Wrestling with the Devil

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

  Wasonga Sijeyo once called me aside and told me never to build any certainty of release on false hopes: “It is good to have faith, to keep on hoping. For what is life, but hope? Never prevent a man from hoping, for if you do, you are denying him reasons for living. To hope for a better tomorrow, to dream of a new world, that is what is human. But don’t be so certain of the hour and the day as to let it break you if the hoped-for freedom does not come at the expected hour and day.”

  We sat on the pavement facing the stone walls that divided our compound from that of the Kenyans condemned to die.

  Then he told me about his past experiences with dreams of freedom. On at least three occasions, he had been very sure of release. The first dream had its origins in a strong rumor from the guards at Kamĩtĩ and was given substance by certain assurances from the tribunal at its sitting in Shimo La Tewa Prison, Mombasa. He waited, unable to sleep, hope climbing on hope. Nothing came of it. The second had even greater substance. It was after a Luo delegation had visited Kenyatta. The delegation was promised Wasonga’s release. A prison officer even told him to be ready, for he could be summoned to Kenyatta’s presence any day, any hour. For a week or so, he lay awake, riding on tenterhooks of hope. Nothing came of this.

  The third dream that seemed almost a reality was the furthest from reality, a nightmare, really, and it was clearly meant to destroy him forever. Again he was told to get ready. He packed his luggage, all the precious little things that one accumulates in prison, and got into his civilian clothes. But at the gate, the officers looked at the official documents and announced in hurt surprise the late discovery of an elementary error that even a child could have detected. “Very sorry, Mr. Sijeyo, but it was not you.”

  Because of these experiences, Wasonga was the most reserved and cautious whenever there were any individual or collective jubilations at rumors of imminent release.

  2

  One such premature jubilation was based on revelations from the Koran; what later came to be known as the Koran theory of freedom. Islam was introduced into the compound by members of the Kenya Somali nationality.

  Ahmed Shurie and Mohamed Abdilie led the daily festival of five prayer sessions (facing Mecca) and a feast of songs in Arabic and Somali. Before the arrival of the Somalis, the only religion was Christianity in the form of two of its major divisions—Catholic and Protestant, led by Father Lawless and Reverend Ngarĩ. Now the two largest world religions, Islam and Christianity, and their two rival books of God, the Koran and the Bible, contended for adherents at Kamĩtĩ Prison.

  The Military Man and I were the only political prisoners who belonged to neither camp. Instead we would play a game of chess or else stand by and watch the proceedings from afar. Islam was the first and only one to make a dramatic conquest. Adam Mathenge, previously a Catholic, became a Muslim. The ceremony of conversion took place on Monday, January 30, at 1:30 p.m. and was watched by all the political prisoners. He became Adam Ahamed and he wore a Muslim cap. I didn’t see any Muslim become a Christian.

  I was fascinated by the two religions, especially by the differences between them. The Muslims at Kamĩtĩ believed in the literal truth of every word in the Koran, with no room for interpretation or metaphor. They told me that the Koran was not just a book. Like the Torah of Judaism, it contained a way of life, a culture that regulated all of a person’s actions. Because it looked more reduced to ritual, Islam seemed the more demanding of the two religions: five prayer sessions a day and, for those aspiring to religious leadership, recital of the whole Koran from the first to the last page, once a week. For Islam’s adherents, the Koran was a world. The Christian Bible, on the other hand, did not contain a rigid way of life, a totality of culture or rules governing daily behavior, and for its adherents, especially at Kamĩtĩ, it was not a world. Christianity was certainly much less demanding in observance of ritual: there were group meetings only when the Protestant chaplain came to visit.

  The Christian chaplain had told me, the Bible is a whole library. Sixty-six books. “You don’t need any more.” The Muslim sheikh used to tell me, “The Koran is the only book you need. It contains all the knowledge there has been, there is, and there will be.” Both claimed that their book was the book of God. But it was the Muslims who seemed to believe more in their book as the infallible word of God, a word-for-word transcript of a tablet in heaven, as revealed to the Prophet Mohamed by the angel Gabriel, for they turned to it, read it, to find out what would happen tomorrow; for instance, who among the Muslim political prisoners would get a family visit and when.

  Now Sheikh Ahmed Shurie read the Koran, and he saw the stars scattering away and oceans rolling, and it was revealed to him that we would all be released on Madaraka (Internal Self-Rule) Day by the grace of Jomo Kenyatta, though the order would come from God.

  Thus June 1, 1978, saw a high temperature of expectation, especially among the Muslims. Most of the non-Muslims expressed doubts about the veracity of the revelations, but we all hoped that the prophecy would come true—whether through revelation or coincidence, it didn’t matter. The calm dignity with which the sheikh kept on asserting the inevitability of our release and the way he would smile confidence at the doubters, made some of us suspect that maybe some friendly guard had whispered vital information to him. But a systematic, though not open, inquiry among the other Muslims revealed that the entire revelation came through the Koran, which was a more reliable source of truth and prophecy. One Muslim political prisoner had even packed his luggage, ready to bolt to freedom at any hour of the day or night.

  Nothing of our freedom came on Madaraka Day. But so sure was he of the truth of the revelation that even on June 2—the newspapers had not yet been stopped—the sheikh asked that all the papers should be read carefully for any clue or hint about our impending release.

  It turned out that Kenyatta’s speech at Madaraka was the shortest ever, and it contained not a single word about the fate of political prisoners. But reading between the lines, we were all sure that Kenyatta was seriously ill.

  3

  It was about the same time that two doves started flying low over the compound, sometimes even perching and cooing on the high walls. Now emerged the dove theory of freedom. In Biblical Jewish mythology, the dove was the bird that brought the good news to Noah’s Ark that all was now well with the earth and he could return home to land from his exile in the sea.

  In some African mythology, the dove also plays an important role as the messenger of peace and hope. There is a beautiful Gĩkũyũ story in which dove, after being fed with castor-oil seeds by a pregnant woman whose life and that of her baby are threatened by a man-eating ogre, Irimũ, agrees to undertake a journey to go to her husband, a blacksmith, Mũturi, in his smithy, far away. It sings to him:

  Smith smithing away

  Cangarara—ĩca!

  Smith smith quickly

  Cangarara—ĩca!

  Your wife has given birth

  Cangarara—ĩca!

  With a man-eater for a midwife

  Cangarara—ĩca!

  The dove sings so persistently and movingly that the smith at once goes back home and releases his wife from misery by killing the man-eater.

  There is another story in which the dove puts together the bones of a dead girl and molds back her flesh using mud, then breathes life into her, and she walks back to her joyous parents with her former beauty multiplied tenfold.

  Now, at Kamĩtĩ it turned out that the last three releases—of Achieng Oneko, John David Kali, and Samson Nthiwa—were each preceded by the mysterious sudden appearance of two doves, one of them actually landing in the yard. One political prisoner believed that if one of these current doves landed in the yard, it would be a sure sign of the imminent release, if not of all of us, of at least one, most likely himself—but a release all the same.

  No doves landed in the prison yard. (When I arrived home after my release, I found doves in the yard. They had nested on the roof of the house. I aske
d Nyambura, “When did these birds come here?” She replied, “In January 1978, soon after your detention.”) But the doves went on increasing in numbers, so that by December about twenty doves were making regular flights over the compound, eliciting many jokes about the dove theory of freedom, but also exciting fantasies of their flight in freedom. The dove theory of freedom and the heated controversy, fantasy, and speculation it aroused—much more than had been aroused by the Koran theory—recalled poem seventeen in Dennis Brutus’s book, Letters to Martha:

  In prison

  the clouds assume importance

  and the birds

  With a small space of sky

  cut off by walls

  of bleak hostility

  and pressed upon by hostile authority

  the mind turns upwards

  . . .

  the complex aeronautics

  of the birds

  and their exuberant acrobatics

  become matters for intrigued speculation and wonderment

  Dennis Brutus, writing about his experiences in a South African prison in 1965, could now speak with uncanny insight to us at Kamĩtĩ, Kenya, in 1978, penned in a similar inglorious spot. Perhaps it is poem eleven from Letters to Martha that best sums up our experience with these successive dreams of freedom:

  Events have a fresh dimension,

  for all things can affect the pace

  of political development—

  but our concern

  is how they hasten or delay

  a special freedom—

  that of those the prisons hold

  and who depend on change

  to give them liberty.

  And so one comes to a callousness,

  a savage ruthlessness—

  voices shouting in the heart

  “Destroy! Destroy!”

  or

  “Let them die in Thousands!”—

  really it is impatience.

  The last line is false as an explanation, though true as a description. The essence lies in the second stanza. For Robben Island in South Africa, as for Kamĩtĩ in Kenya, the poem speaks of a situation in which the release of political prisoners depends on the whims of a bourgeois dictatorship. For these prisoners, their final dream of freedom comes to rest on objective change to give them liberty.

  4

  When I first arrived in Kamĩtĩ, the one question that nearly all the groups shot at me was about Kenyatta’s health. Quite innocently, I would tell them that Kenyatta was in excellent health. On hearing this, the group would drift away in silence without asking another question. It was Thairũ wa Mũthĩga who was to tell me the reason later: “Believe me but we have lost any hope of release through the tribunal or through presidential mercy. Since J.M. Kariũki’s murder, no political prisoner has been released . . . sorry, there was Ochieng Oneko, but we believe he was released to mollify public opinion after the detention of Shikuku and Seroney. So our hope rests on Kenyatta’s death. You don’t believe me? No political prisoner is going to be released until after Kenyatta’s death. That’s our opinion, anyway. So when you told us that Kenyatta’s health was excellent, you were crushing our hopes without your knowing it.”

  This theory of freedom—Kenyatta’s death as the liberator—gained momentum, especially after the collapse of the Koran Madaraka theory and the refusal of the tribunals of January and July to release anybody, especially those like Mwanzia (in Shimo La Tewa), Ongongi Were, and Wasonga Sijeyo, going into their seventh, eighth, and tenth years respectively.

  On Tuesday, August 22, we were locked in our cells at the usual time of 4:45 p.m. As was my daily habit, except when stuck in a writer’s block, I now sat at the desk exorcising out of me all the images reflected in my mind during the day as I walked for exercise, or played tenniquoit or chess, or listened to arguments or narrations or reminiscences. The novel had become my most important weapon in the daily combat with the stony dragon.

  A guard brought me a note from Wasonga Sijeyo: “The greatest has fallen or he is about to fall. Keep this to yourself. Will confirm tomorrow.”

  He had been reading Ali’s autobiography, The Greatest, and I assumed that he was talking about the fall of Muhammad Ali from the boxing throne. But why the uncertainty? He had either fallen, in which case it was news, or he had not, in which case it was speculation, and speculation was no news. And why the caution: “Keep this to yourself? I wrote back another note, for my suspicions and curiosity were now aroused, and I could not wait until morning. “Do you mean THE greatest in boxing?” The reply came through the wall. Just one word, “No,” and I there and then knew what was already public knowledge in Kenya, in the whole world, but for us political prisoners forbidden knowledge:

  Jomo Kenyatta was dead.

  In the morning I cornered Wasonga. He confirmed it: Kenyatta had died in his sleep while on a “busy working holiday in Mombasa.” His last companions were a group of foreign emissaries. “But let’s keep this to ourselves, for the time being. I myself will tell Koigi.”

  It was a rule among us political prisoners that the sources of one’s information were always to be protected. We didn’t want to jeopardize the job of any of our informants or cut off such sources of information.

  It was a most terrible burden trying to keep this vital information from our fellow political prisoners—for it meant so much for each one of them—but we could not turn off the tap of information by committing any indiscretion. For a day, the three of us who carried the burden of our knowledge would speak a thousand silent questions with our eyes or faces, but none had the answer.

  Gradually the news was passed to each political prisoner individually under the strictest promise not to show any feelings on his face, in his voice, or in his behavior toward officers and guards.

  And so for three days, a game of hypocritical silence was played in Kamĩtĩ: the guards pretending that all was as usual and we pretending that we didn’t understand their sudden absent-mindedness, their quick little surreptitious groupings, or their forced laughter. Now simple questions like “How is the weather outside?” or “How is life outside?” though spoken innocently, would suddenly acquire a special symbolism, and you’d see a warder cast a quick suspicious glance or else wince before recovering and trying to laugh off the inquiry.

  It was a most unreal situation. There was an important drama in Kenya’s history being played outside the walls, but here at Kamĩtĩ we were all pretense, actors in a theater of extreme absurdity.

  Ironically, it was Reverend Ngarĩ, the Protestant chaplain, who broke down the walls of this dance of absurdity. For some reason, the chaplain had grown more likable over the year; those who had known him in previously said that they’d noticed a change of attitude toward political prisoners. He had grown less ready to preach at them as if he assumed their guilt and the government’s benign benevolence. He had stopped talking as if all they needed to do was accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, confess all their past political sins, and go back to Kenyatta’s paradise, the envy of the rest of godless Africa. Some of the political prisoners even started missing him; they’d ask, “When is Reverend Ngarĩ coming?” Or grow wistful: “Reverend Ngarĩ has deserted our compound these last few weeks.”

  Between him and me there had grown a mutual acceptance of each other’s position. After our initial encounter, he never again tried to force his religion on me, and I in turn never questioned his right to believe in it. He would come, greet me, ask after my health or comment on the game of chess, and go to his religious sessions with the others. He had, though, some kind of victory over me.

  One day he came with tapes containing a sermon by Reverend Gatũ and challenged me, on the basis of my stated premises, to hear it: had I not in January asked him about sermons by Kenyan nationals? I attended the session, the only one I ever did, and heard Reverend Gatũ at his oratorical best: he was attacking the leprosy of private property and property accumulation, basing his sermon on the text of the sto
ry of Ahab, who had stolen Naboth’s vineyard, after Jezebel, Ahab’s wife, had the poor man murdered. I could hardly believe my ears!

  When on Friday, August 25, Reverend Ngarĩ came into the yard, he seemed disturbed. He didn’t make the rounds greeting people; he certainly did not greet me, and twice he came in and out within a space of fifteen minutes before settling down to the usual religious session. But it turned out not to be the usual religious session. It was as if he sensed that the political prisoners had silently laid a trap for him: they wanted to see if he too—a proclaimed man of God—would participate in the grand deception. It was probably difficult for him, walking on the tightrope between his vows to his Christian conscience and his vows to his prison conscience. He resolved the conflict in prayer. In the course of the prayer and without mentioning names, he prayed to God to keep in peace the soul of the leader who had departed from among us and to guide the hand and heart of the one who had taken over the reins of power. Then he walked out of the compound to avoid responding to any direct questions!

  Now the Muslims (and we, the two nonbelievers) surrounded the Christians to make them describe to us every word of the chaplain, every change of nuance and tone of his voice, every word of his sermon, his gestures and behavior, everything. It was as if the Koranic revelation had been or was about to be fulfilled through a sermon from the Christian Bible.

  Even after this, the theater of absurdity went on, but now all the actors were police, prison officials, and guards. We were still officially ignorant of Kenyatta’s death, and Daniel Arap Moi’s takeover.

  At one time, the guards were summoned by prison officials and put under the strictest orders with threats of dismissal not to reveal anything about Kenyatta’s death to us or to reveal by word or gesture what was going on outside the walls.