In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  One morning, in our last year, we met as usual. E.K. had specifically requested the meeting. After our rituals of prayers and daily diet of scriptures, he said he had something to tell us about the temptation of the flesh. We were about to pray for him to be stronger next time, when he told us that it was more than that. He had put a sister-in-Christ in the family way. It was a great sin, bigger than any that he had confessed to before. It shocked us, but it also made us feel the bigness of his commitment: he had confessed, and he was now humbly asking us to pray for him. After the prayers, Omange spoke frankly and sincerely. What was done was done. We would continue supporting him. For a start, we pledged to be at his side at the wedding, which we assumed would be quite soon so that the child would be born in wedlock. E.K. hesitated. He was not planning to marry her, and no amount of pleading would make him change his mind. Omange burst into tears. We felt betrayed.

  Later, I learned that those temptations that E.K. used to confess to were real, and the lady he told us about was not the first that he had put in the family way. Somehow his heart-wrenching confessions kept him a trusted member of the evangelical community. But Omange and I could not recover from the shock of his categorical refusal to marry the woman. Our cabal disintegrated. We never met again as the evangelical trio, although Omange and I retained our Christian fellowship, now deepened by our experience of betrayal.

  It made me recall with renewed curiosity the Franciscan view of Christian life as being more than mere expressions of piety, that it had to show itself in everyday acts and choices; in the classroom, in voluntary work, in games. Temptations to the will could come during any of these activities and not necessarily in a dramatic encounter with Satan alone in the mountains and on desert plains. The fall of our cabal left a hole in my heart and increased my doubts. But I never gave up in my attempts to convert the souls of the people I knew, despite the mounting failures.

  * Years later, Elimo Njau would become one of the leading artists in Africa; he founded the famous Paa ya Paa art gallery, still active today.

  30

  My religious fervor, however strong, could not dim my passionate enthusiasm for theater. A Shakespearean production of Henry IV, Part I signaled the end of the school year, and I auditioned for a part. I did not land a speaking role, but I was one of the foot soldiers, holding wooden spikes the whole time, part of the silent human background. Being a participant, though mute, inhibited my imagination from meandering and creating additions to the universe unfolding, for I had to keep focused, but the struggle for power and the violence that went with it was clearer in this historical drama than it had been in As You Like It.

  During the production, I became fascinated by the progression of the actors from their initial imperfection to their near flawless execution on the final performance. I came to value the character of theater as a collective effort: the behind-the-scenes mutual dependence of the minor and the major players; the prop, costume, and light management; and the directing to create an enjoyable spectacle before a cheering audience. Nobody who saw the flawless performance would have known how often, during the rehearsals, the actors forgot their lines and positions, or the many tensions and clashes of egos that would bring the preparations to a halt. The collective success was intoxicating and more than made up for the constant threat of chaos. Even the drop in adrenaline on the days that followed the last curtain could not dim the joyful memory of common struggle.

  Ngũgĩ in Alliance High School’s 1956 performance of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I (bottom row, first from left)

  But outside the joy and travails of participation, the political theater onstage was mimicking the real theater of politics outside the school gates. In the world, the Soviets had invaded Hungary, an event that elicited condemnation from Carey Francis, and in the country, the war between the Mau Mau and the British was still going on. All three theaters affected me in different ways. The one on the stage entertained my mind, and the one in Hungary raised my curiosity, but the one in the country threatened my body. The fact that Good Wallace was no longer an active guerrilla but a prisoner of war did not prevent anxieties from hovering over my return to Kamĩrĩthũ at the end of the year. I left the sanctuary in December, the end of my second year, looking forward to a safe return to its bosom in January, for my third year.

  31

  My mother remained of few words even in the hardest of times. She was always happy to see me and to hear of my progress in school, but she felt surer of my safety at school than at our new home and was relieved when the vacation ended. I would have liked to hear her talk more about her thoughts and feelings about what was unfolding, the arrest and detention of my brother, for instance, or the interrogations she had undergone. But to her, everything was in the hands of God, and her proverb, Gũtirĩ ũtukũ ũtakĩa, every night ends with dawn, summed up her view of the world.

  Her love of soil was deep; she was at her happiest when working in the fields, turning the soil over, nursing the crops, and harvesting the produce of her hands. I could see that she appreciated the fact that I was not afraid of working the land, that the high school experience had not softened my hands. She never said, you must go to the fields today, but would say, I’ll roast potatoes for you in the field, an offer she knew I would not refuse.

  She was an early riser, and she was not always sure that we would follow her, but she made sure to let us know where she would be. One time, rather late in the morning, my younger brother and I joined her at her favorite spot. She clearly had not been expecting us, but she was pleased to see us armed with our usual tools of hoes and machetes. At midday she made a fire near the Mugumo tree and selected the best potatoes for roasting. She always roasted many more than she knew we could finish, in keeping with her long-held philosophy that an unexpected visitor might pass by. And that day he did. It was my father, who, hidden from view by the tree, seemed to appear from nowhere. I had not seen my father since the day I said farewell to him in the old homestead before I left for Alliance. Now he and his other wives were in a different section of the village, and I had not been to visit them the last five vacations. My mother did not seem surprised to see him, and I assumed that this was not the first time he had visited her in the fields.

  She asked him to sit down, saying he was in time for a share of roasted potatoes. He asked how I was doing in school, remonstrated with me for not having been to see him, but quickly showered blessings to show he harbored no ill will. Otherwise there was not much conversation between us, or between him and my mother. As we ate together in the field under the shadow of the Mugumo tree, I could not help but wonder whether it was in such a field, or this very one, that he had wooed her. After our luncheon, my father went on his way.

  My younger brother, who had never had the same kind of reconciliation with him that I once had, did not look on the visit generously: I’m sure he turns up only when he’s hungry. My mother was prompt in her censure. He is still your father. Don’t you judge him. Let him judge himself. To smooth the awkward moment, I asked my mother about the story she had once told us of how they had found each other. She just smiled and ignored my request. But my question, or the visit, must have mellowed her, for suddenly she started talking, with uncharacteristic openness, about not him but the tree. She believed it was sacred and healing. For some reason, she made us look at its roots carefully. They were strong and deep, and that’s why a Mugumo never succumbed to prevailing winds and changing weather and lasted many years. Do you know that this particular one has been here since before the coming of the colonizer, even before your great-great-great-grandparents? When we asked her playfully how she knew its age, she said it was time to resume work. But then she answered: Because people have lived here longer than the tree and they tell the story and they pass on the story and we add to the story.

  I had never told her about my spiritual strivings, but she might have detected a restlessness in me, and the story might have been her way of touching on it. Many years later m
y writing would start with a short story titled Mugumo, the Fig Tree.

  1957

  A Tale of the Street and the Chamber

  32

  The Alliance that I returned to on January 17, 1957, was no longer a sanctuary in my mind. But although its lure as a refuge was fading, it retained, and even increased, its character as a window through which I could catch glimpses of what was unfolding outside, in the country and in the world, and as a filter through which I could sort out the meaning of what I saw. These roles of window and filter came through the editorial frames of the school assembly, the classrooms, and the Saturday Evening Paper.

  SEP was founded in 1943 to fill the vacuum left by the suspension of the official school magazine due to wartime shortages of printing paper. The student editors of SEP wrote everything by hand and read it to the assembly. By the time the official magazine resumed, after the war, SEP had become a fixture in the weekly calendar.

  I’ll always remember my first experience of SEP. We had gathered in the dining hall after dinner, eagerly awaiting the famed Saturday entertainments to start, when the school captain, Manasseh Kegode, stood on the raised platform at the end of the hall and called the audience to order to hear the news broadcast in Caesar’s Kingdom, which was greeted with applause by those who knew that the kingdom in reference was Alliance. Then a student, one of the two current editors, stood at the platform with a file in his hands and read out: Saturday Evening Paper; Founders: M. E. Mugwanja and B. M. Gecaga. That, as I later found out, was the unfailing preliminary ritual of the newscast.

  The paper’s quality depended on the editors’ selection of material, their writing and reading abilities, and their own body language of diffidence or confidence. The 1957 team of Allan Ngũgĩ and Lucas Ritho infused SEP with a certain dignity and authority. In 1958 my classmates George Ong’ute and Joab Onyango sustained the high level of clarity in oral delivery and maintained the grand tradition of the variety of material offered, the judicious balance of trivia and gravitas.

  The trivia ranged from mostly satirical stories of events on the campus to some regular, popular columns, like one that took the logic of English spelling and grammar to absurd limits. If the adjectives tall and long were conjugated as tall, taller, and tallest; long, longer, longest; why couldn’t good become gooder, goodest; and bad, badder, baddest? If the past tense of go was went, why couldn’t that of do, almost identical in spelling, become dwent? Others made fun of English pronunciation as impacted by the African languages of our different origins. Fairly constant in the trivia were humorous takes on boys, their names withheld of course, who might have been spotted dating girls in the valley; or censorious but humorous anecdotes about the newcomers, who had been sighted exhibiting such unbecoming behaviors as spitting on the ground, or swallowing their morning porridge noisily. But there could also be serious stories of adventures and misadventures outside the premises of the school, particularly during excursions to the big city.

  The gravitas, my favorite, were the territorial and international stories, culled from the East African Standard. My interest in outside events as they affected Kenya had started with Ngandi, and I still looked at any news through the worldview that had evolved from my conversations with him, generally sympathetic to nationalist sentiments. In its own way, SEP could somehow capture, to my satisfaction at least, the prevailing mood in the country and the world. Such was the case in its coverage of the Suez Canal conflict.

  33

  The struggle over Suez had left a feeling that something, a change, was afoot in the world. In Britain, the crisis, or rather the failure of the tripartite mission, had forced a change of leadership. On January 9, 1957, Anthony Eden resigned as British prime minister and was replaced by Harold Macmillan. Within three months Macmillan was welcoming one of the most dramatic events that would redraw the power map of Africa and her relationship to the world. Ghana’s independence from Britain on March 6, 1957, eclipsed that of Libya, wrested from Italy in December 1951; Tunisia and Morocco, both wrested from the French in 1956; and even that of Sudan, from Britain, also in 1956. Despite their number, we were hardly aware of those other, earlier independences. Ghana’s success, however, was duly noted in SEP, capturing our imaginations as no other recent event in Africa had.

  It could not be lost on me that the first-ever direct election of African members to the Legislative Council, the Kenya Colony law-making body, known by the acronym Legco, took place on March 10, four days after Ghana’s independence. The election, despite the exclusion of Central Province and the fact that Africans were overwhelmingly outnumbered by the European and Asian elected members, was historic. Three days later the eight members formed the African Elected Members Organization, AEMO, and rejected as null and void the Lyttelton Plan under which they had been elected. The phrase null and void entered our student vocabulary immediately.

  It emerged slowly, but Kĩmathi’s capture in 1956 and hanging in February 1957 marked the beginning of a crucial shift of political theater from the mountains to the Nairobi streets and the imperial chambers in London. In pre–Mau Mau days, the street was a popular base from which to openly challenge imperial chambers, but the state of emergency declared in 1952 had literally outlawed the street as a theater of social and political action. After the 1957 elections, however, the street resumed the role it had played earlier, once again becoming a living stage on which unfolded the drama of unexpected scenes and actors.

  In my mind, political actors had always appeared as fictional characters. In the Ngandi period of my youth, the Pre–Mau Mau nationalist lineup had loomed larger than life. Their struggles against the giant white ogre from across the sea were epic battles fought with fiery swords that lit up the dark. Sometimes I saw the heroes battling it out in the shadows with the charging feet of wild rhinos and the roar of lions. Now, confined as they were to exile, prisons, and concentration camps, the characters had faded in outline, but didn’t epic heroes always end up chained between rocks of ages or locked up in dungeons-within-dungeons?

  The new post-Ngandi, post–Mau Mau nationalist characters seemed life size, actors on a stage I could comprehend. Perhaps this was because we were witnesses to their entrances and sometimes their exits, or because of their distinct disadvantage of having been forbidden to form political parties based on an area larger than a district. The Africans used ingenuity to overcome this circumscription and local confinement by grouping themselves under the umbrella of African Elected Members Organization, AEMO. Still, it remained a case of too many bulls in one kraal. I did not yearn to catch a glimpse of them with the intensity I had shown for the older actors. But their clashes with their settler adversaries and their shifting alliances with their Indian counterparts fueled the excitement of the present drama. Sometimes they would move their act from the streets of Nairobi to those of London to confront the imperial throne, but they would always come back to Kenya to report to the masses that thronged the streets, becoming instant poets, their speeches poetry. The peaceful, fun-loving, and singing throng from the slums made the dwellers of the exclusive suburbs tremble with terror of the unknown and shut themselves inside their palaces within reach of guns and telephones.

  Tom Mboya’s confrontation with Michael Blundell, the settler leader, in their Legislative Council debates, created sparks that always seemed on the verge of lighting the prairie on fire, but the sparks were contained in the polite chambers of the legislature, following the tradition of the British Parliament. These gentlemen, always in suits except for the occasional nod to African dress, demanded power, unlike the long-haired, armed guerrillas in their hodgepodge of dirty rags, animal skins, and torn boots, who threatened to seize power, smashing open the walls that chained the epic heroes of yesteryear.

  We at Alliance could not take our gaze away from the drama in the streets. Each day brought out something new that impacted our view of the country, the continent, and the world. Our activities on the school compound now played out against the ba
ckground of the all-year political theater in the streets. At times the compound and the street would come face to face. I felt this interaction profoundly at a scouting event.

  34

  The scout camp, like the chapel, the playing field, and the classroom, sought to instill in students the ideal of service. Scouting was voluntary, but it had all the exciting elements of physical and mental discipline, loyalty, fellowship, and obedience to authority, a kind of secular religion without the rites of a particular spiritual order. As my mother would point out with horror, the word scout in Gĩkũyũ sounded like thika hiti,* a professional burier of dead hyenas, a possibility that always made me wary of the movement. But in 1955 I watched with admiration as the troops came back from camping with stories of adventures in the wild that exhibited their knowledge of outdoor life. Their badges, covering their shirtsleeves, shirt pockets, and shoulders, and their colorful scarves, were irresistibly attractive. The scouts managed the canteen, a very well-run business where one could buy buttered slices of bread. Many of the masters were involved in scouting activities. Even Carey Francis, though not active in the school’s troops, had been a scoutmaster in Cambridge.