Wrestling with the Devil

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

  And today, this morning, December 11, 1978, the SSP agreed to virtually all our requests for sheets and a special diet from tomorrow, December 12. But nobody dares trust the signs of the times, no matter how potent, and the prevailing mood is one of gloom.

  Warĩnga . . . Njoki . . . my symbols of hope and defiance.

  I hear the clinking of a bunch of keys. My cell is next to the tiny exercise yard, so I always hear the noise of the main door into the block whenever it is being opened. Prison officers or corporals on night duty often make unexpected visits to see if the night guards are doing their watching properly.

  Whenever I hear the clinking of keys and the noise of doors opening and closing, I normally wake up and tiptoe to the door. Through the barred opening in my door, I look at the faces and try to catch one or two words, all in an attempt to see if I can get news related to the world outside. I have never succeeded in getting any, but I keep on going through the ritual.

  Tonight, however, I just sit at my desk. To hell with the ritual! I don’t care if the prison officer or anybody catches me writing the novel on “their” rationed toilet paper. It’s not my fault. I couldn’t get enough of the scrap paper the SSP had promised. The novel is virtually complete and I am possessed. Imagination, once let loose, keeps on racing ahead, and the hand cannot keep pace with it.

  Somebody is watching me through the window bars. I know it even before raising my head to meet the eyes of the new SSP. He lingers there as if he wants to speak to me. I walk to the door.

  “Ngũgĩ, you are now free.”

  I am the first political prisoner to hear these words. I shout the news across the walls. “Free! . . . We are now free!”

  I am no longer K6,77. I have regained my name, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

  And when the door to cell 16 is finally open, the first thing I do is to rush to the compound to hug darkness (which I have not seen for a year) and look at the stars.

  We are free. . . . We are free . . . and I feel certain that at home my mother, Wanjikũ, my wife, Nyambura, the children, and the good people of Limuru and Kenya are gazing at the same stars!

  With me, going out of the Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison, is my novel, Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ (Devil on the Cross), written on toilet paper.

  Prison Break

  Notes

  1. Free Thoughts on Toilet Paper

  1. Seven years of elementary schooling.

  2. The novel has now appeared in Gĩkũyũ as Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ (East Africa Education Publishers, Nairobi, 1980), and the English translation appeared in 1981 under the title Devil on the Cross.

  3. Christiaan Neethling Barnard, the South African surgeon who performed the world’s first successful human-to-human heart transplant in 1967.

  4. I Will Marry When I Want.

  5. Leader of the Giriama people’s resistance to British rule 1913–14. She was imprisoned and later exiled from her home area.

  6. She was a healer and the intellect behind the Gusii warriors led by Otenyo, who fought the colonial forces led by Geoffry A. Northcote (whose name was pronounced Nyarigoti by the Gusii) in 1908. Otenyo was captured and beheaded, but Moraa continued urging resistance.

  7. She led protests against the arrest of the workers’ leader, Harry Thuku, in 1922. She and 150 others were massacred by the British colonial forces outside the central police station, the present site of the University of Nairobi.

  8. Today I would probably call it global corporate capital (GCC).

  9. From 1952 to 1960, thousands were herded into concentration camps.

  10. It is difficult to find commonly accepted terms to best describe social class divisions in former colonies whose economy was and still is integrated into the Western imperialist economies. The word comprador, denoting a person or an economic class in a subordinate but mutually beneficial relationship with imperial corporate capital, as opposed to nationalistic capitalists, is still the most helpful term, particularly in the era of globalization.

  11. “It’s No Use,” by Víctor-Jacinto Flecha. The translation, by Nick Caistor, appeared in Index on Censorship, vol. 8, no. 1 (London, Jan.–Feb. 1979).

  12. They may have said Kĩambu, but Tigoni was more likely, because they emphasized the short duration and the fewness of the questions.

  13. Today there is a street in Nairobi, the capital city, named after Kĩmathi. And in Uhuru Park, there is a monument, a memorial to all those who fought to liberate Kenya.

  14. With the introduction of multiparty campaigns, followed by several largely “peaceful” elections and changes in leadership, the culture of fear and silence that I talk about is no longer as dominant. The democratic space has widened. But the old adage is still true: The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

  15. Pio Gama Pinto was the first Kenyan politician to be assassinated after independence, on February 24, 1965.

  16. Assassinated on March 2, 1975.

  17. See note 10 above.

  18. When eventually I left prison, I learned that actually he was a friend of Reverend John Gatũ, who indeed had been to see him and had asked him to check on my health. In my haste to judge and condemn, I even missed out on his hints as to whether I wanted him to carry greetings to my friends. Ideological purity blinded me, kept me from seeing that in opposities there are also possibilities that can contribute to a positive. Did I expect him to join me in denouncing the government? Or his religion?

  2. Parasites in Paradise

  1. The Happy Valley has long fascinated writers, and many books have been written about it. The one that comes closest to the conception of the one I had signed the contract to write in 1967 is White Mischief (1982) by James Fox. It was turned into a film of the same title, directed by Michael Radford, in 1987.

  2. She died in 1987.

  3. In 2005, the current heir to the Delamere family estate, Thomas Cholmondeley, shot dead an African, was not imprisoned for it, and within the same year, shot dead another one. For the second shooting, he was detained until trial for several years, and then when prosecuted, he got a sentence reduced for time served.

  4. On December 31, 1980 the Norfolk Hotel was bombed by unknown persons, but the Lord Delamere bar remained intact.

  5. In my third memoir, Birth of a Dream Weaver, I have revisited this story because of how the “will to die” theory of the African came to play a big role in legal justification for massacres during the years of the State of Emergency, 1952–1960.

  3. Colonial Lazarus Rises from the Dead

  1. In their book Public Law and Political Change in Kenya, Y.P. Ghai and J.P.W.B. MacAuslan have detailed evidence and comment on the colonial basis of independent Kenya’s laws—including the detention laws, regulations, and rules—and on their purpose: “to be a tool at the disposal of the dominant political and economic groups.”

  2. Scouts or spies.

  3. After the fall of the Moi dictatorship, detention without trial was repealed in the new constitution that governs Kenya today.

  4. The Culture of Silence and Fear

  1. The Iregi was a generation of revolutionary rebels who had overthrown the corrupt dictatorial regime of “King” Gĩkũyũ and established ruling councils and procedures for handing over power, an event commemorated in the Ituĩka festival. The last such festival was held toward the end of the nineteenth century. The next, due in about 1930, was banned by the colonial overlords as a threat to public peace and order. See Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya.

  2. A little reminiscent of the Chilean Victor Lidio Jara, who, after the American-engineered anti-Allende coup of September 11, 1973, was arrested, interrogated, and tortured by Pinochet but even while dying tried to reach for his guitar to sing one more song of love, peace, and social justice.

  3. I was once a beneficiary of Richard Frost. I never met him, but he enabled my British Council Scholarship for postgraduate studies at Leeds University. I have touched on the contradictory impact of the British Council on my literary and intellectua
l formation in my other memoir, Birth of a Dream Weaver.

  4. A trans-Africa highway has now been built through Kamĩrĩthũ and has drained the defiant pool.

  5. See Dreams in a Time of War.

  6. See In the House of the Interpreter.

  7. Later he would become an MP for Limuru.

  5. Wrestling with Colonial Demons

  1. Harry Thuku, through his assistant, Desai, was in touch with the Gandhi movement in India and the Marcus Garvey movement in the United States. Recently I have argued that it was the danger he posed as a possible link between the two movements that really prompted his arrest and imprisonment without trial.

  2. This and most subsequent extracts from speeches by Jomo Kenyatta are taken from Jeremy Murray-Brown’s Kenyatta (New York: Dutton, 1973).

  3. In his book Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, Engels has aptly described the social basis of the vacillating character and psychology of the petit bourgeoisie:

  Its intermediate position between the class of larger capitalists, traders, manufacturers, the bourgeoisie proper so-called, and the proletarian or industrial class, determines its character. Aspiring to the position of the first, the least adverse turn of fortune hurls the individuals of this class down into the ranks of the second. . . . Thus eternally tossed about between the hope of entering the ranks of the wealthier class, and the fear of being reduced to the state of proletarians or even paupers; between the hope of promoting their interests by conquering a share in the direction of public affairs, and the dread of rousing, by ill-timed opposition, the ire of a government which disposes of their very existence, because it has the power of removing their best customers; possessed of small means, the insecurity of the possession of which is in the inverse of the amount—this class is extremely vacillating in its views.

  4. In my memoirs, Dreams in a Time of War and In the House of the Interpreter, I have painted a more sympathetic image of Mbiyũ Koinange, because of his concept of self-reliance, with its roots to his time at Virginia’s Hampton Institute, the alma mater of Booker T. Washington. Probably inspired by Tuskegee Institute, he became the mind behind the construction of Gĩthũngũri Teachers College, on a self-help basis. Gĩthũngũri was the first college of higher education in Kenya but was banned in 1952. A symbol of people’s self reliance, Gĩthũngũri was turned into a prison where captured soldiers of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army were hanged. A symbol of pride was turned into one of humiliation and defeat.

  5. See chapter 3.

  6. There are the well-known Pio Gama Pinto, assassinated after independence, and Fritz D’Souza, once speaker of the House after independence.

  7. Meditations!

  1. Ngong, or Ngong Hills, the site of Josiah Mwangi Kariũki’s torture and death, had become a metaphor for state-induced disappearances of opponents of the governing regime.

  2. There was a period during Idi Amin’s military dictatorship in Uganda when the regime lost all control over the export of coffee from Uganda. Chepkube, on the border between Kenya and Uganda, became the center for coffee smuggled from Uganda. The Kenyan middlemen would get it very cheaply, then make a killing at the regular market.

  3. For more on the conference, see my third memoir, Birth of a Dream Weaver.

  4. Kofi Awoonor, after decades of distinguished service always guided by his pan-African consciousness, would eventually meet a tragic end as one of the victims of the al-Shabaab Islamist massacre at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. It is the tragedy of postcolonial African politics that such a committed pan-Africanist would die a victim of African terrorists. Imperialism always gains when its victims are divided on ethnic and religious lines. A disunited Africa only helps Western imperialism and the enemies of African progress.

  8. Dreams of Freedom

  1. On looking back, I realize I was too harsh. Kenyatta’s life, October 20, 1891–August 22, 1978, spanned the entire history of Kenya, precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial. He embodied that history and all its contradictions. Remarkably, from the 1920s to 1963, he remained the symbolic head of the anticolonial resistance, and nothing can take away from the fact he led us into independence.

  About the Author

  One of the leading African writers and scholars at work today, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. He is the author of Wizard of the Crow; A Grain of Wheat; Weep Not, Child; Petals of Blood; and Birth of a Dream Weaver (The New Press). He is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

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