In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir

  Armed with a map of the area, we trekked into the bush early Saturday morning, to learn to read maps and follow trails in the forest and other tips of survival. It was more like a scout camp without the name and with only one recruit. There was very little interaction between us. I just walked with my map in my hands, my two instructors reduced to talking to each other, except when I missed a trail, and the General would explain to me where I had misread the map or failed to notice small but significant landmarks. It was quite exhausting, moving up and down the slopes in the woods, with nothing but a couple biscuits and water to eat and drink.

  Once, while a few steps ahead of them, I overheard a heated debate between them about Mau Mau guerrillas and government forces. It was then I realized that even they had not known each other before and that they held profoundly different views on what was going on in the country. They disagreed, for instance, on the colonial policy of collective punishment. The Archbishop argued for individual accountability, while the General asserted that there was no other way of dealing with natives so given to secrecy. They increasingly based their arguments on hypotheticals. If you knew that one of them held information that would save or endanger lives and that he was hiding among the group, it would be prudent to hold the bloody lot to account, the General asserted. What then was the difference between what the colonial forces were doing and what Hitler did during the Second World War? the Archbishop countered. On and on they continued. I was invisible.

  Suddenly I realized that they had stopped walking and stood facing each other. The exchange had moved from mental confrontation to the threat of physical combat. The elderly, slightly mustached Archbishop would be no match for the younger, clean-shaven army General, yet he was rolling up his sleeves. The sight of them about to duel with fists in the forest was ridiculous. I stood there, completely mesmerized. How could I intervene between two white people at war? Then I had a vision: I thought I saw the man of God in a black cassock, a white collar around his neck, holding a huge Bible in front of him, as a shield against a gun pointed at him by a heavily armed military officer. It was so real that I felt terror. I coughed. They froze. The cassock, the Bible, and the gun were in my imagination, but my coughing had worked. They pretended that they were simply talking. I should go on till I came to another track, the General said. They followed me in silence.

  When we returned to camp, I got on my bicycle and fled, a three-day hostel reduced to a single night and a day.

  48

  My mother used to tell me that traveling outside one’s home made a person realize that it was not only his mother who cooked tasty food. The volunteer youth initiatives confirmed that, despite their disappointments. Alliance, too, showed me the truth of it in relation to Kenyan communities.

  Right from the start, Alliance’s national spirit was contrary to the state’s policy of dividing Africans along ethnic lines, and the school accepted students from different communities. But under Carey Francis, recruitment into Alliance on a countrywide basis became a consistent policy in theory and practice. North, central, east, west, and southern coastal Kenya were all represented on the Alliance compound. Most important, the African staff came from different Kenyan communities and were revered or reviled purely for their individuality, not for their ethnic origins.

  This was the situation that prevailed at Alliance throughout my four years. In Limuru, many workers of different communities had come to our home, but they were visitors. This was the first time that I was living, interacting, competing, and quarreling on a daily basis with such diverse individuals. There was something to learn from every ethnic community and every person.

  Of all the school captains of my four years, I found Bethuel A. Kiplagat the most intriguing. His personality seemed to transcend ethnicity. He was not readily identifiable with any one community. I once asked him about his middle initial: he told me it stood for Abdul. He used to be a Muslim before converting to Christianity. But why do you retain the name Abdul? I asked him. Because it is also my name, part of my life, he told me. Intriguing in a different way was the lovable Samuel Mũngai, the 1958 captain. He was very conflicted, not sure if he was a rebel or a leader. He enjoyed his cigarettes and other pleasures and often broke the rules that he was supposed to enforce. He was also a ladies’ man, who left a trail of broken hearts and a few in the family way. Though he would not have scored highly in the official moral estimate, he somehow held the school together. Altogether I learned that just as good leadership came from individuals of different communities, so also did mischief, troublemaking, and bad leadership.

  I became a dorm prefect in 1957, a leader of the diverse communities in Dorm Two, Livingstone House, succeeding G. Shokwe. Shokwe, a Mtaita, loved boxing. He used to take part in amateur bouts in the lightweight division in Nairobi. He also led the boxing club in the school, and he had often tried to make a boxer out of me. Eventually I agreed to go in the ring. I looked good, to myself at least, in the red gloves of a boxer. In my very first swing, I hit my more experienced, if thin and gangly, opponent on the cheek. The blow caught both of us by surprise. He fell down. I was horrified. I took off my gloves and left them, never to return to the ring. I just couldn’t see myself as victorious for hurting another, even in sport.

  My appointment as a dorm prefect was equally and totally unexpected. I had never consciously behaved in a manner that courted such a consideration, but I took it in stride. Conscious that I was in the same dorm where Moses Gathere used to wake us up with his lines from Macbeth, I toyed with the idea of using another quote from Shakespeare but varying the lines to be or not to be, to become to wake or not to wake. I never actually tried it.

  Dunstan Ireri was the first to challenge my leadership. We had entered Alliance the same year and were friends, but Dunstan considered himself a rebel and expressed this by smoking, often stealing from his bed early in the morning or late at night to smoke down by the bush or the latrines. There was a smoking fraternity at Alliance, with members from all the dorms and ethnic communities. Some prefects had elevated smoking to the worst breach of school rules and would themselves mount invasions of the smokers’ dens. The smokers and the prefects had a running battle of hide-and-seek, which the smokers talked about in terms of adventure, full of evasive maneuvers and narrow escapes.

  I decided to deny Dunstan and the other smokers that pleasure. I did not see it as my duty to sneak up on people in their hideout. I drew a line in the sand. Smoking was forbidden within the dorm and the compound. What they did in the bush outside the school compound was their business. Though nobody of course admitted to being a smoker, I sensed that quite a few in my dorm appreciated the boundaries that I had set. But for one or two others, the end of the game of hide-and-seek spoiled the drama and the fun. Dunstan let it be known that he had been out smoking, and with every provocative behavior, he drew a crowd of admirers. And then he tried smoking under the cover of his bed. He did not really think I would punish him, but I made a stand. The entire dorm was behind me. Dunstan had to spend one whole Saturday cutting grass as punishment for smoking in the dorm. This became my style of leadership: making people stand with me in enforcing rules that affected the community. But even in this I tried to exercise judgment and not exert a sledgehammer on every breach of rules. I liked discussing rather than proclaiming rules and shouting threats. I needed the members to see that in a functioning community, everyone had to be accountable to one another. It did not always work, but it made my tenure as prefect tolerable.

  49

  My interest in different communities drove me into the activities of the Inter-Tribal Society, of which I became chairman, for some time. Leaders of various clubs used to make announcements to members during evening meals at the dining hall. I always had difficulty enunciating Inter-Tribal Society, swallowing the letter n, making it sound as if I were calling on members of the Itertribal Society or Eat-a-Tribe Society, to do this or that, which always provoked laughter. Members met regularly to exchange vi
ews on a whole range of issues, drawing from our different cultures to illuminate them. How was leadership organized in our different communities? What about the rites of passage? The society invited outside speakers and sometimes organized discussions with speakers drawn from its members.

  I valued talks with individual students, outside the formal classroom or house affairs. Evanson Mwaniki, who had taken over from King’ori as the school pianist, told me a lot about church music. It was from him that I first heard of middle C on the keys of the piano. Mwaniki was shy, but when it came to playing the piano, he was very expressive. He did not have formal training in music; he just picked up his piano knowledge from his two predecessors, reinforcing my positive attitude toward learning from one’s peers. I got more Kiswahili from David Mzigo than from Dollymore, the master who taught Swahili. Mzigo was a native speaker; Dollymore had picked it up while stationed in Mombasa as a soldier during the Second World War. Discussions and arguments on history and literature that I held with friends, and the math exercises that I did outside the classroom, greatly added to my insights, sometimes proving useful in tests and exams.

  The national awareness forged in school was also being replicated in the country, through the social struggles led by the nationalists in the mountains and now in the streets of Nairobi. One Nairobi Saturday, I took Joshua Omange and Nicodemus Asinjo to the new village that I was increasingly calling home. Once again my mother’s roasted potatoes proved a winner. On the way back, I met an old lady reputed to be a stalwart nationalist. People said that her head was not well because she would sing banned resistance songs openly. Her back was bent; she walked with the support of a walking stick. After greetings, I told her my two friends, Omange and Asinjo, were both Luo. She touched her heart in blessing. These days there’s no Luo or Gĩkũyũ, she said. We are all the children of Kenya.

  We are all the children of Kenya. All the children of Africa. All the children of the world. Even though she has long passed on, I remember her words and looks and smile. It was another case of wisdom and enrichment from the street. Knowledge gained inside and outside a formal setting impacted my life equally.

  50

  The school library was one of the best and richest outside-the-classroom sources of knowledge. When Oades took us to the library in the first few days after my arrival at Alliance, I stood at the door, mesmerized by the sight of shelves upon shelves of books in a building devoted to nothing else but books: I had never seen so many in my life. I could not believe that now I could go in, borrow books, return them, and get some more as often as I wanted. I swore that I would read all the books in the library.

  There was no guidance, but does one wait for a guiding hand when one is standing on the banks of a river, thirsty? One does not even worry about polluted sections: the water looks uniformly able to quench one’s thirst. I read without any order, often led to an author by the quantity of their books on the shelves. I went through a number of G. A. Henty’s historical empire-building heroics. Some of the titles, like With Clive in India, or The Beginnings of an Empire and With Wolfe in Canada, or The Winning of a Continent, put the imperial theme up front, the preface to With Clive promising great battles to be fought, great efforts to be made, before the vast empire of India fell altogether into British hands. Addressed to my dear lads, the intended youth readership, the preface could apply to most of Henty’s tales of imperialism. I was interested in the fictional but not the historical details. The narratives became tiring, and they put me off such fiction for a long time to come. I abandoned Henty for a more consistently fictional world, or so I thought, in which characters were not bound by the realism of actual history. I wanted a world into which I could escape.

  I thought I had found such a world in Captain W. E. Johns’s series featuring James Bigglesworth, the pilot adventurer, whose actions I followed, wherever he went, whatever he did: Biggles and Co.; Biggles Learns to Fly; Biggles Flies Again; Biggles in France; Biggles Flies East, West, South, everywhere, it did not matter. Biggles was the hero of all seasons, places, and confrontations. It was only when I came to Biggles in Africa that I started feeling uncomfortable with the portrayal of non-English characters. Biggles was an RAF pilot, and he reminded me of the same force dropping bombs on Mau Mau guerrillas on Mount Kenya. His kind were trying to kill my brother. I did not have a developed view of what held me back; I just drifted away, this time into the fictional world of H. Rider Haggard.

  The same odd feelings intensified. King Solomon’s Mines was full of adventure but clearly at the expense of Africa. I had been brought up to respect old age as wisdom and experience, but Gagool was one of the most frightful depictions of an aged African woman I had ever encountered in fiction. She was evil, pure and simple, the genius behind the tyranny that had bedeviled Africa for centuries.

  King Solomon’s Mines reminded me of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, for both had a treasure hunt at the center, but I was not able to wholly escape into Haggard’s characters the way I had with Stevenson’s. King Solomon’s Mines could not stand without a savage Africa as the background; Treasure Island could stand without the savagery of the Pacific peoples. Looking back, I can see that Haggard and other popular writers, when it came to my continent, were penning from the same dictum: imperialism was normal, resistance to it immoral. Africa and its peoples were the background that enabled European self-realization, the same theme that ran through our history lessons. The fast pace, turns, twists, mystery, and denouement sucked me into those adventures, but soon even these elements could not blind me completely to the negative implications of certain images and groupings of characters. Even in fiction I was not going to escape the theme of empire building. But then I stumbled into the crime thriller and detective category, and I thought, just maybe, I might finally escape into the realm of pure, untainted fiction.

  For a time it was Edgar Wallace, with his fast-paced crime thrillers and detective mysteries, and nobody else. Then I discovered that once I had finished the story and knew all the hidden facts, I could not read any of the books a second time. The titles, characters, and places had different names, but the story remained the same. He did, however, lead me to more serious detective thrillers, where the feverish excitement and curiosity about what happens next was not everything. Characters could be more complex and add to the depth and excitement of a story. Thus I came to think of Sherlock Holmes, his friend Dr. Watson, and their address in Baker Street, London, as real. I read and reread any stories with Sherlock Holmes in them. I started looking at people, teachers, fellow students, acquaintances, for clues about their past or where they had just been, the way Sherlock Holmes did. I once tried it on a startled Omange one Saturday:

  I see you have just come back from the Indian shops.

  How do you know?

  Well, you are eating a papaya. Papayas don’t grow in any of the fields around the school. We get them from the Indian shops.

  Wrong. A friend gave me it.

  Yes, but he must have gotten them from the Indian shops.

  Maybe, but that does not mean that I was there or even that I have just come from there!

  Clearly I was better at reading Sherlock Holmes than playing him. But I did not stop trying to imitate him, even using a mirror to look for clues, although a mirror was no substitute for a magnifying glass. Sherlock was so real that he even dwarfed his creator. Robin Hood was the only other such character: I never cared who his authors were, I just read anything with his name on it.

  51

  In time I started looking at what I read in and outside the class more critically: none reflected my black experience. Then one day I happened to pick up Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, the subject of one of Carey Francis’s talks. It may not have been a thriller or a detective novel, but the story of Pastor Stephen Kumalo going into the city to look for his sister Gertrude and his own prodigal son, Absalom, could just as easily have unfolded in Kenya. The theme reminded me of the plot line in Kenneth’s unfin
ished book. I even wondered if Alan Paton was black: how else could he capture so well the tone and the imagery of African speech?

  Cry, the Beloved Country whetted my appetite for books that reflected my social reality, but the library did not meet my needs. On further search, I found several copies of Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. It was my first autobiography. The similarities between the situation in the nineteenth-century American South and Kenya were eerily captured in Washington’s story. Racial barriers to black progress were familiar; in Kenya we encountered the color bar in every walk of life. The difference between colonialism and slavery seemed a matter of degree. That was why his statements that black people had gotten more out of slavery than the whites made me uncomfortable. Comparing his racial situation with the colonial in our country, I asked myself, how could one say that Africans had gotten more out of colonialism than the whites who profited by it?

  Though I had not worked this out fully, I had mixed feelings about Washington. His thirst for education, and his determination to do whatever it took to reach his goal, mirrored mine. I liked his ideas about hard work and self-reliance, for this was what my mother had always taught me. But I felt uneasy about his asking black people not to agitate for social equality: self-reliance and self-effacement were contradictory ideals.

  I looked in vain for writings that I could identify with fully. The choice, it seemed, was between the imperial narratives that disfigured my body and soul, and the liberal ones that restored my body but still disfigured my soul. I was not sure if I really did want to read all the books in the school library.

  I grew more discriminating in my choice. My own awakening and the books I analyzed in class were influencing what I expected to find in a story in terms of depth and complexity of character, theme, and plot. In that sense, the classroom was affecting the outside. Still, the classroom could not give me enough. I still needed the outside. If I could not get texts that appealed to my body and soul, I might at least stick to the ones that appealed to the soul, no matter what time and social space produced them. I could not go back to thrillers, detectives, and adventures with my old innocence.