Dreams in a Time of War

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  The other narrative is a description of a school trip to the Ondiri marshes in Kikuyu. Nothing really happens: Students gather at the school compound, they walk, they arrive, they eat, and they go back. But we can learn about the values that are praised: cleanliness, punctuality, cooperation, good manners, aspects of the new African and the new Christian civics.

  I did not know where the Ondiri marshes were, but I liked to think of them as a magical place. Otherwise why devote pages to a journey during which nothing really happens, in which there were no twists and turns? But although the book did not lift me to the heights that the Old Testament had taken me, it had the immediate appeal of talking about things around me. The book taught me that one could write about the commonplace and still make it interesting.

  A vast reservoir of general knowledge, Ngandi always carried a newspaper, mostly Mũmenyereri, the popular Gĩkũyũ-language weekly edited by Henry Muoria, well folded and placed inside the outer pocket of his jacket. He would read bits from it to his listeners to make a point, but mostly he just referred to it. He was a kind of itinerant scholar, unfolding his book of vast knowledge wherever he found two or three gathered together.

  His knowledge extended to songs and he added to my repertoire. His favorite was Come my friend, let’s reason together. For the sake of the future of our children. May darkness in our country end. He sang it in a tremulous voice, which I could not re-create, a sad strain below the words, but he seemed proud when his pupil displayed what he had taught him no matter the quality of the singing. I was his discovery. He liked introducing me at some gatherings, dramatizing the fact that on top of singing I could read the Bible, Mũmenyereri, and Mwendwo nĩ Irĩ na Irĩri fluently.

  I don’t know when or how it happened but I came to realize that the adults were prolonging the duration of the songs I initiated by adding many more verses to them. They would sing a song over and over and then move to other songs. I was merely a trigger. In time, themes other than purely educational ones crept into the songs, as did names like Waiyaki wa Hinga, Mbiyũ Koinange, Jomo Kenyatta.

  Njamba ĩrĩa nene Kenyatta

  Rĩu nĩ oimire Rũraya

  Jomo nĩ oimĩte na thome

  Ningĩ Jomo mũthigani witũ

  Kenyatta our great hero

  Has now returned from Europe.

  He came back through the main gate (Mombasa).

  Jomo has been our eyes.

  Ngandi would often add background information about historical figures and incidents, mentioned as if he knew them personally or had been present when certain things happened in Africa, Europe, and America. He even talked about characters in the grave, Waiyaki, for instance. Waiyaki wa Hinga was the paramount leader of the Gĩkũyũ of southern Kiambu when Europeans arrived at Dagoretti in 1887. In 1890 he welcomed Captain Lugard in Dagoretti, where they took a solemn oath of brotherhood between the two peoples. Lugard’s followers broke the oath, built Fort Smith, and made it clear, in their hostile actions, that they had come to conquer. Waiyaki mounted the resistance of the spear against the gun but the gun won; he was captured and buried alive at Kibwezi. If you had heard Ngandi talk about Waiyaki’s fate, you would believe that he had been there to hear Waiyaki’s last defiant announcement that he would come back in the spirit of his people to haunt the whites till they left Kenya. Waiyaki’s last wish in 1891, the call to arms in defense of the land, was Ngandi’s first article of political and legal faith. The other was the Devonshire declaration of 1923 that Kenya was an African people’s country and the interests of the African natives had to be paramount. The declaration was an acknowledgment of the rightness of Waiyaki’s last words, Ngandi would say, hinting that Waiyaki was a prophet. Ngandi had a way of introducing debates and igniting discussions on themes that ranged from land, education, and religion to the personalities of Mbiyũ Koinange and Jomo Kenyatta. Ngandi often saw the hand of fate in numbers, coincidences, and even dates: For instance, the fact that both men went abroad within a year of each other, Mbiyũ to America in 1927 and Kenyatta to England in 1929, was a clear sign that their paths would cross.

  Kenyatta had gone abroad before I was born, sent to be the voice of the Kikuyu Central Association. The KCA, though the successor to Harry Thuku’s East African Association, could only register as a regional body, because the colonial state was no longer allowing any countrywide African organization. Kenyatta had come back briefly before returning to England in 1931, where he stayed for fifteen years representing KCA even though it was banned in 1941 in his absence. Along the way he had become a nationalist and a Pan-Africanist. He had told the British in their own country: Kenya is an African peoples’ country, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and nobody can take it away from us. Upon disembarking from the boat in Mombasa in 1946, he bent down and held a fistful of Kenyan soil close to his chest; it was the stuff of legends. He had written the book Facing Mount Kenya and another, Kenya: The Land of Conflict.

  As for Mbiyũ, he was not just educated; he was the most learned in the world, some insisted. People claimed that when he spoke English, even the owners of the language had to consult a dictionary. The two learned giants were rivals. No, the two giants were bosom friends: Kenyatta had even married Mbiyũ’s sister. But had Kenyatta not married an English woman in England? So many stories, so many myths.

  Ngandi, who claimed that he had read Kenya: The Land of Conflict, tried to make sense of all this to his circle of admirers. But even he seemed conflicted as to who was the greater. Kenyatta had wisdom given to him by birth; Mbiyũ had knowledge given to him by books. Wisdom was a gift from God and learning a gift from man, and that was why Mbiyũ always deferred to Kenyatta. See? Mbiyũ is the founder of the Kenya Teachers’ College, but when Kenyatta comes back from England in 1946, what does Mbiyũ do? Makes Kenyatta the principal. The whole self-reliance thing, that is Mbiyũ. He has the mind, the hand, but not the voice. Jomo has the mind, the voice, but not the hand. Look, a big struggle is always led by a pair: Gandhi and Nehru; Mao and Chou En-lai. Moses and Aaron. The hand of genius and the voice of genius. Without one, there is not the other. Mbiyũ and Kenyatta had survived the Second World War, and there was a reason that fate had arranged that they return to the land, one of them just before the beginning of the war, and the other, soon after the war. It was to lead Kenya from slavery to the promised land. The journey to the promised land was not easy; it was full of trials and tribulations, tears, even blood!

  The suffering of Ole Ngurueni was part of a pattern. It was Ngandi, through his talks of the squatters’ resistance and other tales, imagined or culled from newspapers, who conveyed and reinforced in me the sense that something unusual, something of biblical proportions, was stirring in the land. But one could also feel it through whispers of happenings and hints of others to come, with Nairobi at the center. Fact and rumor generated more fact and rumor in quick succession. Most dramatic was the new rumor that all workers in Kenya had come together under the umbrella of the East African Trade Union Congress; that they had called a general strike to oppose the granting of a royal charter to Nairobi, in 1950, which raised its status from a municipality to a city. The word “city” became ominous, evil, threatening. How would Nairobi the city be different from Nairobi the town that my father once ran away from: the Nairobi whence army trucks had come to crash into my mother’s house; the Nairobi where my mother and I had walked after my eyes were healed at King George VI Hospital?

  The royal charter would mean that Africans would be removed from the town, and from areas surrounding Nairobi, as had happened to black people in South Africa, explained Ngandi coolly. Remember that the Kenya Boers came here from South Africa. They expelled the dwellers of Ole Ngurueni in 1948 even as Boers in South Africa were doing the same to black people. White people had a master plan to make Africa, from Cape to Cairo, their own. It was Cecil Rhodes, owner of stolen diamonds and gold in South Africa, who had originally hatched the evil scheme. Ngandi elaborated. In the 1930s there was a secret society
of whites based in Kenya plotting to kill black babies at birth, save a few strong in body for labor but feeble in mind and unable to plot resistance. It was called the Eugenics Society (Kiama Kia Njini), which in my imagination registered as a society of white arsonists, man-eating ogres, the kind that Kabae and others had gone to fight in the Second World War. And now this royal charter to clear black people from the city and the remaining lands contrary to Ngandi’s beloved 1923 Devonshire declaration! The white race was against the black race although he, Ngandi, made exceptions for people like Fenner Brockway, a Labor Forty member of the British parliament. Otherwise Ngandi’s narrative drew a picture of an encroaching reptilian white evil threatening to swallow us all. But battling this white master plan in the shadows of history were young men, some of whom had already confronted white men during the war and triumphed over them, although on behalf of the British. In the spirit of Waiyaki, they were now standing up for Kenya and Africa. The struggle against the white master plan was encapsulated in the fight now unfolding against the royal charter. There had been the great Mombasa strike in 1947, Ngandi explained, but the current battle in the streets of Nairobi in 1950, after the workers had gone on strike, again was more reminiscent of the struggle during the times of Harry Thuku in 1922, which had resulted in the Devonshire declaration, suggesting that an even more momentous declaration might emerge from this struggle. Then, in 1922, as now, in 1950, the rural folk supplied food to the strikers and welcomed to their homes those workers who escaped the brutality of the government forces.

  Some of those who took part in the 1950 strike against the royal charter were from Limuru and brought with them new whispers and rumors about Bildad Kaggia, Fred Kubai, Chege Kibachia, George Ndegwa, Achieng Oneko, Dedan Mugo, and Paul Ngei, among others. The names occupied a space between the real and the unreal, history and story, and I added them to my pantheon of mythical heroes. But the young men and women who told of the turmoil in the streets of Nairobi were real flesh and blood: They seemed serious and purposeful in their words and demeanor. I was a willing recipient of their tales of daring and narrow escapes, triumph and disaster, bespeaking a will hardened by woe. Yes, Waiyaki lived on.

  I started interpreting events and anecdotes biblically. There was a story about an Indian prophet who had returned to Kenya and appeared before a multitude in Kaloleni Hall to say that it was time for white people to go and leave Africans to rule themselves. He had been arrested and in front of the judge said the same thing: Africans can rule themselves. Words never before spoken so directly. His name was Makhan Singh. Apparently this was not his first time in Kenya; every time he came into the country his words would make something big happen, strikes mostly. Ngandi went so far as to claim that Singh started his prophecies as a thirteen-year-old, having just arrived in Nairobi in 1927, the same year that young Mbiyũ had left for America. The colonial government would ban him, deport him to India, but time and again he sneaked back. But this time, his place of birth had mysteriously disappeared, one part of it becoming India and the other Pakistan, and neither country would accept such a dangerous prophet among its people. Governor Philip Mitchell, with orders from London, had him whisked from the courtroom and banished to the desert, where his voice could not be heard. But Singh would surely reappear and then something momentous would happen, as it had before, as evidenced by the strikes. There were whispers of a land movement that would bring about the fulfillment of his prophecy. And then in August 1950 the government announced that a secret movement called Mau Mau had been banned.

  In my mind, and because their names were everywhere in the songs we sang, I connected the genius pair of Koinange and Kenyatta with everything that was happening in the country: the Indian man’s prophecy, especially after Ngandi pointed out the strange coincidence of the arrival of the child-prophet in 1927 and the departure of Mbiyũ for America the same year; the Ole Ngurueni women who sang that, on their arrival in Yatta, they had received a telegram from Kenyatta in Gĩthũngũri inquiring if they had arrived safely; the striking workers in many parts of the country and now the secret movement. In my imagination the Kenyatta and Koinange of the songs and of Ngandi’s talks became fictional characters, larger than life. I imagined a million Kenyan eyes on a giant Kenyatta’s face. I longed to meet the pair, the way one hopes that one may come across a favorite fictional character in real life but knowing full well that such an encounter is impossible.

  I was lucky with Mbiyũ. My eldest sister, Gathoni, was married to Kĩariĩ, who had lost his job at the Limuru Bata Shoe factory after the 1947 strike. They lived in Kĩambaa, next to the land owned by the legendary Senior Chief Koinange. Kĩariĩ’s father looked after Koinange’s extensive orchard of plums and pears. My younger brother and I used to visit our sister to babysit her first child, Wanjirũ. My sister’s house was also very close to that of Charles Karũga Koinange, Mbiyũ’s younger brother. Karũga’s wife, Nduta, and Gathoni, my sister, were on visiting terms, and that was how I first met Wilfred and Wanduga, sons of Charles Karũga Koinange. Wilfred and I were in the same grade, though in different schools in different regions. He and I loved school. So we had plenty in common. Years later, in the early 1960s, I would meet him at Makerere University College, Kampala, where he studied medicine, and I, English. But at the time of our youth and despite our budding friendship he did not have what I wanted: the power and the brilliance to conjure up Mbiyũ from the realm of fiction.

  And then an opportunity presented itself. My younger brother and I were at my sister’s at the same time. We were walking on a narrow path with hedges on either side behind which was a thick growth of green corn when we heard two women talking and pointing to a person going in the same direction but ahead of us. That’s him, they said. The son of Koinange, Mbiyũ himself. He was probably going home after a visit with his brother Charles, or he may have been taking a walk around his father’s enormous estate. This was our chance, I told my younger brother, who was not as obsessed as I was with a person in a gray suit walking pensively along a rural path away from us. But he was always game when it came to adventure. Let’s make sure. Let’s greet him. Taking courage from each other, we dashed behind a hedge and ran through the cornfields. Making sure that we had gone past him, we emerged from the hedges onto the path, walking toward him. How are you, Mbiyũ wa Koinange, we called out in unison. He seemed a little taken aback, and then said, I am well. We did not wait for more. We ran, shouting, Yes, it’s him. But I was a little disappointed. He seemed a less imposing figure than the Mbiyũ of my imagination and Ngandi’s description. The mind can play tricks; months later in 1951 I heard of songs sung by Kenya African Union (KAU) crowds at Kaloleni Hall, Nairobi, as they sent Mbiyũ and Achieng Oneko to England to air grievances, the Mbiyũ of the imagination was back, so different from the one I had seen walking that day.

  Perhaps the real Kenyatta, whenever and wherever I might meet him, would match the Kenyatta of legends. But his home was far away in Gatũndũ and I did not have relatives married in the region. It was unlikely that I would ever be in a position to catch him in a gray suit walking alone, pensively, on a country path through green cornfields.

  Then I heard from Ngandi, who seemed to know everything, that Jomo Kenyatta would be coming to Limuru. He did not know the day, the week, or the month. But I was sure of one thing: I was not about to let the chance pass me by. I did not tell anybody. I simply started frequenting my elder brother’s furniture store at the Limuru African marketplace.

  Wallace Mwangi, or Good Wallace as he was becoming known, was my mother’s first major success. He was born in 1930 and later went to Manguo school for a few years beginning in 1945. He had interesting study habits, especially before a test: He would work all night, with an open paraffin lantern, feet in a basin of cold water to keep him awake, but I suspect that the lack of sleep was not very conducive to good performance. He would try to sell his theory and practice to anybody who would listen. He did not persuade me. With my past history of bad eyes
, I disliked the very thought of studying all night by an oil lamp with my feet in cold water, but he never gave up selling the idea. My mother, who paid his tuition, did not interfere with his school efforts except once when he announced that he intended to become a boy scout. In Gĩkũyũ, the word “scout” sounded like thikauti, or thika hiti, to my mother, and somebody must have confirmed her worst fears that my brother would become a “burier of dead hyenas.” She pleaded with him, she threatened, and she did not want to hear an explanation. She just could not imagine her son becoming a professional mourner and burier of dead hyenas. I doubt if any other animal would have been more tolerable to her, but the hyena was the worst character in stories: greedy, dirty, and it fed on the remains of humans. I don’t know if it was because he caved in to her concerns or because he left school afterward, but he never became a boy scout.

  This may have left, in my brother, a desire that he fulfilled vicariously through the lady with whom he fell in love and eventually married. Charity Wanjikũ was born in 1935 in Kĩmuga village, Kĩambaa, next to my sister Gathoni’s place and Charles Koinange’s. She went to Kĩambaa Church Missionary Society school, where she joined the girl guides squad. Even when not in uniform, Charity often wore a blue beret, leaving all the young men of Limuru agog with envy and admiration. Wallace got himself a girl guide, they would whisper or even say loudly. They nicknamed her Rendi ya Banana, “Lady from Banana Hills,” because the banana place, being on the highway between Nairobi and Limuru, was better known and sounded more esoteric than Kĩmuga or Kĩambaa, which sounded like villages next door. That was years later, of course, in 1954, and my mother had no objections to having a girl guide for a daughter-in-law because the name did not sound like “boy scout.”