Wrestling with the Devil

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

  On another wall are two murals depicting aspects of settler life in that Kenya. One shows the Norfolk—the House of Lords, as it was then known—in 1904. Here again are English ladies and gentlemen—some on horseback, others sitting or standing on the veranda, but all drinking hard liquor served them by an African waiter wearing the servant’s uniform of white kanzu, red fez, and a red band over his shoulder and front. In the foreground is an ox wagon with two Africans: one, the driver, lashing at the dumb oxen, and the other, the pilot, pulling them along the right paths. The ribs of the “pushing boy” and the “pulling boy” are protruding, in contrast to the fully fleshed oxen and members of the House of Lords.

  However, the most prominent feature in this mural is a “rickshaw boy” with grinning teeth, holding up this human-powered carriage for a finely dressed English lady to enter. Oxen-powered wagons for English survival goods; African-powered carriages for the good English lords and ladies. Eleanor Cole, in her 1975 random recollections of pioneer settler life in Kenya, writes:

  Transport in Nairobi in those days was by rickshaw, one man in front between the shafts and one behind, either pushing or acting as a brake. People had their private rickshaws and put their rickshaw men in uniform. There were also public ones for hire.

  The other mural depicts the same type of royal crowd at the Nairobi railway station. At the forefront is a well-fed dog wagging its tail before its lord and master. Amid the different groups chatting or walking stands a lone bull-necked, bull-faced settler in riding breeches with a hat covering bushy eyebrows and a gray moustache. He could have been a Colonel Grogan or a Lord Delamere or any other settler. The most representative feature about him is the sjambok he is firmly holding in his hands.

  The rickshaw. The gun. The dog. The sjambok. The ubiquitous underfed, wide-eyed, uniformed native slaves, the grown men they called boys!

  In March 1907, Colonel Ewart Grogan and four associates flogged three “rickshaw boys” outside a Nairobi courthouse. The “boys” were later taken to the hospital with lacerated backs and faces. Their crime? They had alarmed two white ladies by raising the rickshaw shafts an inch too high! The rhetoric of the magistrate, when Grogan, Russell Bowker, a Captain Gray, Sidney Fichat, and Ernest Low were summoned before him for being members of an unlawful assembly, left not the slightest doubt about the sadistic brutality of these sons of English nobility, graduates of Eton and Cambridge:

  From the first to the last it appears to me that out of all the people present assisting at the flogging of these men, there was no one of that number who ever took the trouble to satisfy himself as to whether these natives had ever done anything deserving of punishment at all. There was no trial of any sort nor any form or pretence of trial. These boys were neither asked whether they had any defence or explanation to give, nor does it appear that they ever had any opportunity of making one. Grogan, who ordered the flogging, has himself stated that no plea or defence which they might have made would have diverted him from his purpose. This is a very unpleasant feature in the case and I consider it about as bad as it can be. Yet, in my opinion, it is further aggravated by the fact that the place selected for this unlawful act was directly in front of a court-house.

  Correct legal rhetoric versus mockery of justice: the culprits, all found guilty, were given prison terms ranging from seven to thirty days. Prison? Their own houses, where they were free to receive and entertain guests! Elsewhere, in the plantations and estates, the bwana (boss) would simply have shot and buried them—or fed them to his dogs.

  In 1960, Peter Harold Poole shot and killed Kamawe Musunge for throwing stones at Poole’s dogs in self-defense. To the settlers, dogs ranked infinitely higher than Kenyans; Kenyans were either children, to be paternalistically loved, like dogs, but not appreciated, or mindless scoundrels, to be flogged or killed. In his autobiography, Words, Sartre has made the apt comment that “when you love children and dogs too much, you love them instead of adults.” The settlers’ real love was for dogs and puppies. A Kenyan defending against an attacking dog was a crime worse than a Brit murdering a Kenyan. When Poole was sentenced to death, the whole colonial Herrenvolk cried in unison against this “miscarriage of justice.” Peter Harold Poole had done what had been the daily norm since 1895.

  In 1918, for instance, two British peers flogged a Kenyan to death and later burned his body. His crime? He was suspected of having an intention to steal property. The two murderers were found guilty of a “simple hurt” and were fined £100 each. The governor later appointed one of them a member of a district committee to dispense justice among the natives. The gory details are there in W. McGregor Ross’s book Kenya from Within. What he describes is the justice of the sjambok!

  I thought about this in my cell at Kamĩtĩ Prison and suddenly realized that I had been wrong about the British settlers. The colonial system did produce a culture.

  But it was the culture of hedonism without morality, a culture of legalized brutality, a racist ruling-class culture of fear, the culture of an oppressing minority desperately trying to impose total silence on a restive oppressed majority. This culture was sanctified by the very structure and practice of the colonial administration of governors, provincial and district commissioners, and officers right down to the askari (native police and soldiers). Prisons and police stations were the central support pillars of the lifestyle of parasites in paradise. I should have written that book: Fear and Silence: A Colonial Affair.

  2

  The culture of fear and silence: the diaries and memoirs of the leading intellectual lights of the old colonial system contain full literary celebration of this settler culture. We need go no further than Colonel Meinertzhagen’s Kenya Diaries and Baroness Blixen’s Out of Africa.

  Richard Meinertzhagen was a commanding officer of the British forces of occupation, but he is far better known in history as the assassin of Koitalel Arap Samoei, the otherwise unconquerable military and political leader of the Nandi people. Under Koitalel’s inspiring leadership, the Nandi people waged a ten-year armed struggle against the foreign army of occupation, humiliating British officers, one after the other. Enter Meinertzhagen, a gentleman. Unable to defeat the Nandi guerrilla army, the colonel invited Koitalel to a peace parley on some “neutral” ground. But only on one condition. Both men would come unarmed. Having been led to believe that the British wanted to discuss surrender terms and guarantees of safe retreat from Nandi country, Koitalel accepted. Pit innocence against brutality, and innocence will lose. Koitalel stretched an empty hand in greeting. Meinertzhagen stretched out a hidden gun and shot Koitalel in cold blood. The incident is recorded in Kenya Diaries as an act of British heroism! Other such deeds of British colonial heroism are recorded in the same diaries.

  The scene now shifts to Gĩkũyũ country, where once again people fought with tremendous courage against the better-armed foreign invaders. So fierce was the struggle that in 1902 Meinertzhagen was forced to make the grudging but prophetic admission that, even if they triumphed over the people, this would be only a temporary victory: the British could never hold the country for more than fifty years. In one of several battles in Mũrang’a, a British officer was captured by the people’s defense army in Mũrũka and was handed to the people for justice. The women drowned him in urine. Months later, Meinertzhagen’s troops stealthily surrounded the Mũrũka ground on a market day, and he ordered a massacre of every soul—murder of unarmed men, women, and children.

  “Every soul was either shot or bayonetted; we burned all huts and razed the banana plantations to the ground. Then I went home and wept for brother officer killed,” Meinertzhagen wrote in his diary.

  Baroness Karen Christenze Blixen-Finecke was the separated wife of the big game hunter–cum–settler Baron Bror Fredrik von Blixen-Finecke. From him she got no children but did get incurable syphilis. As if in compensation for unfulfilled desires and longings, the baroness turned Kenya into a vast erotic dreamland in which her several white lovers appeared as you
ng gods and her Kenyan servants as usable curs. In her two books, Shadows on the Grass and Out of Africa, the animals are the dominant images in her portrayal of Africans. In the more famous book, Out of Africa, she celebrates a hideous colonial aesthetic in an account she titles “Kitosch’s Story”:

  Kitosch was a young Native in the service of a young white settler of Molo. One Wednesday in June, the settler lent his brown mare to a friend, to ride to the station on. He sent Kitosch there to bring back the mare, and told him not to ride her, but to lead her. But Kitosch jumped on to the mare, and rode her back, and on Saturday the settler, his master, was told of the offence by a man who had seen it. In punishment the settler, on Sunday afternoon, had Kitosch flogged, and afterwards tied up in his store, and here late on Sunday night Kitosch died.

  The outcome of the trial in the High Court at Nakuru turned to rest solely on the intentions of the victim. It was decided by a hideous logic that Kitosch had actually wanted to die, and he was therefore responsible for his death. In the colonial European mind, it seemed that colonized natives had a fiendish desire for death that absolved white murderers:

  Kitosch had not much opportunity for expressing his intentions. He was locked up in the store, his message, therefore comes very simply, and in a single gesture. The night-watch states that he cried all night. But it was not so, for at one o’clock he talked with the Toto, who was in the store with him, because the flogging had made him deaf. But at one o’clock he asked the Toto to loosen his feet, and explained that in any case he could not run away. When the Toto had done as he asked him, Kitosch said to him that he wanted to die. . . . A little while after, he rocked himself from side to side, cried: “I am dead”! and died.

  Medical science was even dragooned to support the wish-to-die theory. This was a psychological peculiarity of the African. He wants to die, and he dies. The settler was found guilty of “grievous hurt.” And for a “grievous hurt” to a Kenyan, the foreign settler got two years in jail.

  The fault is not Blixen’s manner of telling the story—all the details are there—but her total acceptance of the hideous wish-to-die theory and her attempts to draw from it aesthetic conclusions meant to have universal relevance and validity about the nature of the African.

  By this strong sense in him of what is right and decorous, the figure of Kitosch, with his firm will to die, although now removed from us by many years, stands out with a beauty of its own. In it is embodied the fugitiveness of wild things who are, in the hour of need, conscious of a refuge somewhere in existence; who go when they will; of whom we can never get hold.5

  The African is an animal: the settler is exonerated. But I err in saying the African was considered an animal. In reality they loved the wild game more. Africans were worse than animals, because they asserted their humanity in the very threats they posed to settlerdom.

  Galbraith Cole shot dead a Maasai national, again in cold blood. The subsequent trial was a prearranged farce, rehearsed to the letter and gesture by all three parties, prosecutor, judge, and murderer (all European, of course), in such a way that, in the records, the murdered Kenyan emerged guilty of armed provocation. But the settler was too arrogant to hide his murderous intentions behind a mask of lies. As later reported by Karen Blixen, this is how the farce reached a climax of absurdity:

  “It’s not, you know, that we don’t understand that you shot only to stop the thieves,” the Judge said to Galbraith.

  “No,” Galbraith said, “I shot to kill. I said that I would do so.”

  “Think again, Mr. Cole”, said the judge. “We are convinced that you only shot to stop them.”

  “No, by God.” Galbraith said, “I shot to kill.”

  He was acquitted.

  Meinertzhagen, the soldier-assassin–turned–writer, and Karen Blixen, the baroness of blighted bloom–turned–writer—theirs is a literary reflection of that colonial culture of silence and fear best articulated in a dispatch by an early governor, Sir Arthur Henry Hardinge, on 5 April 1897:

  Force and the prestige which rests on a belief in force, are the only way you can do anything with those people, but once beaten and disarmed they will serve you. Temporizing is no good. . . . These people must learn submission by bullets—It’s the only school; after that you may begin more modern and humane methods of education, and if you don’t do it this year you will have to next, so why not get it over? . . . In Africa to have peace you must first teach obedience, and the only tutor who impresses the lesson properly is the sword.

  Thus the above acts of brutality were not aberrations of wayward individuals but an integral part of colonial politics, philosophy, and culture. Violence to instill fear and impose silence was the very essence of colonial settler culture.

  3

  This culture reached its high noon between 1952 and 1962. These were the ten years when the sword and the bullet held unmitigated sway over every Kenyan. It was a period of mass trials, mass torture, and mass murder of Kenyans. So brutal were the workings of this culture that some democratic-minded British were shocked into protest against its antihuman character.

  Such was the case, for instance, of Eileen Fletcher, a Quaker social worker, who, after serving for a time as a rehabilitation officer in Kenya, resigned and flew back to England to declare in The Tribune magazine of May 25, 1956:

  I have just come back from Kenya where I was sent by the British Government. I have seen Emergency justice in operation. And now I can reveal the shocking truth, that I have seen African children, in British jails, sentenced to life imprisonment—for “consorting with armed persons” and “unlawful possession of ammunition.” In a women’s prison, less than a year ago, I saw twenty-one young people—including 11 and 12 years olds—who were all condemned to this inhuman punishment, for supposed “Mau Mau offences.” All of them, believe it or not, had been convicted by British magistrates.

  Similarly, Barbara Castle, a Labour MP, had written in horror in The Tribune of September 30, 1955:

  In the heart of the British Empire there is a police state where the rule of law has broken down, where the murder and torture of Africans by Europeans goes unpunished and where the authorities pledged to enforce justice regularly connive at its violation.

  And in the Sunday Pictorial of March 31, 1957, after listing nine Kenyans hanged in one night, she commented: “With this bloody act, Kenya enters its fourth year of blood, repression, brutalities, mass imprisonment—of the lawless enforcement of unjust laws by agents of its government and of the British Government.”

  Barbara Castle was, of course, wrong about what she termed the breakdown of the rule of law. This was the rule of law, the colonial rule of law, and it had been in operation, with differing degrees of intensity, since 1895.

  Evidence comes from the horse’s own mouth. On April 8, 1908, Secretary for Native Affairs Alfred Claud Hollis wrote a secret memorandum on the miserable conditions in the country’s colonial labor camps:

  My first duty on my appointment as secretary for native affairs in June last was to inquire into the labour question. It had recently been reported to His Excellency that a number of Kikuyu had been found dead on the road leading from the railway fuel camps at Londiani to their country. I therefore proceeded to the spot and held an inquiry. A deplorable state of affairs was revealed. It transpired that as voluntary labour was usually not forthcoming, chiefs were called upon to provide labour, and natives were seized by their chief’s orders and forced to go and work. The most unpopular kind of work was for Indian contractors on the railway. The men were sent to detested camps where they were badly fed and often beaten and maltreated. They frequently had no blankets given them though the cold at night time was intense, the miserable grass huts provided for their accommodation were neither watertight nor wind-proof, the work of felling trees and breaking stones was uncongenial, and no attempt was made to give them food they were accustomed to in their own homes. Their lives were consequently a misery and their one idea seemed to be to run a
way and return to their own country. To prevent this, police guards were stationed at most of the contractor’s camps. Many of the men however succeeded in escaping and hundreds must have died of starvation.

  For some years a system of forced labor had been resorted to in various parts of the protectorate, and like most wrongful systems, it had gone from bad to worse. At first mild pressure only was used, then the goats were confiscated, and later on armed force had been employed.

  It is indeed a tribute to the varied character of the human that even amid such carnage of body, mind, and truth, there are some courageous souls prepared to defy the conventionally accepted, speak truth to power, and risk arguing for our common humanity. In condemning racialized empires—or any empires—we must never forget those who stood up for a decent future for all even when it was unpopular or dangerous to do so.

  Exactly thirty years before Barbara Castle, Marcus Garvey had to protest, in words similar to hers, against the 1922 British massacre of Kenyan workers when 150 women and men were mowed down outside the central police station for demanding the release of their jailed leader, Harry Thuku. Among the killers were members of the Happy Valley crowd shooting from the Delamere Terrace in the Norfolk Hotel. Marcus Garvey didn’t see the massacre as a breakdown of law. He saw it as the logical working out of the laws of colonial conquest by the sword and the bullet. In a telegram to Lloyd George dated March 20, 1922, which drew from a resolution passed in a mass meeting in Liberty Hall, Harlem, he prophesied a result that came to pass in 1952: