My grandfather really loves his young wife Mũkami, who always wears Western-style dresses. She is completely devoted to his welfare. Though not haughty and certainly not given to fights with neighbors, she has an aloof bearing that keeps other women, even my mother, at a distance. Nobody would dare wander into her house without certain knowledge that they would be welcome. Sometimes I wonder if it was Mũkami who had driven Grandmother Gathoni away.
One evening Mũkami stops me outside Njango’s hut. I should visit Grandfather first thing in the morning. I assume that he has a letter for me to read or write. But why so early in the morning? I am there, Mũkami opens the door, gives me a seat, and then my grandfather comes to the living room all dressed up. We share tea and sweet potato together. I wait for my assignment. Then my grandfather stands up, says farewell for the day, and leaves for some event out there. Mũkami says thank you to me and I leave, my mind puzzled but my tummy satisfied. Later in the evening Mũkami tells me that I should do the same the following morning.
Visiting my grandfather before any other visitor knocks at the door becomes part of my daily routine. I see it as some kind of privilege and savor the honor. It also makes me feel even closer to him. It is only later that I learn that I have merely replaced Gĩcini as the first caller at dawn. My grandfather believes that boys bring him good luck. He wants a boy to be his first encounter before a woman, any woman, even a girl, crosses his path. I am the new bird of good omen. Apparently good things happen to him after I visit him at dawn.
My grandfather must have been touched by the intolerable congestion and tension inside Njango’s hut. Or maybe it is now clear that my father is not coming to plead for his wife and children. He sets aside a two-acre plot for my mother to put up a building, ironically next to Lord Kahahu’s land.
My brother Wallace Mwangi, in the early stages as an apprentice carpenter, organizes the construction of a mud-walled, grass-thatched rondavel, almost a replica of the house we had left behind at my father’s. Later he puts up his own, a four-cornered two-room house, resting on stilts. My sister, Njoki, whose marriage has gone awry, joins us. During the rainy season, my younger brother, my sister, and I decide to plant twigs of some bush all around the one-acre plot, in the hope that they will take root and form a hedge. The dry season arrives. My mother brings home a small twig of some tree and plants it just outside the courtyard. It is a pear tree, she says, and we laugh at her. Mother, you do things your own way; you don’t plant it during the rains; you choose to do so when the rains are gone. She does not argue. She just smiles. But she waters it and by the end of the season our plantings have died, and the pear tree is alive. The hedge has to be done all over again.
And so new life begins: From a polygamous community we become a single-parent family. I continue playing my role as scribe and bird of good omen for my grandfather. But I will now be going to Manguo and back, from my new home with a lone pear tree just outside the courtyard.
School was about two miles from my new home, but still an improvement on the distance I used to cover when going to Kamandũra. It was midyear in grade three when I left Kamandũra school for Manguo school. Thinking that I was merely acting on my brother’s advice, I was surprised to discover that I was part of an exodus, responding to the same pressures. It was not clear why I was really moving but I learned from other children that it had to do with two mysterious terms, “Kĩrore” and “Karĩng’a.” Nobody explained what they meant or their origins. But they had a history.
After Kenya went from being British company property to being a colonial state in 1895, the state left education largely in the hands of Protestant and Roman Catholic missions, among them the Church Missionary Society, founded way back in 1799. Others such as the Gospel Missionary Society, founded in 1898, came after. The most prominent in my area was the Church of Scotland Mission, founded in 1891, whose hub was in Thogoto, about twelve miles from Limuru, where, under Dr. J. W. Arthur, a school was established that was popularly known as Mambere, meaning “modern” or “progressive.” The mission later opened outreach schools, like Kamandũra, farther out. While these centers were influenced by modernity, kĩĩrĩu, and provided much-needed medical care and even taught useful skills in woodworking and agriculture alongside limited literary education, they were there to proselytize. Successful conversion was measured by how quickly, deeply, and thoroughly one divested oneself of one’s culture and adopted new practices and values. For instance, among the Gĩkũyũ people, circumcision was considered a rite of passage marking the transition from youth, a stage of no legal accountability, to adulthood, with full responsibility. In 1929 a number of missionary societies in the Central Province—the Church of Scotland Mission led by Dr. Arthur; and the Gospel Missionary Society and the African Inland Mission, which had already condemned female circumcision as barbaric and unchristian—went further in their campaign against the practice and announced that all their African teachers and agents would have to sign a declaration solemnly swearing never to circumcise female children; never to become a member of the Kikuyu Central Association, the leading African political organization at the time; never to become a follower of Jomo Kenyatta, the KCA’s general secretary, then in England as the organization’s delegate; and never to join any party unless it was organized by the government or missionaries.* The declaration was asking the schools’ Christian adherents to take a position against the practice and also the politics of resistance, which, despite the banning of Harry Thuku’s East Africa Association in 1922, his exile and imprisonment, and the massacre of twenty-three Kenyans outside Nairobi’s Central Police Station, had continued and even intensified under the KCA. There was a conflict of interests. From early on the missionaries had been the colonially accepted spokesmen for African interests, Dr. Arthur even having a seat in the colonial legislature as the official spokesman of African interests, whereas Europeans and Asians had their own direct representatives. So the struggle over female circumcision became a proxy for economics, politics, and culture and who and which organization had the right to speak for Kenyan Africans.
Kidole, the Swahili word for “thumbprint,” became kĩrore in Gĩkũyũ and evolved into a pejorative term for those who signed or agreed to the declaration. Those who did not sign it, aregi gũtheca kĩrore, left the missionary institutions and joined the nascent African independent schools movement, followed, in most cases, by their students. One of the earliest known independent schools in Kenya was started in Nyanza by John Owalo, but in Central Province an independent elementary school was founded at Gĩthũngũri in 1925 by Musa Ndirangũ, a successful trader, and Wilson Gathuru, its first teacher, who also gave the land on which it was built. Initially a laborer on a white farm, Musa Ndirangũ went to school in 1911–1913 at a Gospel Missionary Society school in Kambũi, the home area of Harry Thuku. His attending school after his laboring days was in pursuit of personal independence, which he found in trade as his own boss. This mind-set was in tune with the politics of Harry Thuku, in part influenced by his ties to Marcus Garvey, whose slogan, Africa for the Africans, embodied the vision of self-reliance. Marcus Garvey had sought independence in business. Ndirangũ applied self-reliance by creating an elementary school run by Africans themselves. After the 1929 declaration, many other schools were founded by local committees of elders and teachers. Two organizations arose to oversee the development of the new schools. The Kikuyu Karĩng’a Education Association (KKEA) was launched in 1933 at Lironi, not far from Kamandũra, and the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association (KISA) in 1934 at Gĩtuamba, Mũrang’a.
The two organizations had religious affiliations: the African Independent Pentecostal Church for KISA and the African Orthodox Church for KKEA, with roots that went back to the American African Orthodox Church via South Africa through Bishop William Daniel Alexander, who visited Kenya for sixteen months between 1935 and 1937. The American African Orthodox Church had been formed by another Alexander, Bishop George Alexander McGuire, who earlier had been chief
chaplain of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. “Karĩng’a” was the self-chosen term for orthodoxy in both tradition and religion. Christianity would be shorn of Western propensities, and tradition, of negative tendencies, the African being the judge of the shape and direction of change. Female circumcision was allowed but not required.
The terms “Kĩrore” and “Karĩng’a” became a way of characterizing the schools. Kĩrore, as applied to missionary schools, connoted schools that were deliberately depriving Africans of knowledge, in favor of training them to support the colonial state, which initially limited African education to carpentry, agriculture, and basic literacy only. Command of English was seen as unnecessary. The white settler community wanted “skilled” African labor, not learned African minds. Karĩng’a and KISA schools sought to break all limits to knowledge. The English language, seen as the key to modernity, also sparked contention. In government and missionary schools, the teaching of English started in grade four or later; in Karĩng’a and KISA schools, in grade three or even earlier, depending on the teachers.
So, in keeping with the traditions established by the educational wars of the time, Kamandũra was seen as denying us the kind of education that would propel us quickly into modern times. In contrast, Manguo was seen as having a more challenging curriculum, demanding rapid acquisition of English as we entered modern times.
Thus in moving from Kamandũra, a Kĩrore school, to Manguo, a Karĩng’a school, I was crossing a great historic divide that had begun way before I was born, and which, years later, I would still be trying to understand through my first novel, The River Between. But at the time I was not trying to understand history or act it out; I just wanted to realize my dreams of education in accordance with the pact that I had made with my mother.
* Theodore Natsoulas, “The Rise and Fall of the Kikuyu Karing’a Education Association of Kenya, 1929–1952,” Journal of African and Asian Studies 23, nos. 3–4 (1988): 220–21, or go to http://jas.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/3-4/219.
English may have been cited as the prime reason for the exodus from Kamandũra to Manguo school, but I doubt if there was much difference in the teaching of the language. Nearly all the instructors were products of the mission and government schools and they could only draw on what they knew. In fact my own two teachers of English and history at Manguo, Fred Mbũgua and Stephen Thiro, were graduates of a Church of Scotland Mission school in Thogoto in Kikuyu, Dr. Arthur’s missionary kingdom.
The difference lay in intangibles. When I think back on Kamandũra, what pops up are images of church, silent prayer, and individual achievement; in Manguo, images of performance, public spectacle, and a sense of community. Sunday services at Kamandũra had a set pattern: a text from the New Testament that carried the theme of the sermon of the day; prayers; and hymns that were Gĩkũyũ translations and renderings of the lyrics and melodies from the Church of Scotland Mission hymnbook. Without instrumental accompaniment, the melodies were slow, mournful, almost tired. The text, the hymns, and the sermon summoned calm introspection in older listeners, but impatience in the young. Manguo on Sunday was different.
Manguo, founded in 1928 on land given by the Kĩeya family, with Morris Kĩhang’ũ as the first head but later replaced by Fred Mbũgua and then Stephen Thiro, did not have a formal church building. On Sunday, the school hall became hallowed ground, the regular tables turned into a colorfully decorated altar and the regular benches into pews. The preacher on the first day that I attended was Morris Kĩhang’ũ, an ordinary teacher on weekdays, in the same school, not the most popular, prone as he was to using the stick to impose discipline and attentiveness in the class.
On the Sunday of my first attendance, I had never seen anything like this service. The hymns, often accompanied by drums and cymbals, had more zest and rhythm. Some were recent compositions, evoking contemporary events and experiences through biblical imagery. In fact many of the lyrics were based on biblical events. In the times of hardship, O Lord, please don’t turn your face away. When Daniel was put in the den of lions, Lord, you sent your angel … etcetera. When Cain pierced his brother Abel with a knife … etcetera. Samson and Delilah. David and Goliath. What the Lord did then he could do now: give strength to the lowly and scatter their enemies.
The lines and the images in the various lyrics were familiar: I had read them in my copy of selections from the Old Testament, but from the lips of this mass of worshippers they carried a suggestion of sublime power. The soloists changed; any member of the congregation could join in, sometimes two taking over the next verse or repeating an earlier one. Some of the call-and-response was triadic: voices in unison, splitting into antiphony before coming together once more in triumphant reconciliation.
And then came the sermon; it was also based on a text from the Old Testament. The preacher started slowly, calmly, gradually raising his voice. Then would come dramatic changes in voice and gesture, as he sang, cajoled, pled, condemned, promised. He would tear off his shirt, baring his chest and beating it, acting out his humiliation, as he implored his God, the God of Isaac and Abraham, to do for the present people what he had done ages ago for the children of Israel, freeing them from oppression, leading them from slavery, across hot deserts, through roaring seas, blinding their pursuers. It was as if he had been an eyewitness to the exodus. Then he would assume the voice of God telling his followers: Tear up your hearts and not your clothes, and turn to me, for I am Jehovah your God! By this time the audience would be groaning and grunting assent, egging on their preacher. In the midst of the sermon, at an appropriate pause, or in response to an implied question, some member of the congregation would respond with a verse from a song, prompting the preacher and the congregation to join in, and then the preacher would resume his performance as if the response had been an integral part of the sermon. Seamlessly, Kĩhang’ũ is no longer the teacher I knew, his body and voice having changed. He is simultaneously conductor and member of a vast orchestra. Yet when on Monday I see teacher Kĩhang’ũ he looks so ordinary, frail even. Where is the voice and the presence that I had seen make the ground move?
Though not always rising to the same intensity, performance permeated everything in Manguo, bespeaking a common experience and hope for collective deliverance. Success and failure were not just personal: They included others. We were competing not just among ourselves but also against some other forces, even time. It was always one for all and all for one.
Nothing showed this better than sports. Manguo did not have good grounds or great sports facilities, but it made do with what it had. One of my greatest thrills came from my first attendance at a sports festival in a part of the Manguo marshes that was often dry and firm in the hot season.
The festival started in the streets with a marching band, which was new to me. The drum major, who wore a Scottish kilt, guided the band with a baton decorated with green yarn that ended in loose bobs and fluffs at both ends. Sometimes he would throw the baton so high in the air that I gasped with fear that he would not be able to catch it, but he always did deftly without missing a step. The drums, the bugles, and the trumpets seemed to be in conversation with each other in beautiful wordless sounds.
As it wound its way through the market and shopping centers, we children, even some adults, ran or tried to march on either side of the band, to the entrance of the festival site where only those with a ticket could enter. The grounds were enclosed by a thick wall of grass and dry cornstalks so as to prevent mischievous efforts to create openings and peer through, efforts constantly thwarted by official watchful eyes, mostly of boys in scout uniforms. But there was little the organizers could do about those who sat atop the ridge or climbed up trees a distance away from the walls.
Within the grounds were sideshows, including a display of a little person whose words and antics were the subject of intense conversation afterward, but the major attractions included synchronized push-ups, leapfroging or jumping jacks, and tableaux, some o
f which, though made to look easy, seemed dangerous to me. Three-legged, egg-in-the-spoon, or human wheelbarrow races provoked raucous crowd involvement, but nothing could top the excitement generated by the athletic races, particularly the ones longer than a mile. Winners were heroes and heroines in their villages. As they ran the lap of honor, some in the crowd would join them. At the end of the day, an even bigger crowd followed the heroes and heroines all the way to their homes in triumph. Sometimes the crowd would carry them shoulder-high, the heroes or their helpers holding aloft the trophies won, be they basins, hoes, machetes, or axes, for prizes were always tools, not money.
The festival was an annual event among the Karĩng’a and KISA schools, which took turns hosting it, thus ensuring that it rotated from site to site, region to region. These events forged a togetherness between KISA and Karĩng’a while also tightening the bond between the schools and the community. The fact that the spectacles were organized without the colonial government or missionary help deepened the community’s collective pride.