Wrestling with the Devil

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

  But I am grateful for what has been allowed through, especially for Gorky’s Selected Short Stories and Selected Plays. Truly beautiful is Gorky’s story of Danko, who, when his people are trapped in a big, dark, and apparently impenetrable forest in their march toward liberation, courageously rips open his breast and tears out his heart and holds it high above his head to lift up their flagging faith. “It shone like the sun, even brighter than the sun, and the raging forest was subdued and lighted up by this torch, the torch of the great love for the people, and the darkness retreated before it.”

  Danko’s story reminds me of one of Blake’s proverbs: He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

  Gorky has shown the way. Art should encourage people to bolder and higher resolves in all their struggles to free the human spirit from the twin manacles of oppressive nature and nurture.

  * * *

  J.M. Dent, publishers, have an interesting sentence in all the books that bear their imprint of Everyman’s Library. The book is supposed to be telling the reader: “Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side.” The line is taken from a medieval English morality play. But it is Wasonga Sijeyo who makes me recall the line.

  “Books,” he tells me one day, “books have kept my mind alive. Without books, I don’t know if I could have survived this long. If prison has taught me anything, it is a big respect for books. You know I never went to anybody’s formal school. Not even once. All my education has been in the streets of struggle or else in concentration camps.”

  He is very widely read, with a keen, informed interest in geography, astronomy, philosophy, biology (especially the character and behavior of animals), world history, culture, literature, religion, and, of course, politics. His knowledge of the material culture of the Luo nationality is truly phenomenal, and I keep on urging him to write a book about it.

  As I see him devouring Russell’s three-volume autobiography, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Balzac’s Père Goriot and Eugénie Grandet, he symbolizes the kind of brilliance and genius pushed to the fore in periods of genuine people’s struggles. The 1952–1962 armed struggle of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) was such a period in Kenya’s history, and Wasonga Sijeyo was one of its direct products. I am sure, and I keep on telling him, that a story of his own life would be very instructive to Kenyan youth and he should write it down.

  I wish, though, that I had asked for Gorky’s three-volume autobiography, My Childhood, My Apprenticeships, and My Universities. I’m sure Wasonga Sijeyo would have readily recognized Gorky’s universities.

  * * *

  However, no book or shelf of books can substitute for the book of life. The fascination people find in newspapers is precisely the illusion of daily participation in and a record of active life. Reading through a newspaper, one gets glimpses of a tapestry of life as it is being daily woven by actions of numerous men and women.

  In prison detention, where people are not allowed newspapers or the radio, the thirst and hunger for news are sometimes unbearable in their torturous insistence.

  Thus, gathering news at Kamĩtĩ is a psychological imperative, and the political prisoners have developed a fantastic instinct for nosing out and extracting news from reluctant warders. A political prisoner who goes out to the hospital or to meet his family must be hawkeyed. He must learn to tune and turn his ears with the deftness and alertness of a cat or a hare. Every word counts. Every building, vehicle, street, dress, and color of trees counts. When he returns to camp, each of these is discussed and analyzed from every possible angle till they yield all their secrets. A similar process, of course, takes place outside the prison, where radio and other media are so uninformative about the real events that people inevitably rely on inferences, deductions, and the grapevine. This is what is erroneously termed rumormongering by the rulers. But in prison, as outside, these inferences are often correct and help make sense of what’s unfolding.

  Sometimes a warder has gone out to buy, let’s say, a toothbrush for a political prisoner. He might bring it wrapped in a piece of newspaper. Should he forget to remove it, then the piece of paper, however tiny, will be seized, and once again, every word, every line, will be discussed and analyzed until it too yields all the secrets, past and present.

  One day, I get a dramatic illustration of news gathering at Kamĩtĩ. I am in cell 6. I feel down because after writing a whole chapter of my new novel without a problem, I have now come to a dead end. Every writer of imaginative literature knows the frustration and desperation that seize a person during such moments. It is naturally worse in prison.

  Suddenly Mathenge, who keeps teasing me that he is the original Kamĩtĩ 6 because his number is K6,75 and mine is K6,77, bursts into my cell with a tiny piece of newspaper no larger than a few square inches. “Look at this,” he shouts. “I collected it from the rubbish-bin outside. I saw a warder throw in some rubbish. I went and saw this, quickly picked it up and hid it before he could see me. It says something about Gachago and Muhuri [Jesse Mwangi Gachago and Godfrey Muhuri Muchiri, two prominent politicians at the time] and conviction, and oh, yes, look, there’s a letter J . . . oh, wait, let the warders come on night duty.”

  At night two warders come. Then suddenly Mathenge calls out one by name:

  “Hey! Have Gachago and Muhuri started their years on the other side?”

  “You mean the two MPs? They started some time ago.”

  “How many years?”

  “Five each. Plus a few strokes.”

  “What for?”

  “Coffee, of course. Magendo. Corruption.”

  Then suddenly the warder realizes that he’s talking to a political prisoner and he stops short.

  “Who told you?”

  “Never mind. Walls have voices.”

  Tomorrow Mathenge will use this information just gathered to get more information about where the two politicians are held, and within a week the whole story will be out, all from the guards’ own mouths.

  The news, though, has an unsettling effect on me. Magendo, corruption, smuggling ivory, gemstones, game-skins, coffee, corn, rice, sugar, unga, tea has been a way of life among the ruling circles in Kenya. Even the smallest child in a village could tell you the names of Big So-and-So, Tall So-and-So, Fat So-and-So, Moral So-and-So, Holy So-and-So, Upright So-and-So, who had camped at Chepkubwe2 waiting for his tons of coffee, later transported to Mombasa under police escort. Why then pick on these two lawbreakers? Or were they just sacrificial lambs to propitiate an angry populace and buy time for a rotting, falling-apart system?

  Capitalism itself is a system of unabashed theft and robbery. Thus theft, robbery, and corruption can never be wrong under capitalism, because they are inherent in it. Well, they are the structure. Without a systematic robbery of peasants and workers, a robbery protected and sanctified by laws, law courts, parliament, religion, armed forces, police, prisons, and education, there is no capitalism. It is worse, the robbery, when a country is under the higher capitalism of foreigners, which is imperialism. How else explain the fact that in a mainly agricultural country, peasants who farm often have to line up for yellow corn from America and Britain after what they have produced has been carted or sold or smuggled to those very countries? Lenin once defined imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. Imperialism is the capitalistic robbery and theft of a country’s wealth, human and natural resources, by foreigners aided, of course, by a few sell-out natives. Two MPs put in the cooler for small offenses while the fat cats continue profiteering unabated.

  And suddenly I discover the hitherto elusive theme of my prison novel. I grow literary wings. I am ready to fly. All because of a piece of newspaper little larger than a square inch retrieved from a trash bin by a fellow political prisoner!

  * * *

  Political prisoners have also learned to gather news from the guards by reading their faces and group behavior. Certain kinds of groupings by certain warders have come to mean
that some upheaval, good or bad for the political prisoners, has happened outside the block. A certain kind of laughter from the crueler guards has come to mean that something not to the advantage of political prisoners has occurred, while a certain kind of sadness and fear on the same faces has invariably come to mean good news for us. This intuitive news-gathering style is inherited by succeeding waves of inmates. An analysis of patterns of laughter and anger, of sadness and irritability, of gait and gestures, has become a daily ritual among the political prisoners. I have been assured that, augmented by judicious and well-timed questions, it often yields very important news! And accurate! But I do not quite believe it at first, and my skepticism registers on my face.

  One day, Gĩcerũ wa Njaũ comes to my door, and he tells me, “I would like you to watch the faces of warders A, B, and C. Observe the fear in their eyes. See how they walk? Some major event to our advantage has occurred.”

  Throughout the day, I maintain a careful watch on the said faces. Alas, their faces yield nothing to me. But later in the week, news leaks out. The commissioner of prisons, Andrew Saikwa, has been dismissed, and Edward P. Lokopoyet, the SSP in charge of Kamĩtĩ, has been transferred to another prison.

  I have never seen anything like it. The old SSP comes to introduce the new SSP (a Mr. James Mareka). When he announces his own imminent departure from Kamĩtĩ, the political prisoners actually clap in a collective spontaneous delirium of joy even before they know how the new SSP will turn out to be.

  For me, relief too. The old SSP will never now demand to read and approve “my poems.” I have never anyway written poetry, in or outside prison.

  * * *

  For a while, the reliefless senseless cruelty ends, and Kamĩtĩ under the new SSP becomes, relatively speaking, a paradise.

  The new SSP ends the practice of locking up political prisoners for twenty-three hours a day. He will deal professionally and legally but reasonably with the occasional defiance of prison regulations and rules. He makes clear that he will not be a pushover. But there will be no more collective punishment unless there is a collective insurrection. Our cells will be opened at six in the morning and locked at five in the afternoon. We shall now be in our cells for thirteen instead of twenty-three hours.

  The new SSP allows us to form our own committee for settling any disputes between us political prisoners, and as a vehicle through which we can present complaints that affect us all. Gĩcerũ and I will be on this committee throughout the rest of our stay. The other members, at different times, are Wasonga Sijeyo, Hadji Dagan, Mohamed Abdilie Hadow, and Ali Dubat.

  The new SSP orders the reconnection of the radio, and for the first time, we can hear Voice of Kenya and foreign news, such as it is, and listen to sounds of music, such as it is. We dance to the sound of music. On the concrete corridor. The new SSP promises us a guitar!

  The new SSP allows us to start classes. Most of the Somalis join English classes conducted by Mũhoro wa Mũthoga, popularly known as Fujika. Now he acquires another name—Mwalimu. His cell, no. 9, becomes a school.

  The new SSP allows us to buy our own newspapers: the Weekly Review, The Standard, the Daily Nation, and Taifa Leo. They are ruthlessly censored wherever there’s a reference to any one of us, but that’s a small price to pay for the privilege of a little contact with the outside world. Better a newspaper with holes all over than no newspaper at all.

  “During your reign,” Wasonga Sijeyo tells the new SSP in a vote of thanks on behalf of us all, “we shall be free!”—meaning that his humaneness is a good omen.

  * * *

  That’s how we come to learn about events like the Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia and the uprising in Shaba (aka Katanga) Province against the Zairean regime of Joseph Mobutu, and the subsequent invasion and occupation of the area by the French to protect Euro-American investments.

  That’s how we come to learn about the heart surgeon Professor Christiaan Barnard’s visit to Kenya as a guest of the attorney general, Charles Njonjo, and about his open defense of racism and apartheid, and his insulting advocacy of ties between Kenya and the dying regime of South Africa.

  I incorporate his visit into my novel.

  * * *

  Writing it makes me better able to cope with life in the block, almost as if, through “stolen” pen and “stolen” toilet paper, I am in daily combat against the forces that had incarcerated me. Most important, time flies.

  * * *

  In the newspapers one day, I see Mĩcere Mũgo, pictured during the 1978 Kenya Schools Drama Festival at the British-run Kenya National Theatre, denouncing the continued dominance of foreign imperialist cultural interests in Kenya, and my heart leaps in joy.

  Mĩcere, a colleague in the literature department at the University of Nairobi, and I co-authored The Trial of Dedan Kĩmathi to rescue him from political and literary burial. Kĩmathi was still buried at Kamĩtĩ prison, but he will forever live in the collective memory of the Kenyan people. Like Waiyaki before him. Like Koitalel before him. Like Me Katilili and Otenyo and Nyanjirũ and many other heroes before him.

  * * *

  On another day, I read news of Charles Njonjo’s launching of Yusuf Kodwavwala Dawood’s novel No Strings Attached (Spear Books, Kenya, 1978) at a ceremony in the Serena Hotel. I read with interest his unstinted praise of the novel, its good, correct, grammatical English, and his attack on those who launch books without first reading them, books moreover that attack the government. I note that while reaffirming the right to freedom of expression, he warns Kenyan authors “not to write about things which might embarrass the government in the eyes of the public.”

  Dawood’s novel is published by Heinemann, and the reported occasion takes me back to the launching of one of my novels, Petals of Blood, by Mwai Kibaki, then minister for finance, in July 1977 at the City Hall, Nairobi. Petals of Blood had also been published by Heinemann, which had hailed the book as a major publishing event! Kibaki had certainly read the novel. He made a speech in defense of literary and intellectual freedom that made him the talk of the university community for the next few months. His words now come back to me with the terrible force of historical irony:

  It is true that writers all over the world want to write and comment on what is going on in their own country of origin. But one of the most terrible things about the modern world is how many writers have had to emigrate to another nation in order to be able to comment on what’s going on in their own country of origin. And it is a tragedy because it means that societies are themselves becoming intolerant, whereas the true freedom in any democratic system should be—as we are trying to do in this country; we have not succeeded yet, but we are trying that those who differ and those who take a different view of the society we live in must be able to paint what picture they see, so that we can have many, many pictures of the kind of Kenya we are living in now, because the efforts by some of the people in the media who write short quick stories, who try to present one picture only, is of course misleading. . . . At least let us give encouragement to those who spend their lifetime writing, commenting on the society that we live in. There is not very much else that we can do but at least we can give them that particular kind of recognition.

  Exactly five months later I was in Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison for helping to write a play in the Gĩkũyũ language, Ngaahika Ndeenda. Strange ways of encouraging Kenyan literature!

  * * *

  Fear of death suddenly dampens our happiness. Shikuku has been on a hunger strike for some days because the authorities have refused to allow him crutches to enable him to walk without crawling against the walls. Shikuku has been on other hunger strikes in prison whenever his rights to medical care and medical prescriptions have not been met. He fights for his rights and is admired for this by fellow political prisoners.

  I had heard about hunger strikes before, but only in books and newspapers, never in real life. Every time Shikuku has been on a hunger strike, I thought he would die. In January, when
most of the others were in Mombasa, he had come to my cell and had allowed me to read all his previous letters to the authorities related to his hunger strikes, just in case.

  The police and the prison authorities would wait until he was on the verge of total collapse. Then they would come for him and rush him to hospital where he would be forcibly fed through the veins. Two or three days later, they would bring him back to prison.

  But this time, it seems to us all, he is in a critical condition. They have kept him for four days. No food. No water. Fifth day. The same. “They want him to die,” we whisper among ourselves. On the sixth day, he collapses. We are all locked up in our cells. They come for him with a stretcher.

  We don’t talk about it. But we are all sure that he is dead. A sense of impending doom grips the whole compound.

  On the fifth day, he is brought back. Without the crutches. But with promises. A few days later, when it is clear that the crutches will not be forthcoming, Shikuku goes on yet another hunger strike.

  They come for him on the fourth day of the strike. But this time they don’t bring him back to cell 11. They take him to an isolation cell in G block to live alone, and we never see him again until the day of our release. But we know he is alive because he keeps on sending guards for books!

  A hunger strike is premised on a readiness to die if one’s demands are not met, and also on the assumption that the other party fears the moral or political consequences of one’s death. But what a terrible thing to watch death knocking at the door of a Kenyan simply because he has made a principled stand on national issues.

  * * *

  In detention, when one is not reduced to the level of a beast, one is certainly treated like a child. You cannot be trusted with sharp weapons because you might take your own life. If you want to shave, you beg for a razor blade from the corporal in charge and then must promptly give it back.