Dreams in a Time of War by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o
By the fourth and last day I was exhausted in body and mind. It was a relief when it was all over.
Over, too, for me, were my years at Kĩnyogori. The struggle for school from Kamandũra School, through Manguo Karĩng’a, to Kĩnyogori Intermediate, a government school; the ups and downs in the fortune of my mother’s house; the drums of war in the country—any of these events could have derailed me from my educational track. Now it was time to say good-bye to the school and the history it carried. Sadly, it was also time to say good-bye to Mr. Kĩbicho and his library.
The weeks of waiting for exam results were among the longest of my life. We were not under the protective umbrella of a school any longer. We were subject to the same perpetual rhythm of tension bedeviling the entire population. Now and then my mother was called to the Home Guard post for questioning. Apparently somebody had revealed the other meaning of mbembe. But my mother was always consistent in her denial: She had been cultivating her cornfields at the time, and corn was corn; she could not see how corn could be anything else. My mother had an unflappable bearing even under the severest of conditions.
Without my being preoccupied with study and exams, my mind begins to wander. I fear that my mother’s house might fall, but mostly I fear for my brother out there in the cold of the mountains, and the fear is not made any less by the memory of his reassuring laughter the night he came home to bid me to do well. That visit was vintage Wallace—he was always doing the unexpected, at least in my eyes. There was that time when, through my child’s eyes, I had seen him as a scholar, because he studied the whole night, his feet in a basin full of cold water. But then he turned out to be a woodworker, and whenever in the Bible I read of Joseph, the father of Jesus, a carpenter, I thought of Good Wallace. And now he had given up everything, his workshop, the secondhand car he had just bought, his wife and child, for the rough life of a freedom warrior. In reality, I had never seen Wallace as a warrior. To me he had always seemed vulnerable, and though he was considerably older than me, I had always felt protective toward him.
There was a man about my brother’s age who, because of the manner of his dress, gait, speech, and name—Mũturi, “Ironsmith,” which sounded menacing—I always felt could beat him in a physical confrontation. I was then in Kamandũra school. I wanted to warn my brother against the man’s company, especially after I learned that they were acquainted, but I did not know how to begin. I approached the subject gingerly, asking him whether they had met recently, as if I was merely interested in knowing about him. But my brother did not seem to be bothered about Mũturi one way or another, and he would ask me to concentrate on my studies and stop worrying about the whereabouts of grown-ups. His indifference to the danger I saw clearly in my mind alarmed me even more, and I never stopped being concerned until the day I heard Kahanya congratulating my brother on how he had floored Mũturi in a street fight.
Similar anxieties now revolve around Kahanya. He will surely betray my brother, and I have no way of warning Wallace about his friend’s treachery. But how could friends betray one another? Ngandi, who had seemed to know everything including what happened in the mountains; yes, Ngandi who had told us stories of the exploits of Dedan Kĩmathi, Stanley Mathenge, and General China with details as if from an eyewitness, should surely be able to explain this. He might even know how to send a message to the mountains. But he never comes to my brother’s place anymore. Perhaps I should search for him and, I hope, by chance, run into him in the streets, but I remind myself that I am not supposed to discuss my brother’s whereabouts with anybody. Well, I never see him again. I have to sort out these contradictions alone.
I start looking for news and information actively on my own instead of waiting for it to come to me. I have no money for newspapers. I set about collecting odd pieces of printed paper wherever I find them. The Indian shops are the best source. The shopkeepers often use newspapers to wrap sugar or other foods and goods for their customers. Even at dump sites I collect a page here, a page there, some torn, but occasionally I get some in succession. The news is not necessarily current. I have no choice in the matter. All I want is to connect things the way Ngandi used to link local, national, and world events. The stories of Mau Mau as atavistic, anti-progress, antireligion, antimodernity are deeply at odds with what I know of my brother, attested by his last daring act of coming home to wish me well. Other stories are mostly about government victories, enumerating the Mau Mau guerrillas killed, hanged, or captured, the most prominent being General China earlier in the year, mid-January.
The one constant source of consolation is the absence of my brother’s name among the fallen. I want him to return home in victory the way Kabae had come home from the Second World War. But there is no printed news of Mau Mau victories, the kind that Ngandi used to tell in very convincing detail. Nor do I find stories of support from abroad such as Ngandi claimed was offered by Egypt, Ethiopia, Russia, and European capitals including London. The only bits I get from London are of a visit by some MPs and of colonial secretaries Oliver Lyttelton and Alan Lennox-Boyd changing places. Otherwise Churchill is still in power, and he sends in more British battalions while recalling others. Other pieces simply confront me with the past of Operation Anvil, the devilish scheme by General Erskine to displace thousands of the Gĩkũyũ, Embu, and Meru from Nairobi, as the colonial state had earlier done with those in the Rift Valley. Limuru, being close to Nairobi, feels the effects of Operation Anvil throughout the year, as it had the effects of other turmoils in the capital. I am heartened when I come across news of the defeat of the French forces in Indochina by a General Giap, at Dien Bien Phu, at about the same time Operation Anvil was playing out, and I hope Kĩmathi would achieve the same kind of victory against the British. Then my brother would come home. In another piece I learn that Eisenhower, through something called Brown versus Board of Education, has ordered the end of segregation of schools in America. It does not make sense to me because I have never seen or even dreamt of the possibility of a school in which African, Asian, and European students coexisted. In Limuru, the Asian school is walled around with stone, an enclosed space behind the shops. The school is part of the shopping center. I have never seen any Indian student running six miles barefoot to school. As for European schools, they are invisible. I have never come across any.
Piecing this and that together to make a coherent story the way Ngandi did is difficult: It is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing. It may have been the same for Ngandi, but he replaced the missing pieces with his fertile imagination. It is okay if I don’t reach the level of the master narrator, I comfort myself, because I don’t have to tell my stories to listeners eager to eat from the palm of my hand. Still, I try out my knowledge and narrative skills on Kenneth. But Kenneth does not swallow just anything: He contests everything that comes out of my mouth, exposing serious gaps in my reporting of events in Kenya and abroad. But trying to make sense of what’s around me, independently, and then defending its veracity as well as I can against Kenneth’s skepticism, makes me feel that much more a man, my own man.
It was about this time that death first danced around me. It happened after I resumed my friendship with Ndũng’ũ, my other brother-by-initiation. He had dropped out of school and did not share the anxiety of waiting for exam results. But although he was a dropout, Ndũng’ũ had a very sharp mind, an active intelligence that years later, after independence, would lead him to become one of the most successful businessmen in Limuru, a landowner and a town councilor. At the time, however, people shook their heads with concern about his future.
Being a man meant that I was an adult able to make decisions on my own. I could sleep out without reporting to my parents. But my mother would not let go of her motherly concern for my welfare, and she kept tabs on the company I kept. A single mother, she did not want to deal with endless conflicts with neighbors. She was of the view that the effective way to avoid such conflicts was to keep to ourselves or else choose friend
Before Kĩmũchũ’s execution, he had built an L-shaped house of stone walls and a corrugated iron roof. The house was largely empty because Ndũng’ũ’s stepmother usually slept in their shop at the Limuru marketplace. Ndũng’ũ occupied the room at the shorter side of the L shape, and that is where I also spent the night sometimes. For me he was good company, and he was certainly more worldly, especially when it came to girls.
It was very cold that month. We never opened the windows. We used a charcoal burner for heating the room. But on a particularly chilly night, we kept on adding more charcoal, and when we lay on the bed we did not take the burner outside or open the windows. Gradually I sank into a deep sleep. Sometime in the morning, Ndũng’ũ heard a faint knocking at the door and at the windows. He found the will to crawl on the floor and somehow manage to open the door before collapsing, like a drugged person, on the floor where I also lay hardly conscious. But the fresh air must have done something, because when I opened my eyes my mother was standing at the door. To this day I don’t know how we fell off the bed onto the floor. Ndũng’ũ and I were saved from asphyxiation just in time.
My mother was very quiet as I followed her back to our house. Later she explained how she had felt ill at ease that it was late in the morning and I had not come home. Fearing that I might have been arrested by the Home Guards, she walked to Ndũng’ũ’s place to find out. She was aghast when she saw me on the floor by a charcoal burner that was still burning.
I realized the depth of her shock at the sight of me lying there when later I learned that her first daughter, her firstborn, had fallen in a fire and had died of severe burns. It explained why she had always uncharacteristically overreacted whenever she found my younger brother and me, when we were children, playing near a fire or holding a burning piece of wood.
My mother’s instincts always amazed me. I remembered that other time when she came to King George VI Hospital when I most needed her. And now she had saved us from carbon monoxide poisoning. Thereafter she would not want to hear anything about my sleeping inside a stone-walled house.
Kenneth, my other brother-by-initiation, and I often met to argue about the world, but mostly to compare notes about our performance and wonder about the exam results, commiserating now and then with one another. But after days of this, we told ourselves that it was better to forget about the exams. So we resumed our interrupted arguments about writing and being sent to prison, both of us still holding firmly to our respective positions. He would remind me that he would write the book that would prove me wrong. But he would not commit as to whether he had already started or when he would. So the arguments continued, about books, about the country, about the world. We never seemed to agree on anything, and yet we still met and argued.
On Sundays he and I went to church in Kamandũra. He carried a small English-language Bible, which we shared. The preacher would read from the Gĩkũyũ-language Bible and we would follow him in the English. We understood Gĩkũyũ perfectly, we could also read Gĩkũyũ fluently, but somehow it felt more and more natural for us to do it that way.
One Sunday in December 1954, instead of going home after attending the Kamandũra church, we decided to go to an afternoon open-air service in Ndeiya, about six miles away from home. Open-air services, held after the more formal services inside the church, were becoming the practice on Sundays. The events were not identified with any one particular church denomination. A personal relationship with God was emphasized more than denominational affiliations. These services were more like revival meetings, where even the laypeople could stand up and contribute to the sermons and the prayers.
They coincided with a fundamentalist revival movement that had swept the country since just before the state of emergency was declared. Now the trend seemed to intensify almost as an alternative to the colonial state and the Mau Mau. “Jesus is my personal Savior” was the refrain of many of its adherents. Young people were swept off their feet, and I recall how girls after being saved would give away their earthly adornments such as bead necklaces and earrings. For those who came from more affluent families and saw themselves as modern, being saved gave them freedom to be in the company of others, even men, because Jesus would not let them fall victim to earthly temptations. I don’t know why they sang in Luganda, Tukutendereza Yesu, Yesu we Mlokozi (we praise Jesus, Jesus the savior), but it may have been because that particular wave of fundamentalism had origins in Uganda and Rwanda. Concerns and restrictions resurfaced when unwanted and unplanned pregnancies became a little bit more frequent among them and no amount of confession and blaming the devil allayed parental concerns.
These open-air Sunday services were also popular because they were among the very few public gatherings that did not need a license from the state. If anything, they met with state approval for they were about Jesus not Kenyatta, about spiritual deliverance from evil and not political liberation from colonial ills.
It was a sunny day, and the service and the singing were good. Some preachers had a way of interpreting some verses in the Bible that made sense of what was happening around us. The signs of war and strife and hunger and false prophets were foretold in the Bible as preceding Christ’s Second Coming. Some of the sermons and songs uplifted my soul, freeing me from the anxieties I was carrying.
It was midafternoon when we started our journey back, but instead of going the way we had come, we decided to take what we thought was a shortcut through Ngũirũbi forest. I don’t know if we were discussing the service or arguing about writing, or about my narratives gathered from bits of newspapers, but whatever the case, we suddenly heard the order to stop.
In front of us was a white military officer in camouflage gear, pointing a gun at us. He motioned us to put our hands on top of our heads and walk slowly to where others were gathered. It was then that we saw ahead of us people sitting on their haunches, their hands behind their heads. The officer was not alone. On either side of the forest I detected the many eyes of more military personnel. Others guarded the seated crowd with guns and an Alsatian dog. As we sat down, we saw that many of those being held, like us, had been at the religious service. A greenish military vehicle and a smaller one, a jeep, were parked next to the woods, a few yards from the group. Kenneth and I had been caught in a notorious mass screening dragnet.
People who were questioned were assigned to one of three groups: the bad, the worse, and the worst. The group of the worst was being guarded by the fat white officer with the Alsatian dog that looked menacing, panting as if thirsting for blood. Even at a distance the animal revived the terror I had experienced with Kahahu’s dog. When Kenneth’s turn came, he was placed among the bad. How was a white man able to look a person in the face and decide to which group the person belonged? I discovered the answer to the question when my turn came. By the jeep was some kind of tent in which sat a man wrapped from top to bottom in a white sheet, two slits for his eyes. This was the dreaded gakũnia, the man in the hood. Having a pair of faceless eyes peering at you from behind a sheet was chilling. I took it that after they finished with me, they would put me in Kenneth’s group since, like him, I was clearly in school uniform.
But to my surprise I was put in the second category of the worse, who would have to answer more questions. In the second round, the culprits were alloted to the bad or the worst group, the latter to be taken to concentration camps. I kept as calm as I could, but inside I was boiling with fear. I knew the baggage I carried. What would I say if asked about my brother Wallace Mwangi? His last and only visit was vivid in my mind. Had somebody seen him visiting us? And as far as I knew, my mother and my brother’s wife had not been questioned about the visit.
I stood in front of the white officer near the hooded man. He asked if I understood English and I said yes, hoping that this would meet with his approval.
“Where have you been?”<
“An open-air Christian service.”
“Say ‘effendi,’” he shouted.
“Effendi.”
“Where do you go to school?”
“Kĩnyogori Intermediate School. District Education Board. I have done my KAPE and I am waiting for results.”
“Have you got brothers?”
“Yes.”
“Say ‘effendi,’” he said.
“Yes, effendi.”
“How many?”
“My father has four wives. I have about ten. …”