Wrestling with the Devil

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

  So a game of deadly wit started: now that we knew about Kenyatta’s death through a prayer, we could talk about it openly, and we no longer hid our feelings. Political prisoners would inquire as to whom they should now send their letters of supplication, and they would be told to write to Kenyatta. What address? State House, Nairobi, of course. So the joke started: “I am writing to Kenyatta, the ex-political prisoner, c/o State House, Nairobi.” But the officials were really to blame for these trite jokes, because they grimly held on to “their fact” that Kenyatta was not yet dead. How completely did they want a man to die in order to say he was dead?

  When Ali Dubat, who had gone for an operation, was finally discharged from the hospital, he was not returned to the compound, but to an isolation cell in G block. His fault? The natural possession of two ears. While he was in the hospital, a hysterical nurse had rushed in shouting the news of Kenyatta’s death. He remained in that punishment cell until the day of his release three months later.

  5

  It is difficult to describe the feelings occasioned in me by Kenyatta’s death. I had met him only once, in 1964 at Gatũndũ. I was then working as a reporter with the Daily Nation. The occasion was May Day 1964, and a group of peasants from Mũrang’a had come to donate relief money for their class counterparts in Nyanza, victims of floods on the Kano Plains. Oginga Odinga was present, a witness of this act of class solidarity. For some reason, I and the Nation photographer were the only journalists present. I still retain a photograph of Kenyatta, Odinga, and me taken at the time. I am standing, with a notebook and pen in hand, probably putting a question to the big two, the peasants crowding around us. It was a brief, a very brief, first and last encounter.

  However, in my novels—Weep not, Child; A Grain of Wheat; and Petals of Blood—Kenyatta has either appeared directly as a historical figure or has been hinted at in the portrayal of some of the characters. In 1964 a publisher asked me to write Kenyatta’s biography, and for a time I played with the idea before rejecting it. I was not sure if I could get official permission and the family cooperation necessary for such a task. I also felt—which was true—that I was then too young, too inexperienced, and too confused in social outlook to cope with the literary and political demands of putting together a definitive biography. The idea resurfaced briefly in 1968 when Ali Mazrui and I were traveling in the same plane from an international conference of Africanists in Dakar, Senegal, and we decided to attempt a joint biography. Mazrui wrote to Kenyatta, c/o President’s Offices, Nairobi, to seek permission for that undertaking. He did not get it.

  In a way, it was good that we didn’t get permission. Our outlooks would have clashed in the interpretation. Mazrui’s analysis of the African situation starts with tribe; mine, with class.

  Even without a clash of outlook, I’m not sure if we could have done a finer job than Murray-Brown’s Kenyatta. It is a revealing biography, less for his interpretation than for the impressive material he has unearthed and brought together between hard covers. Murray-Brown could not get at the Kenyatta brought to dramatic life by the very material he himself had assembled.

  There were then several Kenyattas, but they can be reduced to four. There was the Kenyatta of the era of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), who made anti-imperialist statements and declarations valid for that time. He was then truly a spokesman of the peasants and workers, and he took up the cause of the peasants of the various nationalities in Kenya: Wakamba, Abaluhya, Dholuo, Gĩkũyũ, Giriama, Maasai, the lot. He articulated the need and necessity for a revolutionary unity of peasants and workers of Kenya to overthrow British imperialism.

  There was the Kenyatta of the era of the Kenya African Union (KAU). This Kenyatta was a graduate of Malinowski’s school of anthropology at London University, a cultural nationalist (he had written Facing Mount Kenya, in which politics was deliberately cut out), who for fifteen years had quite literally been out of physical touch with the living struggles of the Kenyan people. KAU was a nationalist organization grouping a variety of classes under its constitutional nonviolence umbrella. It had no quarrel with capitalism, only with the exclusion of Africans, on the basis of race, from full participation in it.

  Then there was the Kenyatta of the era of the Kenya African National Union (KANU): a prison graduate, an ex–political prisoner who for nine years had again been out of physical touch with the living struggle as led by Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA, Mau Mau). The liberation army had been weakened politically and militarily, especially after the capture and execution of the leader, Dedan Kĩmathi, and hence it was not in a position to force adoption of certain programs by KANU.

  And then there was the Kenyatta of KANU in power, who made sure that anybody associated with the militant nationalism of the KLFA were never anywhere near the seats of power.

  Because of his composite history, in looking at Kenyatta, all the classes could see a bit of themselves in him and tended to see what they wanted to see rather than what there was to see: petit bourgeois vacillations and opportunism.1

  My reception of his death was then one of sadness. Even though he had wrongly jailed me, his death was not an occasion for rejoicing but one that called for a serious reevaluation of our history—so as to see the balance of losses and gains and work out the options open to us for the future of our children and country.

  6

  With Kenyatta’s death, another dream of freedom possessed us all, and this time even Wasonga seemed to believe in the possibility. “We shall not be here for more than three years from now,” he would tell us. Three years: not a particularly cheerful thought, but shorter than the ten years he had spent in the compound. Then suddenly a rumor started: we would be freed on Friday, September 22.

  The whole compound was gripped with feverish excitement and expectations. A week to go, and we would all be free to talk with our families, see green life again, hear the sweet laughter of women and children! Food became completely tasteless, and on Tuesday evening very few touched their prison food. We exchanged addresses and confidences, and promises of future meetings. We started talking of detention and political imprisonment and Kamĩtĩ as things of history. Some of the prisoners had already arranged for new tire sandals, which they would carry home as a remembrance of things past.

  The morning of Friday, September 22, found us still in the grip of hope. There had been no official word, but the rumor had become a reality. Why not? Every reasonable argument pointed to our release on that day. Some political prisoners had sat down, made a list of all cabinet members, and tried to determine their voting pattern in terms of yes or no to our release on that day, and naturally the ministers in favor of our release outnumbered those against us. A political prisoner who cautioned realism in our expectations was shouted down and denounced as an enemy of the people.

  It was a kind of collective madness, I remember, and when at about ten o’clock there was a vigorous banging on the outer door and a prison officer dashed in waving his staff of office, I said to myself, At long last, God—freedom!

  But others read something different. Quickly Koigi pulled me aside and whispered, “Go and clean your room at once! There is going to be a search!” and he literally ran toward his own cell to do the same.

  I had never seen a prison search before and though the other political prisoners told me that under Edward Lokopoyet it had been a weekly ritual, I never really knew what it meant. So I was not sure what I was expected to do or how to prepare for it.

  And then the warders descended upon us, from all sides, batons raised, literally hounding us back to our cells. There was no laughter in their eyes. My cell was the first to be raided.

  9

  Sherlock Holmes and the Strange Case of the Missing Novel

  1

  I didn’t know what they were looking for, exactly. Razor blades, nails, weapons of violence? Letters, diaries, secret communications with the outside world? I had no contraband items, maybe the razor blade, but I could not think of anythi
ng else, and even if I could, where and how would I hide them, in front of their eyes?

  Suddenly the sergeant saw scattered piles of toilet paper on the desk and pounced on them. Then, as if delirious with joy and triumph, he turned to the presiding officer and announced:

  “Here is the book, sir, on toilet paper.”

  It dawned on me in that second that this was what they were after, and I felt paralyzed.

  “Seize it!” the officer told him, “the whole lot! Who told you to write books in prison?” he continued, turning to me.

  Soon every sheet of toilet paper on the desk had been put in a bag. They looked at one another satisfied at the loot.

  But I was laughing inside, literally congratulating myself. In writing the novel, I had used several subterfuges to mislead the ever watchful guards as to what I was doing. First I had asked for pen and paper to write my “confession” to the Detainees Review Tribunal. I got pen all right, which was what I really wanted, but unfortunately, for writing material, they gave me a few sheets only. But wait! There was the toilet paper!

  The toilet paper was square single sheets stacked to make a bundle between two slightly harder covers, top and bottom, held together by a tape. In appearance each bundle looked like a notebook without a spine. The paper itself was not the soothing, softy-softie kind. It was actually hard, meant to punish prisoners, but it turned out be great writing material, really holding up to the ballpoint pen very well. What was hard for the body was hardy for writing on.

  I created a not too elaborate visual make-belief that I was writing my confession. In reality, I was drafting a novel on the toilet paper. But how was I to hide the written material? I thought it best to hide it in the open but use a kind of decoy to take their eyes away from the finished drafts. It was simple. I left all the discarded drafts on the desk, quite a pile. But for the finished draft I put it back into the notebook-like bundle, but in the middle, leaving the top and the bottom layer with clean sheets. Then I would put the original tape back. Looking at it from the side, it looked like a clean unused bundle of toilet paper.

  I had to use my share of toilet bundles, with the other fellow prisoners giving what of theirs they could spare. The problem was that the pile of the novel toilet paper at the corner of the room was becoming higher and higher.

  So it was with a sense of triumph that I saw them collect the discarded drafts on the table and put them in a bag. They were about to leave my room when one of the guards stopped by the pillar of toilet paper at the corner. “You are allowed only two bundles at any one time,” he shouted, and the officer motioned him to seize them as well. They had to bring in another basket, but I was no longer looking at what they were doing. All I could sense with the pain of a thousand knife stabs was that they had put all the bundles in a basket and left the cell.

  It was as if I had been drained of all life. My novel, written with blood, sweat, and toil on toilet paper had been seized! Only two chapters hidden in between the empty back pages of a Bible Koigi had lent me remained. The Bible lay there on the desk as if mocking me, “If you had trusted all the Warĩnga novel to me, you would have saved it all.”

  Gloom fell over Kamĩtĩ. Every political prisoner had lost something. We had been deliberately lulled into slumber by the carefully circulated rumor of release. But most political prisoners had developed fantastic cunning, which had made them act like lightening, and many had saved a lot of their prison notes. I had suffered the major loss and the other political prisoners clearly felt with me. I was grateful for the group solidarity. But it didn’t lessen the hurt.

  Only a writer can possibly understand the pain of losing a manuscript, any manuscript. With this novel I had struggled with language, with images, with prison, with bitter memories, with moments of despair, with all the mentally and emotionally adverse circumstances in which one is forced to operate while in custody, and now it had gone.

  The next three weeks were the worst of my stay at Kamĩtĩ. Nevertheless I made a new resolution: no matter what happened, I would start all over again. I would reconstruct the novel in between the printed lines of a Chekhov, or a Gorky, or a Mann, or of the Bible—I would even ask the chaplain for three or four Bibles of different sizes as evidence of a newfound devotion! It would not be the same novel, but I would not accept defeat.

  I never had the occasion to try out my resolution, though I did scribble the plot and the few sequences of events I could recollect in a volume of Chekhov’s short stories—The Lady with a Lap Dog. After about three weeks, on October 18, the new SSP returned the Warĩnga manuscript to me.

  “I see nothing wrong with it,” he said. “You write in very difficult Kikuyu!” he added.

  “Thank you!” was all I said, but he will probably never know the depth of the emotion behind those two words.

  “But you should never have written it on toilet paper,” he went on. “I’ll ask the chief warder to supply you with scrap paper—there is plenty of it in my office—so you can transfer the whole thing from toilet paper.”

  I shut myself in my room for a reunion with my novel.

  Write on, brother.

  Write on!

  My star still reigns!

  I look into the bag, puzzled. Something is not right. Then I realize all too suddenly that what they have returned is the discarded drafts that they had collected from the table! My cleverness has caught up with me. Was this an elaborate joke, a hoax, on the part of the prison authorities? Return to me only that portion that I had pretended to be the novel?

  2

  I turn to the chief warder, the one in charge of the block. He says they have given me back everything they got back from SSP. I say no, they still have the biggest portion of the book. He takes my complaint back to the SSP. The SSP comes to the compound in person and reassures me that he returned everything, but he promises to check and recheck his own office and home. I detect no malice in his gait or look or tone of voice. The report the following day is the same. What he gave back was all he had.

  A mystery. Between my cell and the SSP office, my novel has disappeared without trace. It becomes the case of the missing novel on toilet paper. Everybody starts playing Sherlock Holmes. After a day or two, turning over and over the same speculation, they give up, puzzled, but with some content in simply asserting that they knew that the guards really knew what had happened to the novel.

  Gĩcerũ, the same reader of body languages, does not give up, even after nearly all of us have suspended our amateur detective work. He notices, according to him afterward, that now and then, as the guards in our block leave for home, they would each help themselves to a bundle of fresh toilet paper. He observed the pattern for about a week. One day, he deliberately strays into the warders’ office in our block to ask for something totally irrelevant, but as the Chief warder turns around to look for the something, Gĩcerũ quickly peers at a basket in the corner. It was full of bundles of toilet paper.

  He worked out what had happened. When the warders raided my room and seized my bundles of toilet paper, they put them into the basket. Then as they went to the other rooms and seized their unused bundles, they simply put them on top of my bundles of my novel.

  Gĩcerũ comes back to me and reports: your novel must be in the basket, and since the SSP has given the okay for its return, ask to see what’s in the basket. Which I did. The warder shrugs his shoulders, as if he has nothing to hide, and points to the basket. The surprise on his face told me that even he did not know anything about what I now saw:

  My entire novel, in jumbled bundles of toilet paper, was in the basket. It never left the block. They had assumed that the pile of bundles they had seized from my room had indeed been unused pile of toilet paper. And their only concern was that I was hoarding toilet paper when every cell was allowed only two bundles at any on time. Gĩcerũ, our Sherlock Holmes, solved the mystery in the nick of time. All the unused bundles had been taken. The very next one would have been a chapter or several chapters of the no
vel I had written on toilet paper.

  10

  Devil on the Cross

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

  No!

  There she walks knowing that . . . There she walks carrying . . . knowing . . .

  No!

  She walked outside knowing that greater struggles . . .

  I try different combinations. Now and then I look at the walls for a word, a name, a sentence. The walls of cell 16 have become my dictionary of words and music.

  Since the big fiasco of September 22, dreams of freedom have given way to nightmares of a longer stay in this dungeon. Other dates on which freedom was expected, like Kenyatta Day, though not with the same intensity of September 22, have proved to be receding mirages. The Koran no longer yields its secrets. The man of the Bible has not been seen. The doves keep on flying in increasing numbers, but none lands on the grounds.

  People are silent about predictions. I no longer mention my invitation to a roast goat party at my home on December 25. Life has come to an ominous standstill. No more games of chess, Ludo, checkers, tenniquoit. Walks on the side-pavements have become more popular. But now the main talk is about the necessity to brace ourselves for the nightmare of a longer stay in prison.

  Although I, too, have been affected by the new mood of pessimism, every night I have kept faith with the Warĩnga novel. And since it is no longer a secret, I also have spent parts of the daytime writing it. Scrap paper has proved to be not as plentiful as I had been led to believe. Or the guard in charge is proving to be mean. Other political prisoners have been generous. Mathenge has given me all his reserve of paper; others have chipped in with the little they have.

  But tonight I am back to writing on toilet paper. Of course there have been a few signs of some movement. We have been allowed to buy books through the warder in charge of the block. As a test case, Gĩkonyo places an order for Petals of Blood, and I for copies of Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died and Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road. Petals of Blood has been bought and brought to us, and has been read by all the political prisoners who can read English. Also Going Down River Road. But a paperback copy of The Man Died is not available. Within the same last two months, a new doctor has come and examined us all. The commissioner of prisons has also called once and acceded to our request for toothbrushes and toothpaste.