Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening
Page 15
Conrad’s work was like a bus tour of a world where European royalty and Christian clerics drank wine from the skulls of the slain in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, then went to Church to count their blessings one by one. Colonialism was “just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale.”6 It was a dying world, but one that still had a strong hold on the living, like those at the Tank Hill party.
The formalistic close reading of texts and the Leavisite moral scheme of “high” versus “low” culture that were prevalent in the Makerere English Department were not adequate to study that aspect of Conrad or to help me fully comprehend the dying world and the one supplanting it. To do so would have meant giving a name to what was really unfolding in Uganda and Kenya, which would have meant understanding the subjugated world of which the issues in The Black Hermit were a vague reflection.
The play had focused on ethnic divisions as the primary threat to the new nations. Events unfolding in Kenya and Uganda were confirming the thesis. In Kenya it was the white-settler-backed KADU, allegedly representing smaller communities, the Maasai and Kalenjin in particular, against KANU, allegedly representing the big ones, the Luo and the Gĩkũyũ in particular. Other communities scattered their allegiances between the two political parties.
A similar situation was emerging in Uganda, as in other African countries, where a patchwork of different communities, each with a traditional ruler or political boss, was trying to form new nations. Turtles come to mind.
The story goes that Turtle was once the proud owner of a whole skin, but one day he had Eagle fly him to skyland, where everybody admired his wholeness. Eagle was unhappy at the attention accorded his friend. He left for earthland without even alerting his companion about the journey back. When time was up, turtle had no alternative but to jump back to earth. He landed all right but with his bones scattered. A healer had to put them together but didn’t do too perfect a job. Unlike turtle, who still holds his patchwork together with a centripetal pull for survival, using the patchwork to his advantage as house and camouflage, the ethnic centrifugal pull was straining the national skin.
Promoting ethnic divisions as political tactic was not a new discovery; it was a colonial inheritance. Colonial capital needed whole contiguous territories held together by railways and roads, and cities to make the mining of resources easier and more efficient. But colonists didn’t want the same communication systems to create a sense of national cohesion.
The economic centripetal and the political centrifugal forces were supervised and kept in perpetual tension by the colonial army and police in a hierarchy that went all the way from the foot soldier to the king, queen, or president, and their role was to protect extraction of wealth from the earth. In Kenya, African political associations across ethnic lines were banned until two years before internal self-rule. But white settlers could form countrywide associations, though they didn’t need them, because the state served their interests.
The colonial state thrived on divide-and-rule. And within each ethnic patch, the state created a class whose mind-set was molded by the culture championed by the entire system of education, with its rewards and punishment, praise and censure. Even those who would emerge as champions of a new dispensation would have an outlook rooted in mastery of the colonial language. The ruling language was always the colonial.
Colonialism could not have been expected to nurture and encourage its opposite and survive. The class and ethnic divides could not be overcome by perpetuating the same vision that created, nurtured, and exacerbated them in the first place.
The divisions could have been meaningfully countered only by a bigger vision, certainly one different from the one that had created and nurtured them. Thereby hangs a tale whose implications we could not and did not see at the time.
Each successive government pledged to maintain the inherited standards. Continuity was the name of the game, whose rules were written in closed sessions in London, Paris, or Brussels. But these standards, assumed to be the ideal, had been created and maintained by manipulation of differences of region, development, class, race, and even religion. And we had pledged not to change the foundation on which the standards had been created and maintained. We wanted to have our cake and eat it, too.
The structures on which those standards rested were defended by the army, police, and civil service. Even without conscious malice aforethought, those whose lives had been least disrupted by the struggle were the ones readiest to take over and continue the standards. A verse in one of the popular dances said it well: “The players on the field won the match, but the spectators took home the cup.”
Even before the arrival of the small masquerade in June, those who had played it safe by design or default or luck were ready to step in the arena. When the big masquerade arrived on December 13, 1963, the army generals and police chiefs who yesterday were hunting down LFA soldiers in the mountains and rounding up others in the streets now marched as the new national army and police force, pride of the new nation. They hoisted the new flag and sang the new anthem, whose lyrics and melody had been entrusted to Graham Hyslop, one of the cultural pillars of the colonial era. The words are good, but we couldn’t even trust a Kenyan to do it or, at the very least, compare the different offerings.
The big cheer of the new nation went to a mountaineer, Kisoi Munyao, who scaled Mount Kenya and planted the green, red, and black flag at the top. His feat thrilled millions: the pride was put into a popular lyric and melody that repeatedly called on Munyao to raise high the flag of three colors that signified blood, land, and blackness:
Munyau haicia bendera
Haicia bendera
Munyau Haicia bendera
Haicia bendera
Nĩ ya marũri matatũ
Haicia bendera
Haicio bendera
Nĩ ya marũri matatũ
Haicia bendera
Mũtune thakame iitũ
Haicia bendera
Na mũirũ gĩkonde gitũ
Haicia bendera
Ngirini nĩ ithaka citũ
Haicia bendera
Ngirini nĩ ithaka citũ
Haicia bendera
Haicia
Haicia
Haicia7
The masses sang the same theme or similar themes in all the languages of Kenya. It felt good to hear that song and the national anthem. No longer would I have to ask God to bless our precious king or queen, begging that he or she may long reign over us. At long last, Kenya and Zanzibar, which regained their independence the same month, joined Tanganyika and Uganda to make the entire East African region a colony-free zone.
The Tank Hill mentality reemerged in all the territories, but this time ominously wearing army uniforms. Within days of each other and all within the month of January 1964, there was an uprising in Zanzibar and army mutinies in Tanganyika, Kenya, and Uganda. And in all the countries, the new leadership sought help from Britain to quell the mutinies from sections of the army, the same army that Britain had handed over as a standard to maintain. In the case of Zanzibar, the former colonial master played coy and did not interfere. Why were these soldiers doing this to us? At Makerere, we fumed, siding with Nyerere, Obote, and Kenyatta in their reactions and feeling their humiliation at having to call on the former colonizer to talk down or put down the mutinies.
It was interesting that in Uganda the man who started his military career in the kitchen of the British Army in 1946, who rose through the ranks by ruthlessly collecting the heads of LFA soldiers and their supporters, who was left by the British as the most highly placed African officer in the Ugandan army—this man was one of the main beneficiaries and emerged out of the mutiny as a brigadier and head of the military. We didn’t realize then that Idi Amin had his counterpart in Kenya, at least. Daniel arap Moi had been inserted by the colonial state into the political process in 1954, in the heyday of the anti-LFA campaign, and he always seemed to be the main beneficiary of every major political crisis.
A great change of heart, I noted, recalling a gem in Norman Leys’s book, Kenya: “I, on the contrary, cannot forget what these same men did and permitted to be done when they had things their own way, and I distrust any change of heart that conflicts with people’s strongest interests and long cherished and dearest ambitions.”8 The colonial powers that had built their empires on the back of the black body now said they wanted to be taken as trusted partners in empowering the black body.
However, these were mere bumps in the road called freedom. The bumps couldn’t take away the fact that I now went to college in an African country that had shed the colonial cloak, that delegations from the administration, the oil companies, and other industries were holding job talks on campus, daily. Heaven’s gates were opening for college graduates past and present.
We could also see changes in the composition of the faculty. In 1959, when I entered the college, there were hardly any African or Asian lecturers on the campus. But by the time of the big masquerades, Makerere had had a few, including Bethwell Ogot, Simeon Ominde, David Wasawo, Mwai Kibaki, Senteza Kajubi, and Ali Mazrui. Most of these would later play roles beyond the academy, but their presence at Makerere was a matter of collective pride. It was a sign of the changing times.
With independence, I had another way of framing my college times. I entered Makerere in 1959, a colonial subject, and left in 1964, a citizen of an independent Kenya.
12
Working for the Nation
I
It was as citizen that I took the final exams to fulfill the requirements for a bachelor’s degree from London University. I don’t know whether it was my way of psyching myself or escaping the pressure, but on the weekend before the exams started, I went off to climb rocks outside Kampala with a rock and mountain club of which I was a member. I had joined the club because of my fear of heights. I wanted to overcome the fear by climbing under expert guidance. The club had helped me explore the different landscapes and rock formations around Kampala and beyond. The experience was very much in tune with my awe and love of nature, which had been my inspiration for many of my stories. But on looking back, it was not a very smart thing to have done. Too much relaxation can put defensive nerves to sleep. But I did manage to regroup and sit through all the exams with a degree of optimism.
What a relief when I handed in my last exam! The journey that began with my peasant mother sending me to school in 1947 had ended. The fact that my novels had yet to be published was my only disappointment. I had hoped that Weep Not, Child, at least, might have come out before I left Makerere. I had already sent back edited proofs to London, with an unspoken plea: Please, please Messrs. Heinemann, I want to leave Makerere a published student! But it was clear, with the exams over, that the publishers had not heeded my silent prayers. Now to the anxiety of waiting for the publisher to deliver was added that of waiting for exam results from the University of London. Either way, word from London would determine my future. But no matter the outcome, with two novels, one major play, two one-act plays, nine short stories, and over sixty pieces of journalism, I was confident that I had redefined the limits of what it meant to be a student.
I started worrying about jobs. I turned to the Nation newspapers: I had been their opinion columnist for two of their three years of existence. They responded promptly. They would take me on as a reporter while also continuing my opinion page.
Actually this was not the first time I’d worked for the company in a capacity other than as a weekly contributor to the Sunday Nation. The Daily Nation had given me temp jobs, for which I was grateful because, apart from better pay, they had freed me from even contemplating a return to the EAAFRO crowd and blackaphobic Moses. Michael Curtis was then editor of the Nation. I had met him once or twice; he was kind and considerate and didn’t treat me as just a temp.
I had also made friends with the few African journalists then working for the Nation Media Group, in the Taifa Leo section, George Mbugguss, especially. As a journalist reporting and writing for the Nation from urban black neighborhoods—Kariakor, Bahati, Pumwani, and Shauri Moyo1—in a regular column called Mbugguss Mitaani, he was the Kenya equivalent of the Drum writers of South Africa, the generation of Can Themba, Lewis Nkosi, and Bloke Modisane: the tough, self-assured, ties-worn-loose urbanites reporting on the lumpen-life in black ghettos or the shebeens (unlicensed taverns) where pure alcohol was distilled and served. It’s not that I ever saw Mbugguss drinking hard, but it was the image conjured by his reporting from those locations. By the time I started working there, however, he was no longer in the field: he was assistant editor for Taifa Leo.
Sans Chique, on Government Road,2 behind the Nation offices, then on Victoria but today on Mboya Street, was our “watering hole,” but as a student I couldn’t afford more than what the Taifa Leo lot, such as John Chui and Hezekiah Wepukhulu, could occasionally treat me to. Chui had good sources among the rising politicians and bureaucrats but was also down-to-earth and knew his way around the city. I had never realized, until I met Wapekhulu, that writing on sports could be so addictive. He loved it, talked about it, was thrilled by it. He tried unsuccessfully to get me to accompany him to the games, but I enjoyed the thrills of the soccer field through his narratives.
A newspaper office looked like a marketplace—noisy typewriters and a constant flow of reporters in and out of the office. Motion, noise, and telephones. When a telephone rang at your desk, you were supposed to answer it. It could be news from a field reporter or a reader. But I was terrified of the telephone, and initially I would wait for another reporter to answer it. Word about my fear of telephones must have reached the news editor, who told me I had to answer them.
I hadn’t grown up with telephones. In my youth, there was only one telephone booth serving the whole region, in the main post office in Limuru. Going there to “wait for a telephone call” from Nakuru or elsewhere was itself a sign of privilege: you came from a family that received telephone calls. It involved ceremony, with a gang of one’s friends, in their Sunday best, accompanying the “waiting team” to the post office, a few miles away, and sometimes it meant being at the post office the whole day without the expected call. But even this became the subject of stories, the envy of those not privileged to have participated in the boredom.
It took me some time to get used to taking notes from a long-distance caller: a frustrating job, and with bad lines, one could spend hours saying repeatedly, “Hello? Hello?” Even the experienced reporters were not thrilled with telephone dictation, and they often passed the task on to me.
Initially, as a temp, for a big story, I would accompany the more seasoned reporters to learn the ropes, but for the small ones, the news editor would send me alone. I discovered that getting a good story was an art. I was once sent to interview an Indian diplomat who was leaving Kenya. I went to his office, and for the next hour he gave me one platitude after another about the good relations between India and Africa and his own work in helping promote these good relations. I took down everything. The news editor did not use my story. The next day, he sent a senior reporter to the same diplomat, with me tagging along. The same office. The same character. But as soon as we sat down, my experienced colleague noted a pin on the lapel of the diplomat. “Oh, this one . . . The diplomat, startled, told a very detailed story
of a journey he had undertaken to a village. This story led to others similarly personal and very concrete, not couched in evasive diplomatic language. My fellow reporter’s story was carried as a feature.
On another occasion, on a Sunday afternoon, I was sent to cover a political rally of Doctor Munyua Waiyaki. Waiyaki, a medical doctor, was among the many African intellectuals and nationalists educated in Fort Hare, South Africa, but also the least in stature among the big three of Nairobi district politics, the others being the more dramatic C.M.G. Argwings-Kodhek and the more popular Tom Mboya. I had a soft spot for Waiyaki. Not only did he attend Alliance High School in 1945, years before me, but he was actually the grandson of the legendary Waiyaki. But nearer my heart, his name was the same as one of the characters in my novel “The Black Messiah,” later published as The River Between. The rally was in one of the African neighborhoods, Shauri Moyo. I took a bus to the place. Instead of standing near the platform or near my competitors from the East African Standard, I sat among the adoring crowds, taking down copious notes. I had no shorthand and so had to devise my own personal system of abbreviations, not the most economical or efficient.
As soon as the main draw, Dr. Waiyaki, had finished talking, I left the rally so as to write the story to meet the deadline. I didn’t know how, but in the bus on my way back, I felt that I was being watched. When I got off the bus, I felt I was being followed, and it was a relief when I finally left Victoria Street, now Tom Mboya Street, and entered the premises.