Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o
My mother had taught and expected me to set the very best as my standard. For her there was no limit to the best; there was always room to better one’s best. Wherever I went, it would have to be under terms and conditions that let me set the best goal for myself and follow that dream. From all accounts, Leeds University felt the most suitable for me. Other people I admired—Grant Kamenju, Peter Nazareth, and Pio and Elvania Zirimu—were already there. And of course, before them all, there had been Wole Soyinka, one of the writers I had met at the Makerere conference.
So I firmly said no to any suggestions about Cambridge. Before I sat for my finals, I had also filled out some forms for a Commonwealth Scholarship but then forgot all about it. I had thought that my future was in journalism, not further academic pursuits. I was settling into journalism contrary to the advice of Jack Ensoll, but no problem; it was my chosen future, and the Nation had given me an opportunity.
Moreover, management continued to express its commitment to me by all sorts of assignments that expressed trust—like being asked to write editorials. I felt flattered whenever I was assigned to write them.
Editorials articulate the position of the paper on an issue. In fact, an editorial can be defined as a view that has the weight of the paper behind it. I quickly realized that it was different from the opinion features I used to write. An editorial has to be sharp, pointed, and carry the right tone. It has to have gravitas. The editorial doesn’t carry the author’s name, which is the point. The anonymity of the writer of an editorial is what makes it an expression of the paper as a whole.
Sometime in August 1964, the Nation management came up with the idea of signed editorials, called commentary. With signed commentaries, the Nation newspapers wanted to have the gravitas, though reduced in power, but with the wiggle room to claim that the editorial was a personal opinion in the event of hostile government reaction.
Early in August, the Daily Nation carried a story in which the United States alleged that, on August 2 and 4, 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the destroyer USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. I was asked to write a signed commentary on this incident.
The Daily Nation August 7, 1964, carried my commentary on the “American bombing raid on North Vietnamese torpedo [boat] bases in retaliation for attack on U.S. destroyer Maddox.” Quite clearly I had taken the American claims as true. Later it was found that the incidents were fabrications meant to clear the way for war. The subsequent passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was the legal path for the formal start of the American war on Vietnam.
I felt bad, and yet I had nobody to blame. Although no doubt I was given the general orientation, I had written the commentary in my own words and signed it James Ngugi. My talks with the late J. Njoroge, almost three years before, came back to haunt me. I could almost hear his sarcastic laughter from the grave: I told you! Working in a newspaper means operating within its broad consensus about the world.
This only reinforced some of the doubts and questions raised in my article “The Writer and the Public,” in The Makererean of August 24, 1963. Was I then the typical Makerere graduate, whom I had described as “a man who has been brought up in an educational system wholly colonial, with all its prejudices and intellectual slant in favor of the West?”
Being born and educated in a colony inevitably leaves scars. But anticolonial resistance was also part of my heritage. The colonial and the anticolonial values were always at war in my worldview, a conflict visible in my often inadequate grasp of the global character of imperialism and the intricacies of its neocolonial manifestation, an inadequacy reflected in some of the more than eighty pieces of journalism that I had published in newspapers and magazines. In fiction and theater, I felt more grounded than I did in journalism, but even there, not all the pieces were free of scars. Hope lies in learning enough from the scars to reach for the stars.
I was starting to feel a little lost. I felt drained. Something in me was dying daily. The Nation had given me a career opportunity, but it would not give me what I sought in life. Just six months into the job, and I was already feeling this? And 1964 was not yet over? Perhaps Jack Ensoll had been right after all: my future lay between hard covers.
One morning I woke up and wrote my letter of resignation, the usual one-month’s notice. I didn’t offer any reason. I didn’t think that anybody would understand, because even for me, nothing was really clear about what was smothering me.
III
Michael Curtis took me to lunch. There were one or two others at the luncheon, and I assumed they were part of the management. But I made a mental note that my editor, Hilary Ng’weno, was not among the hosts.
It was a friendly luncheon, but soon I realized why it had been set up. They wanted to know why I had resigned. They talked about my long association with the Nation group; they had plans for me. I must have sounded even more suspicious when I said there was no real reason.
Was I going for higher education somewhere?
Well, I had applied but I hadn’t had any responses offering a place or a scholarship.
Had it anything to do with Hilary Ng’weno? Had we fallen out or something? They asked while assuring me that I could talk to them in full confidence. But I had nothing against Hilary. I thought he did a fantastic job. And we had not fallen out.
The luncheon came to an end with thanks from me and their assurance that if ever . . . Well, it was just that.
Collage by Barbara Caldwell of articles about and by Ngũgĩ in the Makererean and Transition
I didn’t think I was going to change my mind, but you never can tell.
Later when an admission to Leeds University came, followed by an offer of a scholarship, my workmates insinuated that I knew it was coming and hence my resignation.
I didn’t try to explain. I was just struck by the irony: the British Council, which once smashed my dreams with an alleged hand in denying my play, The Wound in the Heart, a space at the Kampala National Theater because “British officers could not do such a thing,” now had a big hand in enabling me to pursue my dreams in Leeds, in Yorkshire, the land of Emily Brontë of Wuthering Heights. And thanks to the British Council Scholarship, Leeds would alter the course of my life as a writer, academic, and thinker.
I now had yet another way of framing my college times. I entered Makerere in the 1959 academic year, a colonial subject, and left in 1964, a citizen of an independent Kenya. In those few years a writer was born. I had a novel out, Weep Not, Child; a second, The River Between, in the pipeline; a three-act play, The Black Hermit; two one-act plays; and over sixty pieces of journalism in newspapers and magazines.
Even then I found it difficult to use the word writer to refer to myself. In my mind, all this was a kind of preparation for the writer-to-be. So on many forms and documents, for occupation, I would put student. It was as if I had not yet written the novel I wanted to write. But the desire to weave dreams remained aflame, an integral part of my life.
14
A Hell of a Paradise
I
“We did not know we lived in Paradise,” Hugh Dinwiddy would later quote Sam Lunyiigo, a former head of the History Department, who made the remark at a conference years after.1
This paradise could only refer to the Makerere of the 1950s and early 1960s. It was not just its location on a hill that faced other hills with poetic-sounding names like Rubaga and Namirembe, on which stood cathedrals or the Lubiri Palace or the Kasubi Royal Tombs.
We partook of paradise in the social evenings in the halls of residence and the dances on the floor of the Main Hall, supplemented by the nightlife in Kampala in and around Top Life, Suzana, and other clubs with live music from resident bands. Music also permeated the dinner parties at people’s houses in Kololo or, for me, the literary salons around Rajat Neogy and Transition. I realize now that, as a budding writer, playwright, and columnist, I may have accessed social spaces not shared by fellow undergraduates, but in the main, Makerere was a place w
Only in that Makerere did it seem possible that “the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. . . . They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”2
But they did hurt and destroy, in the form of Idi Amin, who overthrew the Obote regime in 1971 and scattered Makerereans and Ugandans to the four corners of the world: artists, writers, politicians—no social sector was spared. To Amin and his soldiers, Makerere was the site of an educated elite to be humiliated and made to serve the soldiers, the women among them to be abducted and / or raped. But the new overlords also envied Makerere; Idi Amin, now chancellor, extorted several honorary doctorates from the university. Some professors and students were killed; others fled into exile.
We should have seen it coming, the smoke from the fire of hell, at least. The colonialists had lit the fire. They had exiled kings when it suited them, but they also subtly allied themselves with kings against the nationalists’ demands for independence and later against Obote’s deceptive “move to the left,” a cover for endemic state corruption and tyranny that had little to do with his stated socialist ideals. The colonialists had stoked the tension between Buganda and Bunyoro over the Lost Counties (Bunyoro land taken by Buganda when that kingdom allied itself with the early British colonists), then left it to the new men of power to solve the issue. Above all, they had promoted Idi Amin for his zeal in harvesting the skulls of LFA soldiers, the so called Mau Mau, in Kenya. Obote had accepted the gift from the colony and used it to storm Kabaka’s palace (not that the kabaka himself was innocent of military intrigues against the central government); his ruthless victory gave him military supremacy. He hoped to use the gift to consolidate his moves to the left, only to discover that the gift was a poisoned chalice.
The West embraced their creation with glee. It gave Amin state visits from Golda Meir of Israel, Georges Pompidou of France, and Queen Elizabeth of England. Only when they saw him begin to behave oddly, not always following decorum, did Western leaders denounce him as a dictator and an example of black misrule rather than foreign manipulation. Suddenly they discovered that he did actually refrigerate the decapitated heads of his captives and feed their bodies to crocodiles. But this was not his first decapitation program, for he had acquired the habit of head-hunting as a member of the King’s African Rifles, fighting “Mau Mau,” and he must have been surprised by the fickleness of those who now denounced him for doing things for which they had once given him medals.
There was always hell in paradise, the fire at least, only we didn’t see it, or even the smoke, and that’s why it shocked. For me it was the sheer helplessness of seeing my friends scattered all over the world and not being there to lend a helping hand or even say a soothing word. One’s loss may very well be another’s gain. Kenyan schools profited from the hundreds of Ugandan exiles who became dedicated teachers in Kenya. Britain, Canada, and the United States gained from the entrepreneurial skills of the many Ugandan-Asian exiles who reached their shores.
I had known Peter Nazareth from our Makerere days to our time in Leeds, and we had become close. His wife was Mary and we played with their names as the Mary and Peter of biblical Nazareth. His Makerere stories and plays had exuded love for the Uganda he grew up in. Now he was “Ugandan Asian.” Bahadur Tejani, too: we were five years in the same classes, in the same study group. We shared the same friends, like Bethuel Kurutu, but now he, too, was “Ugandan Asian,” exiled from the land he loved. Theirs was the story of Africa.
This heartache would be best captured in a poem, “Snapshots,” by Susan Kiguli. Kiguli opens the poem by making it clear that she never actually saw the Indians leave. But she feels their exodus in the story of the massacres in Uganda and elsewhere on the continent.
I see the Indians on a journey
Away from their home
In the abandoned houses
Of our districts.
Every day I think of dictators
I see the Ugandan Indians leave.3
Susan Kiguli writes in Luganda and English, and she chairs the Literature Department where Nazareth, Tejani, and I were once students. She dedicates “Snapshots” to Peter Nazareth. Somehow, Makerere survived, but as a shadow of its past. Now, however, with the minds and dedication of Susan Kiguli’s generation, it has all the signs of a phoenix rising from the ashes of terror to be once again the beacon on the Hill, seen from every corner of the continent and the world. The Idi Amin chaos will then be just a temporary setback on the march of history.
Of course, Obote had done his bit to bring about the chaos. After all, it was he, the Makerere man, who had imprisoned Rajat Neogy, the literary man, and forced him into exile long before Idi Amin, the military man, executed the Asian exodus. Idi Amin then unleashed the full force of hell on other intellectuals I had worked with and knew: Pio Zirimu, Wycliffe Kingi, and other Ugandan artists and performers. The road to political hell begins with intolerance of ideas and difference.
I once met Barbara Kimenye in Nairobi. She was working for the Nation, and her column was followed by thousands, but to me, who always associated her with Kampala, she looked like a misfit in the streets of Nairobi. In my eyes, she still belonged to the Kampala built on many hills, certainly more than the seven on which Rome was built, dreaming up her fictional Moses character and fictional school. The Kampala of literary salons and clashing ideas was a thing of the past.
Yes, we lived in paradise, but it was paradise built on the uneven colonial structures we had sworn to maintain. Was it that different from the rest of the continent? By the time Idi Amin’s eight years of terror were over, a civilian Amin had already assumed the throne in my beloved Kenya. His name was Daniel arap Moi. He made children sing his praises for getting them yellow corn from America in times of hunger he had created. He orchestrated marches all over the country with the slogan Karamu chini, Down with the pen. It was the turn of Kenyan intellectuals to flee. The dictatorship forced me to join Peter Nazareth and Bahadur Tejani and many others in exile, where we talked about the Makerere that once promised us paradise. That, prison and exile, is another story. But the Makerere where I discovered my calling as a weaver of dreams will always be part of it.
The Duke of Edinburgh stands beside Jomo Kenyatta as Kenya regains its “independence” in 1963
Acknowledgments
The first public reading of selections from this memoir was at Professor Gaby Schwab’s annual new year festival at her house in University Hills at the University of California, Irvine. Thanks Gaby, family, and friends!
My heartfelt thanks also to: Barbara Caldwell for library research, her design of the pictures and illustrations, and her custody of the various documents for this memoir; Doctor Susan Kiguli and Charles Ssekitoleko for archival research in Makerere; Mary Musoke for enabling; Peter Nazareth and John Nazareth for sharing memories and stories of the past; Carol Sicherman for her work on Makerere, sharing information and pictures, and for reading and suggesting changes in the manuscript; Bahadur Tejani for oral and written testimonies; Glen Dias, who shared memories and redrew The Black Hermit poster from memory; Bethuel Kiplagat, who reminded me that we lived in adjoining rooms; Dan Kahyana, Kathy Sood, Gulzar Kanji, Susie (Ooman) Tharu, Mĩcere Mũgo, Nat Frothingham, and Bernth Lindfors, who all provided useful pictures, and Lindfors for helping unlock memories with his work on my early journalism; Heather Pesani for unearthing the Makerere conference report; Jones Ky
Notes
1: The Wound in the Heart
1. The Theater of Dionysus in Athens saw plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and many others. A metal tripod for cooking over a fire was the trophy for the winner.
2. Nazareth is now the well-known novelist of In a Brown Mantle and The General Is Up. He is also a top professor at Iowa University, an advisor to its International Writing Program, and the editor of numerous scholarly and creative works. Along the way, he has gained notoriety for his innovative interpretation of Elvis Presley as a multiracial, multicultural Third Worlder.
3. Northcote Hall Newsletter, 1962, no. 4, p. 1.
4. All her life, up to her death in 2011, MacPherson edited and maintained the Old Makerere Newsletter, trying to track the movement and activities of all Makererean faculty members and students wherever in the world they had been spotted.