In the House of the Interpreter (18 page)

From Brontë, I drifted to Tolstoy. As in the case of Brontë, I knew very little about Tolstoy. But I had not gone far in his
Childhood, Youth
, and
Boyhood
, the trio in one volume, when I felt a desire I had never experienced, at least not with this intensity: I wanted to write about my childhood. Before, such feelings had been vague and fleeting, not calling for immediate action. This new desire was insistent. It would not even let me finish Tolstoy’s book. I forgot all about my former arguments with Kenneth about the license to write.

It was 1957, my third year at Alliance. The story that came out of me was based on a belief we held as children that we could summon a loved one from wherever they were, by whispering their name into an empty clay pot. In the story, the fictional but autobiographical narrator’s first whisper works: his auntie who lives thirty miles away turns up on the third day after the summons. Emboldened, the narrator is eager to display his new powers to an audience. The opportunity comes when he hears his mother complain that his older brother who works in Nairobi does not come home. He assures her that if she so desires, he can make him come home, no later than the third day. Of course his solemn declaration is greeted with skeptical laughter by the rest of the family, but he does not mind. His revenge
would come:
When everyone was absent, I went to the kitchen. There was the cooking pot, mundane, disinterested, dead—but wait—possessing, as I knew, magical powers. Lifting it reverently from its hook, I slowly and deliberately called my brother by name
. But the magic does not work. That was the ironic twist. Following Tolstoy, I titled the story “My Childhood.” It was a couple of handwritten pages, whereas Tolstoy’s was a book, but I submitted it to the editors of
Alliance High Magazine
.

I did not get a response, not surprising as there was normally no editorial exchange between the writer and the editor, and I soon lost hope and forgot all about it. But when the magazine came out later, in September 1957, a friend spotted my piece. I could hardly wait to see and read it. It was my first-ever published work. In appearance, the nice print was a far cry from my handwritten version. It was of course smaller than the handwritten, but that did not matter.

Once I started reading it, however, I was appalled by the editorial license taken, and my excitement fell. The title had changed from “My Childhood” to become “I Try Witchcraft.” That, I did not mind: the new title was pithy, though misleading because what I described was not witchcraft. But the second paragraph, an editorial insertion, had the fictional narrator assert that Christianity was without doubt
the greatest civilizing influence and as it crept in amongst the people, many began to see the futility of putting their faith in superstition and witchcraft
. A simple story, in which I had poked fun at our childhood beliefs and superstitions, had been turned into a condemnation of the pre-Christian life
and beliefs of a whole community and, simultaneously, an ingratiating acknowledgment of the beneficial effects of enlightenment. I was turned into a prosecution witness for the imperial literary tradition from which I had been trying to escape. Although well intentioned, this editorial intrusion smothered the creative fire within me; no amount of reading of Tolstoy’s
Childhood
and
Youth
would rekindle it. I did not feel pride in my creation.

During the holidays, I showed the piece to Kenneth. His sarcastic reaction was perhaps predictable: Did you first get a license to write?
^*
He never would forget about our arguments. I could have responded that mine was not a book or that I was inoculated from censure by the editorial input of my teacher. But really, I no longer held the position that one needed a prior license to write. Even in our arguments during the Asante rally in Nyeri, I had begun to shift my position, and Tolstoy had inspired me out of it altogether. I conceded defeat. Kenneth did not offer his opinion on the quality of the piece. He was happy that it had won him an argument started in our elementary school, three years before. Now the victor of that argument, he would bring it up even in the presence of a third person, citing my story and indirectly inciting curiosity about it.

The piece garnered me two new friends who I would later
label my ological buddies, and the days of our intense association, my ological period. The first was Kĩmani Mũnyaka, a junior high school graduate and now a primary school teacher. His habit of always carrying a magazine or a book with him had earned him the reputation of being a reader of books. The moment Kenneth introduced us and brought up the subject of my publication, Kĩmani wanted to read it.

I awaited his comments eagerly, hoping that he would not dwell too much on the bit about the civilizing effects of Christianity. I needed to hear an opinion on my actual creation. His first words, when next we met, sounded at odds with the subject: Do you know how to spell the word
psychology
? I was puzzled: What did a spelling test have to do with my story? The word was not even in my piece. To put him in good humor, I tried to say the letters loudly. I kept on getting the spelling wrong, and finally I gave up. His lips, pursed in a smile, told me that he had been anticipating my failure. You see, the word begins with the letter
p
, he explained with the patience of a superior, but don’t blame yourself too much, you did what most people do. They forget that the
p
is silent, so all they hear is the sound of the letter
s
. Now, about your story. The piece was quite interesting. He paused. It manifests one of the pillars of the psychology of desire. I did not know what he was talking about. What had psychology, let alone one of desire, to do with my story? I asked him.

Everything, he argued back. Psychology was in every human action and behavior. It dealt with the hidden motives behind them. You might think that your assembly of words
was just a story about whispers in a clay pot, but actually it was whispers into self, like the silent talks we all have inside ourselves. First you wrote it at Alliance, a high school, away from home. Correct? Yes. You were lonely, you were longing for home, mother’s food, cooked in a clay pot. Your teachers were white, correct? Yes, but not all of them. True, but the principal was, correct? Yes. Remember that you were also surrounded by Christianity, a foreign religion. So you were clearly longing for something to make you feel at home. But the story was more than all these, he explained. It was really a story of the human desire to return to the womb, this clearly suggested by the persona in the story putting his head inside the pot. You know the Gĩkũyũ word for pot,
nyũngũ
, is exactly the same for the womb, correct?

This bit made me look at him strangely. First, I had indeed been looking for something to make me overcome the sense of loss and connect with the new village. Second, I had sometimes wondered what it had felt like to be in my mother’s womb. I would try to recall my own life there, but I had not the slightest memory beyond what my mother told me about my having kicked her, quite often. Apparently, of all her children, I had been the most troublesome in the womb. Kĩmani seemed to be on to something. I listened, my curiosity aroused.

The clay pot, its mouth, narrow neck, and round chamber, obviously suggested the womb, he continued, unaware of my reaction. A person was most secure in the womb. Protected, nurtured, he has the most power. Would one long for security if one were already secure? he asked,
piercing me with his eyes. The story is really about your loneliness and insecurity at Alliance. You probably have difficulty making friends. If you had friends to play with, you wouldn’t have had the time or the desire to retreat into a make-believe world, correct? And you certainly worried too much about whether you, a boy from the village, could survive at Alliance. Before I could explain, he had assured me that he would help me. He would help me break worry before worry broke me.

He brought two books to our next meeting: Dale Carnegie’s
How to Make Friends and Influence People
and
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
. But he wouldn’t let me borrow them to read on my own. He liked talking about them, retelling stories of success cited in them. The stories were always about people who started in lowly positions but rose to success, nearly always measured by wealth. One had started with a dollar but somehow, through single-mindedly pursuing an idea, he had risen to the top. There were hints on how to listen to people, how to let them talk about themselves while you listened. I found him and his stories extremely fascinating. I was a captive audience. He liked my company more than Kenneth’s because Kenneth was more liable to argue back, even question his beloved Carnegie.

Soon I understood the source of Kenneth’s skepticism. In time I noted that Kĩmani only talked about those two books. The reputation he had for reading was based on the fact that he always carried one or the other. He was not expansive about other topics, except as they manifested some aspects of psychology. Talk about education, he brought
up psychology of knowledge. Talk about love or politics, he brought up psychology of power, love itself being a play of attraction and repulsion in the game of power. Had I not seen how even a big man becomes weak before a woman once his heart has been overpowered? He had some old copies of a biannual psychology magazine. It was like his personal talisman or proof that what he said was rooted in knowledge. We both lived in different parts of Kamĩrĩthũ, but our paths crossed time and again. Whenever we met, he had a different psychological insight and then would quickly move on to stories culled from Carnegie.

Kĩmani had a habit of reading a text, restating it in his own words, and then interpreting it by quoting instances from the same passage. His advice was always through quotes or paraphrases from this guru of wisdom, achievement, and success. And for a psychologist who advised on the importance of listening, he seemed to prefer talking to hearing. I started avoiding him. I really did not want to hear my story used as a bridge to Carnegie.

In contrast, I often actively sought the company of Gabriel Gaitho Kuruma, who lived in the next village, Kĩhingo. Gaitho and I had worked together in the Christmas pageant that I had helped to organize the previous year. He taught the group the hymn “We Three Kings.” He reacted to my story differently than Kĩmani: he was sure that I was
already a writer. He had completed two years of high school and was a graduate of Kagumo Teacher Training College. I don’t know how we first met, but we had always been in conversation throughout my high school years.

Gaitho was a reader of books, with an interest in Pan-Africa and the world, and he and I had weeks of conversation, touching on different subjects. But he had a way of smuggling the name of Kwame Nkrumah into any theme or topic of our talks. He had followed Nkrumah’s career from Lincoln University back to the Fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945, culminating in his role as a former prisoner who won Ghana’s independence. Gaitho admired the philosophy of Marcus Garvey because Nkrumah had said that it had inspired him. He liked George Padmore and W. E. B. DuBois because they had allied with Nkrumah and Kenyatta in the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester. It was from Gaitho that I first heard the quote
the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line
, which he attributed to DuBois. And when the subject of Booker T. Washington and his book
Up from Slavery
arose, he pointed out that DuBois, Nkrumah’s friend, had opposed Washington and founded the Niagara Movement, which later became the NAACP. He did not think much of Washington, although he could not quite put his finger on what irritated him. In contrast, he would tell over and over again the story of Rosa Parks, who had refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and so sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, hinting at some kind of connection between that and the Mau Mau–inspired bus boycott in Kenya.

In Kenya, Gaitho liked Tom Mboya because his Nairobi
People’s Convention Party echoed Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party. He talked about Mboya’s rise from a trade unionist, to studying at Oxford, to being the brilliant architect of the tactics used by the AEMO. He knew in great detail every exchange between Mboya and Michael Blundell in Legco debates. But Mboya’s greatest brilliance was his alliance with Kwame Nkrumah. Mboya had learned from the master. All brilliant African roads led to Ghana. It was from Ghana at the All-African Peoples’ Conference on December 22, 1958, that the call for the release of Jomo Kenyatta became continental and global. Our own Mboya was chairman of the conference, a great honor for the Kenyan struggle. It was as chairman that Mboya called for the end of imperialism in Africa. Gaitho could quote, almost word for word, Mboya’s call:
Whereas 72 years ago the scramble for Africa started, from Accra we announce that these same powers must be told in a clear, firm, and definite voice: Scram from Africa
. From scramble to scram: the speech made the twenty-eight-year-old Tom Mboya a household name in Africa. In the Kenyan press, this was reduced to a one-liner,
Mboya calls for whites to scram from Africa
, which Gaitho would add with satisfaction.

Despite his excitement over the independence of Ghana in 1956, Gaitho also argued that Ghana was not the first independent country in Africa, citing the cases of Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco, even hinting of an earlier independence of African peoples in a place called Haiti, though he did not elaborate further, and I did not know enough to counter his assertions and evaluations. Gaitho may have been the secondary school equivalent of
Ngandi of my elementary school days, but unlike Ngandi, he did not mix fact with fiction. While Ngandi told stories largely and would rely on story and rumor as his authority in support of the truth of the story he was telling, Gaitho talked mainly history and ideas and was more likely to cite the authority of a book or a magazine.