Dreams in a Time of War by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o
She had this incredible hold on my mother. There was nothing that my mother could do that seemed to mollify my grandmother and put her in good humor, which forced my mother to intensify her efforts to care for her, to meet her demands, spoken and often unspoken. My grandmother would be talking to us in a friendly almost relaxed manner, but the moment her own daughter approached, she would instinctively revert to her injured self, sighing and hinting neglect or loudly blaming her own body for preventing her from doing things for herself. Tension mounted in the house.
To reduce the contention between mother and grandmother, Good Wallace put up another hut for my grandmother on a separate site, next to my mother’s, hoping that this would give her more independence and my mother some peace. But even in her new abode, my grandmother expected instant service from her daughter. The situation became worse, my grandmother now openly and continuously complaining of neglect. The only other name whose mention made her even more resentful and made her complain even more, was my grandfather’s. But they did not see much of each other, and when they did sarcastic barbs would fly from my grandmother’s mouth and her husband would walk away.
And then a shadow of death fell on my grandfather’s house.
Kĩmũchũ’s house was literally on the other side of my grandfather’s compound. He was in the process of putting the finishing touches on a new stone house next to the old one of wood slabs with its corrugated iron roof. A white man, a British officer, with a gang of African paramilitary, came for Kĩmũchũ by night. His wife assumed that he had been arrested the way Kenyatta and others had been. But when she and other relatives inquired at police stations they got no news. After a few days what had happened became clear. Kĩmũchũ, Njerandi, Elijah Karanja, Mwangi, Nehemiah, some of the most prominent men in Limuru, all picked up the same night, had been summarily executed by the British officer at a wooded glen in Kĩneniĩ, a few yards from the road built by the Bonos. Ndũng’ũ and Njoroge, Kĩmũchũ’s children by his first wife, Wangũi, had now lost both parents.
Terror struck our region, but it hit my grandfather hardest. He was Kĩmũchũ’s surrogate father; they were very close. My grandfather was convinced he would be next, that “they” would come for him by night. He sought refuge in my mother’s hut. Every evening, under the cover of darkness, he would slip into our place. To see this very powerful man, the respected landowner and custodian of his subclan, yes, my grandfather who wrote letters to the government, in our hut, quaking with fear of colonial malfeasance, was my first real intimation of the import of the state of emergency. He had to use a chamber pot. I felt with him his painful humiliation at having to use a chamber pot in his own daughter’s hut! After a few weeks he relaxed and returned to his normal residence with Mũkami. But now and then he would still seek out our place at night.
For the duration of his struggle, my grandmother became less sullen, more sympathetic. An undeclared truce reigned between them. But after he left and the white shadow of death did not strike again, life returned to normal in my mother’s house, which also meant the return of Grandmother’s sullenness, and my mother’s terror of her own mother. My grandmother complained of her displacement from Elburgon before the healer had completed his task. The pieces of broken glass that the healer had not taken out still hurt.
Then came the week when my grandmother turned kind and gentle. She was loving and comforting, and I wished she would always be like that. She joked a little, and laughed softly. People could talk about anything without her bringing up the pieces of glass that unknown evil had planted in her.
Kĩmũchũ’s brutal assassination was always alluded to in a variety of ways: What was going to happen to all his wealth? Would Phyllis, his widow, look after the property in the equal interests of all the children, hers and her stepchildren? This would lead to discussions about Ndũng’ũ, Kĩmũchũ’s eldest son, who was about my age, and Njoroge, his younger brother. Ndũng’ũ was going to be a man soon, my mother said, reporting what she heard as coming from Ndũng’ũ’s grandmother. Then he would look after the portion of wealth due to him.
My grandmother turned to me: “And my husband here? He cannot be left behind.” She called me her husband because I was named after my grandfather. I laughed off the talk of becoming a man. I was focused on school only. The idea of circumcision was very far from my mind. But for some reason she would not let the matter go, and a few days later she brought up the subject, reiterating that Ndũng’ũ, who was my age, could not become a man and leave me behind a boy. I tried to distract her by asking her more details about the story of the removal of the pieces of glass from her body. Previously this would have been sure bait. I was surprised by her mild response.
“I have no ill will toward the evil one,” she said, and then continued in the same train of thought. “I have never meant anybody harm.”
It was as if, by asking questions about her condition, I had induced in her forgiveness and general beneficence. She kept on telling my mother and all of us that she harbored no bad feelings toward anybody. As if to confirm the truth of it, she slightly spit on her hands and breast in the Gĩkũyũ gesture of blessing.
She went to bed. She never woke up again. She had peacefully passed to the next world. My mother’s tears expressed deep sadness and relief. In the evening after the burial we sat around the fireside, with shadows and light playing on our faces.
“Your grandmother was a good woman; it was the illness that had turned her against joy,” my mother said as if to fill the emptiness we all felt. I really missed her. I missed the grandmother I had and the one I could have had.
“She did not harbor any bad feelings toward this or any other house,” my mother continued slowly as if partly to reassure herself.
It was then that I realized my mother had all along been scared that, in her bitterness against life, my grandmother might leave a curse behind. A parent’s curse, even if not directly voiced, could take effect as a result of any bad words they may have spoken in their last days on earth. A curse could also follow failure to meet their wishes expressed before their passing on. A last wish is a final command.
“She said that Ndũng’ũ cannot leave you behind,” my mother said, turning toward me, in a manner that brooked no demur.
The ban on Karĩng’a and KISA schools, especially the Kenya Teachers’ College at Gĩthũngũri, was a practical and psychological assault on the African initiative for self-reliance. Much had gone into their organization. Mbiyũ Koinange had narrowly escaped arrest alongside Kenyatta because he happened to be in England at the time, representing the Kenya African Union. Many others associated with the college were among the thousands arrested. But the biggest blow to the collective psyche occurred when the colonial state turned the college grounds and buildings into a prison camp where proponents of resistance to colonialism were hanged.
Ngandi almost wept at the news. His beloved alma mater turned into a slaughterhouse for nationalists? But the eternal optimist in him would reappear and he would assert that Mbiyũ had not been spared by God for nothing. He would come back. Remember? From America, he brought back Hampton and Tuskegee combined; from England he will bring us Oxford and Cambridge. One way or another Gĩthũngũri would be restored.
The fact that Manguo, a Karĩng’a school, would be no more affected me directly and immediately. Up to then there had been two competing and parallel systems of modern education, that of the government and the missionaries on one hand, and the African-run independent schools on the other. I had been able to move from one to the other. And now? There was no choice. I was not even sure that Kamandũra would take me back.
I don’t know how long I lived with the uncertainty. But the following year, 1953, it was announced that a number of KISA and Karĩng’a schools would be reopened under government control. Some trustees refused to give up their independence and hence their schools did not reopen. Many others were not given that option. Manguo was among those whose board members agreed to have the sch
The effects were immediate. In the new Manguo, music and performance died. The interschool sports festival became a thing of memory. The marching band too. The school was no longer the center of local communal festivities. Some of the old teachers including Fred Mbũgua lost their jobs. Stephen Thiro was retained as acting headmaster pending the arrival of a newly appointed one from Kagumo, a government-approved training college.
There was a subtle shift in emphasis in the teaching of certain subjects like history and English. In the old school, teachers told us about African kings like Shaka, Cetshwayo. They told us a bit about the white conquest and settlements in South Africa and Kenya. But now the emphasis was on white explorers like Livingstone, Stanley, Rebman, and Krapf. We learned in positive terms about the establishment of Christian missions. We learned that white people had discovered Mount Kenya and many of our lakes, including Lake Victoria. In the old school, Kenya was a black man’s country. In the new school, Kenya, like South Africa, was represented as having been sparsely populated before the whites arrived, and so whites occupied the uninhabited areas. Where, as in Tigoni in Limuru, they had taken African lands, the previous occupants had been compensated. There had also been tribal wars. White people brought medicine, progress, peace. The teachers were of course following the official government-approved syllabus under which students would eventually be examined.
A European inspector of schools, a Mr. Doran or some such name, started making the rounds to ensure compliance. His visits were often unannounced, and once on the grounds he expected teachers to run to him and stand at attention the whole time he talked to them. Sometimes he would park his car some distance away and surreptitiously approach the grounds. He would enter a classroom, stand at the back, watch as the teacher conducted class, and then walk to the blackboard, take chalk, and strike out any word that was spelled wrong or any sentence with incorrect grammar and then write the correct words and sentence on top. There was general unease as the teachers tried to make light of it or even pretend gratitude. At first we were half delighted to see somebody else doing to the teacher what the teachers did to us, but as it became a habit we started sharing the teachers’ humiliation. We may have laughed about it, and even talked about it among ourselves, but it was really to hide our embarrassment.
We did not know how strongly we felt about this until Josephat Karanja, a student from Makerere University College, Uganda, came to teach in the school during his long vacation. Karanja was from Gĩthũngũri, the neighboring region. He was always meticulously dressed in gray trousers, a cardigan over a white shirt, and a tie, his hair parted on the side. At first we were excited to have a Makerere student for a teacher, but we soon wished we could do without his services. He used the stick too frequently against students who made mistakes persistently and even against those who did so occasionally.
One day the white inspector drove to the school and stood outside on the grounds leaning against his car as he frequently did. The other teachers ran to him, but Karanja did not. The inspector must have sent one of the other teachers to ask Karanja to come to him. We sensed a drama in the making, and as Karanja left the room we stood on our desks and peered through the windows. The inspector was hopping mad, beckoning Karanja to run. We hoped that Karanja would be disciplined before all our eyes. But Karanja did not change his pace. Even when the inspector shouted, Hurry up, Karanja refused to alter his pace. Now they stood face-to-face. The inspector wanted Karanja to call him sir, but Karanja just looked at him and then walked back to class. Aware that many eyes were watching, the officer hung around for a minute or so and then he got into his car and drove away. We never saw him again.
We retook our seats, but as Karanja entered we all stood up in deference, not fear. He was a hero. He had restored something we had lost, pride in our teachers, pride in ourselves. We hoped that he would come back again. But he did not. He was expelled from Makerere for leading or taking part in a student strike. He completed his undergraduate degree in India and then went on to Princeton, in the United States, later achieving success as independent Kenya’s first high commissioner in London. Eventually he returned to the country and became a disastrous vice-chancellor of the University of Nairobi under Kenyatta and a short-lived vice president for Dictator Moi. Somehow I always recall that moment in a primary school in colonial Kenya when he refused to accede to humiliation.
An African inspector would come next, James Mũigai, actually Kenyatta’s stepbrother, who was much friendlier. Sporting a helmet and goggles, he was impressive on his motorbike and used to brag about his bike being a BMC, Birmingham Motor Corporation, product. No matter how many times he visited, he never forgot to say that he was riding a BMC. I don’t think he was consciously hiding the fact, but he never mentioned his relationship to Kenyatta or talked about what was happening in the land.
Although the study of religion had not been a requirement at the old Manguo school, and I was not a convert to the orthodox or any Christian faith, I missed Kĩhang’ũ’s Sunday performances, which had come to an end with the banning of the African Orthodox Church. Now there was no church associated with the government school. But other churches did try to provide a home for these lost souls.
Indeed, some of those who had been followers of the orthodox faith did try other churches. But for the many faithful, going back to a church associated with missionaries, like Kamandũra, was anathema. For others the Catholic Church seemed the rightful place. It had not been hostile to orthodox followers. It did not confront those who practiced polygamy or wanted to marry their traditions with Christian faith. Indeed, the Catholic Church as a whole had refused to take a hard line in the female circumcision conflict of the 1920s. It was less judgmental in its criteria for admission into its fold. The church at Limuru Loreto Convent was one of the oldest Christian institutions in the area. Many students at Manguo started drifting there, as word spread that admission was easy. You reported there and you came back a Catholic! Later we were shocked when Stephen Thiro’s sister, Hegara Gacambi, the daughter of Kĩeya, the founding patriarch of Manguo Karĩng’a, was granted a place in high school and chose to become a nun.
Kenneth Mbũgua and I too decided to become Catholics. My friendship with Kenneth, whose father was Fred Mbũgua, who years earlier had read aloud my Gĩkũyũ essay, had started off on the wrong foot in the days when I still lived in my father’s house. The route from my father’s house to the Indian shops passed near Kenneth’s home. Kenneth was big for his age and was a bully. He used to terrify my younger brother and me, sometimes threatening to confiscate our tire rims that we drove with sticks as our “cars.” When I told my mother about the threat, she spoke to his mother, Josephine, but Kenneth did not stop harassing us: Things got even worse. My mother hated conflicts, and she would have been the first to scold me if she knew that I had caused a fight. I reported Kenneth to my mother again. She said, Do you want me to fight him for you? I realized that there would be no more help from that quarter, but at the same time I realized that she would not scold me for defending myself.
One day Kenneth threatened us again and expected us to take to our heels, but this time I stood my ground and dared him to touch me. He stepped toward me, and angry and furious I lurched at him. Taken by surprise, he fell to the ground and I was on him. Quickly recovering from the shock, he struggled to get the upper hand by turning me over. I had not the slightest doubt that he had the strength to overpower me but I was determined not to let him. My younger brother, who had fled, now came back, and together we pinned him to the ground. We gave him a few blows, and then we ran away as he chased us swearing revenge but with less and less conviction in his voice. He never did avenge our presumed impertinence. Instead we gradually became friends, especially after I moved from Kamandũra to Manguo school and my father’s house, because our new home was a couple of fields from Kenneth’
In the classroom at school Kenneth and I were emerging as academic rivals, but the gap between us two and the rest of the class was huge and this enhanced our friendship. I don’t know what made Kenneth and me decide to become Catholics. His father in those days was rather indifferent to church matters. His mother was very religious and she always went to Kamandũra church even when her husband had been the academic pillar of Manguo in its Karĩng’a stage. Kenneth had been baptized as a child and I had not. I don’t remember that we talked about Catholicism deeply. It is quite possible that we were merely following a fad. Without telling or consulting anybody, we set a date when we would walk to Limuru Loreto Convent and come back as Roman Catholics.
It was one of those coincidences difficult to explain. On the way, near the Limuru African marketplace, we met his mother. When Josephine learned where we were going and the reason, she was horrified. There was no way we were going to be Catholics, she said firmly. If it was baptism I wanted, and reaffirmation in the case of Kenneth, she would take us to Lord Reverend Stanley Kahahu for registration in his baptismal classes.
I am still conflicted in my relationship to the Kahahus. We had left their domain but we still go there for work. Once Lillian Kahahu, saying that she was helping us, gives me and my younger brother an acre to weed. The money she offers sounds huge in the light of our needs. Lillian looks even more generous when she gives us half the amount as down payment, the rest to be paid after we complete the task. It takes us months to make a dent, and by then the money is not anywhere near worth the labor we have put into the job. We are in a bind; we can’t stop working because we cannot pay back what we have already received. My mother hates debt, and we still need the tiny income. I will not work there again, I tell myself when we finally complete the task.