Wrestling with the Devil

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

  * * *

  It turns out, according to Koigi, that Military Man has never been in military service, but he happened to be social friends with some in the military later arrested and detained without trial for being suspected of plotting a coup. The real military officer—the chess partner who came before me—had told on him. He is a victim of social contact; at any rate he was never in the military. But since his imprisonment without trial, he has internalized the military thing, and in his mind he was really in the military. What about his seemingly good knowledge of the PLO and even naming some of the leaders and other actors in the Middle East? Well, there was a period, before my time, when they were allowed newspapers, and the Military Man had an incredible memory that retained all the details. He had a way of inserting himself in the stories in a manner that seemed convincing, except that logic dictated the contrary. Plus, the real military officer, who had been transferred, had told them the truth. I became even more interested in his fiction.

  * * *

  He lived in a fantasy in which brave men would eventually rescue him, and when angry with the prison officials, he would hint at some kind of retribution. Whatever it is, the fantasy, I suppose, keeps hope alive . . . hope . . . and one needs hope in this hopeless place.

  Does it matter how one gets it, whether from religious faith or in the rightness of one’s political beliefs? Or in the stories of a Military Man sustained by dreams of a giant dramatic rescue?

  * * *

  I will try a diary of life in prison. I’ll record everything that happens: what I see, touch, smell, hear, and think. But no matter how hard I try, no words will form on paper. I was never one for writing diaries and records, and whenever in the past I have tried it—at Manguũ and Kĩnyogori primary schools, at Alliance High School, at Makerere and Leeds universities—I have always had to give it up after one or two false starts. I am too close to the events for me to see them clearly or to immediately make out what’s happening to me.

  Besides that, I find that here at Kamĩtĩ, in a certain sense, everything is so very ordinary—well, worse than ordinary, for time here is sluggish, space is narrow, and any action is a repetition of similar nonactions—that I have nothing outstanding to record. Yesterday as today: Is that enough for a diary?

  For similar reasons, I have never tried to write an autobiography—even when publishers have requested it—for my life has been ordinary, average really, and it would bore me to death. No, I’ll let impressions form in my mind until they accumulate into a composite picture.

  But I could write about premonitions, wish fulfilments, because these have always struck me as oddly inexplicable. My very first piece of writing to be published, in the Alliance High School Magazine, was based on a belief we used to have as children, that if you strongly desired your aunt, whom you had not seen in a long time, to come home, you could actually make her appear by dipping your head in a black pot and whispering to her. I think I did that once. And she came home. In the story, when I try to demonstrate my occult powers, the results are negative.

  Many critics have pointed out the parallels between my own arrest and detention and similar but fictional events in the opening and closing chapters of my novel Petals of Blood. It opens with the arrest of a progressive worker—he is deceived into believing that he is wanted at the police station for a few questions—and it closes with his eventual detention and imprisonment on suspicion of being a communist at heart.

  Or one Sunday a week before my arrest, and for the first time in my life, I drove past the outer gates of Kamĩtĩ Prison, lingered there for a few seconds wondering what it really looked like inside, before continuing my slow drive to a friend’s house at Kahawa. I was there for only a few seconds. Suddenly I felt sad and tired. “You know,” I told him as we looked at books in his study, “I feel as if I am living on borrowed time.”

  But what I really want to write about is the day, in fact the Wednesday before my arrest, when the whole Limuru countryside seemed the most glorious landscape I had ever seen. Madly, I drove past Kikuyu, past Dagoretti Market, past Karen and on to Ngong Hills. The day was very clear, the sky a brilliant blue, and the landscape a luscious green. Down below was the whole expanse of Maasailand and the Rift Valley. To my left, facing Nairobi, I could see a very clear outline of Mount Kenya with its snowcaps against the blue sky. The same for Kilimambogo . . . and the Akamba mountain ranges beyond Athi River town. . . . Everything seemed to grow beautiful and clear under a skin-warming sunshine. “I have never seen Kenya like this,” I told my companion. Let’s go back to Limuru via Gĩthũngũri.

  I try to scribble something about this experience, and it sounds unreal, sentimental, and I am unable to write more than two lines. But throughout my forced stay at Kamĩtĩ, unable to see any green landscape, any contours of valleys and hills and mountains, I continue remembering the vision of that Wednesday with a kind of gratitude.

  * * *

  My argument with the reverend keeps on coming back to me. I grew up with the Bible, mostly the Old Testament, and most of the characters—Abraham, Isaac, David, Joseph—were my early companions in my village. This was because when I learned to read and write, the only book readily available was the Gĩkũyũ language Old Testament. I enjoyed some magical moments: Jonah surviving three days in the belly of a fish; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego surviving fiery flames. It’s the survival part that’s most appealing.

  * * *

  But some sections of the New Testament, as well: the Sermon on the Mount, John the Baptist surviving his sojourn in the wilderness on honey and wild berries. The devil tempted him to quit? The devil once even dared tempt Jesus. They had wrestled with the devil, and emerged stronger from the contest. Did the reverend come to tempt me?

  * * *

  I resent the fact that they cannot tell us a thing about the outside, not even about rain or wind or sunshine. Birds fly far above the walls of the prison. I wish they could lend me their wings, just for a day. What would I do with them? Visit my family, my village, but also what? Oh yes, go to all the houses and offices of those in power, making mischief, or land at caves where they’re planning corruption, and scatter their plates and knives, practical jokes. And then back. No, I won’t come back, I will not come back to this confinement. But the fun is in going and coming back, at will, and enjoying their foolishness in thinking they can confine me within their man-made walls. But this—going and coming—is what I do night and day. I visit my family. I walk the streets. My imagination is my wings of glory.

  * * *

  A novel. That’s what I must do. In Gĩkũyũ. That would be fun, writing a novel in the language that made them bring me here. Yes. Combine fun with fight and flight. But no story would form.

  * * *

  There was a time when I visited Vihiga and western Kenya. I fly back there, and I see the rocks, the Napoléon rocks, and I remember I had wanted to write a story about it. I had even started it? But I cannot remember the plot. All I recall was that there was a devil in it.

  * * *

  Kim Chi Ha’s poem “The Five Bandits” tells the story of a contest of skills in theft among a business tycoon (whose custom-made suit is tailored of banknotes), a politician, a bureaucrat, a general, and a government minister. I read it from The Cry of the People, a book of his poems I picked up in a bookshop in Tokyo. I have been teaching it at the University of Nairobi, and it goes down very well. I can visualize a similar competition among those who brought me here.

  * * *

  I need paper. Pen. Writing material. The warders have plenty. I want to write something, I tell them, hinting it might even be a confession; the older political prisoners had told me of the trick. It always works, they had told me, because that’s what they want us to do, confess, and indeed the chief warder readily complies. A ballpoint, but only a few sheets. Never mind. I can supplement that with, well, toilet paper. Good. The idea eludes me.

  But soon another idea steals into my sleep. It begins to form
a shape. Around a competition among wealthy robbers. Probably not so original, remember Kim Chi Ha? But it strongly appeals to me.

  * * *

  Jesus and the devil come back to my mind.

  * * *

  I still wrestle with my arguments with the reverend. The idea that it was the devil and not Christ who should have been executed on the cross plays in my mind. Jesus was an opponent of Roman imperialism, a proponent of the kingdom of the least among us, a visionary who saw the poor, among whom he walked, as inheriting the earth. The devil was an ally of Roman imperialism and its oppressive practices, a self-serving criminal whose followers, exploiters of the poor, have as much chance of entering heaven as a camel through the eye of the needle. A competition of modern robbers organized by the devil. But the story refuses to form.

  * * *

  Chief Mohamed Nurie tells me fantastic Somali folklore of heroic exploits by Kabaalaf and Egal Shidad. With little variations of word and place, they are like those of Hare and Abunuwasi.

  Hadji Dagan tells me about the real-life anti-imperialist military and literary exploits of Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, the great African patriot whose history Kenya shares with Somalia. Does he belong to Kenya or Somalia?

  Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia share common borders, some common nationalities, and hence some common history. The united peoples’ socialist states of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia, a union freely entered by the peoples of the three territories, holds a great future because of the past the three peoples share.

  Idle thoughts: to whom would the imperialist powers sell the obsolete products of their war industries?

  * * *

  The trouble with you educated people is that you despise your languages. You don’t like talking to ordinary people. But what use is your education if it cannot be shared with your own people? Let me tell you. You may possess all the book education in the world, but it’s we, ordinary people in tattered clothes with bare feet and blistered hands, who have the real knowledge of things. If I was to wear a suit today, you would see me a different person, but it would not mean that I had suddenly acquired more knowledge and wisdom than I had when wearing tattered clothes. Have you seen any European calling himself Mutiso, Kamau, Onyango, Kiplagat, or Simiyu? Have you seen Europeans abandoning their languages and bothering about our languages? Let me tell you something else. Yes, I may not have book knowledge, but even a child can give you a word that might benefit you. You people, even if you follow Europeans to the grave, they will never never let you really know their languages. They will never—and mark my words, don’t look down upon a drop of rain—Europeans will never let you into the secrets held by their languages. . . . What do you then become? Their slaves!

  It is an ordinary Mũgĩkũyũ warder talking to me, no, actually lecturing me, for I am speechless with disbelief. Is he trying to trap me into something indiscreet, anything? Does he know what he’s talking about? Doesn’t he know that I’m here precisely because of trying to communicate with peasants and workers—ordinary people, as he calls them?

  But there is a kind of frank bitterness in his voice that shows much sincerity in his holding me and my “class” responsible for the cultural plight of Kenya. I think he is utterly unconscious of the fact that what he is saying, were he to try and put it into practice, could land him in this very detention block.

  I say he is genuine in his utter lack of consciousness of the heretical nature of his position on culture, because he is one of the few warders who seem to have been completely cowed by prison and authority. If you asked him about the weather outside, he would shrink back in fear, pleading: “Please don’t play fire with my job. It is where I get daily flour for my children.” So in saying this to me, it is probably because he thinks it a safe subject. Languages, culture, education? Who cares? I am content just to listen to his monologue.

  What have Europeans done to you people that you follow them like dogs their master? What have they done to you that you despise your own tongues and your own country?

  I cannot answer him. I am itching to tell him about the Kamĩrĩthũ experiment, but I know that if I so much as mention the name Kamĩrĩthũ, he will freeze in terror, change the subject, and move away from the door of cell 16. But his talk has stung me in ways that he will never know.

  That night I sit at the desk and start the story of Warĩnga in the Gĩkũyũ language. I don’t know how, but the idea of a competition of robbers organized by the devil becomes central to Warĩnga’s adventures. It flows just like that, and for the first time since my incarceration, I feel transports of joy. That which I have always toyed with but feared—writing a novel in Gĩkũyũ—is happening before my own eyes, and I have government toilet paper for writing material and a government-paid guard as a consultant. I am ever willing to learn. In prison, more so.

  * * *

  Throughout my stay in Kamĩtĩ, and looking at all the Kenyan nationalities represented in this compound, I note one dominant tendency. While in ordinary social talks, petty reminiscences, and occasional jokes and family problems, people tend to retreat into their own nationalities, when it comes to serious issues, confrontation with authority, demands for our rights and justice, the walls of nationality break asunder and people group around given positions vis-à-vis the issues. Even when it comes to the interpretation of Kenyan history and Kenya’s future, people tend to group around definite ideological positions.

  I have seen a similar tendency among the warders of different nationalities. There are times when they express the bitterness of an oppressed, exploited class and talk to us as if they see in us just members of an exploiting, oppressing propertied class who have only temporarily fallen from grace and out of favor with other brothers-in-plunder.

  * * *

  Strange how a place acquires its own personality, history, even culture and special vocabulary. All those who have been in this compound have become part of the spirit of our history as political prisoners. Those of us who are new can never hear enough about the personalities, characters, anecdotes, exploits, words, songs, and sayings of those who were here before us and have now left. Cyrus Jamaitta, Achieng Oneko, J.D. Kali, Ndhiwa, Mak’anyengo, Waweru Gĩthiũngũri, and the renowned mganga (medicine man) Kajiwe, etc.—all these acquire legendary proportions in our imagination. Even some senior superintendents of prison (SSPs) and prison officers who have served in this block and have left, have become part of the block’s history and legends. It’s as if we are all part of an undeclared social fraternity.

  * * *

  If you were in prison for life or if you were shipwrecked on an island, what books would you like to have with you and why? That used to be a favorite question of literature teachers at Alliance High School and later at Makerere College. The normal response was to mention, not the books one would have liked to have—the situation envisaged by the question was anyway too remote even for imagination—but the novels or the volume of plays or poetry that one had studied in depth, on which one could do an adequate critical appreciation to earn one a good mark.

  But here at Kamĩtĩ, the question is no longer academic, and when I receive news that my books have arrived, I tremble with excitement at the arrival of a package from home and with eagerness to know which books have been allowed through by the police and prison censors.

  In Kamĩtĩ, there’s no library of any sort. This is a great indictment of conditions in government prisons. The Bible and the Koran are the sole official library. A few political prisoners have had books sent them from home, and they have lent me some. I have particularly enjoyed reading Shaaban bin Robert’s Maisha yangu (My Life) and Masomo yenye adili (Lessons with a Moral); Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities; René Fülöp-Miller’s Leaders, Dreamers, and Rebels; John Abbott’s Life of Napoleon Bonaparte; Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Fragments; Aristotle’s Ethics; and Dennis Brutus’s Letters to Martha. Otherwise, the titles and authors available are too few and too limited in emotional and intellectual range. Therefore in asking f
or authors and titles from my home library, I have taken into account both my needs and those of the other political prisoners, so the list includes several authors and titles I have read and taught at university.

  I am happy, though, for a prison reunion with Voltaire, Balzac, Molière, Zola, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Sembène Ousmane, Shakespeare, Bertrand Russell, and Claude McKay, and to make new acquaintances like Elechi Amadi and Thomas Mann.

  Suddenly I stop, shocked by those titles and authors that are barred by the censors. Books about British colonialism in Kenya are not allowed; hence W. McGregor Ross’s Kenya from Within, a history discussing British colonial fascism in Kenya in the 1920s, has not come through.

  Books about the Boer oppression of Africans in South Africa are not allowed through; hence Donald Woods’s Biko has been returned to sender.

  Books about slavery, racism, and political oppression in the heartland of imperialism, the USA, are not allowed; hence Alex Haley’s Roots has also been returned to sender. I now want to know more.

  From the other political prisoners, I learn that any book discussing socialism (or simply with socialism in the title) is not allowed in, and of course any books bearing the names of Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Stalin, not to mention Mao Tsetung, are banned from detention. I am also told that Abdilatif Abdalla’s book of poems titled Sauti ya dhiki (Voice of Agony), based on his experiences as a political prisoner at Kamĩtĩ, as well as my novel Petals of Blood, have been returned.

  Now a few prison puzzles. Why has Mwendwo nĩ Irĩ na Irĩĩri (One Favored by Wealth and Honor) been returned? The title? The language?

  Why has William Ochieng’s book, The Second Word: More Essays on Kenya History, been returned? Most of the books by William Ochieng, which I had read before detention, were based on a neocolonial interpretation of Kenyan history. Could this book be different? Or was there another reason for banning it? The fact that he now teaches at Kenyatta University College? The fact that he once taught at Nairobi University, where I also used to teach?