In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  Only later did it hit me: he had not reacted to the fact that my brother was in the mountains. Or that my sister-in-law was in a maximum security prison. He did not even ask if I had taken the oath, which I had not. It was as if he knew my story all along. Or perhaps my story was not so unique, just one among many he had heard.

  Indeed, I was to learn later that my case was not unique, that among my classmates were others who carried similar woes. In the early days of the state of emergency, the school, even during vacations, had become a sanctuary for victims of both sides of the conflict: those who feared retaliation by Mau Mau because their fathers were loyalist home guards, and those who feared retaliation by the colonial forces because their relatives were guerrillas in the mountains or captives in the concentration camps. The Franciscan reaction to my revelation put more cracks in my perception of a white monolith pitted against a black monolith, already challenged by the reality of many Africans, including some relatives, who fought on the colonial side. In a more personal way, his reaction went quite a long way to undercut the fear that had haunted my stay in the sanctuary, the fear that a discovery of my blood connection with the freedom fighters would somehow curtail my education.

  One good attracts another, and I also got the welcome news soon afterward that Kĩambu Native African Location Council had awarded me a full scholarship. My arrears would be covered, and I would not have to pay tuition for the rest of my years at Alliance. My next holidays in August were the first that I would enjoy without the fear that money and politics would block my educational path. And then the unexpected happened.

  26

  I was about to return to school for the last term of my second year, when we learned that British forces had captured my brother. Since there was no official announcement, the news reached us through the grapevine from Banana Hills, where his in-laws lived. There were all sorts of rumors: he had been shot in the leg; no, in the head; no, the bullets had gone through the heart. One thing was constant: they had captured him alive. If true, that was a relief. Still, I feared that they would hang him at Gĩthũngũri the way they had many others before him. My fears were deepened by the fact that I did not know the circumstances of his capture.

  Years later I would learn that Good Wallace and his men had fallen into an ambush soon after they themselves had ambushed a small convoy of British soldiers near Longonot. They managed to fight their way through the cordon and then ran in different directions. With more reinforcements, the enemy forces pursued them relentlessly, over hills and valleys, across rivers, day and night, through Gil-gil, southern Nyandarwa. Some of his comrades fell to the enemy fire, but Good Wallace just managed to escape. He would tell a harrowing story of how at one time, completely exhausted, he fell down and crawled under a thick tea bush in the Brooke Bond Estate on the White Highlands side of Limuru, his gun beside him. The enemy soldiers were scattered all over the tea bushes, each following a different row, turning over the thickets with their rifles. At one point, a soldier was literally standing above my brother’s hiding place. Good Wallace thought he had met his fate and opened his mouth to beg for his life, hapana ua, don’t kill, but as in a nightmare, no voice came out. It was just as well. Soon the enemy went away, still searching among the bushes.

  Good Wallace spent the next couple of days trying to reconnect with his remaining comrades, in vain. Alone, with the gun as his only companion, he assessed his situation: he had once escaped into the forests under a hail of police bullets; now he had escaped death by the luckiest whim. Should he tempt fate again? The choice was between accepting a heroic death or giving up for the hope of fighting another day.

  He chose the latter. Burying his gun under a Mugumo tree, he crossed rivers and walked through forest slopes and coffee plantations all the way to Chief Karũga’s family homestead, near Banana Hills, quite a distance. Good Wallace knew the family in the days when my sister Gathoni was their neighbor in Kĩambaa.

  It was very early in the morning when he appeared at the door and identified himself to Grace Nduta, Karũga’s wife, who welcomed him and made a meal for him, the first homemade food he had eaten in years. She was the one who quietly broke the news to her husband. Chief Charles Karũga Koinange ensured that my brother did not fall into vengeful hands. We did not know what tale the chief told, but it was a relief when we learned that Good Wallace had been taken to Manyani concentration camp. He would live, at least.

  The nationalist guerrillas were being hit hard. On October 21, 1956, the British forces captured Dedan Kĩmathi, the Mau Mau guerrilla leader, the one they feared most, the stuff of legends. The image of the wounded warrior chained to his hospital bed would haunt me for a long time, clashing as it did with that of the legendary Kĩmathi whom Ngandi told me of in his stories. I wondered what Ngandi, wherever he now resided, would say about the loss of Kĩmathi. No doubt he would claim that they had merely captured his shadow, that the real Kĩmathi still roamed the Nyandarwa Hills and slopes of Mount Kenya, vowing to fight to the end, proclaiming that it was better to die fighting for freedom than to live on bended knees.

  Still, the capture of Dedan Kĩmathi, following that of my brother, left a sense of defeat in the air and an emptiness in me. But there were signs within Kenya and the world that the challenge to the imperial order that Kĩmathi symbolized was being enacted elsewhere in Africa.

  27

  A few months before Kĩmathi’s capture, on July 26, 1956, Egypt’s Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had seized power in 1952, the same year as the start of the Mau Mau War in Kenya, announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal to provide funding for the construction of the Aswan High Dam. It seemed to me that Nasser had suddenly made Africa a player in world politics, with leaders from Eisenhower to Khrushchev to Mao all paying close attention. The Nasserite act had clearly angered the British and French stockholders in the Suez Canal Company, and the shock waves reached us even at Alliance.

  Carey Francis called an emergency school assembly, during which he described Nasser as a scoundrel and the nationalization a robbery, explaining the history of the canal from its construction by Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1868 to its eventual ownership by the British Suez Canal Company. The history was new to me, but it seemed obvious that a canal that had been dug out of Egyptian territory belonged to Egypt, just as the lands occupied by British settlers clearly belonged to Kenya. France might have provided the engineering expertise and Britain the capital, but what about the Egyptian land and labor?

  Carey Francis was passionately against nationalization. But when, on October 29 of that same year, Israel, France, and Britain invaded Egypt to retake control of the canal, he thought it a mistake and told us so, arguing that two wrongs did not make a right. Carey Francis never ceased to amaze.

  28

  Mirroring all of this political upheaval was my own spiritual upheaval, the pivotal moment of which came toward the end of August, during my second year. David Martin had organized a special Christian Union event for an evangelist to show and discuss a Billy Graham film, Souls in Conflict. The guest evangelist himself was associated with the Billy Graham crusades. The meeting, which took place in the dining hall, was open to everybody, and there was good attendance. After the film, the evangelist said a few words.

  It was evening. Standing on the same stage that had witnessed conjuring tricks, debates, Shakespeare, and counter-Shakespeare, the evangelist began by quoting the Bible, Romans 3:23: For we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God. He slowly looked at us, in such a way that I felt as if he were pointing at me in particular, then went straight to the heart of the listener, creating a vivid vision of the fire that awaited sinners in Hell. And they deserved it, we deserved it, and no good works or learning or books would save us from it. He was masterful, talking to everybody and yet aiming every word at me, or so it seemed. And yet he and I were complete strangers. This God terrified me. I don’t want to go to Hell, I felt myself saying, surprised because I had heard the same words many ti
mes before, and they had never had that kind of effect on me. But Hell was not inevitable, he now said, creating another vision of salvation. The God of wrath and vengeance had become the God of infinite mercy and love. John bore witness to this in 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved.

  He continued talking as if he and God knew each other intimately. God did not force humans to choose one way or another. He gave us freedom of choice, free will. You can choose Heaven or Hell, he said, again looking and pointing at me. Even when I tried to hide behind others, he still found me with his eyes and finger. I believed in freedom of choice. He was appealing to my better nature, my reason, to accept unreason by faith alone. And then, on behalf of God, he gave me an offer taken straight out of the book of Revelation 3:20: Behold I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door; I will come in to him and sup with him and he with me.

  I did not have to go anywhere or do anything dramatic: just open the door. He made it even easier for me. He told us to close our eyes that we might appeal to God for strength and guidance. My eyes still closed, I heard him speak directly to God, asking him to help me make the right choice. Me, yes me, for it seemed he directed his voice at me the whole time. God is not going to rush to the door and open it for you by force. You have to let him in. Will you? He told us, me, not to answer by voice. If I made a choice, would I please raise my hand, without opening my eyes? Yes, it really felt he was appealing to me. I felt my heart breaking into pieces. Something was giving way, a surrender of the will, thought, and reason. I could visualize his eyes on me, watching to see if I would raise my hand in total surrender and submission. I did, not caring if any other person had also done so. After all, he had been speaking to me alone.

  You have made the biggest decision of your life. He talked a little bit more, and then told me to lower my hand and open my eyes. There was silence. David Martin said that people were free to leave but asked anybody who had raised their hands and accepted Jesus as their personal savior to please remain behind, together with those who had already done so before. There was indeed a small group who had always claimed to know Jesus more intimately than the rest of us. I stayed behind, sure that I would be the only one. The majority left, glancing behind to see who had been snared.

  I was one of the snared but relieved that I was not alone. We were a large group of new converts, welcomed by the earlier converts into the fold. We had been elevated to their spiritual plane. Most prominent among them was Elijah Kahonoki*, or E.K., who had always worn his faith on his sleeve. The evangelist spoke with triumph but warned us that there would be many temptations in the way. If Satan had been shameless enough to tempt Jesus, who were we to think that the devil would leave us alone? But we could take strength from His triumph. E.K. assured us that the Christian fellowship of the saved would always be with us in our fights with the tempter.

  Evangelism was not new to Alliance. By 1949, the Balokole, adherents of the Jesus-is-my-personal-savior movement, which had originated in Rwanda, had arrived in Kenya. Some Alliance boys became adherents and passed on the tradition. Although they were faithful members of the Christian Union that met regularly to study scriptures, the Balokole, or Saved, had their own separate group and held additional prayer meetings.

  Carey Francis, for all his sermons about the House of the Interpreter, was not involved in the spiritual enterprise of the breast-beating, Jesus-is-my-personal-savior type of worship. Christianity for him was like a long-distance race, and he often talked of pacing oneself so that at the end one might say: I have fought the good fight, I have completed the race, I have kept the faith. For him, acts and conduct that proclaimed faith were more important than words that shouted belief. But he did not disparage evangelism, probably seeing its value: the Balokole were the most faithful leaders of Sunday schools, walking many miles every Sunday to reach those farthest removed from Alliance.

  Christian Union with visitors from outside the school, 1956: Edward Carey Francis (second row, second from left); Ngũgĩ (second row, fourth from left); Joshua Omange (second row, fifth from left); David Martin, master in charge of Christian Union (second row, middle). In the background is the Alliance High School chapel.

  * Not his real name.

  29

  In time, quite a few of those who had raised their hands and remained behind with us gradually slid into their old ways. But my classmate Joseph Omange, E.K., and I formed a three-person cabal and built a spiritual fortress around ourselves. We three were determined not to let Satan into our midst. We met early in the chapel every day, read the Bible, and prayed, before the main congregation arrived. E.K., having accepted Jesus as his personal savior long before we had, was leader of our trio. Over the years he had made good connections with the evangelical community in the villages around and beyond, in Nairobi and other cities. Through him we felt connected to this larger community of the Balokole outside the walls of Alliance.

  One of the most important responsibilities of the Saved was bearing witness to our Lord’s infinite grace and mercy, so as to convert others to the way of the Cross. E.K. did this effortlessly, while I was tongue-tied most times. I found it difficult to meet with complete strangers and start telling them about my faith. It felt like bragging and putting others on the defensive. It seemed so intrusive. But that was the point, E.K. told me: the idea was to make the sinner uncomfortable and become aware of the Satan comfortably snuggled in his heart.

  The other ritual in the circles in which E.K. moved was confessing one’s sins to the band of the Saved. Each speaker, as moved, would tell how he or she had first found the Lord. As if borrowing from the Confessions of Saint Augustine, one dramatized the depth of one’s depravity in the previous existence, before the Lord had felt pity and showed him or her the way of the Cross. Often the confessors recounted multiple encounters with the devil since conversion, to show how relentless Satan was in the attempt to dislodge them from their embrace of the Cross. Some were very creative in their graphic descriptions of the temptations they had faced. A few had managed to beat the tempter, but others had fallen, and they attracted the most intense prayers of support in their fight against Satan. The bigger the temptation, whether one succumbed to it or not, the more the tempted grew in stature. Sins of sexual desire drew the most attention. No sin seemed bigger. After all, sex was the original sin that had made all humans come short of the glory of God. Some narrators went into titillating details that made one leave the group with more sexual images in mind than before.

  When my turn came, I found, to my dismay, that I had no sins to confess. And yet I must have sinned! Everybody sinned! If we said that we had no sins, we were deceiving ourselves. Omange had the same problem as me: a sinner who did not know his sins. We could only come up with trivial ones like anger, rude words, or cheating by reading for an extra hour when we were required to be in bed by nine. But E.K. always had plenty of sins to confess, especially harboring desires for the opposite sex. On each occasion, he had managed to eke out a victory against Satan.

  Omange and I looked like imposters. In the end, we drifted away from groups outside the school but retained our cabal and our daily routine of additional prayers and Bible reading. E.K. never tired of keeping us informed about his meetings with our other brothers and sisters in Christ. We trusted E.K., who would clear our doubts with biblical quotations. He spoke with the authority of one who had conversed directly with God, which always deepened my doubts about my own state: I could never be sure that God had spoken directly to me.

  Once I asked him about the language in which God spoke to him. English, he said. And how could one tell the difference between God and Jesus when they spoke to him? Was there a difference in the quality and volume of the two voices? Jesus and God were one and the same. I must keep the faith, and
I would soon be able to tell the difference. Such questions, so important because they genuinely troubled me, started creating tension between us.

  One of the most contentious came over the color of God and Jesus. On September 26, 1956, Sam Ntiro, then lecturer at the Makerere Art School, and his student, Elimo Njau,* had visited our school to talk to us about art and show us paintings of a black Christ, pointing out that Jesus was not born in white Europe. Although they had no paintings of God, they argued that He revealed Himself in the different colors of different cultures. God after all made man in his image, to black people in his splendid blackness and to white people in his silvery whiteness.

  There were many skeptics. All the pictures that we had seen in books and magazines were of a white, blue-eyed Jesus. Some of the white teachers told us that it was not necessary to see God through racial lenses. God had no color. Jesus was white, and white was not a color. E.K. took the same view of a colorless God and Jesus but could not explain why all the pictures in Christian literature had both deities as white. I was on Ntiro and Njau’s side: if God made man in his image, then blackness was equally a color of God. Each of us could know how God looked by looking at ourselves.

  I was troubled by my inability to hear the voice of God or lead new followers to the Cross, the way E.K. did. I came up with a plan: if I could convert one person, if I could somehow bring one soul to Christ, I would have my doubts stilled. I started telling people about my faith, mostly select friends on a one-to-one basis. But the few times I tried, people would look at me and laugh, or ask questions for which I had no real answers. My friends were the worst, for they said outright that they did not believe me. Or some would playfully ask me to confess my sins to them so that they could compare theirs to mine. They had not seen me breast-beating and shouting tukutendereza in a mass meeting. I told E.K. about my problems, that my appeals to reason always elicited more arguments than conversions. No, you have to appeal to the heart, not the mind, he told me. Faith was not a matter of logic. He told me not to worry, that it took time to master ways of dislodging Satan from the souls of the fallen. But I was disappointed that my attempts to convert never bore a single fruit. E.K., on the other hand, reported many victories: he had a small following of those who claimed that it was through him that they had found the Lord.