In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir
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This was of course our conclusion, not Schweitzer’s. I often wondered about my enthusiasm for him. It was partly due to Gaitho’s infectious passion. But I may have detected some parallels between him and Carey Francis. Both accepted Jesus as the center of their lives. Both had given up high academic positions for service in Africa. But Carey Francis was clearer that he wanted to serve the least among us. Schweitzer wrote autobiographies; Carey Francis would never do an autobiography or any writings that drew attention to himself. Schweitzer studied the life of Jesus; Carey Francis followed the life of Jesus. But on one thing they were completely united: service to the community driven by their relationship to Jesus, no matter what their interpretation of that relationship. My love of volunteer work may have been inspired by the devotion to service manifested in the lives of two disparate missionaries on opposite sides of the continent.
* In the republic of Gabon today.
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There was no way one could hide from Shakespeare at Alliance. His characters had become my daily companions, as were his insights into social conflicts. Inside and outside the classroom, over the last four years, Shakespeare was an integral part of my intellectual formation. I had come to understand Gathere’s recitation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth every morning.
I always looked forward to seeing which Shakespeare would show up at the end of the year. But the King Lear production in 1958 held more than the usual fascination: it was going to mark the end of one era and the beginning of another. I did not take part in the production, but I could not help but admire my classmate Andrew Kaingu’s courage in auditioning for and accepting so big a role: Lear dominates the play in the number of scenes in which he appears and the lines he speaks. Kaingu had to cram all of this and appear in nearly all the rehearsals, while also preparing for Cambridge exams that would determine his future. But he did it. The last performance was an incredible feat of stamina and a convincing display of the whole gamut of emotions, from the comic to the tragic, in the life and actions of Lear.
Kaingu’s hair had been powdered gray to give his nineteen years a touch of age, but he did not need gray hairs to display his skills and talent. In the storm scene, with only the Fool and blind Gloucester as his audience, Kaingu’s Lear rose to the occasion, mixing reason with palpable madness: Plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it. The lines and delivery captured the ongoing practice of colonial justice outside the walls of Alliance.
Shakespeare may have been beloved by the colonial establishment, pure art to be liberally dished out to schools, but his portrayal of blatant power struggles, like conflicts between the feudal and the new social order dramatized in King Lear, spoke directly to the struggles for power in Kenya at the time. The play accurately reflected the bloody struggle between the Mau Mau guerrillas and the forces of the colonial state. Fundamentally, Shakespeare, by extension, questioned the assumed stability of the state; he dramatized, for all the world to see, that power came from and was maintained by the sword. Shakespeare gave birth to student writers of drama: Henry Kuria, Kimani Nyoike, Gerishon Ngũgĩ, and Bethuel Kurutu.
But though they lacked obvious political themes, the students’ efforts laid a foundation for a tradition of plays in African languages, Kiswahili in particular, and of theater as community involvement. While the English-language productions targeted school audiences and were often attended by the English-speaking colonial elite, the Kiswahili productions targeted the community as its main audience. Still, it was Shakespeare who had inspired the local tradition, one that demonstrated, in practice, that Kiswahili was an equally legitimate vehicle of creative imagination.
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Despite the welcome Shakespearean distraction, I had not forgotten the big academic hurdle still before me. Alliance had annually sent its graduates on to Makerere University College, in Kampala, Uganda, in numbers and regularity that attracted the admiring notice of even the most rabid intellectual settler-philes. A few Alliance graduates had secured places abroad, but the most coveted was admission to Makerere, which depended entirely on one’s performance in fiercely competitive exams. I wanted to be among the chosen.
So for the rest of the year, I hid inside book covers and class notes. There were students who memorized dates when it came to history, formulae when it came to physics with chemistry, and facts of plant and animal life when it came to biology. And as before all other exams, some talked as if they were quite certain of the passages from Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw, or H. G. Wells, on which literature questions would be based. I was bad at cramming facts, worse at retaining and recalling them. I was more interested in understanding processes. So whenever I would hear other boys talk about geography or history, spouting these numerous facts and figures, I would feel slightly nervous, despite the fact that I had been through similar fears before.
In one area, however, I accepted and embraced challenge openly. All eight subjects, including math, were compulsory; one had to take an exam in each. But there was also one optional paper, additional math. It did not count for the final grade or college acceptance. It was for one’s intellectual ego. Additional math was a notch higher and more challenging than the regular. Most students avoided it largely because of the reputed difficulty and quite frankly because it meant extra hours of preparation that could otherwise usefully go to what counted. On an impulse, I mentioned to my friend Joseph Gatuiria that I was undecided about taking additional math. Gatuiria laughed outright. There is no way you can pass additional math. You are not Asinjo, he said, referring to the best mathematics student in the class of 1958. Asinjo had more precision: my path to a solution meandered and was cluttered with debris, while Asinjo’s was tidy and short. Gatuiria’s skepticism became a challenge. I would take additional math.
The Overseas Cambridge School Certificate exams began Monday, November 24. But the final assembly and speech, starring Carey Francis, took place on Thursday, December 4, a day before the last paper. The scene was a little reminiscent of Jesus sending out his disciples to go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Carey Francis read our commission, the same, no doubt, that he had read to all those who Alliance had sent out since he took over the headship in 1940:
Go forth into the world in peace;
Be of good courage;
Hold fast that which is good;
Strengthen the fainthearted;
Support the weak;
Help the afflicted;
Honor all men;
Love and serve the Lord.
That was it. Formal divorce from the House of the Interpreter. So on December 5 I sat the last paper as an occupant of a liminal space, neither an Alliance nor quite an ex-Alliance; neither of the school nor of the world. After it I knew, without a shadow of doubt, that my Alliance days had ended.
One last piece of business remained to mark my final and formal severance from Alliance: the Leaving School Certificate. Carey Francis personally gave these out to each student, one on one. As I went into the office, I recalled all my previous encounters with him, on the grounds, in the chapel, the classroom, everywhere, for he was everywhere even when he seemed to be nowhere.
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The fact is that the Alliance of my time was Carey Francis, and Carey Francis was Alliance. His personality was stamped on everything: the grass that was always well trimmed; the parades of cleanliness as second only to godliness; the tidiness of mind and heart reflected in the body beaten into shape by sports and rigorous tests in endurance; the everyday of prayers in the morning to the preps in the evening. It was stamped on the behavior of faculty and students alike, especially in his presence. Even dignitaries who came to the school, from the governor and high government officials to visiting British MPs, put on an air of gravitas in his presence. It was not that he demanded obeisance; it was simply the way he lived his life as the head of an Alliance Family and the reputation it had
generated. He ran the Family with the guidance of the only one master he accepted and to whom he had pledged his obedience: Jesus. In a 1944 letter to Reverend H. M. Grace about S. G. Young, Carey Francis expressed what he expected from teachers at Alliance:
We need a man (indeed we need several) who has a degree, can teach, is ready to work, is game to turn his hand to anything that is needed. He must be more than a classroom teacher, must care for the boys. He must be a Christian—we try to make that (with very limited success) the centre of everything. I do not mind what brand so long as it is real, and so long as he is ready to work happily with those of other brands who serve the same master.
He was describing himself. His single-minded devotion to that ideal gave him an inner stability whose weight could be felt by those around him. He seemed every inch the Kiplingesque character who would walk with kings and yet not lose the common touch, the rock that could not be moved, by disaster or triumph.
Only once did I see a crack in the rock. It was the afternoon of Tuesday, February 22, 1958, during a visit by his old college mate at Cambridge, Bishop Stephen Neill. Even the way Carey Francis introduced him to us in Form Four A told us that he looked up to him. Bishop Neill talked about the Anglican Church, probably a summary of ideas in his book on Anglicanism. Suddenly, touched by some words Neill had uttered, Carey Francis began to weep, tears flowing down his cheeks. I could not tell what exactly Neill had said to move him so. Maybe it was the phrase via media, which would translate as the middle way between extremes, the core of the Franciscan outlook. Whatever the case, it was almost as if Neill had just come from a conference with Jesus and were delivering a message from Heaven. Neill did not seem surprised. He did not even change his tone of voice. He must have seen it before. But I was shocked. This was a face of Carey Francis I had never seen.
He embodied other contradictions. Once, during a math lesson, he said that in all his time at Alliance, he had met only one boy, David Wasawo,* who could be accepted in Cambridge on the basis of merit alone. And yet here was a person who devoted his life to making Alliance boys excel in whatever they undertook and was delighted when they beat the daylights out of Wales and York in anything competitive. In a talk that he gave at a joint meeting of the Royal African and the Royal Empire societies in London on March 31, 1955, he said that, apart from Africans coming from poorer, less endowed homes,
they are essentially the same as English boys. They would bear comparison with those of the European schools in Kenya, or with a good school in this country, in intelligence, in athletic prowess, in industry, courtesy, courage, and trustworthiness, and as gentlemen.†
He believed, as I would learn years later, that Mau Mau was “evil through and through, and has done much harm to African and European alike; but it is a resistance movement,” waging a legitimate nationalist struggle against foreign occupation and “like resistance movements in the war [World War II], Mau Mau fights not only against European invaders but even more fiercely against African collaborators.” He had faith “in the British Empire and the great traditions for which it stands.” Indeed, he believed that the colonial administration, as opposed to the political white settlers, had integrity and was essentially well intentioned; yet precisely because of his faith in the empire, he led efforts in documenting proofs of wrongs done by the colonial forces and presenting them to authorities higher up the chain of command. In some areas, he had told the joint session of the Royal Africa and the Royal Empire societies, “the average Kikuyu has hardly known which to fear more, the Mau-Mau or the forces of law and order. By both, men have been robbed, beaten, carried off, and killed, and there is almost no hope of redress. They hardly try for it. To whom should they go?” He emphatically told them, “we shall never destroy Mau Mau by killing gangsters or imprisoning oath takers, we shall destroy it only by disposing of the foundations on which it rests by showing that we are not enemy invaders.” He was truly a mystery.‡
Now I was back in his office, facing, for the last time, the man whose shadow had fallen on the entire school during my four years. He asked me whether I knew what I was going to do, pending the Cambridge results. I would be teaching at a primary school called Kahũgũinĩ. Though I had never been there, I tried to explain where it was, but he beat me to it. Is that in Gatũndũ? I said yes. Then he gave me a prep talk about temptations out there in the world. He had one piece of advice: Whatever you do, don’t be a politician. All politicians, black, white, and brown, are unmitigated scoundrels.
I took the piece of paper, a certificate based on how the school viewed each of the students. It vouched for character. Among the remarks, one jumped out: he has shown a pioneering spirit. I looked at Carey Francis. I did not see myself as a pioneer. But I valued this comment more than anything else, for it could only refer to my participation in work and youth camps. My activities at Mutonguini and the escarpment had been noticed. Thank you, Mr. Francis. Thank you, Alliance.
Outside the office, on the parade ground where I first disembarked on January 20, 1955, it hit me all at once. Now it was December 1958. The piece of paper in my hands simply certified that after four years I had forever left what Carey Francis used to describe as an oasis in a desert. The desert and the oasis produced each other. I had once seen it as a sanctuary surrounded by bloodhounds, but in time, over the four years, the howl of the hounds had quieted to a faint whimper. Now, outside these walls, were human voices that drowned or matched those of the hounds. I felt a mixture of delight and dread. I was leaving the walls to plunge into the unknown.
Alas, I had half forgotten that, outside the gates, the hounds were still crouched, panting, waiting, biding their time to pounce …
* Wasawo later graduated from Cambridge with a degree in mathematics and went on to teach at the University of Nairobi.
† Edward Carey Francis, “Kenya’s Problems as Seen by a Schoolmaster in Kikuyu Country,” African Affairs 54, no. 216 (July 1955).
‡ Carey Francis, “Kenya’s Problems,” 190, 191, 194, 193, 192.
1959
A Tale of the Hounds at the Gate
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FRIDAY
The saga of the hounds begins in April 1959, four months after I left Alliance. I am sitting by the window, a few seats from the back of a bus traveling from Nairobi to Limuru. At a roadblock near Banana Hills, the police wave us to a stop. Two officers, one wielding a machine gun and the other a rifle, rush in, shouting don’t move. They imprint themselves in my mind as Messrs. Machine Gun and Rifleman. Mr. Machine Gun stands by the entrance to block anyone from exiting. Mr. Rifleman quickly walks up and down the aisle; then he relaxes, slings his rifle on his right shoulder, and starts demanding identity and tax papers, beginning with those near the entrance. Although there is nothing unusual about this in a country under a state of emergency since 1952, the drama still jolts me.
Up to now it has been a Friday of triple pleasure. I have just received a full month’s salary with three months arrears as an untrained teacher at Kahũgũinĩ Primary School in Gatũndũ, where I had started in January, a month after I left Alliance. I have been getting a percentage of the wages pending results of the Overseas Cambridge School Certificate exams, which I took in December. It may not be much, even with the four months arrears, but fifty pounds is the largest amount of money I have ever held in my hands.
With some of it, I am able to transform my wardrobe. This is important for a new self. At Alliance, trousers were not allowed. Even shoes were for Saturdays and Sundays only. The school did not want clothes to reflect and deepen social difference. The rule was fine for me because I could not have afforded the extra expense. But after leaving school I wanted to mark the difference between the Alliance and after-Alliance lifestyle, the way I had seen my predecessors do.
Earlier today I asked Kenneth to accompany me to an Indian tailor where sometime back I had ordered made-to-measure gray woolen trousers. It was gabardine or worsted wool, the shopkeeper had explained. Very expensive. At the time,
I could only afford a down payment, with the rest to be paid in monthly installments. Now with my full salary plus arrears, I was able to pay the remaining amount. I could hardly wait to change into the new pair of woolen trousers and put my old pair in a box. When I did, I walked around in the shop, looking every inch a college-bound student. Even Kenneth, who was used to wearing trousers of reasonable quality since he had started earning earlier, was impressed and ordered his own made to measure.
In addition to the full wage and new clothes, two other items of news have added to the value of this Friday. I have passed the Overseas Cambridge School Certificate, with Distinctions, in English language, history, physics with chemistry, and biology, second only to Henry Chasia. I have also clocked a credit in additional math. In my bag, I have acceptance papers to Makerere University College, one of nineteen admissions from Alliance. I brought them all to the headquarters in Kĩambu as proof of having passed the exams, the condition for securing my arrears, but I also take pride in having them with me. Throughout the morning, among the throng of teachers old and new who, as usual, have traveled from all over the district to the headquarters to receive their salaries, I have felt like waving the papers to everybody to see that I am a graduate of Alliance and a prospective college student. But I have not done so. I want to share the news with my mother first. It’s the result of our pact, made twelve years ago.
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So eager was I to get home that, in Nairobi, I rejected entreaties from Kenneth and Patrick to while away the time in the city and take a later Nairobi-Limuru bus. The anticipation of the smile on my mother’s face as I place the money and papers on her lap would not let me stay. And now this delay at Banana Hills!