In the House of the Interpreter (8 page)

The situation of women in secondary education changed
when a separate Alliance Girls High School was officially opened in 1948. The two institutions literally faced each other across a valley, so the students referred to dwellers in the opposite institution as Acrossians. For the boys, their female counterparts were nymphs in a misty valley who sang soft but irresistible siren songs, melodies wrought with a promise to mellow the souls of the lucky and, equally, with a danger of anguishing the unlucky. Nearly every tale that related to matters of the heart started and ended with reference to these nymphs, and one did not always know what to believe. But now, here in the second year, one of us swore that he had emerged from the green meadow with the promise and not the anguish, all on account of a Shakespearean sonnet. The success spurred us on. We committed the whole sonnet to memory and could be heard reciting it loudly in the school corridors, trying out different poses and voice modulations:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day
? /
Thou art more lovely and more temperate
, and then declaim,
Thy eternal summer shall not fade / Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest
, clinching the performance with the last two lines:

Though I never tested the sonnet’s effect on any Acrossian, the words were no less sweet, particularly when performed by Kariuki himself. He read them with a flair that brought out their drama and music. With the sonnets, Kariuki
made a case for the immortality of literary creations: in a classroom in Kenya in 1956, we were reading words written somewhere in Stratford-upon-Avon or on the streets of London by a bard who died in 1616.

But even Kariuki could not make me passionate about three centuries of English obsession with flowers and seasons. In Kenya there was sunshine and green life all year round, and flowers were never a thing of surprise. I could not escape the magic of literature, its endless ability to elicit laughter, tears, a whole range of emotions, but the fact that these emotions were exclusively rooted in the English experience of time and place could only add to my sense of dislocation. Not every flower in the world was one of Wordsworth’s
host of golden daffodils
. Kenya’s flora and fauna, and the rainy and dry seasons, could also provide images that captured the timeless relevance of art, but we did not encounter them in class.

This tendency to make Europe the reference point for human experience was exacerbated by the content and approaches in other subjects as well. In geography, the European landscape, mountains, rivers, and industrial locations were the primary formations to which the African versions, secondary of course, could now be contrasted. To the River Thames, about which I learned in my elementary schooling, I added knowledge of the other
civilized
waters in Europe—the Seine, Danube, Rhine, and Rubicon—as the
early locations of commerce and trade. African rivers—the Niger, Nile, Congo, and Zambesi—all discovered by Europeans, had any number of reasons for not being sites of civilization, except of course the Nile Delta, but even that was really part of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, as the Middle East was then named.

In history class, we traveled through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, admiring a gallery of dashing heroes. Even African history was largely the story of Europeans in Africa. Livingstone, Stanley, Speke, and Burton were the larger-than-life bearers of light to a Dark Continent. They were soul merchants, traversing terrains of dangerous forests clad in nothing more than the Bible, spreading enlightenment and casting out the devil. In the story of colonial settlements in Africa and America, only the Spanish and German rivals wallowed in blood, while the English overcame challenges of nature and man. Even in the story of the slave trade, the English, with their antislavery legal enactments, emerged as the heroes of the abolition movement and not the villains of its earlier expansion.

Brilliant in many ways and able to evoke the dramas of history, our teachers, like those in other schools, were following a syllabus laid out by the Cambridge Examination Board. I don’t believe they deliberately distorted the story; they simply offered their objective history of Africa from an imperialist point of view. We crammed the notes, facts, viewpoints, and all because, even then we understood that the correct answers to the often-biased questions determined the future. Our future was made in England.

This pedagogy may have had some unintended benefits:
the glamour of the far away and long ago contrasted sharply with the gloom of the near and present. An escape into wintry snow, flowers of spring, mountain chalets, and piracy on the high seas of those times and places carried my mind away from the anxieties of the moment.

But whatever their fascination, these images of the past could not hold off time. The school vacation finally started on May 10, which for me revived the fear that this could be my last day at Alliance: I would not be allowed back without a clean bill of political health.

For the first few days of the break, I put off the inevitable confrontation with the chief. Hinga had succeeded his sadistic brother, Ragae, who had been assassinated under dramatic circumstances. Mau Mau agents had stalked him from Limuru market and shot him. They did not kill him, but much later, disguised as hospital assistants, they followed him to Kĩambu hospital and shot him dead through a pillow they used as a silencer. Though Chief Hinga did not exhibit the same level of cruelty as his brother, I assumed that he must harbor resentments against his brother’s assassins. As the end of the break approached, I decided to be done with it, but not without much agonizing. Would he require me to go before yet another screening team to prove that I had not taken the oath? How could I prove that, here in the new Kamĩrĩthũ, where everybody knew about Good
Wallace? The chief was sure to be prejudiced against the brother of a Mau Mau guerrilla fighter.

It was a lonely walk through the narrow streets of the village, to the military post, built on the highest part of the ridge. As I approached the gate, I felt its threatening watchtower looming larger and larger over me. Since its construction in 1954, the post had been a site of torture, its walls built to muffle the cries and moans of the victims. My mother had been incarcerated there for three months answering questions about my brother’s disappearance and again afterward, from time to time, at the whims of the powers.

Suddenly, from apparently nowhere, I heard a command: halt. After an eerie silence, the drawbridge was lowered. My stomach was very tight as I walked over it. Under the bridge was a cavernous moat covered with barbed wire and jutted with sharp wooden spikes. At the gate, armed with papers and my school uniform, I made my purpose known, and they let me in. Home guards and administrative police, guns slung over their shoulders, moved about the yard, with others cleaning their guns or playing dice or checkers. Still others, wearing vests for shirts, put their clothes on the lines to dry. I was inside an armed camp, my sole protective armor being the Alliance uniform I wore. I was taken to the chief’s office, in the administrative square building with walls of stone and an iron roof.

I could not believe my eyes. The new chief was Fred Mbũgua, Kenneth’s father, my old teacher at Manguo Elementary who had once noticed and praised my composition.
There had been a recent change, apparently, and the illiterate chief had been replaced by one with formal schooling. I did not know what to make of my old teacher as a colonial chief, I was just glad that he did not ask me any questions, simply writing a letter in his clear cursive stating that I had been screened and found not to have taken the oath. I
was elated as I left the office and the precinct, even when I realized that although he had signed the letter, he had not marked it with an official stamp. Regardless, I still had to make an expedition to Tigoni district assistant’s office for the final official confirmation of my political cleanliness.

A fortified home guard post, at Kiajogu in Nyeri District, with watchtower and staked moat

Tigoni police station, the location of the regional district office, was a few miles from Limuru township, past Loreto Girls School, in an area where Europeans and Africans claimed the same lands, White Highlands to the former, Black People’s Country to the latter. The entrance to the district assistant’s office was a couple yards after the main entrance, and I joined the line waiting for service. Other people came and stood behind me, forming a long queue, and two police officers saw to it that people did not jump the line.

My turn finally came. A white officer sat behind the desk, bending over a folder. A black police officer, a rifle by his side, stood near him, looking at me suspiciously, as if my Alliance uniform were a fake. Eventually the white officer raised his eyes. He looked young but put on a grave face, performing authority. In my mind, I named him Johnny the Green,
Johnny
being the generic reference we used for British soldiers. I handed him my Alliance papers and the chief’s document that affirmed my innocence. He glanced at the documents and the letter in silence, then looked at me askance, wondering why I brought him documents that simply confirmed that I was from Alliance and had not taken the oath. I explained, haltingly, that the letter needed his official seal, a requirement before I could be issued a
passport. He glanced at it again, took a stamp on the table, and applied it, but as he was about to hand the document back to me, he stopped and looked at it yet again. He must have realized that it was not written on the chief’s letterhead and certainly did not carry the chief’s seal. He gave me the document with the order: Wait outside. You’ll be screened again.

This was the end of the road for me, I thought. There was no way I was going to pass the bar before a white stranger or the police officers he would ask to screen me. I stood on the veranda for a while. For some reason, none of the officers seemed unduly bothered with me. I even tried making eye contact, without any discernible response. They were clearly more concerned with those in line than with me. I faced a dilemma: wait and fail the screening or walk away and risk arrest. The document with the official seal was in my pocket. Why wait?

I started moving backward, a step at a time, and nobody attempted to stop me. Two. Three. Four. I was now off the veranda, outside. I turned my back to the building and walked, slowly, unhurriedly, onto the track that led to the main road. I turned left, past the main entrance to the police station. I decided, if caught and taken back to the office, to swear that I had not understood Johnny the Green’s English accent, but the mere thought of being caught broke my armor of carefully cultivated insouciance. Suddenly panic seized me. I heard footsteps. Sirens? Gunfire? Sweat broke out. I started running, not daring to look back to confirm, and did not stop until I was back in Kamĩrĩthũ. The pursuing
footsteps, the sirens, and the sounds of gunfire had been in my mind only.

Back at Alliance at the beginning of August, and now possessing a clean bill of political health, I was issued my passbook. The passbook aimed to further tighten government control of the movement of the Gĩkũyũ, Embu, and Meru communities in the entire country, and to put a wedge between their members and non-GEM Africans. Not even our teachers were exempt.

By giving the illusion that some communities were more privileged, the state hoped to buy their loyalty. But in reality, when it came to sudden raids, blackness, not passbooks, was the uniform profile and identity of the suspect. It was only after the raids that IDs would help sort out the GEMs and non-GEMs. And by then all would have suffered some form of harassment and humiliation.

At Alliance, life was back to normal. But the passbook confirmed that the seemingly unconnected rhythms of life in the school, the country, and the world would sometimes cross and impact our lives in the sanctuary directly, making me realize that perhaps the boundary I had assumed to exist between them, like the pursuing sirens of my escape, had all along been in my mind only.

At any rate, it was clear, by mid-1956, that the rest of my life at Alliance would be a series of crossings between the
conflicting realities of the school and the new village. I was coming to terms with the awareness that whatever relief the sanctuary offered me was not permanent, that both locations, Alliance and Kamĩrĩthũ, would always remind me of loss. Incrementally, I also resolved that even in times of fear, I must not succumb to fear completely. The venture inside the Kamĩrĩthũ home guard post, all alone, and my later instinctive escape from Johnny the Green, stoked the nascent defiance within me, urging me to dare outside the walls of the sanctuary, even during term time, despite the hounds at the gate. It was such a crossing, one too many, that eventually earned me a summons to the principal’s office for my first face-to-face encounter with Edward Carey Francis.