date, though becoming less and less openly assertive about it as days and nights rolled away. Now only twelve days remain. Twelve days to eat Christmas at home. Twelve days to meet my self-imposed literary deadline!

  But tonight something else, an impulse, a voice, is urging me to run this last lap faster. The voice is not all that secret. Maybe it is born of the feverish expectation of early release, which has been building up in the block for the last four months, though now nobody is sure of its ifs and whens. Maybe it is also born of a writer’s usual excitement at seeing the light at the end of a long, hazardous tunnel. Maybe it’s a combination of both, but whatever its source, the voice remains insistent.

  The heart is willing. The hand that has been scribbling nonstop from about seven o’clock is weak. But the voice is relentless: Write on!

  I rise to stretch my legs. I walk to the iron-barred rectangular window and peer into the passageway. The two guards are playing checkers, but they are murmuring more than they are playing. I ask the same guard about the time.

  “Half-past twelve,” he says, and then adds, “Why do you want to know the time, Professor?”

  “I wanted to know if my star is still shining in the sky,” I answer.

  “You better have some sleep. You might need it.”

  No. I don’t feel like any sleep tonight. I go back to the desk to resume the race to the literary tape, now only a couple of paragraphs away. Free thoughts on toilet paper!

  3

  In front of me is a photograph of my daughter Njoki, meaning “she who comes back from the other world”; or Aiyerubo, meaning “she who defies heaven and hell”; or Wamũingĩ, meaning “she who belongs to the people.” Later, when I am out of Kamĩtĩ, I will see her and hold her in my arms and learn that she was named Wamũingĩ by the peasant women of Limuru, Aiyerubo by Wole Soyinka and the Writers of African Peoples in Nigeria, but just now she is only a name and a photograph sent through the mail.

  Njoki was born on May 15, 1978, five months after my abduction. When her photograph arrived in Kamĩtĩ, sometime after that defiant break into life, Thairũ wa Mũthĩga, a fellow inmate, nicknamed her Kaana ka Bothita, Post-Office Baby.

  In saying that the post office has brought us luck, Thairũ spoke a truth I felt more than thought. Njoki is a message from the world. A message of hope. A message that, somewhere, outside these gray walls of death, people were waiting for me, thinking about me, perhaps even fighting for my release with whatever weapons they had. A protest, a hastily muttered prayer from the lips of a peasant, a groan, a sigh, wishes of helpless children: today such gestures and wishes may not be horses on which seekers of freedom may ride to liberty, but I embrace them as offerings of a much needed moral solidarity with us and with the issues for which we have been jailed. One day the organized power and united will of millions will transform these moral wishes into people’s chariots of actual freedom from ruthless exploitation and naked oppression, but just now merely sensing them through Njoki’s photograph is a daily source of joyful strength.

  The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things. It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signin
g the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from abroad, their nationally televised charitable handouts and breast-beatings before the high altar, their high-sounding phrases and ready-to-shed tears at the sight of naked children fighting cats and dogs for a trash heap, that all have seen these performances of benign benevolence for what they truly are: a calculated sugarcoating of the immoral sale and mortgage of a whole country, its people and resources, to Euro-American and Japanese capital8 for a few million dollars in Swiss banks and a few token shares in foreign companies.

  Their vaunted morality is nothing more than the elevation of begging and charity into desirable moral ideals. There is a newfound dignity in begging. Charity, for them, is twice-blessed; it deflates the self-esteem of the recipients and their will to fight, and it inflates the self-image of the giver.

  Recourse to imprisonment, with or without a trial, is above all an admission by the ruling minority that people have started to organize to oppose the plunder of the national wealth and heritage. It fears that the people might rise in arms, and therefore acts to forestall such an uprising, real or imaginary.

  Thus detention and imprisonment more immediately mean the physical removal of progressive intellectuals from the people’s organized struggles. Ideally, the authorities would like to put the whole community of struggling millions behind bars, as the British colonial authorities once tried to do with Kenyan people during the State of Emergency,9 but this would mean incarcerating labor, the true source of national wealth. What then would be left to loot? So the authorities do the simpler thing: pick one or two individuals from among the people and then loudly claim that all sins lie at the feet of these “power hungry,” “misguided,” and “ambitious” agitators.

  Any awakening of a people to their historic mission of liberating themselves from oppression is always denounced by the oppressor with the religious rhetoric of a wronged, self-righteous god. Suddenly, these “agitators” become devils whose removal from society is portrayed as a divine mission. Chain the devils! The people are otherwise innocent, simple, peace-loving, obedient, law-abiding, and cannot conceivably harbor any desire to change this best of all possible worlds. It is partly self-deception, but also an attempted deception of millions.

  Political detention and imprisonment, besides their punitive aspects, serve as exemplary ritual symbolism. If the state can break such progressive nationalists, if they can make them come out of prison crying, “I am sorry for all my sins,” such an unprincipled about-face would confirm the wisdom of the ruling clique in its division of the populace into the passive innocent millions and the disgruntled subversive few. The “confession” and its expected corollary, “Father, forgive us our sins,” become a cleansing ritual for all the past and current repression. For a few tidbits, directorship of this or that statutory body, the privilege of running for parliament on the regime’s party ticket, such an ex–political prisoner might even happily play the role of a conscientious messenger sent back to earth from purgatory by a father figure more benevolent than Lazarus’s Abraham, “that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.” The forgiving father sits back to enjoy international applause for his manifold munificence and compassion.

  Even when they find that such a political prisoner is not in a position to play the role of an active preacher against the futility of struggle (they may have damaged him or her beyond any exploitable repair), they can still publicize this picture of a human wreck as a warning to all future agitators: they couldn’t stand it; do you think you are made of sterner steel? The former hardcore patriot or matriot is physically, intellectually, and spiritually broken, and by a weird symbolic extension, so is the whole struggling populace. All is well in imperialist heaven, for now there is peace on neocolonial earth, policed by a tough no-nonsense comprador10 ruling class that knows how to deal with subversive elements.

  The fact is that imprisonment without trial is not only a punitive act of physical and mental torture of a few individuals; it is also a calculated act of psychological terror against the struggling millions. The aim is a psychological siege of the whole nation. That is why the process from the time of arrest to the time of release is deliberately invested with mystifying ritualism. My arrest, for instance.

  4

  They came for me at midnight. It was December 30, 1977, at Gĩtogothi, Bibirioni, Limuru. Two Land Rovers with police officers armed with machine guns, rifles, and pistols drove into the yard. A sedan flashing red and blue on its roof remained at the main gate, very much like the biblical sword of fire policing the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden by God, who didn’t want humans to eat from the tree of knowledge. The stability of Adamic Eden depended on its residents remaining ignorant about their condition. Behind the sedan were others that, as I later came to learn, carried some local administrative officials and a corps of informers. The latter remained lurking in the shadows for fear that, even at such a dark hour, some peasants around might recognize them and denounce them to the people.

  Armed members of the Intelligence, then known as the Special Branch, who swarmed my study amid an awe-inspiring silence, were additionally guarded by uniformed police officers carrying long-range rifles. Their grim, determined faces lit up only a little whenever they pounced on any book or pamphlet bearing the names of Marx, Engels, or Lenin. I tried to lift the weight of silence in the room by remarking that if Lenin, Marx, or Engels were all they were after, I could save them much time and energy by showing them the shelves where these dangerous three were hiding. The leader of the book-raiding squad was not amused. He growled at me, so I took his “advice” and let them do their work without verbal interruptions.

  I kept on darting my eyes from one raider to the other in case they planted something illegal, like banned pamphlets, so as then to claim they found them hidden among my other books. But I was alone and they were many, all over the study. I soon realized the futility of my vigilance, like the persona in a poem who warns the reader that:

  It’s no use

  Your hiding deep in the dark well of your house

  Hiding your words

  Burning your books

  It’s no use.

  They’ll come to find you

  In lorries, piled high with leaflets,

  With letters no one ever wrote to you

  They’ll fill your passport with stamps

  From countries where you have never been

  They’ll drag you away

  Like some dead dog

  And that night you’ll find out all about torture

  In the dark room

  Where all the foul odours of the world are bred

  It’s no use

  Your hiding

  From the fight, my friend11

  Nevertheless, in helpless silence, my eyes never strayed from the raiders’ activities. To the list of works of the Dangerous Three, they now added Kim Chi Ha’s Cry of the People, and any book whose title contained the words “scientific socialism.”

  And then they saw a pile of copies of Ngaahika Ndeenda. They crowded around it, each taking a copy, flipping through it, and then added the copies to the loot. They had arrested the playscript. It seemed they had accomplished their mission.

  The conversation in my living room went something like this:

  NGŨGĨ: Gentlemen, can I request that we sit down and record all the books and pamphlets you have taken?

  POLICE: We shall do all that at the police station.

  NGŨGĨ: Tell me quite frankly: Am I under arrest?

  POLICE: Oh, no.

  NGŨGĨ: In that case, I’ll provide you with a table, pen, and paper, and we can record everything before it leaves the house.

  POLICE: We shall do it at the station, and you are coming with us.

&nbs
p; NGŨGĨ: What for?

  POLICE: To answer a few questions.

  NGŨGĨ: Am I under arrest?

  POLICE : No.

  NGŨGĨ: In that case, can’t the questions wait until morning?

  POLICE : No.

  NGŨGĨ: Can you please give me a minute with my wife to sort out one thing or two?

  POLICE : It is not necessary. We promise that you’ll be back in the morning. Just a few questions.

  NGŨGĨ: Can you tell me where you are taking me so that my wife here can know?

  POLICE: Tigoni.12

  This was an abduction. Still, I couldn’t help musing over the fact that the police squadron was armed to the teeth to abduct a writer whose only acts of violent resistance were safely between the hard and soft covers of books.

  5

  Tigoni was the local police station, about six miles away. I was pushed into an empty room with bare walls where I was guarded by only one member of the abducting team. Now he smiled rather slyly and he asked me, “How come that as soon as we knocked at the door, you were already up and fully dressed?”