Wrestling with the Devil

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

  As for me, I learned a lot. I had been relegated to the role of a messenger and a porter, running errands here and there. But I also had time to observe things. I saw how the people had appropriated the text, improving on the language and episodes and metaphors, so that the play, which was finally put on to a fee-paying audience on Sunday, October 2, 1977, was a far cry from the original tentative awkward efforts that Ngũgĩ and I had put together. I felt one with the people. I shared their rediscovery of their collective strength and abilities, and their joyous feeling that they could accomplish anything—even transform the whole village and their lives without a single harambee of charity—and I could feel the way the actors were communicating their joyous sense of a new power to their audiences, who went home with gladdened hearts.

  Before long, we had received one delegation from Gĩkambura village, in Kikuyu, and another from Kanyarĩrĩ, asking how they too could start a similar community cultural project. A group of teachers came from Nyandarwa North, and they too wanted to start their own Kamĩrĩthũ.

  Then suddenly the KANU government, through its Kĩambu district commissioner, struck with venom. In a letter to the chairman of Kamĩrĩthũ Community Educational and Cultural Centre dated December 16, 1977, he withdrew the license for further performances of Ngaahika Ndeenda, plunging a three-year-old communal vision into a sea of sorrow and depression. He later gave reasons for banning further performances, citing public security. He should have more truthfully cited the public insecurity of a few individuals who thought their reservoir of cheap labor and sex was threatened by the new confidence generated among the villagers by the new theater.

  The comprador bourgeoisie could have their golf, polo, cricket, rugby, tennis, squash, and badminton, their horse and motor races, their royal hunts, their German, American, French, English, and Italian theater, cinema, music, and concerts, their swimming pools and expensive sauna and massage clubs, their choice of expensive drinks after an easy day’s work, their gambling casinos and striptease joints with imported white nudes, and their endless cocktail parties with participants featured in the socialite pages of Viva, the Daily Nation, and Chic, but peasants with clods of clay had no right to a theater that correctly reflected their lives, fears, hopes, dreams, and history of struggle, had no right to their own creative efforts even in their own backyards. The church, with its eternal call for submissive trust and blind obedience, and the foreign-owned breweries of mass-produced soporific drinks were now their only legal cultural alternatives.

  These men who had so callously razed the Kamĩrĩthũ people’s cultural effort to the ground (some, like the D.C. Kĩambu, had not even bothered to see it) had acted in the dog-in-the-manger tradition of those “faceless faces of important men” once described by Sylvia Plath in her poem “Three Women”:

  It is these men I mind:

  They are so jealous of anything that is not flat! They are jealous gods

  That would have the whole world flat because they are.

  They might be flat, but they had the power of police truncheons and law courts, of the bullet and the prison, and woe unto them who challenge the legal enforcement of flatness!

  A problem remained, however. The office of the district commissioner, Kĩambu, had duly licensed the play’s performances. Everything at the center had been done in the open, including the play-reading sessions, the selection of actors, and all the rehearsals. Kamĩrĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre was itself legally registered as a self-help project with the Department of Community Development of the Ministry of Housing and Social Services.

  In its official submissions to the UNESCO general assembly in Nairobi in 1976, the government had made a very strong case for rural development integrated with culture, including rural village theaters as a central core of the program, and this proposal had been accepted. Indeed, a senior cabinet minister in the government was then the current president of UNESCO. Now a popular people’s play had been refused further performances by a government that had hosted UNESCO and endorsed its cultural policies, and no satisfactory reason was forthcoming!

  How now to deceive the nation and the whole world? Incarcerate the whole village? Detain a whole community? But there had been no riots, no drunken brawls, and no open defiance of any existing laws. On the contrary, the crime rate and drunkenness in the village had markedly fallen for the duration of the play’s run! Besides, detaining a whole village would severely drain a necessary reservoir of cheap labor. Who would now pick tea leaves and coffee beans? Who would cultivate the fields for a pittance?

  For them, there was an easier way. What right had a university professor to work with ragged-trousered workers and tattered peasants and even “pretend” to be learning from a people whose minds we have decreed should never rise above the clods of clay they daily break? What is he really up to? Let us thwart his intentions—whatever they are. Incarcerate the clever fellow!

  And they did! At midnight, December 30, 1977, they took me from my home and led me to Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison in chains. For a whole year, I was to remain in cell 16 wrestling with multifarious demons in the dry wilderness of Kamĩtĩ Prison, contemplating the two dialectically opposed traditions of Kenyan history and culture and colonial aesthetics. They had raised colonial Lazarus from the dead. Who will bury him again?

  *See my memoir, In the House of the Interpreter.

  5

  Wrestling with Colonial Demons

  1

  Wrestling with demons in the stony and dusty wilderness of Kenya’s detention camps since 1895 has produced two types of political prisoners: those who finally succumbed and said yes to an oppressive system and those who defied and said “Never!”

  The demons led the acquiescent types down the abyss of despair to a valley of white bones. There they allowed them a glimpse of African Sisyphus endlessly laboring to push up the rock of oppression, only to see it roll back to the original spot. This is your black fate, the demons told them, and waited for their reactions. When the demons saw that they believed this vision of despair, they let it overwhelm the prisoner. Then sympathetically and graciously they would offer mediation services. First they would give the prisoner another dose of pessimism. The prisoners sank further into despair; they felt helpless. Then suddenly or gradually, depending on how they read their character and the situation outside the stony wilderness, the demons showed them the only way to personal salvation: “See no evil. Hear no evil. Resist not evil.” The prisoner who took that way out came out of the wrestling match a broken soul, ready to denounce in words and deeds his previous stands and actions.

  Harry Thuku was the greatest threat to colonial settlerdom in the 1920s. As the leader of the East African Association, he inspired the workers to organize to fight against forced labor, female and child slavery, high taxation without even a little representation, low wages, and the oppressive kipande (identity paper) that all African males sixteen or older were obliged to carry chained around their necks. Unlike some labor leaders, who bought into the view that trade unionism could be divorced from politics, Harry Thuku clearly saw that the solution to the workers’ problems lay in politics. The economic emancipation of the worker would come through political struggle and never through apolitical trade unionism.

  Thus the East African Association further demanded that Kenya must not be a colony, that elections to the legislative council should be on a common roll, and that all the stolen lands should be returned to the rightful owners. Harry Thuku strenuously fought and exposed the divisive ideology of racism, rejecting, for instance, the white settlers’ attempts to divide Asian and African workers. This was the Harry Thuku1 who could write so movingly about the emerging unity of workers of different nationalities and religious faiths. He wrote in the workers’ newspaper Tangazo:

  I was very delighted to be travelling to the meeting at Ng’enda because I was accompanied by the school-teacher, Samuel Okoth, a Christian from Maseno; and two Muslims, their names were Abdulla T
airara and Ali Kironjo. We were very pleased at our trip for we travelled as brothers. And I saw no difference between the Kavirondo and the man from Kikuyu, or even between the Christian believer and the believer in Islam.

  Thus, the famed “traditional rivalry” between Agĩkũyũ and the Luo people was clearly a later colonial invention. The fact is that, right from the beginning, the two nationalities had the biggest working-class elements. Unity among Mũgĩkũyũ workers and Jaluo workers (because of their numbers) was always a threat to imperialism in Kenya, and Harry Thuku understood this. Unfortunately, so did the settlers and the long line of Kenyan collaborators with imperialism. They had to create artificial rivalry, as they still do.

  This was the Harry Thuku who, on being threatened by the colonial regime with the choice of either losing his well-paid job at the treasury or giving up political struggle, promptly and proudly replied, “I choose politics.” This was indeed the Harry Thuku who could see that colonial chiefs, like Kĩnyanjui, were like dogs: “They bark at the sound of other dogs, when their masters want them to, and also when they want to be fed by the government.”

  Not surprisingly, his arrest on March 14, 1922, brought about one of the biggest workers’ mass protests and demonstrations ever in the streets of Nairobi. The colonial regime, true to its cultural traditions, responded to the workers’ demands for Thuku’s release with mounted troops and rifles. One hundred fifty workers, including their leader, Mary Mũthoni Nyanjirũ, were massacred. At the Norfolk Hotel, the “House of Lords,” the settlers—the Happy Valley crowd—joined in the massacre and cheered and drank whisky at the sight of the workers’ blood. This Harry Thuku has already moved into the realm of legend, and I have treated him as such in the early chapters of my novel A Grain of Wheat.

  After nine years of lonely detention and imprisonment at Kismayu, Lamu, and Marsabit, where he was constantly indoctrinated by the demons in the physical form of district commissioners, he came back, joined the militant KCA (the political successor to his banned East African Association) and he, having succumbed, immediately tried to turn it into a colonial instrument.

  Fortunately, Jesse Kariũki and the other KCA leaders saw through him. This was a different Thuku from the one for whom women workers had composed a praise song, nicknaming him Mũnene wa Nyacĩng’a. In people’s politics, there is no room for sentimentality. It can prove fatal and treacherous to a movement, and the KCA leaders had grasped this. They threw him out.

  Harry Thuku wasted no time in acting out his new chosen role of colonial messenger. He formed a loyalist Kikuyu Provincial Association to fight against the Kenya nationalists:

  Every member of this organization will be pledged to be loyal to His Majesty the King of Great Britain and the established government and will be bound to do nothing which is not constitutional according to the British traditions or do anything which is calculated to disturb the peace, good order or government.

  This colonial zombie, a total negation of his earlier predetention self, could years later write admiringly about colonial chiefs whom earlier he had correctly described as dogs:

  Some of the bravest people during Mau Mau were the Christians; many were murdered because they refused to take the oath. And if they were forced they would go and confess the next day. Chief Njiiri was like this too. When the Emergency broke out, he hoisted the Union Jack in the centre of his village, and I remember one meeting with Sir Evelyn Baring where I was present when Njiiri asked for permission to go into the forest and fight “these evil people” himself.

  He should have added that the same chief was later to smash his radio set to pieces when in 1961 he heard that Kenyatta and the other nationalist leaders were to be released from prison to return home to lead Kenya into independence.

  In his autobiography, published in 1970, Harry Thuku shows not the slightest awareness of his divided loyalties. The colonial ethic of submissive trust had done its work. Harry Thuku was broken by nine years of detention and imprisonment and said yes to colonial culture.

  Jomo Kenyatta was another terror of colonial settlerdom and imperialism in the 1930s and 1950s. This was the Kenyatta who, as a KCA delegate in London, wrote in the Sunday Worker of October 27, 1929, words still ringing with contemporary relevance in today’s anti-imperialist struggles:

  The present situation means that once again the natives of the colony are showing their determination not to submit to the outrageous tyranny which has been their lot since the British robbers stole their land. . . . [Kenyans] have found themselves constantly denuded of their land, and compelled by means of forced labour to work the vast natural wealth of their country for the profit of their interloping imperialist bosses. Discontent has always been rife among [Kenyans] and will be so until they govern themselves. . . . Sir Edward Grigg talks of “agitation”; there is agitation, an agitation that meets a hearty response from robbed and maltreated Africans, and will not cease until we are our own rulers again.2

  Recalling the 1922 massacre of Kenyan workers outside the Norfolk Hotel, he wrote a strong denunciation in the Daily Worker of January 1930 with the prophetic words that Kenyan people will never forget these imperialist atrocities:

  I was in the crowd myself and saw men, women and children killed, and many others lying in agony. It was a most terrible massacre of people who were quite unarmed and defenceless, and the people of Kenya will not forget.

  Or later in 1934, in his contribution to Nancy Cunard’s anthology, Negro:

  Kenya is the most important British colony in East Africa. . . . During the past thirty-five years [our] people have been robbed of their best land and are reduced to the status of serfs forced to work on their own lands for the benefit of the white “owners,” and even in some circumstances to work without pay or food. . . . The soul of the African is stricken nigh to death by confiscation of its ancestral lands, the obstruction of its free development in social and economic matters, and its subjugation to an imperialist system of slavery, tax-paying, pass-carrying, and forced labour. This policy of British imperialist robbery and oppression aroused the greatest alarm and anxiety amongst the Kenyan Africans, the outcome of which was the revolt of 1922, when defenceless Africans, men, women and children, were shot down by these filibusters.

  Yes, this was the Kenyatta who could castigate in the strongest possible terms the colonial Happy Valley culture of golf, polo, whisky, whoredom, and murder of Africans for sport. He condemned the seduction of African girls “to satisfy their bestial lust,” concluding that colonialist “civilization is all in the interest of capitalist greed and imperialist exploitation.” In the 1933 issue of Marcus Garvey’s Negro Worker, he wrote, “The missionaries . . . are agents of the imperialists who teach Africans that they must tolerate all oppression and exploitation in order that they shall have a good home and better conditions in heaven when they die.”

  In the November 1933 issue of the Labour Monthly, Kenyatta might almost have been talking about the Africa of the 1980s when he wrote the following prophecy:

  Perhaps many will ask: what can we do against an imperialist government which is armed with machine guns, aeroplanes and guns, etc? My answer to that is we have learnt examples from other countries. And the only way out is the mass organization of workers and peasants of various tribes, and by having this unity we shall be in a position to put up a strong protest against this robbery and exploitation.

  There, all Kenyan Africans must fight for their liberation. We cannot forget how we have been exploited and oppressed through these solemn “pledges.” Let none of our countrymen have any faith in these imperialist hypocritical “promises” which mean nothing but the oppression and exploitation of the masses. In this fight we shall have the support of all who are oppressed by the British slave empire—the Indians, the Irish, the South Africans—all these people are revolting against this damnable empire whose days are numbered.

  With the support of all revolutionary workers and peasants we must redouble our efforts to bre
ak the bonds that bind us. We must refuse to give any support to the British imperialists either by paying taxes or obeying any of their slave laws! We can fight in unity with the workers and toilers of the whole world, and for a free Africa.

  Good morning, revolution! The Kenyatta of the 1930s was talking about the imminent inevitable collapse of the old British Empire, falling to the united blows of its enslaved workers and peasants. Yes, Kenyatta was talking about a liberated Kenya, concretely meaning the liberation of all the workers and peasants of all the Kenyan nationalities from imperialist economic exploitation and political and cultural oppression. More, he was talking of a free Africa—in 1933!

  This was the Kenyatta of “the burning spear,” of whom the Kenyan masses then rightly sang as their coming savior. This was the Kenyatta reflected in my novel Weep Not, Child, about whom the peasant characters whispered at night. The remnant of this Kenyatta could still, in 1952 at the Kapenguria trial, denounce imperialist justice and reject any and every abject accommodation.

  In saying this, I am asking for no mercy at all on behalf of my colleagues. We are asking that justice may be done and that the injustices that exist may be righted.

  Following the tone he set, the rest of the Kapenguria Six stood luminously splendid in their defiant rejection of imperialist justice: “Impose any sentence you like!” they all said, and they were jailed.