Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o
The South African whites turned the country into a kraal around which they circled wagons of indifference to the cries of shame without and the crisis of resistance within. Sharpening its claws, the apartheid regime perpetrated the Sharpeville Massacre and followed the bloodbath with bans on the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), among others, then hurled their leaders, Albert Luthuli and Robert Sobukwe from the contested civic space into the silence of prisons. The jailing of black leaders climaxed with the incarceration of Nelson Mandela in 1962. Four years later, a white Kenyan settler leader, Michael Blundell, titled his autobiography So Rough a Wind, clearly echoing the 1960 MacMillan metaphor.
The colonialists had tried to blunt the force of the rough wind by releasing, with dramatic fanfare, the Corfield Report, titled The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau: An Historical Survey.5
Frank Derek Corfield, whom the State had handpicked in 1957 to write the survey, had as his qualifications governorships in Sudan and Palestine and retirement in Kenya in 1954, where he became secretary of the War Council against “Mau Mau.” The partisan “historian” received a handsome sum to come up with footnoted musings about a situation in which he was fully implicated. He did not disappoint: he wrote what was supposedly a factual historical examination of the LFA, entirely from a settler’s point of view.
When I left Kenya in 1959, I thought I had escaped the political nightmare that engulfed the land, but the Corfield report, a literary nightmare in its own right, followed me into Uganda. While it created a general stir on the Hill, in me it stirred very personal emotions. I read it through the eyes of my brother Good Wallace and my uncle Gĩcini. I knew they were good men. Both had played a positive role in my schooling. Largely because of them, I could now read the written word, not as a gift horse, but one whose teeth called for critical examination.6
But it was my teeth that I clenched and grated when I read in the Corfield report the description of the soldiers of the Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) as social misfits; that “the seeds of potential unrest are sown whenever any primitive society is brought into close contact with a more highly civilized society.”7 The community I came from was being described as primitive and atavistic simply because we desired freedom and took measures to make the dream come true. To explain the LFA resistance, Corfield simply and unabashedly harvested from J. C. Carothers’s government-commissioned book, The Psychology of Mau Mau,8 which Corfield describes in a footnote as a penetrating document and which he acknowledges having consulted “freely to supplement my own knowledge of the African.”9
The claim to knowledge of the native mind is a thread that runs through much of European writing on Africa, liberal to conservative. The sources of this expertise were just the fact of contact with natives or animals or both—hence the resort to zoological and forest metaphors. The fact that LFA soldiers were based in the forest makes Corfield observe that “the natural tendency of the wounded animal is to return to its lair.”10
For his flight-to-forest theory, Corfield also relied on the work of another “authority,” the policeman Ian Henderson, who, in his Hunt for Kimathi,11 released in 1958, also claimed to know the African mind and its forest orientation: “If the Kikuyu are the Germans of tribal Kenya, [Dedan] Kimathi was their Hitler,” wrote Henderson. “Like Hitler he had to wait until the fabric of society broke around his head, but then he was able to exploit the convulsions with throbbing, burning oratory. Financial chaos and the threat of Communism gave Hitler his chance. The corruption of Kikuyu customs by Mau Mau and the flight to the forest gave Kimathi his opportunity.”12
In his account of the LFA, Henderson had relied on Carothers’s psychology. And now Corfield had used Henderson to corroborate what he got from Carothers. Carothers, Corfield, and Henderson become co-authors of the same pseudoscience, the twentieth-century heirs of Samuel Cartwright, the nineteenth-century physician of the slave plantation. Clearly, here was a case of the colony projecting its practices onto the resisting other. The LFA did not invent massacres, strategic villages, concentration camps, public mass hangings, and the torture chambers that proliferated in the cities and villages.
How did a colonial student ever survive the daily bombardment of this condescending view of my history and being? The journey of a colonial student is marked with failed attempts, but also victories. Even then, scars may remain. They are to be found in some of my outlook and tone at the time. One can only hope the scars don’t hide festering wounds. Luckily for me, I loved books. Books can enlighten but can also benight, but at least one can play one off against another. Makerere taught me to value books even more; her well-endowed library became my second residence. In the library, I was the lord of the intellectual manor with a hierarchy of willing and dedicated staff ready to serve me.
That was how I stumbled upon Norman Leys’s Kenya. This Glasgow University–trained doctor questioned the colonialism he served. Not the least of my fascination was the fact that he wrote of what he observed between 1902 and 1920, without once claiming to know the African mind. He was the answer to Corfield, years before that emissary of colonialism came to the scene.
Leys’s book had several gems for me, and I duly wrote them down as if the fact of trapping them with my handwriting would make them yield the answers I sought. For example:
That a European should land in Africa with 50,000 pounds and multiply that sum tenfold, partly no doubt by his own exertions but mainly by the sale for 200,000 pounds of land he had got from the government for nothing, and by using the kind of offices in inducing the natives of the country to work for him, this seems to the government one admirable proceeding.13
This was the exact opposite of the dominant official narrative of Kenya’s history as the actions of a band of white idealists on sparsely populated wilderness, a view given a veneer of scholarship in Elspeth Huxley’s White Highlands: Delamere and the Making of Modern Kenya.14 Corfield consulted Elspeth Huxley and ignored Norman Leys.
My mother, whose impact on my intellectual life can never be told enough, used to be very hard on us when we children told adults to their face that they lied. This was the one admonition I never understood. Grown-ups lied all the time. But still recalling her concerns, I would ask myself: How does a grown man, an adult, a governor even, literally sit down and consciously fabricate lies and sleep in bed untroubled by his inventions? Corfield had even trashed the efforts the Kenyan people had put into building their own schools, an effort to which I was a living witness.
I was a proud product of the Kikuyu Independent Schools Movement, whose ban and destruction by the colonial state Corfield saw fit to celebrate. If he had honestly consulted Leys’s Kenya, he could have come across another gem about the vast discrepancies in the resources allocated to a white European child and an African child: “The government educational policy is revealed most clearly by the fact that it proposes to spend on new school buildings alone for the 1500 European children in the colony more than its total expenditure on the education of African children during the last five years.”15 Indeed as early as 1924, this doctor had predicted an armed revolt, in another gem: “The whole European colony is organized for defense against African rebellion, while, except for troops and police with European officers, Africans and Indians are unarmed. . . . But will Africans in Kenya always submit passively to the system of life we have imposed on them?”16
The Land and Freedom Army answered the question in 1952 with its actions. The colonial state tried to obscure the clarity in the name with the meaningless mumbo-jumbo “Mau Mau.” The alliterative Mau Mau was based on a deliberate, or inadvertent, rendering of the equally alliterative muma, as in muma wa (gwĩtia) ithaka na wĩyathi, “Oath of unity for (demanding) Land and Freedom. The proper name of the political arm of the movement was Kĩama kĩa Muma, the Muma Movement, and of its fighting wing, Mbũtũ ya Kũrũĩra Ithaka na Wĩyathi, the Land and Freedom Army. Their motto was Maũndũ no merĩ: ithaka na wĩyathi, Two absolute deman
In Makerere, Reverend Fred Welbourne gathered a group of Kenyan students for weekly discussions on the Corfield Report. I was not in the circle, but I eagerly awaited the results, eventually published under the title, Comment on Corfield.17 The group’s well-considered responses and observations were marred only by their talking of “Mau Mau” as if it was also a form of religion. But the LFA was not a religious movement, any more than the Conservative or Labour parties in Britain were Christian for saying prayers and swearing on the bible.
Whatever their shortcomings, the year-long discussions showed once again that, by the very fact of its position on a hill literally and metaphorically, the college could not avoid the effects of the political winds blowing across the continent. Makerere was like a vane registering the direction and intensity of the wind.
V
In its own way, the Makerere Students Guild, founded in 1954 with the Malawian J. David Rubadiri as the first president, had all along anticipated the changing colonial situation. At a time when the entire imperial world denied Africans the vote, the officers of the students’ governing body were elected in a secret ballot on the basis of one student, one vote. Elections involved campaigns for votes, climaxing in debates among the contending candidates in front of the entire assembly. The victorious president drew his cabinet from the Students’ Representative Council, later called the Makerere Students’ Guild, made up of delegates from the different halls of residence elected the same way. The guild was a democracy in an otherwise absolutist colonial system. It was pan-African in composition, reflecting the multinational character of the student body. Between 1954, when it was born, and 1963, the Makerere Students Guild had presidents from Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.18
I was the delegate from Northcote and became the guild information officer in the Ombati government, 1961–62, but resigned later over disagreement about financing The Makererean. I supported the principle of The Makererean being financed by the guild but retaining editorial independence, whereas others thought it should be under the broad control of the guild, an updated form of the Guild Information Bulletin. They did not want to finance a rogue institution.
The guild marked the different phases of a rapidly changing situation. Barely three years after it was formed, the guild was celebrating Ghana’s independence in 1957. In 1958, it organized the first Pan-African Students’ Conference, with delegates from eleven countries, at which Tom Mboya was the main speaker.19
Nigerian independence followed in 1960. But the independence that most defined the early sixties was that of the Congo. The wind of change blowing in the Congo became a hurricane that left in disarray everything in its path.
VI
Patrice Lumumba’s and Kennedy’s rise to power were similar. The two men campaigned for power during 1960. Lumumba won the national elections on May 11–25 and was sworn in as prime minister of a supposedly independent Congo on June 23. Kennedy won his election on November 8, 1960. However, whereas Nixon conceded defeat regretfully but gracefully, King Baudouin I of Belgium, chief opponent of independence, was extremely rude.
Baudouin saw Congolese independence as the climax of the Belgian civilizing mission. He said the Congolese should be grateful for the Belgian colonial genius; they should not change the structures the Belgians had set up for them, including those of his great-uncle, the mass murderer King Leopold II. Sole corporate owner of Congo Free State 1885–1908, Leopold II presided over the deaths of 10 million Congolese. Yet Baudouin chose the moment to tout that history as a good inheritance for Lumumba’s Congo, a history to emulate.
Lumumba reminded the Congolese that, despite the roundtable conferences in Brussels, their independence was not given to them but won by a day-to-day fight: “We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.”20
On January 17, 1961, six months after that statement, Lumumba was assassinated. Three days after, on January 20, Kennedy was sworn in as the head of the country whose CIA agents helped overthrow and murder Lumumba. The man who eventually took over the reins of power was the Belgium-sanctioned Joseph Mobutu. He immediately added Leopard to his name Mobutu. Leopard sounds like Leopold. Thus the Congo would move from the bloody arms of the foreign Leopold to the bloody claws of the native Leopard, both serving the same master—Western corporate and military interests.
The Congo Crisis—Moise Tshombe’s secession, the death of Dag Hammarskjöld, Leopard Mobutu’s military takeover, and the consequent fighting—became a centerpiece in the vocabulary of Cold War politics. The phrase “Congo chaos” was used as a cautionary metaphor against rapid decolonization by those who wanted to slow down the inevitable. But no force could slow down the MacMillan wind.
In Kenya it was a dog, a stone, and a Luger pistol that signaled that the wind had not bypassed the country. Many settlers placed a most feared sign on their gates: MBWA KALI, “fierce attack dogs.” But some whites didn’t even bother with the warning. Every settler’s home had dogs trained to attack a black person. A favorite sport among settlers was setting dogs on Africans, then taking potshots at any who were running or simply sitting back to laugh at their frantic gestures of terror. But woe to any who might pick up stones or sticks to defend themselves! Bullets awaited them, for sure. Case closed. That had always been the ending of any story of blacks and whites and dogs until the day a dog, a pistol, and a stone collided in one Nairobi street.
The dog and the pistol belonged to Peter Poole, a soldier who had fought against the LFA and then set up an engineering shop on Government Road, Nairobi, now Moi Road. The stone belonged to Kamawe Musunge, Poole’s houseworker, then called a houseboy. For reasons unknown, maybe for the usual sport, Peter Poole set two dogs on Musunge, who was riding a bicycle. We know Poole was the aggressor, for why else would the dogs attack, on their own, a person they had often seen in and about the house? Musunge, frightened, picked up a stone for self-defense. He didn’t throw the stone, but Poole shot him dead for threatening his two attack dogs. The murder was barely news, and when, on October 12, 1959, Peter Poole was arrested, everybody, white and black alike, expected the case to go the way of the Kitosch story as told by Blixen in Out of Africa. However, the outcome was new and completely unexpected: the execution of Peter Poole on August 18, 1960, following his trial and conviction. In sixty years of corporate and colonial rule, after the deaths of countless Africans at the hands of gun-toting white settler cowboys, Peter Poole was the first and the only white person to hang for the crime. The name Peter means “rock,” and Kamawe, the name of the man he killed for the crime of picking one up, also means “rock.” Two rocks collided. Two men died. Two dogs survived.
The white uproar turned into a paroxysm of rage when in August 1961, Kenyatta was released from prison and assumed the leadership of the Kenya African National Union.
On December 9, 1961, Tanganyika became an independent state with Mwalimu Julius Nyerere as prime minister. Mwalimu, an honorific meaning “teacher,” shows how much the teacher was valued in the community. Nyerere was an old Makererean. On October 9, 1962, it was Uganda’s turn, with Milton Obote as prime minister. Obote also was an old Makererean.
For those of us on the Hill at the time, Wordsworth better sums up the moment: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”21
VII
We were young! Peter Kĩnyanjui, then president of the Makerere Students Dramatic Society, sought to celebrate the bliss with something more than drink, dance, and speech. We cannot share the moment with Shakespeare, he told me, referring to our previous roles in Macbeth in African robes, he as an actor and I as an assistant director.
Kĩnyanjui had graduated from Alliance a year after me, but even there he stood out as a great actor in Shakespeare’s plays and in their modern counterparts. At Makerere, he played
“So?” I asked him.
“See the writing on the wall,” he said. “Wanted! A three-act play. Help us make a dramatic point with your penpoint,” he added, for emphasis.
I had never dreamed of anything more than a one-act drama. And now Kĩnyanjui was asking for a play with which to mark and celebrate Uganda’s independence. In the wake of the triumph and disaster over The Wound in the Heart, the chance request presented an opportunity and a challenge. Seize the time; seize the day.
I said, “Only on one condition: that we perform it at the Kampala National Theater.”
“A deal,” he said. The society would look into the matter of venue; I, into the matter of script.
5
Penpoints and Fig Trees
I
Sixteen years later, at the Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison, in which I was held as punishment for my community theater activities at Kamĩrĩthũ in Kenya, I looked back to that day in 1962, when, with only two small one-acts in my drama writing kit, I accepted Kĩnyanjui’s challenge. I wondered, was it also the moment the writer in me was conceived?
Or did the miraculous conception begin years earlier in the evenings at my mother’s hut where I first heard her stories of Swallow, who carried messages of those in distress; Hare, who fooled the biggies, Hyena, Lion, and Leopard, even arbitrating among them; Donkey, who brayed sorrow and shat mountains at the same time but also was so stubborn; and the scary two-mouthed ogre who lured beautiful maidens into his lair up in baobab and sycamore trees?