Dreams in a Time of War

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  The big houses in the plains affected the two brothers differently. After staying with their auntie at Uthiru, my uncle moved away from the hurly-burly of town to seek his fortune in the more rural parts of Ndeiya and Limuru, with the Karaũ family as his base. But my father, fascinated and intrigued by the urban center with its white and black dwellers, remained. Eventually he got a job as a domestic worker in a European house. Once again details about this phase of his life in a white house were few, except for the story of how he escaped induction into the First World War.

  From the time of the Berlin Conference of 1885 that divided Africa into spheres of influence among European powers, the Germans and the British had been rivals for the colonization of East African territories as exemplified by two adventurers: Karl Peters, founder of the German East Africa Company in 1885; and Frederick Lugard of the Imperial British East Africa Company, incorporated in 1888 by Sir William Mackinnon. The territories that these private companies carved out for themselves with the “reluctant” backing of their respective leaders, Bismarck and Gladstone, were later nationalized, which is to say colonized. And when the mother country coughed, the colonial baby contracted full-blown flu. So when in Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, a Serbian student, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and thus launched a European war among the emerging rival empires, the two colonial states, Tanganyika and Kenya, fought on the side of their mothers, hence against each other; the German forces, led by General von Lettow-Vorbeck, were pitted against the British, led by General Jan Smuts. But it was not just the European colonists fighting one another—after all, they made up less than 1 percent of the population. They drafted many Africans as soldiers and members of the Carrier Corps. The African soldiers died, in combat and from disease and other ills, out of all proportion to the European soldiers. Their participation would be all but forgotten except for the fact that the places where they camped, in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, would bear the name Kariokoo, a Swahilinized form of Carrier Corps. Since the Africans were being forced into a war whose origins and causes the natives knew nothing about, many like my father did whatever they could to avoid the draft. Every time he knew he was going for a medical exam, he would chew leaves of a certain plant that raised his temperature to an alarming level. But there are other versions of the story suggesting the connivance of his white employer, who did not want to lose my father’s domestic services.

  From this historical event, and my father’s age group, Nyarĩgĩ, I was able to calculate that he was born sometime between 1890 and 1896, the years that Queen Victoria, through her prime minister, Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, took over what was then a company “property” and called it East Africa Protectorate, and, in 1920, Kenya colony and protectorate. Immediate proof of effective British ownership was the creation of the Uganda railway from Kilindini, Mombasa—the highway of the monster that my father saw spitting out fire even as it roared.

  The Nairobi where my father now worked was a product of that change in formal ownership and the completion of the railway line that eased the traffic of white settlers into the interior from 1902 onward. After the First World War, which ended with the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919, white ex-soldiers were rewarded with African lands, some of the land belonging to surviving African soldiers, accelerating dispossession, forced labor, and tenancy-at-will on lands now owned by settlers, such tenants otherwise known as squatters. In exchange for the use of the land, the squatters provided cheap labor and sold their harvests to the white landlord at a price determined by him. The buttressed white settlerdom did meet resistance from Africans, the most significant movement at the time being the East African Association, founded in 1921, the first countrywide African political organization, and led by Harry Thuku, who captured the imagination of all working Africans, including my father. In him, an African working class, the new social force on the stage of Kenyan history, and of which my father was now part, had found its voice. Thuku forged connections with Marcus Garvey’s international black nationalism to the West, in America, and with Gandhi’s Indian nationalism to the East, the latter through his alliance with Manilal A. Desai, a leader of local Indians. His activities were closely monitored by the colonial secret police and discussed in the London colonial office as a menace to white power. Both Gandhi and Thuku had called for civil disobedience at about the same time in their respective countries. To suppress this Kenyan link between Gandhian nationalism and Garveyite black nationalism, the British arrested Thuku in March 1922 and deported him to Kismayu, now in Somalia, where he languished for seven years. It is probably a coincidence, but an interesting one all the same, that Gandhi was arrested on March 10, barely a few days after Thuku. The workers reacted to news of Thuku’s arrest with a mass protest outside the Central Police Station in Nairobi. Aided by settlers who were drinking beer and liquor on the terraces of the Norfolk Hotel, the police shot dead 150 protesters including one of the women’s leaders, Nyanjirũ Mũthoni. I don’t know if my father was present at the mass protest and mass murder, but he certainly would have been affected by the subsequent call for a general strike by domestic workers, upon whose labor the white aristocracy depended entirely. My father fled Nairobi altogether, avoiding the emerging political turmoil in the same way he had escaped the plague, the way he had evaded the draft during the First World War. He followed his brother to the rural safety of Limuru.

  But Nairobi had left its mark on him. From his European employer my father had learned a few choice English words and phrases—“bloody fool,” “nigger,” and “bugger”—but which he Gĩkũyũnized as mburaribuu, kaniga gaka, mbaga ĩno, and which he used freely to address any of his children at whom he was angry. From his employment he had saved enough money to buy some goats and cows that in time had bred more goats and cows, and by the time he fled the capital, he already had a reasonable herd that his brother helped look after. Eventually my father bought land in Limuru from Njamba Kĩbũkũ. He paid in goats under the traditional system of oral agreement in the presence of witnesses. Later, Njamba sold the same land to Lord Stanley Kahahu, one of the early Christian converts and graduates of the Church of Scotland Mission at Kikuyu, and to his brother Edward Matumbĩ, who had made money in Molo through logging, sawing timber, and making roofing shingles for European customers. The resale was recorded under the colonial legal system, with witnesses and signed written documents. Did the religious Kahahu know that Njamba was selling the land twice, first in goats to my father and second in cash to him? Whatever his knowledge, the double transaction created a lasting tension between the two claimants, my father and Kahahu.

  The hearing to determine the real owner, an on-and-off affair, at the Native Tribunal Court at Cura, dragged on for many years, but at every hearing it was a case of the legal written word against oral testimony. Orality and tradition lost to literacy and modernity. A title deed no matter how it was gotten trumped oral deeds. Kahahu emerged the rightful owner; my father retained a noninheritable right of life occupancy on the compound where he had built the five huts. The victor immediately asserted his rights by denying my father access to grazing and cultivation on the rest of the land.

  Did my father ever reflect on the irony that he had lost out to a black landlord, a product of the white missionary center at Kikuyu, under the same legal system that had created White Highlands out of the African-owned highlands? He had more immediate things to worry about than the ironies of history: how to feed his children and the vast herd of goats and cows.

  My maternal grandfather, Ngũgĩ wa Gĩkonyo, helped my father out. He gave him grazing and cultivation rights on the lands he owned, lands that stretched to the Indian shops, the African shops, and beyond, on the African side of the rails. My father’s new thingira and cattle kraal were located between the edge of a forest of blue gum and eucalyptus trees that Grandfather Ngũgĩ owned and the outskirts of the African market.* My father’s wives and children remained at the old homestead
.

  So, despite the legal blow and its consequences, my father’s reputation as the richest in cows and goats continued, as well as his reputation for having a disciplined home and an eye for beautiful women going all the way back to when he won his first bride.

  * Winston S. Churchill, My African Journey (Leo Cooper, 1968), p. 18.

  * The forest no longer exists. It is now the site of the extended Limuru Township, after the original Indian shops were moved from the old site.

  Wangarĩ’s looks and character had been the talk across hills and valleys, between Limuru and Riũki. Actually the two regions were near each other, but in those days when there was no transport they seemed many miles apart. Uncle Njinjũ, my father’s brother, was the first to be smitten by her looks and vowed to get her as his second wife. It is not known how Uncle Njinjũ, or Baba Muũkũrũ as we called him, first heard of her or came into contact with her or her family. It is not even known whether he had actually met her. Most likely he had simply set in motion one of those family-to-family wooings mediated by third parties. Property, in cows and goats, and good character were more persuasive than looks, and, presumably, the two orphans who had started with nothing but had brought themselves up to match the achievements of the young men of their age, in wealth in goats, had demonstrated they did not rely on their handsome looks but on their hands and minds.

  Since their flight from Mũrang’a, my father and Baba Mũkũrũ had traveled slightly different paths and developed different attitudes to life. My father had acquired urban airs in dress and outlook; for instance, he had a cavalier attitude to traditional rites and practices. My uncle on the other hand had made his way through rural cultivation and herding, observing traditional values and rites, like those performed in his marriage to his first wife. Still, the fact that Baba Mũkũrũ was now aiming for a second bride, while my father was still unmarried, was a measure of my uncle’s success and validated the choice he had made to avoid the city in favor of the countryside.

  Accompanied by my father, Baba Mũkũrũ took a delegation that included nonfamily spokesmen, for one never talked on his own behalf in such matters, and they went to Wangarĩ’s father, Ikĩgu. Everything went well, the drinks, the formal preliminaries, until the bride was called in to meet her suitor. They should have better prepared her because, on entering, her eyes fell on the younger of the two men, my father. Corrections afterward about the real suitor fell on the deaf ears of a young woman being asked to choose between being the second wife of an older man or the first wife of another who exuded both youth and modernity.

  By the time they returned home, the fortunes of the two brothers had changed; Wangarĩ had fallen in love with the young urbanite, my father, and eventually became his first wife. The brotherly relationship, though not broken, became strained, and remained so for life. Love had come between the two men who in their youth had depended on each other in their quest for a new life far from home.

  I don’t know how my father later obtained his second wife, Gacoki. Rumors hinted that his first wife, Wangarĩ, needing extra hands in managing their growing wealth in cows and goats, had helped attract Gacoki to the home. More likely, news of the poetry of the heart and the rhythm of work between Wangarĩ and my father may have allured Gacoki, the beautiful daughter of Gĩthieya, long before my father actually proposed. The experience of my own mother, the third wife, provides some evidence of my father’s ways of wooing.

  My mother, Wanjikũ, was of few words. But those words carried the authority of the silence that preceded their utterance. Now and then, words would gush from her mouth, opening a little window into her soul. I once asked her, during one of those moments of well-being that follow a good steaming meal, Why did you consent to polygamy? Why did you accept being the third wife of my father, who already had older children—Wangeci and Tumbo with Wangarĩ, and Gĩtundu with Gacoki?

  It was because of his two first wives, Wangarĩ and Gacoki, and their children, she said with light and shadows from the wood fire playing on her face. They were always together, such harmony, and I often wondered how it would feel to be in their company. And your father? He was not to be denied. I don’t know how he knew where I worked in my father’s fields, well, your grandfather’s, but he would somehow appear, just smile and say a few words. What a pity if such a hardworking beauty should ever team up with a lazy man, he would tease me. Those were no small words coming from a man who had so many goats and cows, and he had acquired all that wealth by his own toil. But I did not want him to think that I would simply fall for his words and reputation, and I challenged him. How do I know that you are not one of those who work their wives to death and then claim the wealth came from his hands alone? The following day he came back, a hoe on his shoulder. As if to prove that he did not include himself among the lazy, without waiting for my invitation even, he started to work. It became a playful but serious competition to see who would tire first. I held my own, she said with a touch of pride in her prowess. The only break was when I lit a fire and roasted some potatoes. Don’t you think you and I should combine our strengths in a home? he again asked. I said: Just because of one day’s work on a field already broken? Another day, he found me trying to clear some bush to expand my farm. He joined in the clearing and by the end of the day we were both exhausted but neither of us would admit to it. He went away and I thought that he would never appear again. But he did come back, on another day, without a hoe, an enigma of a smile on his face. Oh, yes, such a day it was! The crop was in bloom, the entire field covered with pea flowers of different colors. I always remember the butterflies, so many; and I was not afraid of the bees that competed with the butterflies. He took out a bead necklace and said: Will you wear this for me? Well, I did not say yes or no, but I took it and wore it, she said with an audible sigh.

  My mother would not answer follow-up questions, but what she had said was enough to tell me how she became the third of my father’s wives, but not sufficient to tell me how she came to lose her place, as the youngest and latest, to Njeri, the fourth wife, or even how she felt about the new addition to the family.

  I was born into an already functioning community of wives, grown-up brothers, sisters, children about my age, and a single patriarch, and into settled conventions about how we acknowledged our relation to one another. But it could be confusing and I had to grow into the system. The women themselves would never refer to each other by their names; to each other, they were always the daughter of their respective fathers: Mwarĩ wa Ikĩgu for Wangarĩ, Mwarĩ wa Gĩthieya for Gacoki, Mwarĩ wa Ngũgĩ for Wanjikũ, and Mwarĩ wa Kabicũria for Njeri, the youngest. I came to learn that when talking about them to a third party, the first wife, Wangarĩ, was my elder mother, maitũ mũkũrũ, and the other two were each my younger mother, maitũ mũnyinyi. The unqualified maitũ was reserved for my biological mother. Otherwise, it was always Yes, Mother, or Thank you, Mother, when addressing each woman directly. But one could also distinguish among them by referring to them as mother of any one of their own biological children. My half siblings could call my mother “Ngũgĩ’s mother” when talking about her to a third person.

  It would be a bit more complicated when talking about several siblings to an outsider. Our naming was informed by a symbolic system of reincarnation that meant that each mother had children alternatively named after her side of the family and my father’s side, and hence many of the children had identical names to those that came from my father’s line. There was the broad category of brothers and sisters from the same mother and half sisters and half brothers when introducing them to a third person. Otherwise we were differentiated from one another by our biological mother; for instance, I was always Ngũgĩ wa Wanjikũ. In addition, many of my sisters and brothers had nicknames they had given themselves or had been given by others, and these were individual to them. There was Gacungwa, “Little Orange”; Gatunda, “Little Fruit”; Kahabu, “Half-a-Cent”; Kĩbirũri, “the Player of Spinning Tops”; Wabia, “Rupee”;
Mbecai, “Money”; Ngiree, “Gray”; Gũthera, “Miss Clean”; Tumbo, “Big Tummy.” I grew up knowing them by these, and it was a shock when later I learned their real names, which seemed less real. I came to accept that within the framework of Thiong’o’s family, there were multiple ways of identifying oneself or being identified by others.

  The four women forged a strong alliance vis-à-vis the outside world, their husband, and even their children. Any of them could rebuke and discipline any one of us kids, the culprit likely to get additional punishment if she complained to the biological mother. We could feed from any of the mothers. They resolved serious tensions through discussion, one of them, usually the eldest, acting as the arbiter. There were also subtle, shifting alliances among them, but these were kept in check by their general solidarity as my father’s brides. They had their own individuality. Njeri, the youngest, was strong-framed with a sharp, irreverent tongue. She brooked no nonsense from anyone. She was known to speak on behalf of any of the other women against an outsider even if it was a man. She could openly defy my father but she also knew when and how to back off. She was the undeclared defense minister of the homestead. My mother was a thinker and good listener loved for her generosity and respected for her legendary capacity for work. Though she would not confront my father openly, she was stubborn and let her actions speak for her. She was like the minister of works. Gacoki, shy and kind, disliked conflicts, adopting a live-and-let-live attitude even when she was the wronged party. She, the minister of peace, was the most scared of my father. Wangarĩ, the eldest, was always calm as if she had seen it all. Her power over my father was through a look, a word, or a gesture of disapproval, as if reminding him that she was the one who had chosen him over his brother. She was the minister of culture, a philosopher who drew from experience and cited proverbs to make a point.