MESSAGE FROM CHINUA ACHEBE:
Africa is a huge continent with a diversity of cultures and languages. Africa is not simple – often people want to simplify it, generalize it, stereotype its people, but Africa is very complex. The world is just starting to get to know Africa. The last five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light, and now the time has come for Africans to tell their own stories.
The Penguin African Writers Series will bring a new energy to the publication of African literature. Penguin Books is committed to publishing both established and new voices from all over the African continent to ensure African stories reach a wider global audience.
This is really what I personally want to see – writers from all over Africa contributing to a definition of themselves, writing ourselves and our stories into history. One of the greatest things literature does is allow us to imagine; to identify with situations and people who live in completely different circumstances, in countries all over the world. Through this series, the creative exploration of those issues and experiences that are unique to the African consciousness will be given a platform, not only throughout Africa, but also to the world beyond its shores.
Storytelling is a creative component of human experience and in order to share our experiences with the world, we as Africans need to recognize the importance of our own stories. By starting the series on the solid foundations laid by the renowned Heinemann African Writers Series, I am honored to join Penguin in inviting young and upcoming writers to accept the challenge passed down by celebrated African authors of earlier decades and to continue to explore, confront, and question the realities of life in Africa through their work; challenging Africa’s people to lift her to her rightful place among the nations of the world.
PENGUIN CLASSICS
DEVIL ON THE CROSS
NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. One of the leading African writers and scholars at work today, he is the author of Weep Not, Child; The River Between; A Grain of Wheat; Homecoming; Petals of Blood; Devil on the Cross; Matigari; Decolonising the Mind; Moving the Centre; Writers in Politics; and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, among other works, which include novels, short stories, essays, a memoir, and plays. In 1977, the year he published Petals of Blood, Ngũgĩ’s play I Will Marry When I Want (cowritten with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ and harshly critical of the injustices of Kenyan society) was performed, and at the end of the year Ngũgĩ was arrested. He was detained for a year without trial at a maximum-security prison in Kenya. The theater where the play was performed was razed by police in 1982.
Ngũgĩ ’s numerous honors include the East African Novel Prize; UNESCO First Prize; the Lotus Prize for Literature; the Paul Robeson Award for Artistic Excellence, Political Conscience and Integrity; the Zora Neale Hurston–Paul Robeson Award for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement; the Fonlon-Nichols Prize for Artistic Excellence and Human Rights; the Distinguished Africanist Award; the Gwendolyn Brooks Center Contributors Award for significant contribution to the black literary arts; and the Nonino International Literary Prize for the Italian translation of his book Moving the Centre. Ngũgĩ has given many distinguished lectures including the 1984 Robb Lectures at Auckland University, New Zealand, and the 1996 Clarendon Lectures in English at Oxford University. He received the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Cabinet for “his uncompromising efforts to assert the values implicit in the multicultural approach embracing the experience and aspirations of all the world’s minorities.” He has taught in many universities including Nairobi, Northwestern, and Yale. He was named New York University’s Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Languages and was professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies. In 2003 Ngũgĩ was elected as an honorary member in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Currently he is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.
NAMWALI SERPELL is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She has won the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Born in Zambia, she now lives in San Francisco.
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First published in Gĩkũyũ by Heinemann Educational Books (East Africa) Ltd 1980
English-language edition translated by the author published in Great Britain by Heinemann Educational Publishers 1982
This edition with an introduction by Namwali Serpell published in Penguin Books 2017
Copyright © 1982 by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Introduction copyright © 2017 by Namwali Serpell
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Ebook ISBN 9781101634868
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover photograph: Ryan Heffernan / Getty Images
Version_1
To all Kenyans struggling against the neocolonial stage of imperialism
Contents
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction by NAMWALI SERPELL
DEVIL ON THE CROSS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Introduction
On December 30, 1977, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was arrested. In the middle of the night, bulky Land Rovers and flashing police cars stormed his yard in Limuru, Kenya. They were brimming with men armed with pistols, rifles, and machine guns. As the officers searched his library, Ngũgĩ asked if he was under arrest. The officers said no. He was simply being asked to accompany them to the police station, where he would be tasked with cataloging the books and pamphlets the officers were plucking from his shelves: titles by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and so on. They also confiscated about twenty-five copies of Ngũgĩ’s own play, cowritten in Gĩkũyũ with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ , entitled Ngaahika Ndeenda, or I Will Marry When I Want. The two writers and the locals of a village called Kamĩrĩĩthũ had staged the play in a community-built open-air theater. Its five-month run had been immensely popular, drawing large crowds from afar. But on November 16, 1977, the Ministry of Housing and Social Services had essentially banned further performances of the play by withdrawing the license for any public gathering at the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre. This, Ngũgĩ assumed, was why, when he reached the police station, he was handed a detainment order signed by the then Vice President of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi. In the early morning hours of December 31, 1977, Ngũgĩ was driven to Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison in Nairobi. He would be kept there without a trial for nearly a year.
Ngũgĩ has detailed his prison experiences i
n Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary. He lost his name—he became detainee K6,77—and lived in Cell 16 in a block with a handful of other political prisoners. For a time, they were given only one hour of light a day. They took it in a bare compound where they chatted and played chess and sought prophecies in the pages of the Koran or the obscure flights of doves. Mostly, Ngũgĩ says, they moved in “erratic, aimless circles and wanderings, going everywhere and nowhere. . . . The compound used to be for the mentally deranged convicts before it was put to better use as a cage for ‘the politically deranged.’” Ngũgĩ vividly evokes the temptations to derangement during detainment without trial—the isolation, the poor and delayed medical treatment, the hunger for news, the absence of a release date to look forward to: “he can be released after an hour, a day, a week, or after fifty years!” For many prisoners, reading and writing were palliative. Ngũgĩ notes with amusement that he had always found the idea of toilet paper manuscripts “romantic and unreal.” But if the coarse toilet paper at Kamĩtĩ was meant to be punishing, “what was bad for the body was good for the pen.” Ngũgĩ wrote the notes that became Detained on that toilet paper. He also wrote the novel you’re holding in your hands.
Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ, or Devil on the Cross, came into being at a crossroads in Ngũgĩ’s life and in the life of the country that he loved enough to criticize. How did he and Kenya get here? The ways that Ngũgĩ’s biography intersects with Kenya’s history offer insight into the novel, especially when it comes to the question of its politics—to me, an inescapable and intriguing question. In his well-known collection of essays, Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ says a writer’s handling of reality is affected by “his material base in society”; by “his basic philosophic outlook on nature and society”; and by “that undefinable quality of imagination, a writer’s artistry, which is able to perceive what is universal—that is, applicable to the widest possible scale in time and space—in its minutest particularity as a felt experience.” To understand how these three factors touch upon Devil on the Cross, let us first place Ngũgĩ and Kenya in context.
• • •
In 1952, when the Mau Mau Rebellion began—members of the largely Gĩkũyũ Kenya Land and Freedom Army revolted against the yoke of colonial imperialism, sometimes with extreme acts of violence—the British declared a State of Emergency. By the time Ngũgĩ was fourteen years old, the colonial regime had taken over Kenya’s national schools. English, already widely used to enforce submission to colonialism and conversion to Christianity, became the language of instruction. This meant that young Kenyans were introduced to classics of English literature like Shakespeare’s plays. But they were also forcibly exposed to the incongruous, racist, and mediocre works of colonial writers like Elspeth Huxley. In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ provides telling anecdotes about his childhood inculcation in linguistic imperialism. Refusal or inability to speak English was punished in both corporal and psychological fashion: strokes of the cane upon the buttocks; metal plates around the neck saying I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY. Each time a student spoke in a mother tongue, they would receive a button; they would hand it on when they overheard the next culprit; at the end of the day, the students would sing the names of whoever had passed them the button; all the offenders would then be punished. In this way, cultural shame was both internalized and self-regulating.
Ngũgĩ had grown up speaking Gĩkũyũ at home. This was how he first encountered stories, riddles, proverbs, and what he calls the “music of language.” He was the son of a farmer and the brother of a political dissident. His brother, a member of the controversial, militant Mau Mau movement, was killed; another brother, deaf and mute, was shot during the State of Emergency; Ngũgĩ’s mother was held in solitary confinement for three months. Both of these facts of his biography—his class upbringing and his family’s politics—served as marks against him, but Ngũgĩ managed to gain admission to Makerere University College, in Kampala, Uganda, in 1959. There, in 1962, he attended “A Conference of African Writers of English Expression,” a historic meeting of black writers that included Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Es’kia Mphahlele. Ngũgĩ, who at the time went by James Ngugi, had written but not yet published his early novels Weep Not, Child and A River Between. Ngũgĩ was stirred by the debates at the conference. The very first item on the agenda was “What is African literature?” This zombie question—still often raised, never fully dead—naturally led to a discussion of language. Why was most so-called African literature written in European languages?
These questions haunted Ngũgĩ. As early as 1967, in an interview at Leeds University, he was quoted as saying: “I have reached a point of crisis. I don’t know if it is worth any longer writing in English.” A year later he became involved in the Nairobi Literature Debate about the curriculum at Nairobi University. The statement he put together with two other lecturers read: “We reject the primacy of English literature and culture. The aim, in short, should be to orientate ourselves toward placing Kenya, East Africa, and then Africa at the center.” But Ngũgĩ continued to write and publish novels in English, including A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood, and to teach in English as an associate professor and chairman of the literature department at Nairobi. Ten years later, an old woman in Kamĩrĩĩthũ, a village near the suburb where he lived, asked Ngũgĩ to help rehabilitate the local cultural center. Only then did Ngũgĩ begin to write in Gĩkũyũ. The play that sparked his arrest was also his reawakening to his mother tongue. Ngũgĩ calls the Kamĩrĩĩthũ experiment an “epistemological break” with his past.
As for Kenya, the country had broken free from the British Empire in 1963, riding what Harold Macmillan called “the wind of change” blowing through Africa. Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of the newly independent Kenya, came to power (and stayed there) declaiming an African-flavored, socialism-inflected political agenda, including the important concepts of uhuru (freedom) and harambee (cooperation). As Kenya moved into its second decade, it took steps toward celebrating and cultivating African art and culture. While the Kenyan National Theatre in Nairobi persisted in colonial puppetry, putting on plays like The King and I, the early nineteen seventies saw new productions by traveling theaters in Swahili, which had become the national language. Kenyatta’s Kenya African National Union (KANU) government made the case to UNESCO that rural development be integrated with culture through projects like village theaters.
Ngũgĩ’s theater initiative at Kamĩrĩĩthũ was registered as a self-help project with the Department of Community Development of the Ministry of Housing and Social Services. The form of the play—which incorporated Gĩkũyũ song, dance, and folklore—and its staging in a community-built theater seemed to suit the new government’s aim to promote Kenya’s culture and history. But its substance—its vehement Marxist critique of that government and what Ngũgĩ called its “neocolonial” regime of cynical and capitalistic oppression—was deemed inflammatory. Ngũgĩ had been dubbed an “agitator.” As he writes in Detained, “any awakening of a people to their historic mission of liberating themselves from external and internal exploitation and repression is always seen in terms of ‘sin’ and it is often denounced with the religious rhetoric of a wronged, self-righteous god. These agitators suddenly become devils whose removal is now portrayed as a divine mission. . . . Chain the devils!” The story of Kamĩrĩĩthũ, the detainment that it sparked, and the Gĩkũyũ novel that he wrote while in prison dominate Ngũgĩ’s early essays about the politics of writing. It is key to Devil on the Cross.
There’s a tendency these days to diminish or castigate works of literature—particularly older works of postcolonial literature—for trying to teach us something. Young writers from Africa can feel frustrated by the expectation that they must represent a culture or a politics. They wish to be considered as artists, not demagogues or pedagogues. They are bored of answering the question Ngũgĩ found so engaging in 1962: “What is African literature?” They will write what th
ey want, how they want. But Devil on the Cross is a pointedly didactic novel. It cannot be extricated from the political background to its inception or its reception. To read it otherwise, or to suggest that Ngũgĩ’s artistry, “that undefinable quality of imagination,” somehow exceeds or disrupts his politics, is to condescend to the novel. It is to offer it the anemic consolation prize of aesthetic praise. This is especially true now. The question of political literature is more urgent than ever before at the time of this reissue of Devil on the Cross.
This is the era of Occupy, with its critique of capitalism in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. This is the era of the Arab Spring of 2010, catalyzed by the overthrow of neocolonial regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen. This is the era of Black Lives Matter, sparked in 2012 by a surge in audiovisual evidence of the deaths of young black people in the United States, particularly at the hands of police officers. This is the era of Rhodes Must Fall, which began in 2015 when South African students led protests against the vestiges of apartheid in landmarks like the Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town and in university admissions policies nationwide. Haiti has just joined the African Union. Germany is set to issue a formal apology to Namibia for the genocide of the Herero over a century ago. The British courts recently paid £19.9 million in reparations to 5,000 victims of the violent colonial suppression of the Mau Mau (among the crimes acknowledged: rape, castration, torture, and murder). There is widespread agitation in the media about the obdurate white male bias of cultural institutions like Hollywood, journalism, publishing, universities, and the literary canon. The Internet is teeming with campaigns calling for these institutions to “decolonize” their basic premises. A movement in the United Kingdom just came into being this year. It is called “Why Is My Curriculum White?”
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