In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  Mũngai had already graduated from Alliance and gone to Makerere University College, but his Macbeth had left a mark, perhaps even inspiring Moses Gathere’s mornings of Had I but died an hour, which had once startled me. I looked forward to the forthcoming As You Like It, hoping, vaguely, for similar drama on and off the stage. The dining hall had been changed into an auditorium with chairs facing the stage, itself transformed, with a proscenium extension. Arden did indeed look like a forest through which the actors in their rich colorful costumes wandered. Boys played both male and female roles, as in Shakespeare’s time. It was fascinating to see dresses, earrings, and head scarves turn boys into beautiful ladies of the court. Equally fascinating though strange was the sight of Africans dressed in sixteenth-century English costumes, speaking in iambic pentameter.

  But what the performance lacked in social authenticity or anything resembling local history, it more than made up for as a spectacle of other histories, far away and long ago. When I heard Mwangi Kamunge, as the melancholy Jaques, say: All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, I had a momentary vision of the world as a vast village of the old type with numerous paths, their entries and exits beyond the horizon.

  As I followed the action, just about everything I saw and heard, from scenery, to lines delivered, to dress and gait, triggered my imagination. I could not help comparing the pairs of exiles in Arden to my brother, Good Wallace, wandering in the forests of Nyandarwa and Mount Kenya or wherever in the mountains he now lived. I could imagine the guerrillas carving coded messages for each other or reading the pamphlets dropped from the sky. But my mental meanderings did not take away from my overall enjoyment of this first experience of staged Shakespeare. Maybe the play’s happy ending could portend … but dwelling on that possibility raised the other possibility.

  A scene from Alliance High School’s 1955 production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It

  Thoughts and images of my guerrilla brother often stole into my mind at the most unexpected times, triggered by any association, but most often by Oades. Ever since he had taken us to his house for our first English lesson, I could not forget that, as a member of the Kenya Police Reserve, he could have come into a deadly face-to-face with my brother. Oades was a kindly person, and I could not imagine him in a shoot-out with anybody, but when I learned that he would return to England in December, I felt some relief.

  My first annual speech day was an extravaganza of guests, speeches, and prizes, formally announcing the end of my first year at Alliance. All of us in our class had to chase Henry Chasia, but I had successfully maintained my position among the top. I would carry this success back to my mother. She might not understand the differences between A and B streams, but I would assure her that I had done my best.

  The holidays began on December 10. It was incredible how people had adjusted to their new life in the concentration village, at least on the surface. I would try to do likewise. My younger brother, Njinjũ, was my regular companion, and he knew all the ways of the new narrow streets. He and I would take panga and jembe and walk to the fields to join my mother. On these treks, the women would stare in disbelief: an Alliance student was going to dirty his educated hands in the fields. But the dirt actually helped me adjust. The fields my mother cultivated were largely the same ones she always had, and while working there, pulling out the weeds, mulching, clearing bush, and eating her fire-roasted potatoes, I would feel a sense of connection with the old, with what had been lost. On my return to the village in the evening, melancholy would steal back into me, but inside the hut, with memories of work in the fields and the occasional story, I would experience the illusion of the old homestead, an illusion soon shredded by reality.

  Just before Christmas, my brother’s wife, Charity, was arrested, accused of organizing food and clothes for the guerrillas in the mountains. I had never seen her collect food or clothes; there were not even enough to go around in our home, and I did not see how she could have found the time. But now my brother was out in the mountains, and my sister-in-law was in the notorious Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison. Yes, reality had stolen joy from my Christmas.

  1956

  A Tale of Souls in Conflict

  18

  I could hardly wait for January 18, 1956, to return to the sanctuary. In my first year, the outside had not intruded except that every member of the Gĩkũyũ, Embu, and Meru communities had to have a written permit to travel by train or any public transport from one region to another, the lack of which had almost derailed my first entry into the school. Otherwise, the permit played no role in life inside the sanctuary. But in my second year, the outside began to make itself felt within the walls.

  We had hardly settled down when some government officials came to the school to take fingerprints. We were required to have identity cards. Every time I saw the officials, I felt my stomach tighten. The whole process went smoothly, but the colonial policies were changing so fast that the ID card was soon out of date, to be replaced by a passbook, an internal passport like those in apartheid South Africa. Every movement across regions by a member of the affected communities was to be stamped on its pages. The bar for getting the document was raised: a recipient had to be thoroughly screened and certified that he had not taken an oath of allegiance to the Mau Mau. In March 1956 an official screening team visited the school and for two weeks interviewed teachers, students, and staff of Gĩkũyũ, Embu, and Meru origins. When my turn came, it was determined that I should be screened in Limuru and would have to bring back a stamped letter from the district office, certifying my innocence. To get the stamp, I would have to get a letter of clearance from the chief of my location. This would have to be done during the term break.

  Members of Livingstone House, 1956: House Master David Martin (second row center), Assistant House Master Ben Ogutu (next to Martin in the middle), Ngũgĩ (first row standing, second from right)

  So instead of enjoying my new life as a second-year student, I felt my sanctuary haunted by fear of failing the clearance. The chief that I had left behind was reputed to be cruel. He would know about my brother being in the mountains and his wife being in prison. I did not see how he would give me a clean bill of political health, and the fear nagged me, dogged me. I did not have anybody in whom I could confide. Though Wanjai and I both came from Limuru, our families were on opposite sides in the anticolonial struggle.

  I once came very close to sharing my burden with Samuel Githegi. Githegi and I were classmates, and we often exchanged pleasantries. He had a warm personality and was friends with many people. But there was something about him, a kind of sadness or loneliness, that I could not then understand. Once, after lunch, we walked out together and wandered about in the yard. I was about to tell him of my fears when, out of the blue, he started talking about sugar. Apparently he had what he called a sugar illness. It was serious, he said, but even then I could not understand: diabetes was not in our vocabulary, and he looked the very picture of good health. The sad strain behind his friendly face prevented me from talking about myself.*

  I thought of my teachers. How would they receive the information about my family? They might turn me in as the brother of a Mau Mau guerrilla. My coming of age had been shaped by the notion of a white monolith, Mbarĩ ya Nyakerũ, pitted against a black monolith, Mbarĩ ya Nyakairũ. Every popular song had talked about it. The very identity of the land was contested: White Highlands versus Black People’s Land.† Jomo Kenyatta, who would become the first Kenyan president, had once written of Kenya as a Bũrũri wa Ngũĩ, Land of Conflict. Black and white conflict, of course. Who, really, were these whites who held the chalk and seemed completely dedicated to our mental welfare? And who were these blacks teaching alongside the whites and equally dedicated to our mental welfare? Where did they fit in the schema of white versus black?

  Ngũgĩ (on right) and Samuel Githegi (on left), outside on Allianc
e High School grounds

  Even amid the horrors of war, concentration camps, and villages, the few African teachers at Alliance had remained positive models of what we could become, but they often did not last long enough for us to know them well. Joseph Kariuki was the most constant black presence. He was an old boy, who had entered Alliance in 1945, becoming school captain in 1949 before going to Makerere, which had just become a degree-awarding Overseas College of the University of London. He was among the first, the lucky thirteen, to earn a degree at Makerere in 1954. His personality endeared him to everyone, and even Carey Francis seemed a little more tolerant in his case. Kariuki made a spectacle when he played lawn tennis with white ladies on Saturday afternoons, teachers from the girls’ school. He and the ladies were dressed in white, he in his shorts and tennis shoes, and they in similar shoes but with skirts whose hemlines were far above their knees. After a game, Kariuki could be seen trekking back to his house with his white female tennis partner. It may have been because Carey Francis himself was an avid tennis and croquet player, but I noted no outburst from him. Charming and debonair, Kariuki used to push the envelope in other ways, and when left in charge of the school as the master on duty on the weekend, he would show us films with exciting secular themes that other teachers would not show.

  Though he taught lawn tennis and literature, his real passion was music. It was not a subject in itself, but arguing that music was the gateway to literature, particularly poetry, he would play European classics, Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach, at every opportunity, provoking skeptical laughter when he said that Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony, with the “Ode to Joy” movement, while completely deaf and in poor health. If he was really deaf, how could he hear the music he wrote? Feeling, Kariuki would say. He felt it in his heart and mind. Music vibrates in the mind before it is captured in sound. Shut your eyes and think of a familiar melody: can’t you hear soundless motion?

  Kariuki was also in charge of the school choir, and it was in the spiritual that he most excelled in bringing together music and poetry. Because of the school’s roots in the American South model, the spiritual had always been popular at Alliance, but Kariuki took it to another level. Though he did not dwell too much on the politics of the spiritual, he talked about its background as a survival mechanism on the slave plantation, letting the music speak to us directly through its own language. The sheer force of his energy and enthusiasm turned even the most skeptical into musical believers and unbridled enthusiasts for the spiritual. Whether Kariuki intended the effect or not, the spiritual’s poetry of resistance and music of liberation eloquently echoed in a Kenya then governed under the state of emergency. How could one hear the school choir, which he led, sing, Oh freedom, over me, and before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free, and not feel the yearning for freedom around us?

  Perhaps I could unburden myself to Kariuki. He would understand. But neither in the classroom nor outside did he openly discuss the parallels between the music and the terror in the country. Neither did we. We kept our thoughts to ourselves, confining our musings to matters of meter and melody.

  * A year or so after leaving Alliance High School, Githegi succumbed to diabetes.

  † In 1902, Sir Charles Eliot, governor of colonial Kenya, had set aside the prime estate of Limuru as part of the White Highlands, for Europeans only. Black Africans were relegated to the less desirable land, labeled African Reserves.

  19

  In general, the Alliance classroom of our times abstracted knowledge from local reality. It had not been always so. The early years had seen bold attempts to relate the vocational side of the school to local knowledge. Agriculture was then a major subject, and studies of indigenous trees and fruits, the language of cattle marks, beekeeping, and butter making were part of the classroom. Efforts to connect with local technology included visits to local blacksmiths, from whom the students learned how to make forges and smelt iron. Teachers were required to learn at least one African language, and the program of Bantu studies and civics incorporated a practical project of recording African legends, riddles, proverbs, and songs.

  But as the literary side of the academy gradually took over, the tribute to local knowledge diminished. With Makerere, in 1948, beginning to offer degree programs from the University of London, secondary education became increasingly a preparation for college, with the Overseas Cambridge School Certificate the gateway to academic heaven. By the time I joined the school in 1955, hardly any traces, except in carpentry, remained of these early efforts to mine and harvest local knowledge.

  Our literature classes were no different: English texts were the norm, and Europe the cultural reference. But Kariuki, who took over from James Smith in 1956, introduced fun into the study of literature. To Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the set text, he added what he called love sonnets, which we happily welcomed, thinking they might turn out to be useful to hearts awakening to Cupid’s whispers, real or imagined. One boy in fact soon claimed that he had used Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet on an Acrossian one sunny afternoon, with unspecified good results.

  In the first term of my first year, the constant allusions to Acrossians in tales told by seniors had puzzled me. The name conjured an image of dwellers from a different planet, who would occasionally descend to play in a valley of green meadows awash with magic that lured men. Wanjai unraveled the mystery of the valley to me.

  In its early years, Alliance High School, though mostly for boys, also admitted girls. Among its earliest female graduates was Nyokabi, who later married her teacher, Eliud Mathu, himself the second Kenyan African to get a B.A., the first African to join the staff of Alliance, the first African to represent African interests in the Legislative Council, and the first African member of the colonial Executive Council. Among the last female graduates was Rebecca Njau, an actress of amazing power and grace in the 1951 Alliance production of The Lady with a Lamp, who, years later, would become a force in women’s education and a pioneering novelist, playwright, and internationally acclaimed batik artist. Still, the number of female students had remained small: between the first intake in 1938 and the last in 1952, the school had averaged only five girls annually.

  The situation of women in secondary education changed when a separate Alliance Girls High School was officially opened in 1948. The two institutions literally faced each other across a valley, so the students referred to dwellers in the opposite institution as Acrossians. For the boys, their female counterparts were nymphs in a misty valley who sang soft but irresistible siren songs, melodies wrought with a promise to mellow the souls of the lucky and, equally, with a danger of anguishing the unlucky. Nearly every tale that related to matters of the heart started and ended with reference to these nymphs, and one did not always know what to believe. But now, here in the second year, one of us swore that he had emerged from the green meadow with the promise and not the anguish, all on account of a Shakespearean sonnet. The success spurred us on. We committed the whole sonnet to memory and could be heard reciting it loudly in the school corridors, trying out different poses and voice modulations: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate, and then declaim, Thy eternal summer shall not fade / Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest, clinching the performance with the last two lines:

  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

  Though I never tested the sonnet’s effect on any Acrossian, the words were no less sweet, particularly when performed by Kariuki himself. He read them with a flair that brought out their drama and music. With the sonnets, Kariuki made a case for the immortality of literary creations: in a classroom in Kenya in 1956, we were reading words written somewhere in Stratford-upon-Avon or on the streets of London by a bard who died in 1616.

  20

  But even Kariuki could not make me passionate about three centuries of English obsession with flowers and se
asons. In Kenya there was sunshine and green life all year round, and flowers were never a thing of surprise. I could not escape the magic of literature, its endless ability to elicit laughter, tears, a whole range of emotions, but the fact that these emotions were exclusively rooted in the English experience of time and place could only add to my sense of dislocation. Not every flower in the world was one of Wordsworth’s host of golden daffodils. Kenya’s flora and fauna, and the rainy and dry seasons, could also provide images that captured the timeless relevance of art, but we did not encounter them in class.

  This tendency to make Europe the reference point for human experience was exacerbated by the content and approaches in other subjects as well. In geography, the European landscape, mountains, rivers, and industrial locations were the primary formations to which the African versions, secondary of course, could now be contrasted. To the River Thames, about which I learned in my elementary schooling, I added knowledge of the other civilized waters in Europe—the Seine, Danube, Rhine, and Rubicon—as the early locations of commerce and trade. African rivers—the Niger, Nile, Congo, and Zambesi—all discovered by Europeans, had any number of reasons for not being sites of civilization, except of course the Nile Delta, but even that was really part of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, as the Middle East was then named.

  In history class, we traveled through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, admiring a gallery of dashing heroes. Even African history was largely the story of Europeans in Africa. Livingstone, Stanley, Speke, and Burton were the larger-than-life bearers of light to a Dark Continent. They were soul merchants, traversing terrains of dangerous forests clad in nothing more than the Bible, spreading enlightenment and casting out the devil. In the story of colonial settlements in Africa and America, only the Spanish and German rivals wallowed in blood, while the English overcame challenges of nature and man. Even in the story of the slave trade, the English, with their antislavery legal enactments, emerged as the heroes of the abolition movement and not the villains of its earlier expansion.