In the House of the Interpreter (15 page)

I was a little shaken. I had thought that stage fright applied to actors only, but now I understood. I knew the prayer by heart, having first memorized it way back in my elementary days at Kamandũra, and yet when the moment came, I froze. It was a humbling experience and a lesson. The rest of the Sundays in 1958 went smoothly, with parents and children in the area getting to know me as
Mwalimu
and occasionally inviting me and my team to their homes.

Most students did not participate in Sunday school. In the afternoon they would go about their personal business, hang around the compound and study, visit home for those who lived in the nearby neighborhoods, or walk to the valley for dates with Acrossians. These boys had the most glamorous stories to tell in the evenings, as if taunting us with
what we, the Sunday scholars, had missed. Certainly no tale about teaching scriptures could successfully compete with those about adventures with nymphs in the famous magic valley.

But I was not about to give up my Sunday school for social outings. The eager faces of the children reminded me of the magic of my own Sunday schools at Kamandũra. Later my commitment was reinforced by my personal and dramatic experience of evangelical Christianity. The commitment preceded and survived the breakup of the cabal. Not once did the preparation for the exams of my life ever tempt me to quit Sunday school at Kĩnoo.

Not surprisingly, sports were a requirement at Alliance, for they educated the body in the same way that the classroom did the mind and the chapel the soul. Chess, though not a requirement, could contribute to character. Together they created the man strong to serve. Although from the time of Grieves’s leadership sports had been important, it was Carey Francis who turned the playing field into a secular equivalent of the chapel. He brought to Maseno and Alliance the passion he had already acquired in his youth in England, where he captained soccer, cricket, and tennis teams. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he had been a member of the First XI soccer team.
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I never stood out in any team sports. My lack of coordination was almost comical. In soccer, the ball seemed to deliberately avoid me or else pass me by, mocking my leg in the air. My hockey stick nearly always missed the ball. I did, however, excel at indoor games, even if they were not at the center of the Alliance ideal. Although they were deemed merely recreational, I found them formative of character, mind, and soul.

I had joined the chess club begun by David Martin in 1950. Not having come from a feudal order, I found its medieval characters of kings, queens, knights, bishops, footmen or pawns in their descending order of value, the highest to the lowest, all in defense of the king, strange, even confusing at first. But once I mastered the rules, I took to it. Nicodemus Asinjo, one of the best in my time, could think several moves ahead. He had early on discovered the power of the pawn; sometimes he would even sacrifice his queen for pawn and position, which he would use to devastating effect. It became a life lesson for me: even in the lowest of persons, there is great potential, or as the Gĩkũyũ proverb put it, heavy rains start with a drop. Chess, though, had few regularly active followers compared with other sports. For some it was too slow; for others it involved too much thinking and mental calculation. It was a war game and called for mental endurance and the ability to vary tactics within a strategic vision, the very reasons I liked it.

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
.

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.

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 students 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.