In the House of the Interpreter (5 page)

First term was coming to a close, and I had already been changed immeasurably. Still, I did not quite feel that I belonged to Alliance. It was not only because the bullies continued to put us in our place at every opportunity; I also hadn’t made a significant mark on anything. Intellectually, I was always mindful that the twenty others in the A stream had performed better than me, and even within
my B stream, I could not tell where I stood. But despite this dislocation, I was caught by the fever that now seized the whole school. Exams! I did not have to be told that they were coming: I saw it in the sudden change of behavior. Students, everywhere, buried their heads in books, even the bullies.

My anxiety increased as Tuesday, April 5, the first day of exams, approached. After the last exam on Thursday, I felt even more crestfallen. The way the other boys talked of their performances discouraged me, especially when I compared the answers they so assertively claimed were correct with what I could recall of my own responses.

But when the results finally came, Henry Chasia, myself, and Hiram Karani, in that order, were at the top of both streams. I would move to A stream. The fact that I had done well in all subjects, even in the sciences, boosted my self-confidence. The students who had intimidated me, who could say, by rote, many of the theorems and formulas, had not done as well as their showy confidence had led me to expect.

So when the school assembly broke on April 21, the formal end of the first term, I had every reason to look forward to a triumphant return to my village. I felt differently about myself. My exam results had assured me that I was now truly an Alliance student. My uniform of khaki shorts and shirt, blue tie, shoes, and long socks announced the fact to the outside. The pass the school had issued me would confirm it to any inquisitive government agents. The image of bloodhounds panting at the gates, waiting to pounce on me, had faded into the background. Alliance would protect me
from harm. Nothing prepared me, then, for the desolation of my village and the melancholy collection of mushrooms called Kamĩrĩthũ.

Villagization, the innocuous name the colonial state gave to the forced internal displacement, was sprung on the Kenyan people in 1955, in the middle of my first term at Alliance, but living within the walls of the school, I had not heard about the agents of the state bulldozing people’s homes or torching them when the owners refused to participate in the demolition. Mau Mau suspects or not, everybody had to relocate to a common site. In some regions, the state forced people to dig a moat around the new collective settlement, leaving only one exit and entrance. The whole of central Kenya was displaced, and the old order of life destroyed, in the name of isolating and starving the anticolonial guerrillas in the mountains.

The mass relocation was followed by forced land consolidation. A person or families who owned parcels of land in different locations would have them joined together into a contiguous piece but had no choice over the location of this consolidated land. People in the mountains and the concentration camps were not there to verify their claims. It was a mass fraud, often giving land from the already poor to the relatively rich, and from the families of guerrilla fighters to those loyal to the colonial state.

Local Gĩkũyũ residents leaving Kamĩrĩthũ home guard post, having been forced there overnight for “protection” against Mau Mau attack, but really to prevent them from feeding Mau Mau fighters under the cover of night

The division between the loyal and everyone else was reflected in the architecture of the new village. The loyal occupied corner houses of corrugated iron roofs with ample space between them, while those deemed disloyal, the majority of the landless and poor, lived in mud-walled grass-thatched round huts, with hardly any space between them. The loyal household was likely to be Christian, relatively wealthy, better educated, with the nuclear family of father, mother, and children left intact. The peasant and worker households were usually just mothers and children.

The new villages were the rural equivalent of the concentration
camps, where thousands were still being held, with more additions every year, since the Declaration of Emergency in 1952. The inmates of the concentration camps were mostly men, those in the concentration villages mostly women and children. These two sets of concentration had many features in common.

The most visible of these features was the watchtower, usually built on the highest ground, and from which the Union Jack fluttered its symbol of conquest and control. Under constant surveillance, the inmates of the camp and the village, loyal or not, were likely to be stopped and searched at any time of day or night. For all practical purposes, the line between the prison, the concentration camp, and the village had been erased.

In the new Kamĩrĩthũ, my family lived in a mud hut, with our bedding on the floor. I don’t know how my mother managed to organize some semblance of meals. Only on certain hours of given days could women attend their fields or work for the wealthier villagers. My sister, Njoki, and my brother’s wife, Charity, now and then worked on the European-owned tea estates.

Adding to the melancholy was the talk of a doomsday. In mid-January 1955, Governor Sir Evelyn Baring had offered amnesty to any Mau Mau guerrillas who would surrender. This offer followed the failure of the 1954 surrender
negotiations under Operation General China. Under the terms of the amnesty, just as in the failed negotiations of late 1954, the guerrillas would get not a single concession to their political demands for land and freedom, but a pledge of prison instead of gallows. In both situations, the colonial state refused to see the Mau Mau as a legitimate anticolonial nationalist movement with political goals. Low-flying airplanes dropped leaflets in the mountains and villages, threatening unspecified consequences should the guerrillas not accept the offer. The threats intensified amid the building of the new village.

I viewed the offer and the threats as they related to my elder brother, Good Wallace, who fought somewhere in the mountains. I feared for his life. Throughout the break, the doomsday scenario hung over our family, made worse, for me at least, by the fact that we did not really talk about it. I was a little surprised to see Charity, my brother’s wife, taking the threats of doom so calmly, but maybe she was just putting on a front. Packed with so much anxiety and uncertainty, my three weeks of break ended without my having met with Kenneth to discuss his book.

I went back to Alliance on May 12 to begin my second term in the sanctuary, haunted by images of the community prison I had helped to build back home, and weighed down by thoughts of the doom awaiting Good Wallace and his fellow guerrillas for defying the calls to surrender. Henceforth I was going to live out my life in a home that reminded me of the loss of home and a school that offered shelter but not the certainty of home. Both, ironically, were colonial
constructs, but I feared that even they might clash at any moment and crush my dreams.

Edward Carey Francis had been on leave when I first arrived at Alliance in January, but his absence was strongly felt. Boys in classes ahead of us talked about him as a mystery. They called him Hiuria or Kihiuria, conjuring the image of a big rhino on the offensive and its sideways motion when turning. He was usually a reference point in stories about Alliance. Everywhere, in dorms during the hours of rest, in the dining hall at mealtimes, in classes between lessons, the older students would talk about what they thought had become loose or too relaxed since Carey Francis went on leave to England in December 1954. Of the teachers’ wives, who wore colorful dresses, especially on Sundays, the students said that they were behaving with the abandon of children in the absence of their stern father.
Paka akienda Panya hutawala
, others would say in Kiswahili. Wait and see what the mice will do when the cat comes back. Sometimes the students would imitate Carey Francis’s walks under different moods, particularly when he caught a teacher or a student doing something of which he disapproved. Alarmingly, they claimed that none could escape his notice: he knew every single boy in the school, all two hundred of them, by name. No, he knew the names of all the boys who had ever gone through Alliance since he assumed its leadership
in 1940. In my imagination, he became a huge formless unknown.

Early in the second term, as Wanjai, Aaron Kandie, Kirui, and I were walking from the dining room after lunch, I saw a figure, dressed in a khaki safari-type coat, shorts, and stockings, walking in the sun across the fields, playing with a dog: he would throw a tennis-size ball as far as he could, and the dog would run and retrieve it. That is Hiuria, Wanjai told me. Carey Francis, the others chimed in. He had come back from England on May 21, nine days after my return from break. He did not look like the scary figure of my imagination. You just wait, Wanjai said.

Immediately the effects of his return could be felt and seen. A new alacrity, timing, and self-discipline were discernible among faculty and students, as if they did not want to risk being caught wrong-footed. Still, I could not tell what the fuss was all about.

And then one Sunday, during a morning parade before chapel, I saw for myself the fury that fueled the tales. The parade started rather inauspiciously. Carey Francis, dressed in a gray suit and blue tie, stood in front of us, as did the other teachers and their wives. As we waited for the inspection ritual, a European couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kingsnorth, a bit late, passed by him. Mrs. Kingsnorth wore a dress with a hemline that revealed a bit of her legs, more so than the other ladies. The scent of her perfume filled the air.

Suddenly Carey Francis started breathing heavily through the nose, fuming, tongue thrust into the cheek, rolling it side to side inside his closed mouth, as if moving
a small ball from one side to the other, so that his left and right cheeks swelled in turn. He started stumping, left, then right, to and fro, sometimes in small circles, like, I had to admit, a bull about to charge, each step raising dust that expressed his rage, his trousers swaying, as if equally furious. Students called it stepping. For a moment, I thought the ground underneath his feet would give way. Surprisingly, the faculty and older students seemed nonplussed, as if they had seen this before and were simply waiting for the storm to pass or at least subside.

On this occasion, it did not end the way they thought it would. His heavy breathing and stepping were echoed in the sky by thunder, lightning, and a sudden downpour. The prefects tried to maintain a disciplined march to the chapel, but soon they, and even the teachers and their wives, had to follow the mass of boys running toward the holy shelter. With everybody finally seated in their pews, a perfectly calm Carey Francis read a passage from
Pilgrim’s Progress
in which Christian, while visiting the Interpreter’s House, is taken into a parlor full of dust. As the room is being swept, the flying dust almost chokes the onlookers. Then a woman sprinkles water on the floor and all is well:

Out of this, Carey Francis gave an incredible performance in which he likened Alliance to the Interpreter’s House, where the dust we had brought from the outside could be swept away by the law of good behavior and watered by the gospel of Christian service. The word
service
peppered the entire sermon. But, he added, it was only Jesus, through mercy, who could grace the outcome of our earthly struggles.

The sermon from the chapel seemed a fitting follow-up to nature’s sermon in the storm. But it was the Franciscan fury preceding both that became the topic of conversation. What had triggered it? It was the tardy couple, some said. Carey Francis hated tardiness and wanted teachers to set a good example. No, others countered, it was the woman’s perfume, her dress, the hemline. He does not like excess. No, not excess: he has a thing about women. His ways are at odds with the norm, don’t you think? others asked, extending the talk beyond the fury and the sermon to his whole life. How could he abandon a prestigious position as a university lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge to accept a lowly one as headmaster of a primary school in Africa in 1928? You think it’s just a missionary call to service? No, it was something else. Very personal. Oh, yes. Thwarted love.

During the First World War, the story went, Carey Francis fought in England and France. But when he returned home, he found his sweetheart had gone to sweeten the life of another. He turned his broken heart away from women to his dog and God, the only two who could never abandon him, and he turned his resourceful mind away from
the serene life of a don on grass lawns in Cambridge to one of self-sacrifice and pure devotion in the thorny bushes of Africa. Fact or fiction, the story of love and war seemed to make sense in explaining how this man, born in Hampstead, London, on September 13, 1897, educated at William Ellis School and Trinity College, Cambridge, senior wrangler in the Mathematics Tripos, would leave everything behind for a dusty elementary school in a foreign land to start a new life from nothing.