The sense of communal victory or loss was also felt in the classroom, much evident when the exam results were announced at the end of the year. Parents, guardians, relatives, and neighbors came to the school to participate in the celebration of excellence. It was a formal occasion attended by the school’s founding elders, among them Mzee Kĩeya, who had donated the land, and whose son Stephen Thiro taught there. Whoever took the coveted three places, first, second, or third, was the pride of his family and community. Those who held the tail, as was the expression at the time, brought shame to their family. So every celebration of academic excellence was accompanied by laughter and tears, collective joy and grief. The pressure to do well must have produced the high degree of tolerance for corporal punishment, sometimes verging on abuse, that was so common in Manguo. The aggrieved children had no sympathy from their parents. The teacher was always right; after all, he was the daily eye of the community in the classroom.
Though things would change in years to come, I did not stand out in any subject during my first year at Manguo, not even in sports or physical education. But I had done something that caught the attention of Fred Mbũgua. I had written a class essay in Gĩkũyũ, a report on a meeting of an imaginary council of elders. He seemed to have been struck by the fact that I had captured the gravitas of elderly speech in my choice of words, imagery, and proverbs. The paper was read to the assembly. I can’t remember if my elder brother was there. Certainly my mother was not. But by the time I reached home, my mother knew about it. That I had been made to stand up and take a bow was confirmation of my having done the best I could.
My mother must have been pleased, because later she allowed me to climb up her dear pear tree and shake down some fruit. She guarded it jealously with love and care, and the tree, as if returning the favor, often bore a lot of fruit.
I was happy that my class exercise had made her happy and had brought collective honor and pride to my new community.
I did not know that I would soon become a traveling troubadour. Music at Kamandũra accompanied religious ceremony, prayer mostly; at Manguo music was incorporated in everything, secular and religious. Even the sports festival had choirs who marked the intermissions, an alternative to the marching band. Performances, including music and dance, were part of the year-end school assemblies. Some of these were simple skits and sketches.
Two made an impression on me for a long time. One, called “a bicycle built for two,” was the story of a love triangle wherein two male friends outwit each other to win the love of a girl. They end up fighting, giving the girl an opportunity to slip away. Both lose. The other had something to do with justice or the art of righting wrongs unjustly. A mother has left two bananas for her two children to share. The two brothers start fighting over the bananas; both want the bigger one. An old man, looking every inch a caring adult, passes by, sees the problem, and offers to help by making the two bananas equal. Taking both pieces of fruit in his hands, he compares them and bites a piece off the bigger one, only to create a new inequality, which he tries to rectify in the same way. Eventually he finishes off both bananas, leaving the brothers to ponder the equality of loss. Too late the brothers join forces against the old man, who runs off the stage as if the bananas have given him new youth. The skits were all in mime yet they were so eloquent, they generated applause, laughter, and nods of understanding.
The performance of songs, most of which had educational themes, produced a different mood and made some in the assembly tear up.
Korwo nĩ Ndemi na Mathathi
Baba ndagwĩtia kĩrugũ
Njoke ngwĩtie itimũ na ng’ombe,
Rĩu baba, ngũgwĩtia gĩthomo
Ndegwa rĩu gũtitũire
Thenge rĩu no iranyihahanyiha
Ndirĩ kĩrugũ ngũgwĩtia
Rĩu baba, ngũgwĩtia gĩthomo
If these were the times of our ancestors Ndemi and Mathathi
My father, I would ask you for the feast due to initiates,
Then I would ask you to arm me with a spear and shield,
But today, Father, I ask you for education only
Our herd of bulls is gone
Our he-goats depleted
I will not ask you for a banquet
My father, all I ask for is education
There were other variations in which the singers asked for writing materials, pen and slate, instead of spear and shield. I took the lyrics and melody personally: I felt as if they were expressing the fate of my father’s herds.
Gradually the new songs spread beyond the school, sparked by an emerging social trend among young men and women. On Sunday afternoons they would arrange social gatherings in homes or in the open air where they would converse and sing. The railway station platform was no longer the main social center. It was at such a gathering in my new home that I first sang the Ndemi Mathathi song, at the playful urging of the young men and women in my brother Wallace’s place. The emotion I put into the singing came from a heart soaked with recent loss: the depletion of my father’s cattle, my expulsion from home. The public and private emotion of loss intersected. The crowd joined in the singing. My rendering had captured, in ways that I had not expected, the mood of the hour.
My brother Wallace decided that I was a singer. Wherever there was a gathering of young men and women he would find a way of making sure that I displayed my talent. Being small for my age, I always aroused curiosity. The results were always the same: adult involvement, adulation afterward. The boy is smart. The boy who wrote the essay that Mwalimu, Fred Mbũgua read at assembly was also a singer.
I was now in my second year at Manguo. I had already completed the Competitive Entrance Exam at grade four and passed well. It was a terminal exam, a real hurdle in the competition for school. The exam was later abolished: So many kids would fail, ending their education; they would become workers for the tea and coffee plantations. Passing the exam added to my reputation among my brother Wallace’s friends.
One morning I arrived at the school earlier than I normally did and found a group of students singing instead of playing as they usually did before the morning assembly. I was transfixed. The melody was familiar: Where had I heard it?
Then I remembered. One day while still in my father’s house I had gone down to the Manguo marshes. During the rainy season the marshes were, of course, soggy and remained so for many months, sometimes even until the next rainy season. Reeds grew. Birds flew above the marsh; some made their nests among the grass and reeds where they laid eggs. There was a dirt road that joined Limuru to the Nairobi–Nakuru Road built by the Italian prisoners of war. Some white people used to come there to shoot birds, their dogs thrashing in the water to retrieve the fallen game. I had not even crossed the road when, at a place we used to call Kĩmunya’s corner, I saw a convoy of trucks with men and women caged in the back.
Any convoy of trucks along this road always brought back the memory of the accident in the murram quarry that killed army men and wounded others during the Second World War. My tummy would tighten up, fearful of another accident. The convoy that I saw produced the same fears. There was no accident, but the people sang as if they had witnessed or expected one.
I did not catch all the words, but the melody and the way they sang it, with total conviction, touched me with its defiance and immeasurable sadness. I would have liked to know the words.
And now these students were singing the lyrics!
Wendani ndonire kuo
Wa ciana na atumia
Mboco yagwa thĩ tũkenyũrana
Hoyai ma, thai thai Ma
Amu Ngai no ũrĩa wa tene
Great love I saw there
Among women and children
When a morsel was picked from the ground
It was shared equally among us
Pray to him fervently
Beseech him fervently
He is the God eternal
The same words, the same melody, as if the students had been part of the conv
oy of the caged. I learned the verse and the chorus and added it to my repertoire. I needed only to start singing and grown-ups would take it up.
My singing made some of my brother’s friends, who often came to visit him in his new single-bedroom house, start talking to me about affairs of the land as if I myself was a grown-up. They nicknamed me Mzee, “Elder,” a term of respect. I called them Mzee in turn. They were adults, my elder brother’s peers, but Mzee became a nickname among us. The most learned and knowledgeable in the adult group was Ngandi Njũgũna.
“It is the song of Ole Ngurueni,” Ngandi explained to me when I asked him about its popularity.
“Ole Ngurueni?” I asked, puzzled.
“From 1902 onward when Europeans stole our lands they turned many of the original owners into squatters by force, or guile, or both. You see, to get money for taxes one had to work for pay, somewhere. Then after the First World War more Africans had their lands taken from them to make way for soldier settlement. Some of them went to the Rift Valley, increasing the squatter population. Then in 1941, even as our men went to fight for them in the big war, European settlers started expelling squatters from their farms, displacement a second time. Ole Ngurueni, near Nakuru, was a resettlement area for some of those who had been displaced. But then, three years after the return of our soldiers from the Second World War, the colonial government decided to expel the residents of Ole Ngurueni, yet again, a third time. The dwellers of Ole Ngurueni made a stand: They would not move; they would not be moved from their homes three times. Their power? Solidarity. They swore to stick together and never break ranks. The family of one of the leaders, Koina, comes from Limuru. What did the government do? Placed them in trucks, like cattle, brought them to Yatta in Eastern Kenya. They put the narrative of their forced removal from Ole Ngurueni to Yatta, a region they called the land of black rocks, into song.”
It was in 1948 that I first heard the song. I did not know that two, three years later I would hear it again at Manguo or that I would be singing it to a very responsive crowd, some of whom may have been relatives of the victims.
According to Ngandi, Ole Ngurueni, a tale of displacement, exile, and loss, was really a story of Kenya; people’s resistance was a harbinger of things to come.
Ngandi was educated and trained as a teacher at the Kenya Teachers’ College at Gĩthũngũri. He talked about his alma mater with pride: It offered the best education in the world.
The college was a product of the competition for teachers and students between the alliance of KISA and KKEA on the one hand and the Kĩrore and Thirikari, the state and the missionary programs, on the other. Even after the growth of independent African schools intensified starting in 1929, the government and mission centers remained the source of trained teachers, and they were reluctant to admit those candidates who came directly from the two independent organizations, KISA and KKEA. The independent schools continued poaching teachers from the missionary centers, meeting the shortage with the untrained. Yet both KISA and Karĩng’a prided themselves on being beyond government and missionary control. The quest for self-reliance with respect to teachers was the challenge that led to the conception of a Kenya Teachers’ College at Gĩthũngũri, the site of the first independent elementary school founded by Musa Ndirangũ. The site symbolized continuity.
The mind behind the conception and the execution of this teachers’ college was Mbiyũ Koinange, the first son of the legendary Senior Chief Koinange. After a stint at Alliance High School in Kikuyu, Mbiyũ went to Virginia’s Hampton Institute in 1927 for his secondary school education, the same school from which a famous African American educator, Booker T. Washington, had graduated in 1875 and where he taught before going on to start Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881 at the recommendation of General Armstrong, the principal of the Hampton Institute. Mbiyũ must have carried himself well to have elicited, on his graduation from Hampton, appreciative comments from fellow students: A noble person goes his way, conscious of his nobility, they said of him.
After Hampton, Mbiyũ went to Ohio Wesleyan College, graduating with a B.A. in 1935. His graduation from Ohio drew the attention of Time, in the issue dated June 4, 1935, which listed Negro spirituals as among his interests. Describing him as the son of a dancer, it noted his eagerness to return home to promote “yearning for learning” in his community, whose members’ otherwise “prime ambition,” the issue editorialized, “is to make his earlobes touch his shoulders.” Time had obviously never heard of Harry Thuku and his anticolonial workers’ movement of the 1920s, or the struggle for education led by those very long lobed elders. Mbiyũ went on to Columbia University, for his master’s in education, the first Kenyan African to acquire a higher degree. Returning to Kenya in 1938 and in consultation with his father, he came up with a solution: an African-run, community-owned college, modeled on Hampton and Tuskegee, and he would be the principal. With its dreamers hoping that it would eventually develop into Kenya University, the college was to become one of the biggest and most ambitious educational projects ever undertaken in colonial Kenya. In modeling itself on Hampton and Tuskegee, the college was reconnecting itself to the Garveyite concepts of self-reliance that, through Harry Thuku and the Negro World, had inspired the start of the independent schools. Garvey had himself been attracted to the Tuskegee model when in 1914 he left Jamaica for the USA, but he arrived too late to meet with Washington, who died in 1915.
The Kenyan dreamers looked to their cultural traditions for solutions to funding problems, ironically based on the contentious practice of circumcision. Every Gĩkũyũ adult, man or woman, belonged to an age set, based on the year they were initiated. Money would be raised through age groups, each competing with others to see which could raise the most. But there were other individual initiatives and innovations.
The story is told of one illiterate peasant woman, Njeri, who went to see the famed college for herself. She was horrified to find that while the boys lived in rooms built with stones, the girls slept in a hut of mud walls and grass thatch. She went back to her village and started organizing women, who gave whatever they could afford toward buying stones and aluminum for the girls’ dorm. Her initiative became a woman’s movement expanding beyond her village.
The effort to raise money mobilized the entire adult Gĩkũyũ community, and the Kenya Teachers’ College at Gĩthũngũri became part of the collective pride enshrined in many popular songs of the time.
When you get to Gĩthũngũri
You’ll find an African people’s college
It’s a four-story building
The builders are Kenyans
The overseer is a Kenyan
The committee is made up of Kenyans
The college, which also incorporated secondary schooling, was thus seen as a counterweight to the colonial and missionary project, which always assumed the fragility of the African mind. Open to all Kenyan Africans, Kenya Teachers’ College at Gĩthũngũri was an institution committed to producing teachers who would provide African children with unlimited, unbiased knowledge, enabling them to compete with the best that the government and missionary schools offered. The college inspired intellectuals organically connected to the community, who would be traveling interpreters of the world to the people.
Ngandi Njũgũna was of that ambition and tradition. He always talked about the day the college was formally opened on January 7, 1939, as a great day for Kenya. Though it opened at a time of war, it survived the hardships. He claimed that even many Europeans and Asians used to visit the college to witness the initiative for themselves. Black American soldiers stationed in Nairobi visited the college and even sang Negro spirituals for the community. Ngandi could never talk for long about anything without somehow bringing the Kenya Teachers’ College into the conversation.
He first stood out from the crowd around me when he lent me a book that soon became second only to my torn copy of the Old Testament as most prized. It was Mwendwo nĩ Irĩ na Irĩri (Beloved of the People
), written by Justus Itotia, a teacher at Jeans School, at Kabete near Nairobi, founded in 1925 for rural community development. The book was a collection of essays, riddles, and stories all promoting the ideal of a good person whose moral character was molded by the values of civility, responsibility, and mutual accountability, which, though found in the old culture, anticipate and find fulfillment in the Christian ideals of the modern world. Two narratives were exemplary: a parable and a prosaic description of a journey.
A man about to go to trade in another country asks his friend, a herdsman, to look after his black-and-gray-spotted cows while he is away. The cow gives birth at about the same time as the herdsman’s brown cow. Since the spotted cow is known for high yield in milk, the herdsman simply exchanges the calves, giving the spotted one to the brown mother to suck and the brown one to the spotted mother. Eventually the man returns to claim his cow and its offspring only to find the oddity of a spotted calf being mothered by the brown cow and the brown calf by the spotted mother. Realizing what has happened, he takes the matter to the elders. Though the elders suspect the truth because of the color of the calves, they cannot come to a consensus because it is one person’s word against another’s. Out of pity for the suffering of the council of elders, for the case dragged on for years with the disputed calves giving birth to others who gave birth to still others, a boy offers to settle the case. The elders are skeptical, but since they are at their wits’ end, they let him try. They follow his instructions. On the eve of the next session, they secretly put him in a hole and, leaving enough room for air, they cover it with a rock that tested their combined strength in rolling it to the place. When the man and the herdsman come for the hearing, the elders, who are seated very far from the rock, first ask the herdsman to go and bring the rock to the elders. Failing, after much sweat and toil, and seeing that he is all alone, he mutters to himself, Why on earth did I ever exchange the calves, instead of holding on to what is mine? He goes back to the elders. The other complainant is given the same instructions. Failing to move the rock even an inch, he mutters to himself: However hard the task, I will never give up on what is rightfully mine. The entire court now moves and sits all around the rock as if before an oracle. The voice from the rock tells them what each of the men has said, and the case is settled and justice is done. In the character of the fictional boy who grows up to become the wisest man of his times are hints of a precocious Jesus or Solomon figure.