In the House of the Interpreter (13 page)

Kenya Scouts Jamboree at Nyeri Showground, 1957: Ngũgĩ (on left); Kenneth Mbũgua (on right) at the February 23 Asante rally in honor of Baden-Powell

Once, trying to push my way through the milling crowd without losing sight of the Alliance contingent, I bumped into Kenneth Mbũgua, my Limuru childhood friend. What a coincidence! We spent some time together and even posed for pictures, our scout’s knives hanging from our belts. We discussed everything, from our experiences in scouting to books we had read. It was always a treat to argue with Kenneth about books, for it stretched the limits of our understanding in the frantic search for reinforcements to buttress our side of the argument.

It was inevitable that Kenneth and I would resume our eternal dispute about the license to write. This time I was not as aggressive in my rejoinders, curious about the progress of his own book. He appreciated the comments I had made about simple sentences and the virtues of the Anglo-Saxon word. Goodwill established, I tried to press my advantage toward, well, my first convert. I knew his obstinacy too well to approach the subject directly. I had to be circumspect as I slipped into my Jesus-is-my-personal-savior mode, still trying to snag my first catch. He could learn from the Bible, I told him, more than simple words of its language. But Kenneth proved skeptical and did not fall for my sly attempts to move from English language structure to soul restructuring. His soul remained stuck to his sinful body the way his
characters remained stuck in the city, probably victims of police raids and their own sins.

Eventually our talk drifted from books and salvation, about which we never seemed to agree, to life in the new village. We were struck by the fact that, living in the same congested village, we hardly ever met the way we used to in the old homestead. Ever since the loss of the old homestead, I had been haunted by the melancholy of the new. We lived in the same village, but we were a collection of strangers, lonely villagers. It may have arisen from my yearning for something, anything to make me feel at home in the new, but increasingly I found myself troubled by the lack of any social activity that could bring the youth of the new village together. Kenneth expressed the same feeling. Maybe we who had had the benefit of a high school education and teacher training could lead the way and contribute something to help the community discover its soul. Kenneth seemed to warm to the idea of contributing to a community spirit more than he had to that of rescuing his own.

The challenge of forging a togetherness among the youth of the new villages would not leave my mind. When later I went back to Kamĩrĩthũ on April 18 for the first break of the year, I started contacting Limuru boys and girls now in high school, and those in the last years of their primary, to explore ways in which we might work together. This took
me to many homes in the different parts of Kamĩrĩthũ and in neighboring villages. I began to connect with the different families of the old homestead while also discovering and making contact with new families. Instead of the melancholy I had seen reflected in the canopy of smoke over the village, I began to see the buoyant spirit of youth rising, expressing itself in many little things: walks in the narrow streets; informal gatherings in corners; occasional dancing in people’s homes.

I returned to Alliance for the second term, a little bit more at ease with the new village. On the next Nairobi Saturday, I invited Allan Ngũgĩ, the famous editor of
SEP
, to come home with me, and he loved the novelty and the challenge of walking ten miles on foot. We found my mother at home. She roasted some potatoes for us, and afterward Allan confided that they were some of the best he had ever eaten. His appreciation was like an embrace of one of the most constant images in my life. My mother’s roast had come to symbolize continuity despite the many changes in my life. Her last roast at the foot of the Mugumo tree and the talk that ensued about adding on to a story would be imprinted in my mind for years to come; it had already affected my attitude toward the village.

There was not a single mishap, the first time on a return to the village that a calamity had not befallen me. On our way back, I could appreciate the joy of walking and talking, without a memory of terror or anxiety of being late to school. It was amid our talk of different futures, immersed in many topics, that an idea of how best to carry out the
Baden-Powell spirit in Kamĩrĩthũ stole into my consciousness: instead of a scout troop, why not a debating club, where the youth of the village would receive and add to the story?

The debating society at Alliance was one of the oldest student clubs, started in 1939. The first motion,
Should Germany’s colonial claims be accepted by Britain?
was an ironic case of the colonized debating the merits of rival imperialisms and presumably taking sides. But this started a tradition of the society tackling political themes. Good debaters were instant heroes, especially when it came to interschool contests. Such was the case involving the fourth-year Kĩmani Nyoike and his Kagumo counterpart, Paul Mwema. I was in my first year, part of the crowd that went to witness two obstinate giants go at each other with relentless verbal onslaughts, vying for our attention and allegiance. They talked without notes, fluently. Where did people get the courage to stand before such a crowd and air their views? I would ask myself, time and again, mesmerized.

When finally, on another occasion, I contributed to a debate, the question of courage did not arise.
Western Education has done more harm than good in Africa
was the motion. As the proponents and opponents continued, I felt that frivolity was winning out over the seriousness the subject demanded. I recalled all the talks I used to have with
Ngandi about education, land, and religion. I raised my hand. As the debates were then mostly dominated by third and fourth years, the intervention of a first year raised eyebrows and curiosity. I did not have the eloquence of words and smoothness in delivery, but I had the clarity of passion. I held a pencil in the air. All eyes were fixed on it. I told a story. A person comes to your house. He takes your land. In exchange he gives you a pencil. Is this fair exchange? I would rather he kept his pencil and I kept my land. It was a huge effort. I sat down, breathless. The applause that followed told me the analogy had worked. It might even have helped swing the debate in favor of the motion. Of course, the contradiction was clear: all of us, for and against the motion, were at Alliance in pursuit of the Western education we had censured. But I learned the power of images in clarifying complex relations. Additionally, my intervention made an impression on the leadership of the debating society.

I became an avid participant in debates, if without that same kind of impact. Over the years, however, a few others and I became increasingly critical of the format. I felt that too many in the audience were passive; something was missing. When I became part of the leadership of the debating society, we discussed how we could inject drama into the sessions. I wanted consistent fire, or at least sparks, and it could only come from audience involvement. Our inspiration came from the Legislative Council.

Established in 1907, Legco was initially a completely white affair, with debates on such issues as eggs and plumes
of ostriches: people were not allowed to take eggs from natural nests or capture natural ostriches, to protect licensed ostrich farmers. There were also, of course, more sinister debates to forge laws that consolidated Kenya as a white man’s country.

Alliance had a long history of contact with this august institution. Even before the school was founded, its backers were closely associated with it. Dr. John W. Arthur, a missionary and a central player in the Alliance of Missions that had set up the school, was appointed representative of African interests. He guarded his status as the African voice jealously and was horrified that nationalists like Harry Thuku and Jomo Kenyatta would want to set up their own political organizations instead of joining the loyal associations that Dr. Arthur organized. He was a kindly person and obviously dedicated to his mission, but he acted as if he knew Africans better than they knew themselves. It was not until 1944 that the government appointed the first African representative of African interests, Eliud Mathu, Alliance class of 1928 and later a teacher there. Students, too, were involved in the colonial body: whenever a new session of the Legco opened, the school sent two boys as ushers. In 1955 it was Peter Mburu, of the debating society, and Bethuel A. Kiplagat, our Dorm Two prefect.

By 1957 Mburu and Kiplagat had left Alliance, so there was nobody in the committee with any personal experience of the legislative procedure. But we knew that it was modeled on the British Houses of Parliament, which we had studied in class, and we decided to change our debating
format into our interpretation of the Parliamentary system. The dining hall became our parliament. The chair, a mallet of authority in his hand, became Speaker of the House. The audience would constitute ordinary members of Parliament, evenly divided between the government and the opposition. Once the principal proponents and opponents had spoken, it was the floor’s turn. But they could not make a statement directly. They could only ask questions so as to expose holes in the position of the mover or that of the opposition, or help beef up any of the earlier responses. Skillful questions and follow-ups could really bring out contradictions in the positions of the speakers. If an ordinary member of the house disagreed profoundly with the position of either side, he would demonstrate this by crossing the floor. Whether they spoke or not, everybody was a participant. The constant to-and-fro across the aisle created drama, the crossings often greeted with clashing calls of shame or welcome, keeping the speaker constantly busy with his mallet.

Soon the Franciscan binary grouping of political actors into statesmen and scoundrels entered the lexicon of the debates. Initially the words provoked laughter because everybody knew that they were a good-humored dig at Carey Francis, but later they took on a life of their own, becoming descriptions of radical versus conservative positions. Scoundrels were more popular than statesmen, providing more drama with their extreme though often frivolous questioning, drawing applause, whistles, and boos from the audience. The speaker would call out order, order, lecturing the audience on parliamentary decorum and threatening to
have the recalcitrant ejected by the sergeant at arms. One speaker always prefaced his answers with the Churchillian phrase
As I was saying before I was rudely interrupted
. And on another occasion:
Do you realize, sir, that your answer is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma?
Thereafter speakers outdid one another in borrowing phrases from politicians in and outside the country.

Two debates stood out under the new format.
If you want peace, prepare for war
was the motion, which I was to move. Although I did not believe strongly in the proposition, rhetoric was more important than personal conviction. My main thesis was that if a people don’t prepare for war, they become an easy target for the warlike, while those who prepare have a means of defending themselves. Then one could negotiate peace from a position of strength. Arming oneself acted as a deterrent, as in the Cold War between America and Russia. I concluded with the Machiavellian maxim
Hence it is that all armed prophets have prospered and all unarmed have perished
, a kind of
Dawa ya moto ni moto
. With more people crossing the floor to our side, we were clearly winning. The warrior seemed to inspire more awe and admiration than the peacemaker.

But a peacemaker intervened at a strategic moment. You harvest what you plant. You don’t plant potatoes and expect to harvest corn. If you want war, prepare for war. If you want peace, prepare for peace. When my turn came to summarize, I could not put the slightest dent in that graphic image.

All in all, our interpretation of the parliamentary system worked for our needs, livening up the debates. Little did I
know that a few years later the format would intervene in my life in the most unexpected of ways.

The August break, which began on July 31, brought good news to our family. My brother’s wife, Charity Wanjiki, came home from Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison, and we learned that Good Wallace had been relocated to the last post on the pipeline, literally next door to our village.

The pipeline was the system the colonial state had devised for releasing those held in the concentration camps. Those who refused to cooperate with their interrogators, despite attempts to break them with words or torture, remained held in the harshest camps; those who showed degrees of cooperation were moved in stages, until they were finally released to the camp nearest their home, before their reentry into the concentration villages. My brother was deemed cooperative after declaring that he had accepted Jesus as the ruler of his life. Good Wallace had never seen any contradiction between Christian values and those of liberation. As far back as I could remember, he had read the Bible avidly and regularly attended Sunday services at the African Orthodox Church before it was banned.

I had not seen him since that day he came down from the mountains by night, an armed guerrilla, to wish me success in my end of the primary school exams. I put on my Alliance uniform to show him that his prayers and wishes had been met. He was together with other prisoners but was
allowed to come to the wall of barbed wire. Ngenia was not a heavily fortified prison: who would want to break prison on the last stage of their release? Still, the state wanted to make sure that the freedom fighters were seen as captives, common criminals, and not the heroes of people’s political imagination. But Good Wallace would always be a hero to me. I fought back tears of joy, tinged with sorrow at the sight of him caged. He was quick to note my khaki shorts, shirt, and blue tie. The look and the smile on his face spoke of gratitude and satisfaction, as if the uniform were worthy of all the suffering he had undergone. As we parted, his older-brother instinct kicked in: he reminded me to take off the uniform and wear regular clothes so as not to get it soiled and ruffled. This assertion said it all. He had survived police chases, the mountains, and concentration camps. He was alive and well.