Wrestling with the Devil

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

  Even the glamorous easy riches of independence—for the lucky few—couldn’t deflect him from the path of struggle. He became one of the bitterest critics of the postindependence betrayal of Kenyan people. He kept reminding Kenyatta and the entire KANU leadership that it takes more than a flag and an anthem to make a nation. “We don’t want to create a Kenya of ten millionaires and ten million beggars,” he would add, in stark contrast to Kenyatta’s refrain, “What have you done for yourself?”

  Like Makhan Singh before him, Kariũki had dared to say no.

  4

  Makhan Singh was a communist. He said so both before and after his detention and imprisonment. As such, he was opposed to capitalism. J.M. Kariũki was a nationalist. He was not necessarily opposed to capitalism. He wanted to free national capitalism from foreign control and to build a welfare state in which “everyone will have an opportunity to educate himself to his fullest capabilities, in which no one will die or suffer through lack of medical facilities and in which each person will earn enough to eat for himself and his family.”

  However, they shared a common anti-imperialist national tradition that goes way back to the very early political prisoners—Me Katilili, Waiyaki, Ngunju wa Gakere—who all said no to the colonial culture of fear and rejected its aesthetic of blind trust and obedience to foreign economic, political, and cultural occupation and encirclement. On the contrary, they had rooted themselves in the people’s revolutionary culture of outspoken courage and patriotic heroism, a tradition that Kariũki invoked when as a youth he took the oath of loyalty to Kenya Land and Freedom Army. Afterward, in the maize, he wrote in Mau Mau Detainee:

  I felt exalted with a new spirit of power and strength. All my previous life seemed empty and meaningless. Even my education, of which I was so proud, appeared trivial besides this splendid and terrible force that had been given me. I had been born again and I sensed once more the feeling of opportunity and adventure that I had on the first day my mother started teaching me to read and write. The other three in the maize were all silent and were clearly undergoing the same spiritual rebirth as myself.

  Armed with the new power given him by his total identification with the resistance culture of his people, he was able to face imprisonment and all the temptations in the stony wilderness. Detention could not break him. Only death. But that came later, not at the hands of a colonial commandant in a concentration camp but at the hands of those who had inherited the colonial power.

  In 1953 he was taken from his own small hotel in Nakuru to the first of more than fourteen concentration camps, where he endured seven years of torture. In 1975 he was arrested inside a prominent foreign-owned hotel in Nairobi. After hours of torture, he was sent to a death camp at Ngong.

  A colonial affair . . . a neocolonial affair—what’s the difference?

  5

  It was not very cheering to know that most of those who had said no to the culture of fear died untimely deaths, buried alive in deserts or left on hillsides for hyenas’ midnight feasts. Nor was it pleasant to contemplate that I was now in detention under a regime headed by an ex–political prisoner who had finally given in to years of imperialist pressure. Would a political yes-man ever recognize the rights of a political noman and the human and democratic legitimacy and necessity of that position? Would he, in other words, release a political prisoner who dared say no where he himself had said yes?

  Yes. No. Ndio. La. Two of the tiniest words in any language. But one had to choose between them. To say yes or no to unfairness, injustice, wrongdoing, oppression, treacherous betrayal, the culture of fear, and the aesthetic of submissive acquiescence, one was choosing a particular world and a future.

  Wasonga Sijeyo’s position inspired both hope and despair. He had refused to renounce his pre-1969 anti-imperialist and anti-exploitation views and he was now entering his tenth year at Kamĩtĩ. Others were in their eighth, seventh, fourth, or third year. I was only just starting. That Wuodh Sijeyo looked cheerful and strong in spirit was a source of hope, but that he was now in his tenth year with no hints of release was cause for despair. If release for those who said no depended on the number of years, what hope was there for us who were novices? There came a time when virtually all of us eighteen political prisoners silently said, Let them release Wasonga Sijeyo, at least; that would signal hope for us too!

  I am not trying to write a story of heroism. I am only a scribbler of words. Pen and paper have so far been my only offensive and defensive weapons against those who would like to drown human speech in a pool of fear—or blood. Besides, I would hate to court unnecessary martyrdom. But I searched every corner of my mind and heart to see if I could find a speck of wrongdoing in joining hands with Kamĩrĩthũ peasants and workers in our open democratic venture of building our village, and I could find not the slightest trace of wrong to challenge my conscience.

  If release depended on duration of stay, I was in for a long spell. If it depended on saying yes, then I was likewise in for a long stay in Kamĩtĩ or any other prison in Kenya. For right from the beginning, I was determined never to renounce Kamĩrĩthũ—there was really too much of Limuru and Kenyan history in that tiny village! I was equally resolved to always speak truthfully and proudly about our collective aims and achievements at Kamĩrĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre. I would never, for as long as I lived, and for as long as I was sane, disown the heroic history of Kenyan people as celebrated in Ngaahika Ndeenda, or be a conscious party to the historical betrayal mourned and condemned in the same drama. My involvement with the people of Kamĩrĩthũ had given me the sense of having become a new being, and it had made me transcend the alienation to which I had been condemned by years of colonial education.

  So I was intellectually reconciled to the possibility of a long stay in prison. If Wasonga Sijeyo was the yardstick, then the earliest release date I could think of was 1988. No thought for comfort. Besides, intellectual acceptance was one thing; emotional reconciliation to the stark reality was another. I had to find ways and means of keeping my sanity. Writing a novel was one way.

  I came up with a tentative ten-year writing plan. I would finish the Gĩkũyũ version of the one I was writing by the end of 1978. Gĩkũyũ was the language of my birth. Then I would embark on a Swahili version in 1979. Kiswahili was the all-Kenya national language, with its roots in the culture of Kenya’s coastal nationalities. In 1980, I would attempt an English version. English was a foreign language, but it was an important language in the history of Kenya. All this was in line with my new language policy.

  Thereafter? Maybe I would find other things with which to occupy myself. Besides, one could never really tell how long a novel would take to write. The River Between had taken me one year; Weep not, Child, two; A Grain of Wheat, three; and Petals of Blood, about four years. Maybe the new novel, translations included, would take me many years. Or it might never be completed. For I would continue to write in Gĩkũyũ, and under prison conditions, where one had to keep on playing a game of write-and-hide, with inquisitive guards prying and prowling constantly.

  But writing aside, I knew, in my heart of hearts that my sanity depended on my being able to continually say no to any and every manifestation of injustice and to any and every infringement of my human and democratic rights, a no that included detention itself. I would seize any and every occasion to denounce detention and imprisonment without trial. Yes or no—two great words in their own way, but the greater of them was no when spoken in sound or silence or action against oppression.

  In Kamĩtĩ prison, one of the most oppressive and offensive practices to human dignity was the chaining of political prisoners before giving them medical treatment or letting them see their wives and children. Those who had the misfortune of being hospitalized received even worse treatment. In the operating room, their legs and hands were chained to bed frames while armed police officers and prison guards stood on guard night and day.

  The other political prisoners had told me
about this, and I dreaded the prospect of this unnecessary humiliation. It was not so much the chaining that I minded most—one had no power to resist if it was forced on one; it was the expectation and requirement of a political prisoner’s own cooperation in the rituals of his own enslavement that I found most repugnant. Cooperate in my own chaining as the condition for getting medical treatment that I was entitled to, and as the condition for a five-minute glance at my wife in the presence of an overarmed escort?

  Then a tooth begun to hurt, intermittently at first and then rising to a continuous throb. The prison doctor recommended that I see a dentist at Kenyatta National Hospital. I could not delay the confrontation I dreaded.

  6

  Unchain My Hands!

  1

  Jela ilimshinda, or alishindwa na jela, meaning “prison defeated him,” was an expression often on the lips of guards, discrediting any political prisoner who had physically or mentally broken down within the double-walled compound, almost as if they—the guards—were some neutral referees in a gladiatorial contest between the prison and the prisoner, a contest that the defeated had freely and willingly entered with the sure-to-win braggadocio of a Muhammad Ali.

  The expression was a cover for any fatal or near-fatal ill treatment of a political prisoner: the moral accountability for the disablement is thus thrust back onto the victim, like Karen Blixen’s magistrate holding the murdered Kitosch responsible for his own death because he had moaned in pain, “Nataka kufa” (I would rather die).

  But the guards’ pretense of a contest between prison and prisoner, with cheering or jeering forces behind each, also contains a grain of truth. A narration of prison life is nothing more than an account of oppressive measures in varying degrees of intensity and the individual or collective responses to them. Even if one were getting the best possible food, accommodations, and health care, the fact of being wrongfully held in captivity at presidential pleasure, the forcible seizure of a person for an indefinite time entirely determined by somebody else’s fears, is in itself torture, and it is continuous torture to the last second of one’s detention. All other forms of torture, not excepting the physical, pale beside this cruelest of the state-inflicted wounds upon one’s humanity.

  The imprisoning authorities are not, of course, content to just inflict the wound once; they must keep twisting hot knives into it to ensure its continued freshness. This re-infliction takes various forms: beatings with the constant possibility of being beaten to death, straitjacketing for total bodily immobility, being made to sleep on cold or wet cement floors without a mat or a blanket so the body can more easily contract disease, denial of news or books to weaken the intellect, bestial food or a starvation diet to weaken the body, segregation and solitary confinement to weaken the heart—these and more are the standard sadisms of prisons and concentration camps. One or a combination of these instruments can be used to keep the wound fresh. And for the duration of the presidential pleasure, the stony dragon remains deaf to all human cries and groans from its captives.

  Saint Man in a deadly combat with the stony dragon: not for comfort the thought that nobody can tell beforehand how he or she will cope with the unsought-for combat. Nobody knows how long the president’s pleasure might last. Nobody can tell how a particular prisoner will physically, intellectually, and spiritually survive the hot knives of torture.

  Many factors come into it: stamina, the occasional measure of fairness and humaneness in the guards and prison officers, the extent and intensity of the jailers’ desire to break their victim, and the degree of the detainee’s awareness of and commitment to the cause that brought that person to jail. More important are the prisoner’s moral standards and principles born of that awareness and commitment. Anitar, an African poet of Arabia, once wrote that despite captivity in slavery:

  I will not leave a word for the railers

  And I will not ease the hearts of my enemies

  by the violation of my honour.

  I have borne with misfortune till I have

  discovered its secret meaning.

  Even with such ideals, however, it is hard to predict one’s bodily or mental reactions to certain forms of torture. Some people can withstand any amount of physical torture; others, any amount of psychological torture; and a few others can withstand all without breaking, even unto death. Kindness can break some; threats, others. Whatever the case, one can tell this only at the hour of trial.

  At Kamĩtĩ, disease and family were the two most frequent means of tormenting political prisoners. First, disease. It was the most dreaded hydra in Kamĩtĩ Prison. “Whatever you do,” the other political prisoners had told me, “try not to be ill. . . . Here they wait until disease has fully percolated through your system before treating you, . . . and even then, they treat you not to cure, but to have it on record that they treated you.”

  One political prisoner suffered swollen veins. His laments would be met with indifference or with the catch-all charge of malingering. Then suddenly he would be whisked off to Kenyatta National Hospital, in chains, under heavy guard, for surgery. Two days later, he would be back in the block, still in chains, but with bleeding cuts. The laments would start all over again. This game of treatment-without-curing had gone on for seven years. He was still hospitalized at Kenyatta National Hospital when news of his freedom reached him.

  Another political prisoner had a wound in the anus: advanced piles. He bled a lot. He had to lie sideways. Eating was torture because of thoughts of the pain to follow. He had been arrested a week before he was due for an operation by a top specialist at Kenyatta National Hospital. His terror was that the wound might extend to his intestines. On arrival at Kamĩtĩ, he had reported his critical condition. It was not until six months later that they took him to hospital for an operation. He could hardly walk. But they put him in chains, plus an armed police and prison squad. At the time of his release on December 12, 1978, he was still uncured.

  My own observation was that at Kamĩtĩ, every political prisoner suffered from one or more diseases: headaches, backaches, toothaches, eye and skin ailments, anything. And the guards had only one explanation, malingering, although there was no work to be avoided. The prison doctor, a man who had been in prison all his working life, had only one explanation: depression. The standard prescription for everything, headaches, stomachaches, toothaches, broken backs and hips, was antidepression tablets—Valium, mostly. “It’s just the effect of jail,” he would say. “You’ll soon come out.” He normally met complaints with a chilling threat: “I can even inject you with water or worse and get away with it. You think you’re more important than Kenyatta whom I used to treat with water at Lodwar?” He was an example of the continuity of the colonial into the postcolonial.

  The most notorious case of disease as punishment was Shikuku’s. Martin Shikuku was a populist, a vocal member of parliament who had made a national reputation for himself by raising awkward issues in the “House of the Honourables.” He was an active member of the committee formed to investigate the case of J.M. Kariũki, the findings and final report of which virtually incriminated the Kenyatta regime in Kariũki’s torture and assassination. He also proposed and won a motion for a select committee on corruption, causing much hatred from the big ones, who proceeded to quash it. Then one day in October 1975, he made a passing reference to the effect that parliament should not be killed the way KANU had been killed. He was detained and put in prison.

  I had mentioned his detention and that of Jean-Marie Seroney in my novel Petals of Blood, so I was naturally curious to see him. One day, soon after my arrival in Kamĩtĩ, I entered his cell. I found him seated on the bed. There was a yellow plastic pail near him. Between every two sentences, he would vomit into the pail. Each time he belched, he would vomit into it. He had to eat about fifteen times a day so that after vomiting something would remain behind to sustain his life. He had been in that condition for two years. I was shaken by this revelation. He was a very sick man really, altho
ugh he took it all philosophically. “That which is hidden under the bed will one day come to light,” he told me. I could never have believed the scene in a supposedly independent Kenya. Why keep a sick man in prison just to prove to him that the ruling party was not dead, that what he thought was death was simply the party’s style of life? I was then under internal segregation and the guard ordered me back to my cell.

  I was looking through the iron bars of my door when suddenly I saw somebody crawling along the corridor, using the walls for support. What apparition was this? It was Shikuku again. He had come to ask me a few questions about the outside. Now I learned that on top of his minute-after-minute vomiting, the man could not walk without support. There was something wrong with his hips. To the guards? He was malingering. To the doctor? He was simply depressed. Although he could not walk without some support, Shikuku used to be chained to his bed in the hospital, with armed police and warders guarding all the exits and entrances night and day. He remained in that tortured condition, the doctors unable to cure him, the authorities unwilling to let him go home and seek his own cure. The instructions to the stony dragon concerning the detained combatant would seem to have been: if you miss his will, don’t miss his body. Break his will, or break his body or both.

  Not surprisingly, fear of illness was itself another kind of disease infecting all the political prisoners at Kamĩtĩ. Along with it was also the fear of being poisoned under the pretext of being treated. I too caught the fever. What I dreaded most was a possible recurrence of my asthma. In Dakar, Senegal, in 1968, I had nearly lost my life after a very severe attack, my inability to speak French hindering my frantic efforts to get a doctor or any medical help. The timely arrival of Ali Mazrui in my hotel had saved me. At home in Limuru, I always kept some quick-relief tablets in readiness. At Kamĩtĩ prison, I was lucky. Not once did I get such an attack, not even bronchial wheezes, but the fear remained.