For me the trial of Jomo Kenyatta becomes a vast oral performance narrated and directed by Mzee Ngandi with the ease and authority of an eyewitness. I presume that Ngandi, like some of his audience, has to read between the lines of the settler-owned newspapers and government radio. But he enriches what he gleans here and there with rich creative interpretation. His narration is influenced by his conviction that Kenyatta will win. This more than anything else helps his listeners to willingly suspend all disbelief.
Ngandi has never been to Kapenguria, or any part of Turkana, but he begins by setting the scene: a couple of shops, a narrow dusty road, a dilapidated schoolhouse turned into a courtroom in a vast arid land of stunted grass, cactus, a thorn tree here and there, and herdsmen, with their goats and cows, who suddenly look up to see cars, armed police, white people they had not seen before, come and go, every day for weeks and months.
He introduces the cast of international and local players. Heading the cast is one who is actually absent from Judge Ransley Thacker’s court: Mbiyũ Koinange, KAU delegate, free in England, turns out to be the genius behind the formidable cast of defense lawyers, aided, no doubt, by his old friends, Fenner Brockway and others of the Labor Party. What do you expect? Ngandi asks his audience rhetorically. The mind that once organized Kenya Teachers’ College at Gĩthũngũri, bringing different people together in a common pursuit, is at it again.
Then follows D. N. Pritt, the lead defense attorney, no ordinary lawyer; he is a QC, Queen’s Counsel, which means that he advises the head of the British Empire, Ngandi explains, strongly hinting that the queen may not have been very pleased with Governor Baring’s hasty act of arresting Kenyatta. Kenya is her favorite country, he asserts, quickly reminding his audience that she was transformed from princess to queen while honeymooning at the Treetops lodge, near Nyeri. See? On February 6, 1952, she learns she has become a queen while on Kenyan soil; in October 1952 she hears that her prime minister, Churchill, and her representative here, Governor Baring, have had Kenyatta arrested.
Other members of the defense team have come from all parts of the queen’s empire, including Dudley Thompson from Jamaica and H. O. Davies from Nigeria. Others from all corners of the world have been denied entry at the airport in their attempt to work with the three local lawyers, Fitz de Souza, Jaswant Singh, and A. Kapila. Kapila is second to D. N. Pritt in brilliance. If Kapila lived in England, he would have long ago joined the secret group of Queen’s Counsels. Jawaharlal Nehru himself, the prime minister of India, has sent lawyer Chaman Lall, a member of Parliament, to join the team.
The fact that the prime minister of India has sent lawyers is a very significant contribution to Ngandi’s certainty of victory. The British had colonized India for hundreds of years. Led by Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru, Indian people demanded their independence. Just like our people are now doing, led by Jomo Kenyatta and Mbiyũ Koinange. And look at their leader. He describes the frail figure of Mahatma Gandhi, dressed in a loincloth they call a dhoti, and how Indians all over the world loved him and hang his picture on the walls of their shops. Mahatma Gandhi? Their leader? A loincloth? That was the very picture I used to see hanging on the walls of the Limuru Indian shops. I had taken it that he was one of the Indian gods because my mother had once told me so.
They got theirs in 1947, Ngandi continues with his infectious logic of optimism. There is no reason we should not get ours in 1957. Gandhi fought the British with truth; Kenyatta will smite the British Empire with his call for justice. India led the way.
Ngandi tells the story of India’s long relationship to Kenya, which starts long before the railway and the string of railroad towns. Before Europeans came to East Africa, there were Indian traders in Mombasa and Malindi already. The pilot who showed that rascal Vasco da Gama the route to India across the ocean was an Indian resident at the coast.
Against demurring voices, for his listeners have not seen any Limuru Indian involved in public affairs or being forced to attend the chief’s barazas and participate in communal labor, he uses the occasion to talk positively about the Indian contribution to the Kenyan struggle. Strange that his listeners could earlier have accepted with delight the story of Makhan Singh as a prophet and yet be skeptical about the Indian role now. But Ngandi soldiers on and cites cases of Indian organizations and individuals working with Africans at different stages of the Kenyan struggle, including giving office space and printing facilities to African-language newspapers and magazines. He mentions the Desai alliance with Harry Thuku in the 1920s and Gandhi’s expression of solidarity with the imprisoned Thuku.
Ngandi may or may not have known that documentary evidence was on his side. But when the workers’ leader was arrested and detained in Kismayu, then part of Kenya, Gandhi himself wrote in the paper Young India that Thuku was the victim of “lust for power,” and that if Thuku “ever saw these lines, he will perhaps find comfort in the thought that even in distant India many will read the story of his deportation and trials with sympathy.”*
Every workers’ strike from Harry Thuku’s times to the 1947 strikes that spread to Uplands Bacon factory and Limuru Bata Shoe Company had had Indian support, Ngandi asserts.
I had personal knowledge of some of the strikers. One of the Bata workers, Kĩariĩ, who used to come to my mother’s house, ended up marrying my eldest sister, Gathoni, and took her to his place in Kĩambaa near Koinange’s. After he lost his job, he went back to Kĩambaa to farm and complain about the Bata Boers. Every white man was a Boer to my brother-in-law.
Indians are not all from Limuru, Ngandi would say, citing others like Gama Pinto, ending with the case of Ida Dass, who accompanied Mbiyũ to England. And now you see the good work that Mbiyũ is doing rallying support abroad for this trial.
From Ngandi’s lips, the trial of Jomo Kenyatta becomes geography, history, politics, civics, and above all myth. In his retelling, the places mentioned in the trial—Manchester, Moscow, Denmark—become backdrops in a huge fictional territory in which Ngandi engages the inhabitants, sometimes in embrace, sometimes in fury. He is a narrator who takes sides in the struggle between his characters. He has nothing but contempt for Thacker, an old settler, retrieved from the dump yard of retirement to sit, on behalf of the settler community, in judgment of a nationalist. Having already made up his mind, Thacker does not even pretend to listen to evidence: Instead he plays with his glasses, nods off, occasionally waking up to say no to motions by the defense and yes to those by the prosecution. Ngandi argues with Anthony Somerhough, the prosecutor, and his witnesses, some of whom, like Louis Leakey, the court interpreter, arouse in him genuine anger. Louis Leakey grew up among us, the son of Canon Leakey; he even befriended the Koinange family. Mbiyũ was the best man at his wedding with Mary. He is a spy. He learned Gĩkũyũ so that he could report about us from the inside. That is why he is called Karwĩgĩ, “Hawk.” He is actually a Trojan horse.
I know next to nothing about horses, least of all the Trojan type, and Ngandi takes the time to explain. I am one of his most attentive listeners, and he is more expansive when I am in the crowd. In my presence he injects more English phrases and sentences, and my seeming to understand what he says serves as confirmation of his knowledge to the others.
His real ire is mostly directed at the African prosecution witnesses like Rawson Macaria and Gĩciriri. Traitors, he would say, annoyed that he and some of these witnesses breathe the same Limuru air, although now and then he tempers his anger by saying, Lord forgive them for they know not what they are doing.
The mention of Gĩciriri interferes with the mythical plane in which the characters have been moving. I have seen him in Limuru. Everybody knows him; he’s a friend of the assassinated Kĩmũchũ even. One of his children, Wanjikũ, has been in the same school with me. Very nice, very agreeable, and she does not seem like the daughter of the ogre emerging from Ngandi’s narrative. Still, every time I think of Gĩciriri, I shiver a little: I cannot see how any African would ever agree to testify against hi
s own people, especially in this case, since one of the Kapenguria Six, Kũng’ũ Karumba, comes from Ndeiya in Limuru.
Ngandi’s representation of things seen and yet unseen in different locales, repeated over many days, helps replace the gloom of despair with a glow of hope. Looked at from every conceivable angle, the case for Kenyatta’s release will prevail. In time I come to share the same certainty: Kenyatta and the rest of the Kapenguria Six, as the defendants have been dubbed, shall win.
So when on April 8, 1953, it emerges that Kenyatta and the others have been found guilty and sentenced to seven years of hard labor, my heart falls. What went wrong? How could the queen, Nehru, and all those lawyers from all the corners of the empire allow this? Bewildered, I turn to Ngandi, as if questioning his authority as a storyteller. The tale did not end the way the narrator had led me to expect.
But Ngandi is not daunted. Listen carefully to Kenyatta’s words in the court: “Our activities have been against the injustices suffered by the African people … What we have done, and what we shall continue to do, is to demand the rights of the African people as human beings that they may enjoy the facilities and privileges in the same way as other people.” Do you think he was just talking to Prosecutor Somerhough and Judge Thacker? What would be the point? His words are a signal to Mbiyũ and Kĩmathi to continue and intensify the struggle. He will be free for greater glory: Remember that Kenyatta’s friend Kwame Nkrumah came from prison when he became a prime minister of Gold Coast only a year ago, 1951. PG, prison graduate, he called himself. And Nehru? Was he not a prison graduate?
I note how in time the main characters in his story change: It is now Field Marshall Dedan Kĩmathi, his generals, their guerrilla army, who are the movers of history. I ask Ngandi why one of them is called General China. He does not hesitate. He tells me a little about the Chinese liberating themselves in 1948, a year after India’s independence, but he does not elaborate. I ask him about rumors I had heard that black Americans and black South Africans would come to help us.
South Africans and black Americans have their own struggles. But they are sympathetic to our plight, Ngandi tells me. Bishop Alexander from South Africa was here, a guest of KISA and Karĩng’a, between 1935 and 1937, to help ordain clergy of the Orthodox faith, such as Arthur G. Gatũng’ũ of Waithaka. Black Americans have already been involved in our fight. He mentions Marcus Garvey, whose journal, Negro World, somehow reached KCA leaders in the 1920s. And after the Kenya settlers and the colonial state massacred those demanding the release of Harry Thuku in 1922, Marcus Garvey himself called a huge rally at Liberty Hall in New York, and on their behalf sent a telegram to Lloyd George and prophesied that in thirty years Kenyans would wage armed struggle against the British. Marcus Garvey was a prophet. What he said has come to be. He cites the friendship of Kenyatta with Paul Robeson, George Padmore, and W. E. B. Dubois and the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Ralph Bunche, a big man in the United Nations, was Chief Koinange’s friend. Mbiyũ was educated in America and he must have made many friends. But the soldiers who came to Kenya Teachers’ College at Gĩthũngũri in 1944 and sang Negro spirituals may have been behind the talk of black Americans coming to help us fight the British. He reminds us that Mbiyũ is free, abroad, who knows? Everything comes back to Mbiyũ, the genius, though Kĩmathi, the general, is increasingly occupying center stage.
It is Kĩmathi who will set Kenyatta free. To lull skeptical eyes and ears Ngandi tells the story of how Dedan Kĩmathi once disguised himself as a white police officer and went to dine with the governor, sending him a letter of thanks afterward. He tells of other more amazing feats: how Kĩmathi can crawl on his belly for miles and miles; how he makes his enemies think they have seen him, but before they can pull out their guns they don’t see him, they see a leopard glaring at them before leaping into the bush. This side of Kĩmathi is the more appealing to my imagination, and I want to hear more about his spectacular feats.
I am amazed by the extent of Ngandi’s knowledge—Gĩthũngũri must have been a really good college—but even more so by how freely Ngandi can move from the natural to the supernatural and back without batting an eyelid. Fact or fiction or both, Mzee Ngandi makes sense of it all, in his matter-of-fact tone and with his occasional irony, not to mention his whistling to himself.
Years later, in my novel Weep Not, Child I would give to the young fictional Njoroge an aura of fact and rumor, certainty and doubt, despair and hope, but I am not sure if I was able truly to capture the intricate web of the mundane and the dramatic, the surreal normality of ordinary living under extraordinary times in a country at war. In the facts and rumors of the trial and imprisonment of Jomo Kenyatta and the heroic exploits of Dedan Kĩmathi, the real and the surreal were one. Perhaps it is myth as much as fact that keeps dreams alive even in times of war.
* Young India, December 18, 1924. Reprinted in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi vol. 25, p. 398, http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/people/gandhi/anil.html.
I am sending word to your father that you are now ready to become a man, my mother tells me toward the end of 1953, the first time she has spoken to me about my father since she left his house years ago. Both parents must give consent to this rite of passage. But I am entering this rite, at this time, in obedience to a voice from the grave. My grandmother’s last words were clear: Ndũng’ũ, Kĩmũchũ ‘s son, must not leave me behind. So the date is tied to Ndũng’ũ’s choice of when he will be ready for the rite of passage. Fortunately, the time chosen coincides with the school vacation at the end of the year.
In precolonial times, circumcision among the Gĩkũyũ marked the passage to adulthood. In a society where governance, military obligations, law, and morality presupposed the succession of generations, this rite was a necessary stage up the ladder of social life, for the balance and continuity of the whole. The entire ceremony—the preparation, the act, and the healing—was therefore communal, familial, and personal at the same time. In olden times, the dates would have been set by a council of elders for the whole nation. The candidates, young men and women, would go through the three stages at about the same time. All the initiated during that period would comprise the class of that particular year, and they would be given a name that would forever remain unique to them. The age group would also be on a par with family and clan in terms of personal identity and expectations of loyalty. But loyalty to one’s age group was stronger because it cut across families, clans, and regions.
That was why Mbiyũ Koinange could use age group loyalty as a mobilizing tool for funding the Kenya Teachers’ College at Gĩthũngũri. But in colonial society the organization of power was based on different legal criteria, covering as it did a multiplicity of nations, each of which had ordered its precolonial life according to particular cultural traditions. So, even for Gĩkũyũ people, circumcision in my time no longer played the political, economic, and legal role in the community that it once did. It neither conferred special communally sanctioned rights nor demanded special communally set obligations and expectations. In my time, only remnants of the rite’s communal past remained. Many males, even those not religiously affiliated, drifted to hospitals for the surgery. I would not be one of them. I wanted to go through it. I hoped it would contribute to my self-identity and the sense of belonging that I had always sought.
Of the three stages, before, during, and after the act, I find the preparatory more enjoyable: It is carnival time with house-to-house performances. In olden days the celebration would have moved from village to village, region to region, limited to distances that could be traveled on foot. My sisters and brothers from my father’s and my mother’s houses have been here, helping to cook and do other chores, and most have stayed for the special night of Mararanja, the eve of the rite, when hardly anybody sleeps.
I have seen this before, when it involved others, because everybody, adult, child, man, and woman, can take part in the dancing and singing. But it is not as easy to lose oneself in the festival w
hen one is a candidate for the knife. Besides, my voice has now broken and lost its quality. I used to sing set pieces with set words, but the singing in our house is now a strict call-and-response affair with often unexpected challenges directed at the candidates. It is lyric improvisation within a set melody. The candidate has to be alert, creative, and prompt, but fortunately one can be aided by those who are more able, and my relatives are there to help me. Some of the challenges are erotic in nature; in fact all the dances and songs contain lewd verses and suggestive hip motions. It is a period of license to talk sex but not to engage in it. Boundaries are drawn strictly between mime and reality. Satiric verses alternate with vulgar abuses and equally vulgar responses ending in reconciliatory tender lyrical words. The whole night is a musical feast of melody after melody, dance after dance, with a constant to and fro of human traffic between our house and Ndũng’ũ’s place.
I enjoy all this but I am thinking about the knife cutting through the flesh. I am also thinking about my friend Kenneth. I don’t know the details, but a family conflict prevents unanimity about his candidacy. Ndũng’ũ and I will leave him behind. I feel sorry for him and all my mates, because after tomorrow I cannot play with them anymore for it would be like an adult playing with children. The gulf that opens between initiates and noninitiates is abrupt, deep, and wide and cannot be bridged by any means other than undergoing the rite.
At long last the morning of the event arrives. I have not slept at all. But still I am ordered to wake up very early for the menjo, the ceremony of shaving off head and pubic hair. First I have to take off my clothes, an enactment of shedding childhood. The shorn hair is buried in the ground, symbolizing the burial of that stage of my life. I remain naked as now we move on to the Manguo waters. It is a long way there, it seems to me, although in reality it is only one and a half miles. Men, women, and children are following, jostling, dancing, and singing, some waving green leaves in the air. By the time all the candidates meet at the waters, the procession of supporters has become a massive crowd, milling about.