In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir

  In the evening, the police huddle us into a truck. Under armed escort, the truck leaves the precinct. They don’t tell us where we are, headed. For all I know, they may be taking us to a quarry to open fire on us. Throughout the state of emergency, I have heard of people detained on whatever suspicions, released in a forest and told they were free to go home, then shot in the back as terrorists in a running battle. It is only when the truck stops by a barbed-wire fence and the gates open to swallow us that I know from the others that we are in Kĩambu Remand Prison.

  Talk of comedy! Yesterday, Friday, I was here in Kĩambu to collect the largest wages of my life. I was with friends. Now I am back in the same town, without the money, and nobody knows me. The prison guards shake their heads to every question concerning the fate that awaits us. A Saturday in ruins, I note in my mental diary.

  62

  On arrival at Kĩambu Remand Prison, we are made to stand in line and take out whatever valuables we have—money, watches, and other personal items—and hand them over to reception, where they are counted, recorded, and put in different bags that are labeled and put aside behind the counter. We are distributed among strangers to different rooms, already holding other inmates awaiting trial. It feels like a family separation. So when three of us from Thĩmbĩgwa are pushed into one cell, I feel lucky. They lock the door from the outside.

  A few minutes later they open it and throw in some blankets, and we grab whatever we can lay our hands on. We sit on the cold cement floor, our bodies almost touching, blankets wrapped around our feet and knees. The room, designed for four, now holds eight. An electric bulb deep in the ceiling lights up the room, but not too well. Soon we get used to it and are able to see a clearer outline of each other.

  The inmates already in our room could be my age, but their faces are hardened. They look at us warily as if we are intruding into their home. Two of the Thĩmbĩgwans are clearly elderly, at least compared with the rest of us. For some time, the earlier inmates only murmur among themselves, but the inevitable questions about why we have been brought here eventually break the barrier between the old and the new. I don’t participate, but one of the Thĩmbĩgwans reveals that I am from Alliance. They all shake their heads, murmuring disapproval as if my arrest, so obviously wrong, proves that they too have been held by mistake. It’s the evil character of the colonial police. This state of emergency has given them the license to do whatever they want. They don’t want to see us black people educated.

  The shared sympathy for my position triggers stories of why they left school—tuition, failed tests, cruel teachers, or simply the lure of a more exciting life, which they now admit was an illusion. One or two have never been inside a classroom: there were no schools in their area, the independent ones having been banned.

  How then did they end up here? One was arrested after snatching a wallet from an Indian woman; another trying to break into a drapery to steal. Others tried to rob a bank with a gun rented from a police officer for a share of the loot. They feel betrayed: the insider on whose information they had relied was a plant. When they finally catch up with the traitor, no matter how long it takes, they will exact vengeance. There’s no emotion; it’s a statement, chilling because it carries a certainty of intention. More chilling for me, a revelation, is this partnership in crime between criminals and crime busters.

  For some, their present arrest is just one more in a series that has already seen them in and out of prison: crime has become a way of life. Others exchange their experiences in different prisons at different times. A few tell of how time and again they managed to talk their way out of the gallows into a prison term, which they served with exemplary behavior that earned them remission.

  These tell of their experiences, not in pride or resignation, but matter-of-factly, as one might talk about meeting an unexpected mishap during a leisurely stroll down the street. They don’t complain about the conditions that drove them to their ways; they are not judgmental about the social conditions that have shaped their lives; they take society the way they take the reality of physical nature and its vagaries. You do what you have to do to live with it, not to change it, for how does one change the reality of mountains, rivers, floods, fires?

  63

  I notice that my fellow Thĩmbĩgwans have become increasingly quiet, almost as if they recognize the differences between their experiences and those of the young men. They are older; they seem surprised that here in the remand prison are people who own up to crimes and discuss their involvement calmly. In their own case, they were victims of the administrative police who were looking for the slightest reason, even a manufactured one, to make arrests.

  The situation changes when one of the self-confessed criminals brags about the courage involved in the deeds they do. Even pickpocketing involves observance, quick hands and feet, and steady nerves. One of the Thĩmbĩgwans eventually breaks his silence. He speaks slowly, almost in a whisper.

  Young men, I will speak to you because you could be any of my sons, and fate has now brought us together. There is no courage in snatching people’s wallets, be they European, Asian, or African. There is no courage in renting a gun from a policeman to risk your life so that the man supposed to enforce the law can dispose of the loot however he likes. Courage is in those young men and women who took to the mountains to face an enemy armed ten times more than they, not for their individual gains, but because they were responding to the cries of a community. Courage, my sons, is in the old man Mbiyũ, who gave up the glories of a senior chief and the wealth of a big landowner and the peace of old age, to throw in his lot with the community.

  Are you talking of ex-senior chief Koinange wa Mbiyũ? asks the bank robber, or Mr. Bank Robber, as the name etches itself in my mind. What has he given up, his land? My grandfather worked for him for many years, and did he give him a piece of the lands he owns? His sons are safe in England; another is a chief even now …

  He cannot be expected to give a piece of land to every landless person in the country and leave the whites to sit on lands they stole from us. His sons have not escaped persecution. What additions to his wealth was he after? No, it was for all of us, the landless, the poor. Because of his agitation for education, land, and freedom for all, the old man languishes in a remote desert place, Marsabit.

  Yes, but I hear he has all the servants he needs, and even his wives are allowed to live with him.

  In exile? Marsabit? Banished from his home and family? Wouldn’t you rather be in your home without servants than live in Hell with servants to look after your burns?

  What has he sacrificed really? Where is the courage?

  It has become a two-person war, of words, yes, but a war all the same. The elderly man keeps quiet for a while, as if he has decided not to continue, but he is only reorganizing his thoughts for defense and assault.

  The old man has given the ultimate in self-sacrifice for a cause bigger than himself. I will say this here, and if anybody should carry the words out of this circle, I will deny everything, to my grave.

  He draws a portrait of the old man, from the 1920s onward: his being appointed a colonial chief and then turning the title into a platform for airing anticolonial grievances; his struggle for education for all, though he never went to school; his testimony to the Carter Land Commission in London; his turning his home in Kĩambaa into a parliament where many nationalists gathered to plan for our freedom.

  He tells a gripping story of how the war for freedom was planned in the old chief’s homestead; how he had turned one of his hidden stores into an armory; how very few knew of the actual secret place. But somehow Gathiomi, one of his sons, discovered it. The decision was taken to disappear him. It was his life or that of thousands. Confronted with the choice, the old man did not say no. Young man, do you read the Bible? Do you know how Abraham felt when asked to sacrifice his son for a greater cause? Only in his case, God intervened and provided an alternative. The same book gives us another example. For God so loved the
world, that he gave his only begotten Son … Well, Gathiomi was not his only son, but a father loves all his children equally.

  As a boy growing up in Limuru, I had heard whispers about the mystery of Gathiomi’s disappearance. Now the incident is being discussed openly in the most unlikely of places, ten years later, within two or so miles of the old chief’s homestead. A razor could have cut the tension in the room, a cough from one of the other Thĩmbĩgwans only intensifying it.

  And what courage, other than evading tax collectors, do you have to show? Mr. Bank Robber asks, rather sarcastically.

  Here we are all strangers, and yet they are going at it as if they were old adversaries.

  Young man, he says, not paying taxes to a cruel government is not the worst of crimes. But I pay all the same to avoid this kind of thing. It takes me away from my work. I did not have the papers on me at the time, and these dogs would not listen to any explanation. As for courage, well, let me tell you, I may not be able to hold a knife or fire a gun, but—

  He stops, chokingly. When he resumes, he tells a most incredible story. He sees himself as a freedom fighter. He used to work in Nairobi. Once a very cruel area assistant chief, who had killed many patriots with his own hands, was captured and sentenced to death by a people’s court. How were they going to get rid of his body? The colonial forces would turn everything upside down. So the executioners cut him into pieces. Then people, among them the storyteller, were each given a piece to bury, in the rural areas outside Nairobi. The people did not know the executioners or any of the other carriers. The idea was that nobody should have all the information, in case caught and tortured. The storyteller was given his piece—an arm. He wrapped it in paper, put it in a basket, and rode a bus. Just outside Nairobi the bus was stopped. The police entered and even poked at his package. He was sweating. The package oozed blood. But the police were more interested in those who did not have their papers in order. The memory of the encounter and narrow escape overwhelms him. Even his verbal adversary holds back his tongue.

  You see the irony? Yesterday I was coming from the field, and now I am here. Why? Because my papers were not in order.

  Total silence follows. His name forms in my mind: Mr. Body Parts. Although I can’t see the faces of the other prisoners clearly, it appears to me that there is a change in how they look at him. There is now a hint of awe or fear. I feel the chill myself: I would not want to brush against him. Why did he tell us his story? Does prison create a space for confessions? Is it because the listeners are total strangers, not likely to repeat it? Or is it the closeness of shared grievance? I don’t know. I recall that when I was once in the hospital, patients tended to talk their hearts out to each other. But I also note that in all the conversation today, nobody gives their names or any details of their homes and family. I am the only one with a known location: Alliance.

  64

  Suddenly the two robbers and a third inmate make signs to each other. They stand up and come toward me. I am terrified. But they just want to go to the doorless toilet hole, at the corner in the same room. Two of them hold the edges of a blanket to make a curtain at the entrance; the third person goes behind the curtain, and soon I hear the sound of his bowels. They do it in turns. I am overwhelmed by the stink. I feel like throwing up, but I have nothing to let out. After several hours I stop smelling it and then realize that it is only because everybody and everything smells the same. I find it striking, amusing even, that these who have confessed to terrible deeds still maintain a sense of modesty when it comes to shitting.

  I want and don’t want to sleep. I am wary of the warders outside, my fellow inmates, the room, everything. There is no escape, no retreat even; I am bound to their company. I’m privy to their secrets. They have not been hostile to me, by word or gesture. But their stories have stirred inside me a fear I cannot define. When I start dozing, I find myself fighting to remain awake, watchful, although I don’t know why. But I feel it’s important to keep my eyes open, open, open. It is a struggle. I end up suspended between sleep and wakefulness.

  I drift into a plantation. As the wind blows, the breeze turns the surface, as though opening the pages of a book, to reveal different crops—coffee, tea, sisal, cotton—that extend to the horizon on all sides. I am the only worker in this vast plantation. If I try to rest, a bank-robber-turned-overseer prevents me. In one hand he holds a huge machete; in the other a sjambok, which he cracks every time I show slackness. Why, why? He is black like me. Then from nowhere appears his master on a horse whose hooves are made of rubber. If he slacks again, he tells the bank robber, pointing at me, cut him up into pieces. I want to protest, but no words issue from my mouth. I try harder. Instead of bare words, out comes a melody, My Lord what a morning, at first hoarsely, as if a cough is stuck in my throat, and then smoothly:

  You’ll hear the trumpet sound to wake the nations underground,

  Looking to my God’s right hand, when the stars begin to fall.

  I look up at the vast canopy above, and I see only one star, whose light is masked by gray and dark clouds. The master gallops away to escape the impending rain. Is this a signal for the overseer to start cutting me up? Then from nowhere I see men in blankets wrapped around their waists, their upper torsos bare, walking toward me slowly, singing, Swing low, sweet chariot, but ending with the line, coming for to carry you home.

  No, no, they cannot deceive me. I know the home they are talking about. Each has been ordered to carry a piece of me hidden in their blankets to bury it in remote parts of the plantation. At first I plead with them to be aware of the overseer: I know the orders that the owner has given him; once he finishes with me, he will do the same to each of you. They don’t heed my words, so I sing back, drowning their voices with my one voice that calls out: Freedom, oh freedom. Now they hear me. We join voices:

  And before I’ll be a slave

  I’ll be buried in my grave

  And go home to my Lord and be free.

  It is not the burial in the grave part of it that moves me but rather its reiteration of Freedom! Freedom! Oh freedom over me. I find so much power in its categorical assertion of no more moaning and its promise of space for singing and praying, for what am I doing but praying for a day without a landlord and an overseer on my back? Looking from side to side and back again in terror, the overseer starts retreating, his huge machete and sjambok somehow merging into a rifle in front of our eyes.

  Still, we go after him, defiantly singing Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ’roun’. I say I’m gonna hold out until my change comes, waving our blankets in the air, like flags. The strength in numbers has made all the difference.

  65

  The noise of shit and piss jolts me back to reality. The choristers are simply my fellow inmates queuing to visit the hole. The toilet is full, overflowing, and even the brave ones curse as, behind the blanket of modesty, they make more deposit of shit and urine.

  I cling to my corner for all it is worth. Let me retreat deeper into self, the way I did the night before at Thĩmbĩgwa, pretend that I am here, in this inferno, for one night only. But I must not slide back to sleep. It is difficult: competing images flit across the void. I must select an image of something good that has happened to me in the past and hold on to it, like that of the day the doors of Alliance opened, that January four years ago. Instead, here comes the district officer, a boy my age, a leering smile on his face, reminding me that earlier in the day he let me go, only to bring me back to him, a white cat playing with a black mouse. He has stolen into my dreams disguised as a plantation owner. Everything about him is disguise. But this time he cannot deceive me. I am not a mouse; I am human. I have done no wrong. What does the white boy have that I don’t? With malicious glee, my only triumph over him, I think of him as having failed in his bid for college. And even physically, one on one, blow for blow, I think I could hold my own: was I not once circumcised into manhood? Yes, a voice answers me, but this has nothing to do with manhood, age, physique,
or mind: do you want to know the great image of authority? Yes, I answer back. He has vanished. Just like that. Instead I hear Andrew Kaingu’s voice, speaking lines from King Lear:

  Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?

  And the creature run from the cur?

  Yes, yes, Lord Kahahu’s dog once made me take flight. It bit me. What did you do? the voice asks. Nothing, just went home crying. The voice laughs and says, a dog’s obeyed in office.

  But I refuse to obey. As if in response to my defiance, the white boy reappears in a Land Rover full of armed soldiers and banishes me to Marsabit. I am adorned in a toga of Colobus monkey skin. I find others in similar wear. We are all men of some means, evidenced by the rare animal skins we wear. Marsabit is a forest of green cacti that sprout big leaves and flowers where there should be thorns. Marsabit is a cover name for arcadia, where the exile finds a home and the weary traveler, peace. Here in the Marsabit arcadia, leaflets, pinned on tree trunks, carry messages of love. But wait, it is all an illusion. It’s the RAF dropping bombs on us, which turn into harmless leaflets as they reach the ground. I pick one up. It warns us that we shall be cut up in small pieces unless we come out of the forest. We run through the trees, in different directions. I wander through the forest in a tattered blanket, alone. It is raining, and the wind is howling. A small man appears from nowhere and runs a straw through my tattered garments, and I can only cry out helplessly: it is unfair; this is not justice. And the small man is saying, Look, it is all an illusion, it is not raining, the sun is shining over a field of lilies. I sit down on a fallen tree trunk: it is indeed shining. The small man is talking to me about a journey’s end: