In the House of the Interpreter (7 page)

My first annual speech day was an extravaganza of guests, speeches, and prizes, formally announcing the end of my first year at Alliance. All of us in our class had to chase Henry Chasia, but I had successfully maintained my position among the top. I would carry this success back to my mother. She might not understand the differences between A and B streams, but I would assure her that I had done my best.

The holidays began on December 10. It was incredible how people had adjusted to their new life in the concentration village, at least on the surface. I would try to do likewise. My younger brother, Njinjũ, was my regular companion, and he knew all the ways of the new narrow streets. He and I would take
panga
and
jembe
and walk to the fields to join my mother. On these treks, the women would stare in disbelief: an Alliance student was going to dirty his educated hands in the fields. But the dirt actually helped me adjust. The
fields my mother cultivated were largely the same ones she always had, and while working there, pulling out the weeds, mulching, clearing bush, and eating her fire-roasted potatoes, I would feel a sense of connection with the old, with what had been lost. On my return to the village in the evening, melancholy would steal back into me, but inside the hut, with memories of work in the fields and the occasional story, I would experience the illusion of the old homestead, an illusion soon shredded by reality.

Just before Christmas, my brother’s wife, Charity, was arrested, accused of organizing food and clothes for the guerrillas in the mountains. I had never seen her collect food or clothes; there were not even enough to go around in our home, and I did not see how she could have found the time. But now my brother was out in the mountains, and my sister-in-law was in the notorious Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison. Yes, reality had stolen joy from my Christmas.

I could hardly wait for January 18, 1956, to return to the sanctuary. In my first year, the outside had not intruded except that every member of the Gĩkũyũ, Embu, and Meru communities had to have a written permit to travel by train or any public transport from one region to another, the lack of which had almost derailed my first entry into the school. Otherwise, the permit played no role in life inside the sanctuary. But in my second year, the outside began to make itself felt within the walls.

We had hardly settled down when some government officials came to the school to take fingerprints. We were required to have identity cards. Every time I saw the officials, I felt my stomach tighten. The whole process went smoothly, but the colonial policies were changing so fast that the ID card was soon out of date, to be replaced by a passbook, an internal passport like those in apartheid South Africa. Every movement across regions by a member of the affected communities was to be stamped on its pages. The bar for getting the document was raised: a recipient had to be thoroughly screened and certified that he had not taken an oath of allegiance to the Mau Mau. In March 1956 an official screening team visited the school and for two weeks
interviewed teachers, students, and staff of Gĩkũyũ, Embu, and Meru origins. When my turn came, it was determined that I should be screened in Limuru and would have to bring back a stamped letter from the district office, certifying my innocence. To get the stamp, I would have to get a letter of clearance from the chief of my location. This would have to be done during the term break.

Members of Livingstone House, 1956: House Master David Martin (second row center), Assistant House Master Ben Ogutu (next to Martin in the middle), Ngũgĩ (first row standing, second from right)

So instead of enjoying my new life as a second-year student, I felt my sanctuary haunted by fear of failing the clearance. The chief that I had left behind was reputed to be cruel. He would know about my brother being in the
mountains and his wife being in prison. I did not see how he would give me a clean bill of political health, and the fear nagged me, dogged me. I did not have anybody in whom I could confide. Though Wanjai and I both came from Limuru, our families were on opposite sides in the anticolonial struggle.

I once came very close to sharing my burden with Samuel Githegi. Githegi and I were classmates, and we often exchanged pleasantries. He had a warm personality and was friends with many people. But there was something about him, a kind of sadness or loneliness, that I could not then understand. Once, after lunch, we walked out together and wandered about in the yard. I was about to tell him of my fears when, out of the blue, he started talking about sugar. Apparently he had what he called a sugar illness. It was serious, he said, but even then I could not understand: diabetes was not in our vocabulary, and he looked the very picture of good health. The sad strain behind his friendly face prevented me from talking about myself.
^*

I thought of my teachers. How would they receive the information about my family? They might turn me in as the brother of a Mau Mau guerrilla. My coming of age had been shaped by the notion of a white monolith,
Mbarĩ ya Nyakerũ
, pitted against a black monolith,
Mbarĩ ya Nyakairũ
. Every popular song had talked about it. The very identity of the land was contested: White Highlands versus
Black People’s Land.
^†
Jomo Kenyatta, who would become the first Kenyan president, had once written of Kenya as a
Bũrũri wa Ngũĩ
, Land of Conflict. Black and white conflict, of course. Who, really, were these whites who held the chalk and seemed completely dedicated to our mental welfare? And who were these blacks teaching alongside the whites and equally dedicated to our mental welfare? Where did they fit in the schema of white versus black?

Ngũgĩ (on right) and Samuel Githegi (on left), outside on Alliance High School grounds

Even amid the horrors of war, concentration camps, and villages, the few African teachers at Alliance had remained positive models of what we could become, but they often
did not last long enough for us to know them well. Joseph Kariuki was the most constant black presence. He was an old boy, who had entered Alliance in 1945, becoming school captain in 1949 before going to Makerere, which had just become a degree-awarding Overseas College of the University of London. He was among the first, the lucky thirteen, to earn a degree at Makerere in 1954. His personality endeared him to everyone, and even Carey Francis seemed a little more tolerant in his case. Kariuki made a spectacle when he played lawn tennis with white ladies on Saturday afternoons, teachers from the girls’ school. He and the ladies were dressed in white, he in his shorts and tennis shoes, and they in similar shoes but with skirts whose hemlines were far above their knees. After a game, Kariuki could be seen trekking back to his house with his white female tennis partner. It may have been because Carey Francis himself was an avid tennis and croquet player, but I noted no outburst from him. Charming and debonair, Kariuki used to push the envelope in other ways, and when left in charge of the school as the master on duty on the weekend, he would show us films with exciting secular themes that other teachers would not show.

Though he taught lawn tennis and literature, his real passion was music. It was not a subject in itself, but arguing that music was the gateway to literature, particularly poetry, he would play European classics, Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach, at every opportunity, provoking skeptical laughter when he said that Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony, with the “Ode to Joy” movement, while completely deaf
and in poor health. If he was really deaf, how could he hear the music he wrote? Feeling, Kariuki would say. He felt it in his heart and mind. Music vibrates in the mind before it is captured in sound. Shut your eyes and think of a familiar melody: can’t you hear soundless motion?

Kariuki was also in charge of the school choir, and it was in the spiritual that he most excelled in bringing together music and poetry. Because of the school’s roots in the American South model, the spiritual had always been popular at Alliance, but Kariuki took it to another level. Though he did not dwell too much on the politics of the spiritual, he talked about its background as a survival mechanism on the slave plantation, letting the music speak to us directly through its own language. The sheer force of his energy and enthusiasm turned even the most skeptical into musical believers and unbridled enthusiasts for the spiritual. Whether Kariuki intended the effect or not, the spiritual’s poetry of resistance and music of liberation eloquently echoed in a Kenya then governed under the state of emergency. How could one hear the school choir, which he led, sing,
Oh freedom, over me, and before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free
, and not feel the yearning for freedom around us?

Perhaps I could unburden myself to Kariuki. He would understand. But neither in the classroom nor outside did he openly discuss the parallels between the music and the terror in the country. Neither did we. We kept our thoughts to ourselves, confining our musings to matters of meter and melody.

In general, the Alliance classroom of our times abstracted knowledge from local reality. It had not been always so. The early years had seen bold attempts to relate the vocational side of the school to local knowledge. Agriculture was then a major subject, and studies of indigenous trees and fruits, the language of cattle marks, beekeeping, and butter making were part of the classroom. Efforts to connect with local technology included visits to local blacksmiths, from whom the students learned how to make forges and smelt iron. Teachers were required to learn at least one African language, and the program of Bantu studies and civics incorporated a practical project of recording African legends, riddles, proverbs, and songs.

But as the literary side of the academy gradually took over, the tribute to local knowledge diminished. With Makerere, in 1948, beginning to offer degree programs from the University of London, secondary education became increasingly a preparation for college, with the Overseas Cambridge School Certificate the gateway to academic heaven. By the time I joined the school in 1955, hardly any traces, except in carpentry, remained of these early efforts to mine and harvest local knowledge.

Our literature classes were no different: English texts were the norm, and Europe the cultural reference. But Kariuki, who took over from James Smith in 1956, introduced
fun into the study of literature. To Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
, the set text, he added what he called love sonnets, which we happily welcomed, thinking they might turn out to be useful to hearts awakening to Cupid’s whispers, real or imagined. One boy in fact soon claimed that he had used Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet on an Acrossian one sunny afternoon, with unspecified good results.

In the first term of my first year, the constant allusions to Acrossians in tales told by seniors had puzzled me. The name conjured an image of dwellers from a different planet, who would occasionally descend to play in a valley of green meadows awash with magic that lured men. Wanjai unraveled the mystery of the valley to me.

In its early years, Alliance High School, though mostly for boys, also admitted girls. Among its earliest female graduates was Nyokabi, who later married her teacher, Eliud Mathu, himself the second Kenyan African to get a B.A., the first African to join the staff of Alliance, the first African to represent African interests in the Legislative Council, and the first African member of the colonial Executive Council. Among the last female graduates was Rebecca Njau, an actress of amazing power and grace in the 1951 Alliance production of
The Lady with a Lamp
, who, years later, would become a force in women’s education and a pioneering novelist, playwright, and internationally acclaimed batik artist. Still, the number of female students had remained small: between the first intake in 1938 and the last in 1952, the school had averaged only five girls annually.