Devil on the Cross

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  “As for my education—and here, good people, I crave your indulgence: if I brag a little, don’t take it that I am being arrogant—as for my education, I am a man with three degrees in his pocket or, rather, in the head you see before you. A hero is not gauged by the size of his calves, and fame is often greater than its owner, and wisdom is innate and not attached like a patch of cloth. . . . If anyone’s in doubt, I still have a small stack of my business cards. In the cards you’ll see all my degrees in a row: B.Sc. (Econ.) (Mak.); B. Comm. (NRB); MA (Bus. Admin.) (Harvard, USA); MRSocIBM. The last one is not really a degree; it is an honor, and it stands for: Member of the Royal Society for International Business Management. The card shows clearly that my knowledge is concentrated in the fields of business management and economic development. All that skill and knowledge is contained in this small body you see before you. That’s why I say that fame is often greater than its owner.

  “I don’t believe in foreign ideology. But I believe in the ideology of modern theft and robbery. But in order that you should know—”

  Before he could continue, Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ was interrupted by a man who wanted to ask a question. The man had seen Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ merge from a matatũ that morning, and he had serious doubts about whether Mwĩreri had reached the necessary standard in theft and robbery to qualify him to enter the competition.

  “Mr. Chairman, the speaker on the platform has waxed eloquent on the subject of his degrees. That’s very good. Even the system of theft and robbery needs educated people. But Mr. Chairman—and remember, one can hit out at a loved one—could the speaker please let us know first what make of car he drives? That’s the kind of fame we understand. Tales about education are all fiction to us.”

  The man sat down. He was given a big ovation. And now, because Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ did not know that the man had spotted him getting out of Mwaũra’s matatũ, he was a bit confused and did not know where to start. And then many of the guests shouted at him, demanding details: “His cars, let him tell us all about his cars! Hatukujui bila kitambulisho chako . . . your identity card . . . !”

  “Mr. Chairman,” Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ, “Mr. Chairman, my car. . . . I am sorry that I forgot to mention that. As for my car, I’ve only got one, a Peugeot 504 (with petrol injection). I tell you, though, that car is very fast, faster than the swiftest arrow. The same car acts as my memsahib’s shopping basket. But now I am thinking of getting her a small plow, a Toyota Hilux pickup, only two tons, just a plow that she can also use as a shopping basket.”

  Mwĩreri was interrupted again by the same person. “Mr. Chairman, could Mr. Mwĩreri please let us know if he drove to this feast in the Peugeot 504 (with petrol injection), or can I take it that it died in flight, the way an arrow does?”

  The man was given another ovation. He was filled with fresh strength, and he continued to ask questions edged with sarcasm. “Yes, how did he get to the cave this morning? Which was the car that brought him to Ilmorog yesterday? Or did he come in a borrowed car? Mr. Chairman, a man who owns only one car, even granted that it is swifter than an arrow, is he fit to stand up before mature people to talk about the art of modern theft and robbery? I move that Mwĩreri be thrown out, together with his collection of degrees. He should be thrown out like Ndaaya wa Kahuria!”

  The man sat down. Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped beads of sweat from his face. He cleared his throat and stared challengingly at the people, then he raised his voice and spoke with all the courage of wounded pride.

  “Mr. Chairman, I did not come in my car. You, Mr. Chairman, you know me, and you certainly know my car. Was I not the main distributor of these invitation cards in Nairobi?”

  “Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ!” The master of ceremonies cut him short. “Let me remind you of what you have just been told, that it is not easy to recognize a man without his car. A car is a man’s identity. I once met my wife on foot because she had left her car at home. I didn’t recognize her. She told me about the encounter later. Now, if I can’t recognize my own wife without her car, do you think that you’re an exception? Show these elders your identity card so we can get on with the feast.”

  “Mr. Chairman,” Mwĩreri cried out in desperation, “Mr. Chairman, my car stalled at Kikuyu. I left it outside the Ondiri Hotel. If we rang the hotel, we could ask someone to check whether or not a Peugeot 504 is standing in the yard. I came in a matatũ, Matatũ Matata Matamu. You can ask the owner whether or not I told him about the problem with my car, for I wouldn’t want you to think that I’m entirely dependent on matatũs for transport! Robin Mwaũra, please stand up!”

  Robin Mwaũra stood up, grinning broadly. Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ started asking him questions as if Mwaũra were giving evidence in a court of law.

  Mwĩreri: What is your name?

  Mwaũra: Robin Mwaũraandũ. Mwaũra for short.

  Mwĩreri: Do you own a matatũ?

  Mwaũra: Yes, I’m owner and driver. Matatũ Matata Matamu, Model T Ford, registration number MMM 333. Motto: If you want to hear rumors, enter Matatũ Matata Matamu. If you want gossip. . . .

  Mwĩreri: Can you recall last night?

  Mwaũra: Yes.

  Mwĩreri: Tell this gathering of modern thieves and robbers what happened.

  Mwaũra: It was about six o’clock. I found you outside Sigona Golf Club, near Kikuyu, just before Njoguinĩ, standing at the bus stop. I had four other passengers from Nairobi.

  Mwĩreri: Did I tell you anything about a car?

  Mwaũra: Yes. You told me that your Peugeot 504 (with petrol injection) had stalled at Kikuyu, that you had left it outside the Ondiri Hotel, and that therefore you were looking for a lift because you did not want to be late for this competition.

  Another man jumped up and told the chairman that they had not come to settle a lawsuit.

  “Let Mwĩreri continue with the tale of his theft and robbery. Come to think of it, his face is beginning to assume the shape of a Peugeot 504 (with petrol injection), and I doubt that it could acquire that shape if he did not own such a car.” He sat down.

  Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ was very pleased with the man’s words. “That’s all, Mwaũra. The elders are now satisfied,” he told Mwaũra. “You can now resume your seat. Mwaũra, you can now sit down.”

  But Robin Mwaũra remained standing. Everybody turned toward him.

  “Mr. Chairman, our foreign guests and elders,” Mwaũra began, “I beg to be allowed to say a word. I too would like to enter the competition, for, as was once said, men meet in battle to test one another’s mettle in order to resolve all doubts about who is who. But before I begin my story—I started stealing and robbing long before the Emergency—I would like to reveal a small matter that could be the ruin of this feast. At about two o’clock, I looked for Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ to tell him that two of the people to whom he gave invitation cards, a worker and a peasant, are planning to spoil this competition. The two are utterly without gratitude, seeing that they were given those invitation cards by Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ. The brain behind the whole thing—”

  Several people stood up to speak, but the man who managed to shout down the others took the floor. He said that they had not come to the cave to listen to stories about workers and peasants. Mwaũra should be told to keep his rumors and gossip to himself and to let the feast proceed. The sun never waited for anybody, not even a king.

  Mwaũra sat down, his face dark, his heart heavy. Mũturi is after me, and now I have missed the chance to harm him, Mwaũra said to himself. He had thought that once he had given away Wangarĩ’s and Mũturi’s secret, he would be accorded an opportunity to testify and perhaps to earn the crown. Despite his humiliation, Mwaũra did not lose heart. He bolstered his spirits with three proverbs: to a beggar, a rich man’s fart has no smell; he who loves beauty does not complain while he is pursuing it; he whose stomach is upset is the one who
goes to the forest.

  The other guests were waiting patiently to hear Mwĩreri’s testimony. His face was now less anxious and the beads of sweat on his forehead had dried.

  The following is the testimony given by Mwĩreri wa Mũkĩraaĩ B.Sc., B. Comm., MA, MRSocIBM.

  “I’ll pick up the tale where I left off. We shouldn’t mind too much how many cars a man owns. What’s important is the make of a car. We know a bee does not begin with the honeycomb. A bedbug grows fat even when it is living in a crack in a piece of wood. We should only worry about a man’s beliefs and about where he stands—yaani, his stand—in relation to the development and exploitation of the wealth of a nation.

  “I don’t have much to say. I believe in the god of modern theft and in the lord of modern robbery. I say this because my education has shown me that all the nations and countries that have made progress and have contributed to modern civilization have passed through the stage of exploitation. Among such nations, power has been taken away from the workers and peasants and given to the heroes of theft and robbery—in English, we might say, to those who have capitalist business know-how.

  “Our modern heroes are those who know about creative investment, yaani, those who know how to market their talents so that they’ll bear fruit. This simply means those who are experts at sniffing out that rare delicacy called profit, yaani, the rate of profit. That in turn means this: if you steal five shillings today, tomorrow you must steal more than five—say, ten shillings; and the day after tomorrow you must steal more than ten—say, fifteen shillings. You must steal more, rob more all the time: five shillings today, ten tomorrow, fifteen the day after, twenty-five two days after that, and so on, until you find that the rate of profit is growing at a tremendous speed day by day, like a progressive graph to paradise. The profit curve should go up and up all the time. In English we say that you look for conditions that will ensure an ever-increasing rate of profit. So you have to be knowledgeable about fertile fields, fields that will ensure that the rate of profit does not fall below the level of yesterday and will not remain static. And where but in the sweat of workers and peasants can you find such fertile fields?

  “But, friends, modern theft is of two kinds. There is the kind of theft that is a domestic or, let’s say, a national affair. In this case, expert thieves and robbers of a given country steal from the workers and peasants of their own country. But there is another kind of theft that involves foreigners. In this case, the thieves and robbers of one country go to another country and steal from the masses there and take the loot back to their own country. This means that such thieves and robbers steal both from their own workers and peasants and from the workers and peasants of other countries. Such foreigners are able to feed on two worlds: theirs and other people’s. Today, for instance, American, European and Japanese thieves and robbers steal from their own masses, and then go on to Africa, Asia and Latin America to rob the peoples there, and take their plunder back to their own granaries. These foreigners are, of course, aided in their enterprise by bands of local thieves and robbers.

  “Sometimes these foreign thieves and robbers build stores and granaries in the countries they loot, and they employ a few of the thieves there to look after them. What all that means is this: when foreigners such as the ones we have here come to our land and build stores and granaries, their plan is simply to rob our country and take the spoils back to Japan, Europe and America.

  “I, Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ, believe only in the first kind of theft and robbery: that is, the theft and robbery of nationals of a given country, who steal from their own people and consume the plunder right there, in the country itself. But to the second kind—the theft of foreign thieves and robbers who come to our country and build lairs here, helped by some of us—I say no, hapana, a thousand times, no!

  “We, the national experts in theft and robbery, should not join hands with foreigners to help them to seize our national wealth and carry it back to their own countries, leaving us only a few crumbs, the price of the heritage they have taken from us.

  “Let’s not be their spies, their watchdogs, their disciples, their soldiers, the overseers of their lairs and stores in our own land. Let them leave us alone to exploit our own national fields.

  “Why do I say that?

  “I’ll speak very frankly, come what may. These people are hypocrites, though you might not believe that as you watch them now, peacefully smoking their cigarettes and pipes.

  “I, Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ, have studied thoroughly the system based on the theft of the sweat and blood of workers and peasants—what in English we call capitalism. The system is this: the masses cultivate; a select few (those with talents) harvest. Five rich men grow roots in the flesh of fifty workers and peasants. I’ve got the learning, and I don’t need anybody to teach me more about it. I believe that we who are here today are capable of building our own lairs and stores in which to stack the products of the sweat of our masses. I am very sure that we, the Kenyan thieves and robbers, can stand on our own feet and end forever this habit of sharing our loot with foreigners. Let me repeat myself, for a word hidden in the heart can never win a lawsuit: we should not rob our workers and peasants—I should really call them our slaves—and then hand over the spoils to foreigners to do the sharing out, returning a little to us and exporting the rest to their own countries! Why don’t they allow us to steal from their America, their Europe and their Japan so that we can import their loot into our own country? Why don’t they allow us to build lairs and stores in their countries so that ours becomes the decisive voice in the distribution of the products of the sweat of their people?

  “Let us steal from among ourselves, so that the wealth of the country remains in the country, and so that in the flesh of ten million poor we can plant the roots of ten national millionaires. We shall then be able to blind the masses with the following words: ‘Wananchi, don’t complain! When the foreigners were eating, did you ever moan? Did you ever scratch yourselves? Our people, the plague that is stalking the country is not as alien as the one in Europe. You should be rejoicing at the fact that your sweat and blood has produced ten native millionaires.’

  “I’m a man of few words. You can tell the food that will cook well from the first lot of boiling water. My story is short. It concerns my struggles against companies owned by foreign thieves and robbers.

  “After finishing school, I started working for various imperialist companies. There are very few foreign-owned companies in which I haven’t set a foot as an employee—oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, coffee- and tea-processing companies, finance houses, tourist hotels, motor companies and several agricultural firms. In some I was a sales manager. In others I was a personnel manager. Generally, however, I was employed as a public relations manager.

  “But in none of these firms was I ever allowed into the secrets of the inner circle—you know, where the real decisions are made, where the decisions about money and the distribution of profits are made, for instance. Membership of the inner circle was reserved for Europeans.

  “But whenever there was a crisis in the country—when the workers became restive and impossible, or Parliament was debating income tax measures that might curb the constant rise in the rate of profit, or the Cabinet was about to agree on certain measures concerning foreigners—I was the one who was dispatched to act as the eyes and ears of the foreigners. In some places I would appeal to national chauvinism to put out the dangerous fire; in others I would smooth away wrinkles in the skin with modern oils; and in yet others I would change the minds of those in power with a bit of hard liquor. And so on and so forth. But on many occasions I would buy a good public image for the foreigners through Haraambe contributions.

  “One day I stopped to ask myself: Are these foreigners employing me as an individual, or are they employing the color of my skin? Are they buying my abilities or my blackness? And all at once I realized that I was being use
d as window-dressing. If our people looked out for foreigners, they would see me at the window of the enterprise; and on seeing me, they would think they saw a bit of themselves reflected in me, and they would think they had a share in the enterprise, and so they would continue to acquiesce in the foreigners’ theft, in the belief that they were becoming wealthy bit by bit.

  “I took counsel with myself. The wealth of a nation is produced by the workers of that country. For it is true that without the hand and the head and the heart of a worker there is no wealth. What do foreigners bring into the country? A bit of machinery and a bit of money to pay the workers’ first month’s salary. That is the kind of lure that is thrown to a monkey to fool it into allowing itself to be robbed of the young it is holding. The machinery is a kind of a trap, and the salary is the piece of meat that is used to trap a mouse. Or the machinery is the fishing line, and the salary is the worm used as bait to attract fish. The machinery is a machine for milking the sweat, blood, energy and skills of a worker, and the banks are the vessels—the calabashes, tins, drums—in which the milk is stored.

  “So I asked myself: Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ, how can you allow the imperialists to milk their country and yours? Don’t we have people of our own who can milk the masses, soothing the workers with a little fodder as they are being milked? Are foreigners the only ones with skill at milking? Are they the only people who know how to eat what has been produced by others? Can’t you, Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ, step forward to exploit your own people’s sweat, use it to produce things and then sell the things back to the owners of the sweat, so that they produce them first and then have to buy them, grow crops and then buy the same crops? We don’t want eaters of what has been produced by others to come from foreign countries: we can encourage the growth of a class of eaters of other people’s products—yes, a class of man-eaters—in our own land.