Wrestling with the Devil

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

  It was the toothache that caught me unawares. The rearmost lower right-side molar had a hole, and I started experiencing difficulties in eating. The right side was really very painful, and woe unto the whole mouth if a grain of salt should lodge itself in the hollow. However, when the doctor recommended that I see a dentist at Kenyatta National Hospital, I was seized with panic.

  Two principles suddenly clashed inside me: the necessity for bodily fitness for my physical survival in the combat and the necessity to make a stand over the issue of chains for my spiritual survival in the combat.

  2

  It is the paramount duty of all political prisoners to keep physically fit. Any bodily disablement can considerably weaken their will or forever damage them. Those who survive the deadly combat can always live to fight another day. There is also the saying, told me by one political prisoner as a piece of homely advice: When a cow is finally pinned to the ground and tied with ropes, it cannot refuse to be slaughtered. We in detention were that cow, and we had no choice but to do whatever was dictated by the whims of our captors.

  But a human being is not a dumb beast. Even the cow does not acquiesce in its own slaughter. It goes down kicking to the last breath. In the same way, political prisoners must always stand for certain principles to prop their spirits in the struggle to survive the trials of the stony dragon. They must be ready to protest against wrongs even in prison. They must keep on insisting on their constitutional rights, however few and whatever they are, and on their democratic and human rights.

  Now my own feelings were that, once the authorities had detained a person, they carried the entire responsibility for any diseases afflicting that person for the simple reason that prisoners cannot take care of themselves medically. I felt that it was wrong, it was criminal in fact, to torture people with disease, to use it to extort information or confession, to use it as a means of vindictive humiliation or to break a person’s will. I strongly felt that if the authorities were unable to take a prisoner to a hospital outside the compound, then, even by the least of all democratic and human fairness, they had to bring a doctor into the compound. Even prisoners of war are supposed to be given full and fair medical treatment without conditions.

  In Kenya, particularly at Kamĩtĩ, it was a different story. Crawl on your hands and feet so that we can treat you. Cooperate in your own chains of humiliation without a murmur of protest so that we can take you to the hospital. Kneel and beg; if not, die or become crippled forever. Quite apart from that, I had resolved that, at the earliest possible moment, I would make my feelings known about the whole business of chaining political prisoners, people who had never been convicted in a court of law, who never had any history of physical violence, escape, or attempted escape.

  The same political prisoner who had advised me on the necessity for passivity at a slaughterhouse told me that chains on the innocent were badges of honor, and a political prisoner should never be afraid of them. No. Chains were badges of humiliation. But I was not afraid of them. After all, I had come to Kamĩtĩ in them. Even if I had been chained and dragged through the streets of Nairobi or my village, I would never have allowed the intended humiliation to touch my heart, because I had done no wrong whatsoever. I had merely chosen sides in the class struggle. To write for, speak for, and work for the lives of peasants and workers was the highest call of national duty. My only regret was that for many years I had wandered in the bourgeois jungle and the wilderness of foreign cultures and languages. Kamĩrĩthũ was my homecoming.

  Nevertheless, I had resolved that, while I wouldn’t make any physical resistance to the wearing of chains—that way lay suicide—I would equally not willingly or cooperatively put out my hands for chaining. I would at least say no. I would kick even though I was tied up and being led to a slaughterhouse.

  I knew this course might involve me in certain difficulties. The tendency is for a police or prison officer to take such a protest as a personal affront or defiance of his own personality. I had to keep reminding myself that when the time came, I should protest politely but firmly. I should state my case without rudeness to the executing authority, for my being at Kamĩtĩ was not a directly personal thing between him and me.

  For a long time before the dreaded day, I keenly felt this clash of principles. I wished that the battlefield had not been my health. But I equally felt that if I didn’t say no to this oppressive requirement at the earliest opportunity, I would never thereafter be able to say no over the same issue or any other acts of blatant oppression.

  Then the hour suddenly came. Thursday, June 15, 1978. Over three months after my initial complaint of toothaches. At Kamĩtĩ a political prisoner was told he was going out only a few minutes before the police armed escort was due to arrive. The political prisoner was then required to change from his prison uniform, kũngũrũ, into his civilian clothes, which were otherwise kept under lock and key in the chief warder’s office.

  It was about ten in the morning. I changed as required. I walked through the compound toward the gates. Was it worth resisting the chains? I have said no to oppression several times in my life, and I have always experienced the same sensation of agonizing fears and doubts, before voicing or acting my protest. I feel foolish, childish even . . . why disturb the currents?

  As a boy, I used to pick pyrethrum flowers for one of the very few African landlords in pre-independence Limuru. The landlord on whose land we lived as muhoi tenant-at-will had an orchard of pears and plums. Once, some children went into the orchard and picked a few plums. The landlord’s wife came to know about it. In the evening, after she had weighed our flowers with a spring balance, she announced that we would all lose our day’s pay in punishment for the stolen plums. It was a collective punishment, but of course if we squealed and pointed out the culprits, or if the offenders gave themselves up voluntarily, then the innocents would be spared. We were all angry because of the collective punishment and its severity: lose a whole day’s pay because of a few “stolen” plums? She called out each person’s name. Own up to the crime, squeal, or lose your day’s work! She was met with noncommittal silence.

  My heart was beating hard. Gĩkũyũ precolonial culture, the remnants of which still governed our lives, was very strict about the relationship between a child and a grown-up. I remember, for instance, being admonished by my mother for telling an adult, to his face, that he was lying. Grown-ups had the right to beat a child who was rude to them, even if they were the ones who had initiated the action resulting in the rude exchange. And if the grown-up should report such an exchange to the parents, woe unto the “rude” child. I now believe that the oppressive reactionary tendencies in our precolonial peasant cultures are only slightly less grave than the racist colonial culture of fear and silence and that they should be fought, maybe with different weapons, but fought all the same. But I had not then worked this out.

  I felt cold panic inside me. I knew I would raise a dissenting voice. I was stung by the injustice of it all, and although I could not reverse it, I had no intention of suffering in silence. In our home, we depended on every single cent that we could collect from the sale of our labor. We had sweated in the sun, without a meal or a glass of water all day, and here she was, going on about morality and enforcing it by robbing us of our hard-earned money without so much as a blink. “You claim you are saved,” I shouted at her in tears. “Is this what you mean by Christian salvation? Cheating and robbing us? This is theft! This is theft!” She came to my home the same night and reported what she called this “terrible abuse from a mere child” and urged my mother to beat me. My mother, a peasant living on the estate of the landlord, just looked down. She didn’t say anything. But she didn’t beat me.

  I had felt the same cold panic each time I knew I would join the chorus of those at the university who used to protest against the annual beating of protesting students, a yearly ritual of violence fully sanctioned by government. The worst such ritual was in 1974, when women were raped and others ha
d their limbs broken, their blood left spattered all over the whitewashed walls of the different classrooms. In 1969, I had resigned from the university in protest. I was outraged by the silence of most lecturers and professors, a silence that I took for complicity with the fascist evil. But in 1974 more lecturers had joined in the protest and had made their feelings publicly known.

  What I most remembered about these past incidents was that unpleasant cold foreboding that always preceded my every no to oppression, but it was always a sign that I would not hold back the voice of protest. So when now the prison guard asked me to raise my hands for the ceremony of chaining and I felt the same kind of foreboding, I knew I would refuse. Which I did!

  The guard, also in civilian clothes—going out for a political prisoner was a civilian ceremony all around—couldn’t believe his ears. He called the others. Still I refused.

  He reasoned with me, trying to prove to me that the chains meant nothing: “Be a man and carry the chains!”

  I thought this a strange way of proving my “manhood,” and if there was nothing to the chains, why was I required to wear them? I still refused.

  Kimeto, the police superintendent in charge of escorting political prisoners in and out of Kamĩtĩ, intervened. He was tall, with a partiality for straw hats, which he wore with a conscious swagger, probably in imitation of an American FBI detective he had once seen on television.

  “Listen!” he said, standing arms akimbo, measuring his voice for all to hear clearly. “Even Kenyatta was once chained, and he accepted it.”

  “I am not Kenyatta!” I said.

  “So you refuse to go for medical treatment?”

  “Would I have so promptly put on my civilian clothes if I was not eager to go? After all, it is I who have the toothache. It is you who is refusing to take me to hospital.”

  “Then we have to chain you.”

  “I don’t want to be chained. I don’t see why you must chain an innocent political prisoner.”

  “You are refusing to go to hospital.”

  “No. It is you, refusing to take me. I am not faster than all the bullets you and your team are carrying. Why anyway chain me as a condition for medical treatment? If you are finding it difficult to take me out to see a dentist, and I am not insisting on going out, why don’t you bring a dentist here?”

  “Take him back to the cell!” he shouted, disgust written all over his detective face. “We shall see if he will cure himself.”

  I was never treated, though I kept on complaining. I even complained to the commissioner of prisons, Mutua, on the only occasion that he visited the compound. I pointed out that it was wrong to use disease to torture political prisoners.

  I also wrote a letter of protest to Mũhĩndĩ Mũnene, the political prisoners’ security officer, seeking his intervention to secure me dental treatment inside the compound. It had been done before, I later came to learn, so there was nothing in the regulations that said that a dentist couldn’t come into Kamĩtĩ. Nor was there a regulation requiring chaining as a condition for medical treatment outside Kamĩtĩ. Even if there was, it was unjust and criminal. Not all political prisoners, I came to learn, were chained!

  Mr. Mũnene never replied. And the Detainees Review Tribunal under the Honourable Mister Justice Alan Robin Winston Hancox, before whom I raised the matter in July, never did anything about the use of disease to torture political prisoners.

  One got the impression that the next stage for the authorities would be to actually infect political prisoners with certain diseases if natural ones failed. Any political prisoner who contracted a disease and was taken to the hospital or was treated in prison had always that additional fear. What if, having got there, the government quack “mistakenly” injected strychnine, causing death not in combat or in defiance but prostrate in a ward bed? Considering Kenya’s recent history and the general official attitude toward disease, this fear was not without foundation.

  Fortunately for me, the abscess gradually healed—must have been the medicine of willpower. At any rate, it gradually ceased throbbing except when something hard—like a grain of salt or a piece of bean or ugali—lodged inside it.

  But this was not the end of the chains affair. The next act was later to be played out on the occasion of a scheduled family visit six months after my abduction.

  3

  Because of the intensity of emotion attached to it, the family can be used to break the political backbone of an unprepared political prisoner. Any forcible separation from loved ones is, of course, very painful, but even more painful is the sense of utter helplessness. There is nothing one can do about it. Such a person feels that there was something left unsaid, a sentence cut off in the middle, a melody abruptly stopped. It now feels as if even a minute’s brief reunion would enable the unsaid to be said, the sentence or the melody completed. If only . . . if . . . if . . .

  In my case, I had left Nyambura four months pregnant, and now a child, whom I could see only through the courtesy of photography and the post office, had been born. A visit would enable me to see her. I was also eager to know how the others—Thiong’o, Kĩmunya, Ngĩna, Ndũcũ, Mũkoma, and Wanjikũ—were doing at school and how they were taking the whole thing. My mother also. In 1955 she had to bear three months of torture at a Kamĩrĩthũ Home Guard post because of my elder brother, who had joined the Kenya Land and Freedom Army guerrillas. Throughout the 1950s, she had to carry the burden of not knowing if he would come out of the mountains, and later out of the concentration camps, alive. In 1974 she lost her youngest son, Njinjũ, in a car accident. I knew that now she would be very afraid of losing another. A visit would reassure her. As for Nyambura, I was keen to erase from my mind my last image of her: standing in the inner corridor of our house at Gĩtogothi, pregnant, bewildered, but silent in absolute immobility. “Give me the keys of the car!” were her last words before they took me away. She had seen what I was not able to see: that they were taking me away for a long time.

  Spouses may not understand why their loved ones—wives, husbands, sons, and daughters—were arrested or may not sympathize with the cause. Such a person can easily be approached directly or indirectly—through a third or fourth party, that is—and be fed, in a sympathetic tone and voice, stories of the loved one’s arrogance or stubbornness in prison, of how the loved one has spurned all the government’s moves for reconciliation and cooperation. The left-behinds will be told, ever so earnestly, that their husband/son/wife/daughter is behaving as if they are the government or own the government. It might then be suggested to them that a letter from them, just a few lines urging the prisoner to cooperate, could work miracles and hasten their release. Examples of those already released can be referred to: “Is your husband/son/wife/daughter bigger than so-and-so, who agreed to cooperate and was immediately released? Look at him now. He’s the director of this or that government crop-marketing board or this or that parastatal corporation. Why can’t your husband/son/wife/daughter agree to come out of prison and play the same kind of constructive role?”

  Before they are aware of what’s happening, the tables are turned and subject/object relationships are reversed. It is the husband/wife/son/daughter who is now stubbornly clinging to the prison walls despite several magnanimous government pleas. Gradually the person on the outside will be put in the position of thinking that their spouse is actively working for and aiding their own release by writing them letters gently, lovingly rebuking them for their uncooperativeness. They might even add stories of family suffering and how the prisoner’s presence is urgently needed if the home is not going to fall apart. An exchange of letters (the prisoner’s censored, of course) might start here, but these will only widen the gulf of mutual incomprehension.

  On the side of the detained person, stories of the spouse’s moral conduct in their absence might be leaked to the prisoner. If they are people of property, the victim may be allowed to know how everything they had spent so much toil and sweat and years to build is going to ruins.


  There was a guard who, whenever it was his turn at night, would come to my door and would literally insist that it was I who was refusing to leave prison. “You know the government cannot bring you here for nothing. Just own up, confess everything . . . and you’ll see yourself home tomorrow, but go on demanding to know why you were detained and, my friend, you will be here forever.” The guard knew the Limuru area very well, and I often wondered what stories such a person might be releasing about my stubborn refusal to be “free.”

  Therefore, when political prisoners get a chance to see their spouses and families, they are very eager to seize the time, because even though they will have no privacy, they can reassure the family and give them the heart and spirit to endure the trials to come. Prisoners also gain strength and spirit from that brief supervised encounter. All the words that could be said cannot not be said, the sentence and the melody remain incomplete, but another word will have been added, another note will have been sung.

  What I found disgusting in these family visits were the elaborate lies in the whole surreal exercise. First the family, not the prisoner, had to apply for a visit through the political prisoners’ security officer or through the Ministry of Home Affairs. Depending on the whims of the concerned authorities—there really seemed to be no rational basis for granting or denying these visits—the family would be notified to call at the necessary police station early in the morning of a particular day. They would then be driven to the airport and ushered into a waiting room. They would wait for hours.