In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  Table tennis, as we called Ping-Pong, was the other game in which I could reasonably hold my own. Here the greatest champions of my time were Philip Ochieng and Stephen Swai. They were artists with the paddle. To the repertoire of shots—forehand, backhand, loops, lobs, chops, spins, and smashes—they added quickness of feet and could retrieve the ball from any corner, whatever its speed and power, and return it with the arrogant ease of a champion. Sometimes they could wear down an opponent by their defense tactics alone. I never quite figured them out, and I lost to them more consistently than I beat them. When the two of them clashed, even players at the other tables would stop to watch two great artists at the height of their powers.

  Ngũgĩ (on right) with Nicodemus Asinjo

  Every boy was expected to participate in real sports like soccer, hockey, gymnastics, and volleyball and take them as seriously as the chapel and the classroom. The interhouse and interschool competitions ensured wide involvement. Of course our bodies were not equally equipped for every sport, but participation was what mattered. Even the cheering spectator was an integral part of each performance. Carey Francis was one of the most intense spectators, and he could be seen kicking the air in solidarity with a player, or grinding his teeth and stamping the ground when an Alliance player made a silly mistake. He also emphasized fairness and sharing the ball, and he was not amused by displays of individualism in soccer and field hockey. In victory, he wanted us to display humility, and in defeat, learn lessons that would lead to future success.

  Track and field at Alliance was the crown jewel of body education and my favorite as a spectator and participant. I loved the aesthetics of jumps, and since my elementary school days, I had been fascinated by long races. The narrative, rhythm, and drama of the hundred- or two-hundred-yard dash were concentrated in a short time, like a story that ended before one had even savored the beginning. But the long-distance races, from the mile to the marathon, were like a long story, narrated and acted by the runner with his body. The collective narrative, unfolding slowly and gradually rising in tempo, gave the spectator time to follow the tactics of the various runner-characters, heightening the spectators’ expectations of what happened next.

  I represented my house in the junior section in the high jump, unsuccessfully, but in the mile, I could just about hold my own. The mile and longer races were a wrestling match between the determined spirits of the will and the persuasive devil of surrender. I learned this in my very first cross-country race. The entire school took part. In the initial yards, we all ran as one mass. But as we went further down the slopes of Alliance, along the valley and up through other ridges and planes, the mass of competitors gradually separated into groups. I tried to keep up with the leading group. I felt good, proud. And then, suddenly, I started hearing inner whispers for me to slow down. The temptation was strong, almost paralyzing in its appeal. I would ignore them, only for them to return with greater and greater vigor as we approached the end. Finally I hearkened to the call, slowed down, and then walked, hoping that this would rest my feet and rekindle my energy. It did not. It was as if my legs were suddenly made of lead. Soon almost all the groups that had been behind me caught up and passed me.

  In the next race, I fought against the demons, willing myself to take the next step, always seeking to catch up with the ones in front but never succumbing to the whispers of surrender. I finished in the top twenty and maintained this position. But the little demons never relented. Each race was simply a renewal of the struggle, the temptations increasing the more determined I became. It was this effort that made me understand why the metaphor of running the good race was so central to the Franciscan Christian ideal. Years later running would become an important symbol in my books, especially in A Grain of Wheat.

  * First XI is equivalent to varsity.

  45

  Alliance competed with many schools, which, in Kenya, were then separate and unequal. Educational performance across the three racialized categories was not easy to compare, and so sports acquired a symbolic value as the only way of comparing abilities. But race consciousness remained a factor in every aspect of any encounter between whites and blacks, particularly in the sports arena.

  The one soccer event that lasted in my mind, though I was only a spectator, did not even involve the rival schools: it was a once-only match between the Alliance team and a well-known European club, the Caledonians. It was a home match, and I remember Carey Francis impressing upon us the importance of politeness, win or lose. There would be no dishonor in defeat by such a team; the chance to play against the Caledonians was its own honor and reward. He repeated the ban on a popular applause line: if you miss the ball, don’t miss the leg.

  Whether intended or not, the prep talk had the reverse psychological effect. The Alliance boys played as if they were possessed. Holding the Caledonians to a draw in the first half, the Alliance spirit rose tenfold, while the Caledonian fell by the same. In the second half, Alliance was the first to draw blood and kept up the pressure. In the last minute or so of the match, Hudson Imbusi stopped a shot at the Alliance goal with his foot. Everybody expected him to dribble a little, then kick it deep into the enemy side, but instead, hunted and attacked from all sides, Imbusi dribbled the ball across the entire field and scored, just before the whistle. The solo performance, an exclamation point, was greeted with thunderous applause from our school and gloom from our opponents, who left the field with bowed heads. A draw would have been a moral victory for Alliance, but an outright win? Carey Francis, the great believer in teamwork, thought the solo act foolish, very foolish, but even he did not seem too upset by it. The Alliance win was a big boost to our self-esteem: if we could beat a semiprofessional team, white schools like Duke of York and Prince of Wales would be nothing.

  Yet the triangular sports between Alliance, Duke of York, and Prince of Wales became more like a duel between white and black than simply a routine athletic competition. Consciously so or not, every sports event between white and black became a metaphor for the racialized power struggle in the country.

  Social and academic contact with Duke and Wales, outside sports, might have made a difference, but these were minimal, consisting of occasional attendance by a few students at each other’s musical concerts and theater performances. Hosts and guests were polite, but there was no natural mingling. Some classes from Alliance and Wales would visit each other’s school, hosted by their counterparts. They were like arranged debutante parties, with hopeful parents hovering around in expectation. The practice was abandoned. It may have been on such an artificial occasion that I first talked, one on one, with Andrew Brockett, from Prince of Wales, for my first social exchange with a white student. It was brief. I would have forgotten the incident, name and all, except that months later in my final year, we met again at a voluntary service camp.

  46

  Multiracial volunteer work and youth camps, being a new phenomenon, were not on the same scale of value as scouting, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, or excelling in sports. Involvement in them carried no expectations of public accolades. And yet I was drawn to them. It could be that I was still looking for a community to replace the home I had lost or was simply responding to their novelty or the mood of the times.

  The change-is-in-the-air mood was manifest in efforts by good-willed souls to bring the different races together to make up for the years of separate development. Bodies like the United Kenya Club and the Capricorn Society spearheaded these better-late-than-never goodwill missions. They saw change as a question of inviting Africans, qualified by education, property, and manners, to wine and dine with the like-minded and the like-placed of other races. Other experiments tried to bring white and black youth together through volunteer youth camps.

  I don’t know how Mutonguini came to be chosen as the location of this multiracial, multiethnic experiment. The area had a historical and geographic significance, being part of the region that connected the Kenya heartland to the coast, and had many stude
nts at Alliance. But the most dominant personality of the region was Kasina Ndoo, an ex-military man, a colonial chief so loyal to the British state that when once offered a reward of his choice, he begged for the Union Jack. He had also demonstrated inner courage in overcoming personal adversity: on returning from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, a neighbor had chopped off his hands. It was not known if the motive was jealousy, political protest, or vengeance, but the amputation did not deter him from active and loyal service to the colonial power.

  The Mutonguini Camp was organized by some white Quakers from Western Province. Of the three Alliance volunteers, I was the only one from outside the area. Indeed, the expected diversity did not materialize. There was not a single Asian, and Andrew Brockett from Prince of Wales was the sole white student. He and I recalled our brief encounter at Alliance. He had already completed school and was waiting for admission to Oxford to study history. I was curious as to why he had joined the work camp in a completely black African area. He confessed that he chose volunteer service not for the pure love of it but to avoid taking a job in the colonial administration, enforcing unjust laws. I didn’t mention it, but I couldn’t help wondering if the youth, Johnny the Green, who once stamped my passbook papers and from whom I escaped, could have been such a student.

  This led us to discuss racial issues, in terms not of economy and politics but of psychology. Social apartheid bred misunderstanding, which stoked the fear of the unknown, which in turn bred even more misunderstanding, in a vicious circle of endless mutual suspicion and animosity. We agreed that greater social contacts could lessen racial tensions and stereotyping, our way of expressing satisfaction with the work camp. Years later, in my novel Weep Not, Child, the scene would reappear as the brief exchange between the fictional Njoroge and Stephen, relocated to a school compound.

  The majority of the camp participants came from the Quaker-run Kamusinga High School in Western Province. I had met some of them before, as members of the Kamusinga choir that had once visited Alliance en route from a musical event in Nairobi. They were a truly joyous lot. They burst onto our compound as if hosts, not guests, announcing their arrival with singing:

  We are happy and a-jolly

  Like the monkeys on the trees

  We are happy and a-jolly

  Tonight.

  They treated the body of their truck as a mobile drum, banging it in rhythm with their catchy tune. It was their energy and passion that made the melody live long in my mind. The group from Kamusinga at the Mutonguini Camp—among them David Wanjala Welime, David Okuku Zalo, Alfayo Ferdinand Sandagi, and Mabati Litaba—brought onto the site the same kind of energy and enthusiasm. The relationship between them and their white teachers seemed much more relaxed and interactive than any that I had seen before.

  Our project involved constructing a social hall, the heart of what would become Mutonguini Community Center. From the European Quakers, already skilled in masonry and carpentry, we learned how to make bricks, bake them, make walls, and use theodolite and other tools of masonry and carpentry, a process that brought back memories of my days at Good Wallace’s workshop in Limuru. After a hard day’s work, we played soccer and volleyball with the community, often challenging local teams, not always successfully. Sometimes we had social evenings of discussion, again with the community. These quiet moments, the church services conducted by the local minister of the African Inland Mission, and our weekly excursions and climbing in the surrounding hills helped forge a genuine community spirit.

  It was not my first time interacting with Akamba people. Although there had traditionally been border skirmishes between our two communities, the relationship between us was mainly one of trade. I remembered itinerant Akamba women traders being received by my mother and welcomed to stay for a night or two on their way to the next stop. This time I was part of their community. A few of the elders often came to our site. They were very much like the Gĩkũyũ elders I had known. I spoke Gĩkũyũ and the elders spoke Kikamba, two cognate languages. Precisely because of that similarity, however, there were some linguistic misunderstandings.

  The elders, who seemed to genuinely like me, interspersed their address to me with the word mutumia, which in Gĩkũyũ meant woman. Why are they calling me woman? I wondered, troubled. But neither in their tone nor in their body language could I detect any hint of malice or insult. Eventually I confided my unease to Stephen Muna, my classmate from Alliance, a resident of Mutonguini who, though he did not sleep at the camp, participated in the daily activities. He laughed at my predicament. Mutumia in Kikamba meant elder, not woman: they were showing me respect, accepting me, a young man, as one of them.

  It was also during the camp that I learned and experienced the power of the drum. The drum was not a central musical instrument among the Gĩkũyũ as much as it was among the Akamba. One evening we heard the sound of a drum calling us to see the famed Akamba acrobatic dancers in their home area. We decided to go to the arena. It was pitch dark, the stars and moon the only sources of light. It did not matter. The insistent sound was clear and near. We followed the road toward Kitui town. Every time we rounded a corner or climbed up a ridge, thinking that was where the sound came from, we would be disappointed: the sound seemed to come from the next hill. Some gave up and went back to camp. Eventually only Welime, Okuku, and I were left, now determined more than ever to get to the source of this power.

  After many miles of walking, we managed to trace the source to a bush off the road. Before us was a clearing, in the middle of which was a fire, and around the fireside some young men were drumming and others dancing. It was not the large spectacle we had imagined: these were neighborhood youth, out in the night. With my Gĩkũyũ and Welime’s Kiswahili, we were able to explain ourselves. They welcomed us and continued drumming and dancing but now with greater vigor: they had a foreign audience in their midst. Our presence and obvious interest had injected a new life into what for them had been routine practice and self-entertainment. But still, for a time, there was nothing out of the ordinary. We were about to leave when the dancers we had thought cautious started doing somersaults in the air, sometimes two of them crossing in the air in skillful aerial acrobatics, made more mysterious by the firelight in the dark. Possessed, the drummers’ upper bodies shook as if they held no bones. Then they too jumped in the air, in turns, holding the drums tightly between their legs, hands still beating rhythmically. It was as if they were in contest, propelled higher and higher by the competing powers of their drums. Then suddenly, peace. The fire was now just red embers. They were obviously enjoying the gasps of admiration from their visitors. When the time came for us to leave, they told us that we were actually on the outer edges of Kitui Town. A drum at night can sound deceptively near, I learned. Thereafter I would always associate the Ukambani region and the Akamba people with drums by night and aerial maneuvers against a background of encroaching darkness, held in check by the glow of red embers.

  47

  I had enjoyed the communal experience so much so that when later the same year I heard of another youth initiative, organized by a new body, Kenya Youth Hostels Association, I promptly signed up. The camp was a weekend affair, intended to be the first of a projected series that would bring European, Asian, and African youth together. Participants were asked to bring the barest of beddings: it would be an education in survival, not an indulgence in luxury. I borrowed a bike from my half-brother, Mwangi wa Gacoki, and reached the site, in West Limuru, on a Friday evening. It was the longest journey I had ever undertaken on a bike.

  The site was on an escarpment, in an abandoned railway station built in 1899. A rail track was half buried under the earth, still visible through the grass that had grown around and over it. Altogether the place looked forlorn, not a single hint of its old glory. I had hoped to find and interact with boys from all over Kenya, a much bigger affair than the one in Mutonguini. Instead, I found only an Indian boy, Govinda, and two European instructors, one from the
church and the other from the army. The army man, young, still in his military khaki pants and shirt, walked with the swagger of his trade. He made me recall the officers who had once beaten me in 1954, as well as the ones who had interrogated me in the 1956 Nairobi Saturday fiasco. In my mind, I named him the General. He had come in a Land Rover piled high with sleeping bags and other tools of survival. The churchman had come in his car. He was a bit elderly, in a safari jacket over a long-sleeved shirt. I named him the Archbishop. What a contrast: while the General walked as if he owned the earth, the Archbishop trod gingerly, as if afraid to hurt the ground under him. The General and the Archbishop had expected many more participants, at least more than this frail-looking Indian youth in long pants and his African counterpart in an Alliance uniform.

  The Friday evening was a prep talk for Saturday, then into our different camp beds in the enormous hall, probably haunted by the spirits of hundreds of Indian workers who had lost their lives laying the railroad in this extremely steep escarpment that ended in the yawning Great Rift Valley below. Govinda and I talked about the adventures awaiting us on Saturday, even making a virtue of our numbers—we would get their undivided attention. But early the next morning Govinda collected his stuff, got on his bike, and left. Now I had two instructors all to myself. I would have their completely undivided attention, I consoled myself.