In the House of the Interpreter (3 page)

We then rushed for the showers. I hesitated to remove my clothes in front of the others. In my village, the circumcised and the uncircumcised would never have shared showers, but here that’s what everybody, including the prefects, was doing. The school had obviously broken such divisions, for
nobody seemed bothered by any other person’s nakedness. Some were already soaping themselves, while humming tunes or shouting at one another. Stop staring and get in, somebody yelled at me.

After the showers, we were to get ready for the morning parade, a phrase that conjured up magic. Truly, every day, hour, minute, and second in the school was producing something new and strange, with promises of more to come. I put on my khaki uniform and blue tie with initials AHS and merged into a khaki uniformity, as everyone trooped to the parade ground, which turned out to be the same place we had disembarked on the first day. This fact did not dim the light of its wondrous newness: it may have been an empty
muram
surface, but I would soon learn it was one of the most important spots in the entire school, the site of a daily performance of power.

We stood in lines in the order of our houses, and within each house according to our heights, the tallest in the back. We faced a tall pole with a rope loosely hanging down its side. The senior prefects stood in front of their houses, the house masters a few steps ahead, facing us. The other teachers stood in groups of twos and threes, nonchalant spectators. I had never seen so many white teachers, and my eyes fell on the four black teachers, points of identification.

Suddenly Moses Gathere shouted: Attention. Members of Livingstone responded immediately. Appearing apparently from nowhere, the acting principal, James Stephen Smith, and the school captain, Manasseh Kegode, began their inspection, trailed close behind by the house master and the house prefect. Smith walked along the lines, stopping
in front of each boy and examining his clothes, bare feet (shoes were for Saturdays and Sundays only), and hair, deducting points for every instance of discernible untidiness. I thought that I had combed my hair thoroughly, but Smith picked on it and deducted some points from Livingstone. Even in my primary schools, my hair had given me trouble. I had gotten into the habit of pulling my hair or running my fingers through it when absorbed in thought, so no matter how thoroughly I combed it, it looked ruffled after an hour. This was not a good beginning, I told myself.

I was wondering what next, when suddenly I heard sounds of drums, trumpets, and bugles. The band, after a few rounds, stopped by the pole on the raised grass platform in front of us. The entire parade, including the teachers, now stood at attention. Drums purring softly, the drum major walked to the pole in measured steps and attached the folded cloth in his hands to the rope. One of the band boys stepped forward and blew a bugle as the drum major raised the Union Jack. When the flag was finally fluttering in the wind, high up the pole, the assembly sang solemnly:

The words and the tune were new to me, but I mumbled along. I don’t think I noted the irony in my singing this
hymn of prayer while my own brother, Good Wallace, was out in the mountains fighting with the Mau Mau guerrillas so that the queen did not reign long over Kenya.
^*

After the parade, we trooped to the chapel, a small, steep-gabled building located slightly below one end of the soccer field in a cluster of trees. We took our places in the pews, which held Bibles and hymnbooks,
Songs of Praise
and
Songs of Redemption
. Principal Smith, general inspector of clean bodies, was transformed into a grand inspector of souls. He followed a strict ritual of passages from the Bible and hymns. One hymn caught my attention. Its tone was pleading and fervent, but solemn in its desire:
Wash me, redeemer, and I shall be whiter than snow
.

After chapel, we ran to the dining hall for a breakfast of porridge, unbuttered slices of bread, and cocoa, which we had been asked to bring with us from home. With body and soul fed, we were now ready for what had brought us here from our different places: the diet of the mind.

The entire school was divided into two streams, A and B. Before I left home, people in Limuru had talked as if I had done better than any other student in Kenya, a homegrown genius. I was surprised to find, then, that twenty other
boys had done better than me and were placed in stream A, while I was among the twenty lesser geniuses in stream B. It didn’t matter, really: every student learned the same lessons, studied the same texts, and took the same tests. My wings of pride might have been clipped a little, but I was still driven by the pact with my mother: I would always try my best and see what the effort would earn me.

English language was my very first class, and like everything I encountered here, it started with mystery and drama. The potbellied Englishman who entered the class was the same P. R. Oades I had encountered as senior bursar. After introducing himself, he said, Follow me, and walked out. We trooped behind him, across the parade ground, past the soccer field, toward the main gate. He then veered to the left, onto a dirt road that sloped up towards the top of the hill, with gray-stone-walled and brown-tile-roofed bungalows and big manicured lawns on either side. Oades led us to the door of one of these houses: Welcome to my castle. Our first English lesson was a tour of a real Englishman’s house.

It started in the living room, the parlor, as we learned, and Oades described its contents: some landscape paintings on the wall, scenes of an English countryside; the carpet, rugs, fireplace, and mantelpiece with candles and china figurines; a cushy sofa set and cushions, side and coffee tables (Not for resting your legs, he hastened to say), a bookcase; and a tall cupboard with plates and glass on display (Not for regular use, he added). In the bathrooms, we discovered bathtubs, sinks, faucets, toothbrushes, and toothpaste.
Everything was in dramatic contrast to my village hut, an all-purpose living space sometimes shared with goats. Our bathrooms were the riversides, where we washed clothes and bathed behind the reeds, and the yard, where we dipped feet or hands in water collected in a basin. In our village, red earth was part of the bathing culture; here, everything was immaculate white.

We moved on to the kitchen, where Oades named the gadgets within: electric cooker, pots, pans, knives (which he described as cutlery), and utensils. In the dining area was a table on which were plates, forks, and knives of various sizes and shapes, and of course, napkins. Oades described how not to sit (Never plant your elbows on the table); how to hold forks and knives, the order of forks and knives, and whether they were used for meat or fish. It was polite to say, Pass the salt please, instead of leaning on another guest to reach out for what one wanted; and of course to tilt the plate away from the body so that one did not spill sauce or soup on oneself. And don’t talk with your mouth full of food. There was a lesson on placement of napkins (on the lap, not tucked around your neck), and how to use the tip of a napkin to clear an unwanted something on the lips (but never to blow your nose). We learned that one placed knife and fork crossed or at an angle, preferably a wide angle, to show the waiter that one had not yet finished with the dish at hand, and of course, to place knife and fork together in parallel to tell the waiter that he could now take the plate. We learned about a three-course meal that ended with fruit and dessert. I thought he meant desert, and I wondered how one
could eat a piece. Another boy voiced similar doubts. No, it was a dish, not a piece of sand, and the name was
dessert
, not
desert
. We laughed. It was all abstract, so different from my rural cuisine of
ugali
and
irio
that I usually ate with my fingers, certainly without anybody waiting on me. Under the ideals of table manners, Oades was training us into the habit of being waited upon or, at the very least, planting the idea in our minds.

Finally, we moved to the master bedroom, where Oades named mattresses, bedcovers, dressers, drawers, closets, pajamas, and dressing gowns. As he was about to lead us to the guest bedrooms, some of the boys spotted guns hanging on a side porch. Oades wanted to pass on, but the boys stopped, staring. That was a Lancaster machine gun, a Very pistol, and a siren, Oades explained. In 1952, when the Mau Mau War started and the state of emergency was declared, he and David Martin had joined the Kenya Police Reserve. In the early years, they had also armed some students with bows and arrows for night patrol, but the Mau Mau had not yet attacked or even threatened the school. It was clear that Oades was not quite comfortable: guns and their uses were not one of the intended lessons.

As we trooped back to the schoolyard for the next class, we did not discuss this final, jarring note. Instead, we were full of excuse me please, pass the water please, thank you. We recited the order of a three-course meal: starter, soup, main dish, fruit, and dessert, which some still pronounced desert, to a general laughter. Would you like some Sahara? No, no, just a little Kalahari. Most important, some of us
chanted, don’t hold any food, except fruit, in your hands. This produced more laughter: how would we eat
gĩtheri, irio
, and
ugali
with forks and knives? The
ugali
would lose its taste, someone observed with solemn concern. The pleasures of eating
ugali
lay in touch and taste: dipping fingers into the smoking dish and letting it cool in your mouth, rolling it around with your tongue. He was talking about
English
food, and
English
manners, others added. Overhearing this, Oades explained, before dismissing the class, that table manners had no race or color. Good manners, like cleanliness, were pathways to God and godliness.

Oades’s subsequent lessons were confined to the classroom, but the English language continued to fascinate me. I discovered that the grammar I had picked up at Kĩnyogori Intermediate School had more than prepared me for high school. Conjugation in general, and the adjectival and adverbial clauses and phrases that made the simple subject-predicate structure into a complex sentence, came easily to me. Literature was an enjoyable extension of my language classes. Ironically, then, it was in a literature class that I first experienced tension with my teachers.

One day Principal Smith, our literature teacher, dwelled on our tendency to use big words to suggest a profound grasp of the language. He read out a sentence from an essay a student had written: As I was perambulating on the road, I
countenanced a red-garmented boots-appareled gentleman mounted on a humongous four-legged creature of bovine species. This became the poster sentence for how not to write English.

Avoid words with Latin roots, he told us. Use the Anglo-Saxon word. Above all, learn from the Bible. It has the shortest sentence in English. Jesus wept. Two words. So follow the example of Jesus. He spoke very simple English.

I was puzzled. Not trying to be clever or correct him, I raised my hand and said that Jesus did not speak English: the Bible was a translation. My comment elicited laughter from the class and a sheepish silence from Smith. Then he gave us a short sermon on willingness to learn. Remember you have come here to learn, not to teach. Or do you want to change places with me? he asked, holding out the chalk to me. There was tense silence. He now explained that he was talking about the King James–authorized translation of the Bible, which had inspired many writers of English prose and poetry. It had excellent English, for those who wanted to learn. Smith’s testy response froze questions and differing perspectives.

This episode made me recall Kenneth Mbũgua, a fellow student at my primary school, and our frank, often heated debates that left no rancor. In my first few weeks at Alliance, I had looked, in vain, for someone with whom I could argue the way Kenneth and I used to do. I was convinced that Kenneth could have more than held his own with any of my fellow students. It was almost by chance that I was in a high school and he at a teacher-training college, both of
us on journeys to different destinations. My performance in English, more than any other subject, had gained me entry into the best of the African secondary schools.

I had not heard from Kenneth since he left for Kambui, and I missed him, especially after my confrontation with Smith. Finally one day I got a large envelope from him. In his letter, he did not tell me tidbits about how he was faring at the teacher-training school, nor ask how I liked Alliance. Instead, he brought up a long-standing argument between us: whether or not one needed a license to write. I’m not sure how I had come to my position, but I had long been adamant that without a license one would risk arrest and imprisonment; Kenneth, on the other hand, was sure that no qualification was necessary. Now he was reviving this heated debate, informing me that he had started writing a book to prove me wrong. He sent me pages as evidence.

His story, about a boy who goes to Nairobi to find work to pay school tuition for himself and his two siblings but gets lost in the corruption of the city, was captivating but too short. Immediately I noted a serious flaw in the telling: he used big words and long sentences. Before, I would have been impressed by the weight of his vocabulary, but now I looked at his work through Smith’s eyes. Indeed, Smith’s call for us to learn from the example of the English prose in the Bible must have left a mark. The King James–authorized version remained one of my favorite reads. I learned to mix the simple, the compound, and the complex for different effects.

Give me some more pages, I wrote back to Kenneth.
But don’t use big words. Read the Bible again and see how English is used. I was about to write that Jesus spoke simple English but caught myself. Still, Smith had given me my first critical tool for evaluating a piece of work.