In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  The most visible of these features was the watchtower, usually built on the highest ground, and from which the Union Jack fluttered its symbol of conquest and control. Under constant surveillance, the inmates of the camp and the village, loyal or not, were likely to be stopped and searched at any time of day or night. For all practical purposes, the line between the prison, the concentration camp, and the village had been erased.

  14

  In the new Kamĩrĩthũ, my family lived in a mud hut, with our bedding on the floor. I don’t know how my mother managed to organize some semblance of meals. Only on certain hours of given days could women attend their fields or work for the wealthier villagers. My sister, Njoki, and my brother’s wife, Charity, now and then worked on the European-owned tea estates.

  Adding to the melancholy was the talk of a doomsday. In mid-January 1955, Governor Sir Evelyn Baring had offered amnesty to any Mau Mau guerrillas who would surrender. This offer followed the failure of the 1954 surrender negotiations under Operation General China. Under the terms of the amnesty, just as in the failed negotiations of late 1954, the guerrillas would get not a single concession to their political demands for land and freedom, but a pledge of prison instead of gallows. In both situations, the colonial state refused to see the Mau Mau as a legitimate anticolonial nationalist movement with political goals. Low-flying airplanes dropped leaflets in the mountains and villages, threatening unspecified consequences should the guerrillas not accept the offer. The threats intensified amid the building of the new village.

  I viewed the offer and the threats as they related to my elder brother, Good Wallace, who fought somewhere in the mountains. I feared for his life. Throughout the break, the doomsday scenario hung over our family, made worse, for me at least, by the fact that we did not really talk about it. I was a little surprised to see Charity, my brother’s wife, taking the threats of doom so calmly, but maybe she was just putting on a front. Packed with so much anxiety and uncertainty, my three weeks of break ended without my having met with Kenneth to discuss his book.

  I went back to Alliance on May 12 to begin my second term in the sanctuary, haunted by images of the community prison I had helped to build back home, and weighed down by thoughts of the doom awaiting Good Wallace and his fellow guerrillas for defying the calls to surrender. Henceforth I was going to live out my life in a home that reminded me of the loss of home and a school that offered shelter but not the certainty of home. Both, ironically, were colonial constructs, but I feared that even they might clash at any moment and crush my dreams.

  15

  Edward Carey Francis had been on leave when I first arrived at Alliance in January, but his absence was strongly felt. Boys in classes ahead of us talked about him as a mystery. They called him Hiuria or Kihiuria, conjuring the image of a big rhino on the offensive and its sideways motion when turning. He was usually a reference point in stories about Alliance. Everywhere, in dorms during the hours of rest, in the dining hall at mealtimes, in classes between lessons, the older students would talk about what they thought had become loose or too relaxed since Carey Francis went on leave to England in December 1954. Of the teachers’ wives, who wore colorful dresses, especially on Sundays, the students said that they were behaving with the abandon of children in the absence of their stern father. Paka akienda Panya hutawala, others would say in Kiswahili. Wait and see what the mice will do when the cat comes back. Sometimes the students would imitate Carey Francis’s walks under different moods, particularly when he caught a teacher or a student doing something of which he disapproved. Alarmingly, they claimed that none could escape his notice: he knew every single boy in the school, all two hundred of them, by name. No, he knew the names of all the boys who had ever gone through Alliance since he assumed its leadership in 1940. In my imagination, he became a huge formless unknown.

  Early in the second term, as Wanjai, Aaron Kandie, Kirui, and I were walking from the dining room after lunch, I saw a figure, dressed in a khaki safari-type coat, shorts, and stockings, walking in the sun across the fields, playing with a dog: he would throw a tennis-size ball as far as he could, and the dog would run and retrieve it. That is Hiuria, Wanjai told me. Carey Francis, the others chimed in. He had come back from England on May 21, nine days after my return from break. He did not look like the scary figure of my imagination. You just wait, Wanjai said.

  Immediately the effects of his return could be felt and seen. A new alacrity, timing, and self-discipline were discernible among faculty and students, as if they did not want to risk being caught wrong-footed. Still, I could not tell what the fuss was all about.

  And then one Sunday, during a morning parade before chapel, I saw for myself the fury that fueled the tales. The parade started rather inauspiciously. Carey Francis, dressed in a gray suit and blue tie, stood in front of us, as did the other teachers and their wives. As we waited for the inspection ritual, a European couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kingsnorth, a bit late, passed by him. Mrs. Kingsnorth wore a dress with a hemline that revealed a bit of her legs, more so than the other ladies. The scent of her perfume filled the air.

  Suddenly Carey Francis started breathing heavily through the nose, fuming, tongue thrust into the cheek, rolling it side to side inside his closed mouth, as if moving a small ball from one side to the other, so that his left and right cheeks swelled in turn. He started stumping, left, then right, to and fro, sometimes in small circles, like, I had to admit, a bull about to charge, each step raising dust that expressed his rage, his trousers swaying, as if equally furious. Students called it stepping. For a moment, I thought the ground underneath his feet would give way. Surprisingly, the faculty and older students seemed nonplussed, as if they had seen this before and were simply waiting for the storm to pass or at least subside.

  On this occasion, it did not end the way they thought it would. His heavy breathing and stepping were echoed in the sky by thunder, lightning, and a sudden downpour. The prefects tried to maintain a disciplined march to the chapel, but soon they, and even the teachers and their wives, had to follow the mass of boys running toward the holy shelter. With everybody finally seated in their pews, a perfectly calm Carey Francis read a passage from Pilgrim’s Progress in which Christian, while visiting the Interpreter’s House, is taken into a parlor full of dust. As the room is being swept, the flying dust almost chokes the onlookers. Then a woman sprinkles water on the floor and all is well:

  Then said Christian: What means this? The Interpreter answered: This parlor is the heart of a man that was never sanctified by the sweet grace of the gospel. The dust is his original sin and inward corruptions that have defiled the man. He that began to sweep at first is the Law; but she that brought water and did sprinkle it is the gospel.

  Out of this, Carey Francis gave an incredible performance in which he likened Alliance to the Interpreter’s House, where the dust we had brought from the outside could be swept away by the law of good behavior and watered by the gospel of Christian service. The word service peppered the entire sermon. But, he added, it was only Jesus, through mercy, who could grace the outcome of our earthly struggles.

  The sermon from the chapel seemed a fitting follow-up to nature’s sermon in the storm. But it was the Franciscan fury preceding both that became the topic of conversation. What had triggered it? It was the tardy couple, some said. Carey Francis hated tardiness and wanted teachers to set a good example. No, others countered, it was the woman’s perfume, her dress, the hemline. He does not like excess. No, not excess: he has a thing about women. His ways are at odds with the norm, don’t you think? others asked, extending the talk beyond the fury and the sermon to his whole life. How could he abandon a prestigious position as a university lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge to accept a lowly one as headmaster of a primary school in Africa in 1928? You think it’s just a missionary call to service? No, it was something else. Very personal. Oh, yes. Thwarted love.

  During the First World War, the story went, Carey Francis fought in England
and France. But when he returned home, he found his sweetheart had gone to sweeten the life of another. He turned his broken heart away from women to his dog and God, the only two who could never abandon him, and he turned his resourceful mind away from the serene life of a don on grass lawns in Cambridge to one of self-sacrifice and pure devotion in the thorny bushes of Africa. Fact or fiction, the story of love and war seemed to make sense in explaining how this man, born in Hampstead, London, on September 13, 1897, educated at William Ellis School and Trinity College, Cambridge, senior wrangler in the Mathematics Tripos, would leave everything behind for a dusty elementary school in a foreign land to start a new life from nothing.

  Carey Francis came to Alliance in 1940, a kind of wartime principal, where he started by imposing strict discipline. He did not like the lax ways of Grieves’s ancien régime and vowed to overthrow it and reconstruct Alliance in his image. Under the new regime, everything was going to change drastically, as in a revolution, the first act being the replacement of the students’ knee-length khaki shorts, maroon fez, and black tassels with plain khaki shorts and shirts. He expelled teachers, especially Africans, who would not fall in line. Others simply left in protest. The students grumbled over the loss of their teachers and even more over the loss of their maroon fez and black tassels. But the breaking point between the new principal and the students came over the Franciscan call for them to grow vegetables in allotted gardens to contribute to the British war effort. Someone removed the notice the new principal had put up, and no student would own up to the impudence or snitch on another.

  Carey Francis responded with a mixture of expulsions and caning, the boys readmitted, on a one-by-one basis, only after each of them accepted in writing that they were wrong, promised to obey the new rules of discipline, and said thank you sir for the punishment. He used the crisis to reorganize the day-to-day running of the school by separating the academic from the administrative, and the classroom from the dorm: teachers would still be in charge of curricula and related activities, but the student prefect system would handle student life outside the classroom. The principal was, of course, the head of both the academic and the administrative hierarchies. The legend of a disciplinarian was born, to mingle in school lore with stories of love and war and magic.

  Once, while taking a walk through one of the villages not far from Alliance, Carey Francis stopped to chat with a crowd of African children. He asked a boy to let him see the coin he was holding. With all their eyes on him, Carey Francis made the coin disappear and then reappear behind the ear of another boy. The children did not wait for more but streamed home to tell about the magic and the man.

  One Saturday evening I saw the full display of his magic. I could not believe that the person on the stage was the stern principal I thought I knew. Time and again he made cards and golf balls disappear into thin air and then reappear, seemingly from nowhere. Most startling were the rabbits and doves he pulled from his hat. But at the end of it, perhaps mindful of the village incident, he was careful to explain that he was playing magic, not practicing it: his acts were conjuring tricks. It was my first experience of such tricks, and whenever, in later years, I witnessed more amazing conjuring feats from professional magicians, I always recalled that first Night of Magic with Edward Carey Francis at Alliance.

  What I would later have no doubts about was his magic as a reader. During one of his Friday assemblies, he introduced us to a book, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), by Jerome K. Jerome, an account of a boating trip on the Thames River. At first I was skeptical: who wanted to hear of boats on rivers that one had not seen? But when he started to read, I suddenly found myself engrossed in the humorous trials and tribulations, including the drama of making an Irish stew out of unpeeled potatoes, a cabbage, half a peck of peas, half a pork pie, a bit of cold boiled bacon, potted salmon, and other leftovers.

  By the time he finished the excerpts, I felt part of the imaginary boat ride on a river I did not know, laughing. It was a moment more magical than the night of conjuring tricks. I found it difficult to reconcile the images of the tongue-eating, stumping conjurer of storms; the tongue-in-cheek conjurer of illusions; and this loose-tongued conjurer of life from a book published in 1889.

  16

  Carey Francis did not teach the lower forms. He remained a towering figure who was everywhere, who could generate fury, fire, and fun in turns. I would have liked to know him as a teacher, but I had to make do with the occasional sermon in the chapel and the Friday assemblies, during which he would discuss current affairs, national, continental, and international, his way of keeping in touch with the entire student community.

  Winston Churchill’s resignation from his Conservative prime ministership in November was the subject of such an assembly soon after Carey Francis returned from leave. Churchill was one of the leading statesmen in the world. Even the fact that throughout his career he had changed parties was a testament to his independent character: he was more loyal to principles than to parties. By keeping his head cool when all about him were losing theirs, Churchill had rallied the world to defeat Hitler. He offered blood, toil, tears, and sweat, where a scoundrel would have promised Heaven. His alliance with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign the Atlantic Charter in 1941, in a secret meeting on the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales, had changed the aims of the war from just a victory over Hitler to one for human freedom, reaffirming people’s right to choose the government under which they lived.

  Churchill’s words came across with such force of conviction that it was easy to be carried away by his assertions. But inside me was always the cautionary voice of Ngandi*, my beloved mentor of earlier years, who had drawn a different picture of Churchill: as a fighter for the preservation of the empire. Ngandi had complained of Churchill’s ingratitude in allowing Governor Baring to declare a state of emergency in Kenya and send British troops to crush the very Kenyans who had helped him fight Hitler and now wanted freedom. It was Churchill’s Conservatives who reproduced, in Kenya, Hitler’s concentration camps. Ngandi might have disappeared from my life, but his way of looking at the world, questioning the assertive correctness of authority, stayed with me. I did not need Ngandi’s presence to add to the list of imperial evils in the concentration villages all over central Kenya, for I had just come back from one. Churchill had caused me to lose my home. The loss lurked inside me, stoking fears of more unexpected and sudden interruptions of my life. Governor Baring’s doomsday, the day he demanded the Mau Mau surrender or else, set for June 10, hung over my second term at Alliance, made heavier by the fact that I could not share my anxieties about Good Wallace with anybody.

  However, the drama of daily life and learning at school was enough to distract me from thoughts of the new village, the doomsday, and my brother in the mountains. By August 4, when the second term ended and I returned to the village for break, the doomsday had come and gone. But it had hit my home: my mother had been detained in the home guard post for questioning. She talked very little about the ordeal she had undergone, and I felt sure that there were many more things my family hid from me, to save me from the burden of knowing what they knew. They treated me as an outsider who could not bear too much reality. In protecting me, they made my estrangement much harder to overcome.

  Suspects rounded up by British soldiers during a sweep through part of Nairobi’s Eastlands, 1953

  Though its propaganda planes stopped dropping leaflets, the state intensified bombings on Mount Kenya, conducted arbitrary raids in towns and rural marketplaces, and carried out mass arrests and public hangings. This had happened so regularly that the new village seemed to have incorporated them into an eerie semblance of normality. But the normality did not lessen the melancholy that seemed captured in the blue canopy of smoke hovering over the huts.

  I returned to school for the third and last term of my first year on August 4. There was a slight change in the staff, with the departure of Allan Ogot and his replacement by a new te
acher, A. Kilelu. Classes would continue as before, but this change threatened the stability that I had hoped for in the sanctuary.

  * See Dreams in a Time of War.

  17

  The third term did not carry the curiosity and expectation of my first arrival, or the Franciscan drama of the second term, but I could now see the light at the end of the tunnel of my freshman status. The existential condition of always being merely tolerated by older students would end and their bullying along with it. The exam fever, more intense than at any time before, emphasized the coming of the end. For me, I felt the pressure, going into the second year, to keep my place among the top ten in stream A. I was not looking forward to the end of the year or leaving the premises, even for a few weeks, but the intensity of preparation for exams took my thoughts away from the hounds waiting outside the gate.

  The prep rooms were always packed, the grounds full of students reading under the shade of trees. More and more students were caught trying to read by the light of their flashlights under their blankets when they were supposed to be sleeping. The school had turned into a space for bookworms. It came as a surprise, then, when I learned that rehearsals of Shakespeare’s As You Like It were going on, that even some seniors were involved.

  The Alliance dramatic society had been founded in 1939, and Shakespeare became an annual fixture in the 1950s, with Henry V in 1952, Macbeth in 1953, and Julius Caesar in 1954, productions that had become part of the school’s lore. The older students told of Joseph Mũngai’s role as Macbeth with awe, that when he left the stage after the line Is this a dagger which I see before me, he was shaking as if he still held the bloodstained weapon. After the performance, he was in tears, as if he could see blood everywhere. For a week afterward, he kept to himself, still in character, haunted by the blood of his victims.