There were some storybooks that transcended their time and authorship. Grimm, Aesop, and Andersen: I read their stories over and over again without their ever losing their appeal. They came closest to the oral tales around the evening fireside with which I had grown up. They had a common magic quality; they renewed themselves in the rereading and retelling.
My heightened discriminating sense led me to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It opened my eyes to a dramatically different way of telling a story. With its many voices, it felt much the way narratives of real life unfolded in my village, an episode by one narrator followed by others that added to it and enriched the same theme. The story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw as told by Nellie Dean and Lockwood took some time to unravel, but it was gripping and immeasurably sad. The winds of the Yorkshire moors reminded me of the frosty winds in Limuru in July. I never knew an author who could make the weather feel so real.
From Brontë, I drifted to Tolstoy. As in the case of Brontë, I knew very little about Tolstoy. But I had not gone far in his Childhood, Youth, and Boyhood, the trio in one volume, when I felt a desire I had never experienced, at least not with this intensity: I wanted to write about my childhood. Before, such feelings had been vague and fleeting, not calling for immediate action. This new desire was insistent. It would not even let me finish Tolstoy’s book. I forgot all about my former arguments with Kenneth about the license to write.
It was 1957, my third year at Alliance. The story that came out of me was based on a belief we held as children that we could summon a loved one from wherever they were, by whispering their name into an empty clay pot. In the story, the fictional but autobiographical narrator’s first whisper works: his auntie who lives thirty miles away turns up on the third day after the summons. Emboldened, the narrator is eager to display his new powers to an audience. The opportunity comes when he hears his mother complain that his older brother who works in Nairobi does not come home. He assures her that if she so desires, he can make him come home, no later than the third day. Of course his solemn declaration is greeted with skeptical laughter by the rest of the family, but he does not mind. His revenge would come: When everyone was absent, I went to the kitchen. There was the cooking pot, mundane, disinterested, dead—but wait—possessing, as I knew, magical powers. Lifting it reverently from its hook, I slowly and deliberately called my brother by name. But the magic does not work. That was the ironic twist. Following Tolstoy, I titled the story “My Childhood.” It was a couple of handwritten pages, whereas Tolstoy’s was a book, but I submitted it to the editors of Alliance High Magazine.
I did not get a response, not surprising as there was normally no editorial exchange between the writer and the editor, and I soon lost hope and forgot all about it. But when the magazine came out later, in September 1957, a friend spotted my piece. I could hardly wait to see and read it. It was my first-ever published work. In appearance, the nice print was a far cry from my handwritten version. It was of course smaller than the handwritten, but that did not matter.
Once I started reading it, however, I was appalled by the editorial license taken, and my excitement fell. The title had changed from “My Childhood” to become “I Try Witchcraft.” That, I did not mind: the new title was pithy, though misleading because what I described was not witchcraft. But the second paragraph, an editorial insertion, had the fictional narrator assert that Christianity was without doubt the greatest civilizing influence and as it crept in amongst the people, many began to see the futility of putting their faith in superstition and witchcraft. A simple story, in which I had poked fun at our childhood beliefs and superstitions, had been turned into a condemnation of the pre-Christian life and beliefs of a whole community and, simultaneously, an ingratiating acknowledgment of the beneficial effects of enlightenment. I was turned into a prosecution witness for the imperial literary tradition from which I had been trying to escape. Although well intentioned, this editorial intrusion smothered the creative fire within me; no amount of reading of Tolstoy’s Childhood and Youth would rekindle it. I did not feel pride in my creation.
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During the holidays, I showed the piece to Kenneth. His sarcastic reaction was perhaps predictable: Did you first get a license to write?* He never would forget about our arguments. I could have responded that mine was not a book or that I was inoculated from censure by the editorial input of my teacher. But really, I no longer held the position that one needed a prior license to write. Even in our arguments during the Asante rally in Nyeri, I had begun to shift my position, and Tolstoy had inspired me out of it altogether. I conceded defeat. Kenneth did not offer his opinion on the quality of the piece. He was happy that it had won him an argument started in our elementary school, three years before. Now the victor of that argument, he would bring it up even in the presence of a third person, citing my story and indirectly inciting curiosity about it.
The piece garnered me two new friends who I would later label my ological buddies, and the days of our intense association, my ological period. The first was Kĩmani Mũnyaka, a junior high school graduate and now a primary school teacher. His habit of always carrying a magazine or a book with him had earned him the reputation of being a reader of books. The moment Kenneth introduced us and brought up the subject of my publication, Kĩmani wanted to read it.
I awaited his comments eagerly, hoping that he would not dwell too much on the bit about the civilizing effects of Christianity. I needed to hear an opinion on my actual creation. His first words, when next we met, sounded at odds with the subject: Do you know how to spell the word psychology? I was puzzled: What did a spelling test have to do with my story? The word was not even in my piece. To put him in good humor, I tried to say the letters loudly. I kept on getting the spelling wrong, and finally I gave up. His lips, pursed in a smile, told me that he had been anticipating my failure. You see, the word begins with the letter p, he explained with the patience of a superior, but don’t blame yourself too much, you did what most people do. They forget that the p is silent, so all they hear is the sound of the letter s. Now, about your story. The piece was quite interesting. He paused. It manifests one of the pillars of the psychology of desire. I did not know what he was talking about. What had psychology, let alone one of desire, to do with my story? I asked him.
Everything, he argued back. Psychology was in every human action and behavior. It dealt with the hidden motives behind them. You might think that your assembly of words was just a story about whispers in a clay pot, but actually it was whispers into self, like the silent talks we all have inside ourselves. First you wrote it at Alliance, a high school, away from home. Correct? Yes. You were lonely, you were longing for home, mother’s food, cooked in a clay pot. Your teachers were white, correct? Yes, but not all of them. True, but the principal was, correct? Yes. Remember that you were also surrounded by Christianity, a foreign religion. So you were clearly longing for something to make you feel at home. But the story was more than all these, he explained. It was really a story of the human desire to return to the womb, this clearly suggested by the persona in the story putting his head inside the pot. You know the Gĩkũyũ word for pot, nyũngũ, is exactly the same for the womb, correct?
This bit made me look at him strangely. First, I had indeed been looking for something to make me overcome the sense of loss and connect with the new village. Second, I had sometimes wondered what it had felt like to be in my mother’s womb. I would try to recall my own life there, but I had not the slightest memory beyond what my mother told me about my having kicked her, quite often. Apparently, of all her children, I had been the most troublesome in the womb. Kĩmani seemed to be on to something. I listened, my curiosity aroused.
The clay pot, its mouth, narrow neck, and round chamber, obviously suggested the womb, he continued, unaware of my reaction. A person was most secure in the womb. Protected, nurtured, he has the most power. Would one long for security if one were already secure? he asked, piercing me with his ey
es. The story is really about your loneliness and insecurity at Alliance. You probably have difficulty making friends. If you had friends to play with, you wouldn’t have had the time or the desire to retreat into a make-believe world, correct? And you certainly worried too much about whether you, a boy from the village, could survive at Alliance. Before I could explain, he had assured me that he would help me. He would help me break worry before worry broke me.
He brought two books to our next meeting: Dale Carnegie’s How to Make Friends and Influence People and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. But he wouldn’t let me borrow them to read on my own. He liked talking about them, retelling stories of success cited in them. The stories were always about people who started in lowly positions but rose to success, nearly always measured by wealth. One had started with a dollar but somehow, through single-mindedly pursuing an idea, he had risen to the top. There were hints on how to listen to people, how to let them talk about themselves while you listened. I found him and his stories extremely fascinating. I was a captive audience. He liked my company more than Kenneth’s because Kenneth was more liable to argue back, even question his beloved Carnegie.
Soon I understood the source of Kenneth’s skepticism. In time I noted that Kĩmani only talked about those two books. The reputation he had for reading was based on the fact that he always carried one or the other. He was not expansive about other topics, except as they manifested some aspects of psychology. Talk about education, he brought up psychology of knowledge. Talk about love or politics, he brought up psychology of power, love itself being a play of attraction and repulsion in the game of power. Had I not seen how even a big man becomes weak before a woman once his heart has been overpowered? He had some old copies of a biannual psychology magazine. It was like his personal talisman or proof that what he said was rooted in knowledge. We both lived in different parts of Kamĩrĩthũ, but our paths crossed time and again. Whenever we met, he had a different psychological insight and then would quickly move on to stories culled from Carnegie.
Kĩmani had a habit of reading a text, restating it in his own words, and then interpreting it by quoting instances from the same passage. His advice was always through quotes or paraphrases from this guru of wisdom, achievement, and success. And for a psychologist who advised on the importance of listening, he seemed to prefer talking to hearing. I started avoiding him. I really did not want to hear my story used as a bridge to Carnegie.
* The debate on the license to write is narrated in Dreams in a Time of War.
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In contrast, I often actively sought the company of Gabriel Gaitho Kuruma, who lived in the next village, Kĩhingo. Gaitho and I had worked together in the Christmas pageant that I had helped to organize the previous year. He taught the group the hymn “We Three Kings.” He reacted to my story differently than Kĩmani: he was sure that I was already a writer. He had completed two years of high school and was a graduate of Kagumo Teacher Training College. I don’t know how we first met, but we had always been in conversation throughout my high school years.
Gaitho was a reader of books, with an interest in Pan-Africa and the world, and he and I had weeks of conversation, touching on different subjects. But he had a way of smuggling the name of Kwame Nkrumah into any theme or topic of our talks. He had followed Nkrumah’s career from Lincoln University back to the Fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945, culminating in his role as a former prisoner who won Ghana’s independence. Gaitho admired the philosophy of Marcus Garvey because Nkrumah had said that it had inspired him. He liked George Padmore and W. E. B. DuBois because they had allied with Nkrumah and Kenyatta in the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester. It was from Gaitho that I first heard the quote the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line, which he attributed to DuBois. And when the subject of Booker T. Washington and his book Up from Slavery arose, he pointed out that DuBois, Nkrumah’s friend, had opposed Washington and founded the Niagara Movement, which later became the NAACP. He did not think much of Washington, although he could not quite put his finger on what irritated him. In contrast, he would tell over and over again the story of Rosa Parks, who had refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and so sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, hinting at some kind of connection between that and the Mau Mau–inspired bus boycott in Kenya.
In Kenya, Gaitho liked Tom Mboya because his Nairobi People’s Convention Party echoed Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party. He talked about Mboya’s rise from a trade unionist, to studying at Oxford, to being the brilliant architect of the tactics used by the AEMO. He knew in great detail every exchange between Mboya and Michael Blundell in Legco debates. But Mboya’s greatest brilliance was his alliance with Kwame Nkrumah. Mboya had learned from the master. All brilliant African roads led to Ghana. It was from Ghana at the All-African Peoples’ Conference on December 22, 1958, that the call for the release of Jomo Kenyatta became continental and global. Our own Mboya was chairman of the conference, a great honor for the Kenyan struggle. It was as chairman that Mboya called for the end of imperialism in Africa. Gaitho could quote, almost word for word, Mboya’s call: Whereas 72 years ago the scramble for Africa started, from Accra we announce that these same powers must be told in a clear, firm, and definite voice: Scram from Africa. From scramble to scram: the speech made the twenty-eight-year-old Tom Mboya a household name in Africa. In the Kenyan press, this was reduced to a one-liner, Mboya calls for whites to scram from Africa, which Gaitho would add with satisfaction.
Despite his excitement over the independence of Ghana in 1956, Gaitho also argued that Ghana was not the first independent country in Africa, citing the cases of Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco, even hinting of an earlier independence of African peoples in a place called Haiti, though he did not elaborate further, and I did not know enough to counter his assertions and evaluations. Gaitho may have been the secondary school equivalent of Ngandi of my elementary school days, but unlike Ngandi, he did not mix fact with fiction. While Ngandi told stories largely and would rely on story and rumor as his authority in support of the truth of the story he was telling, Gaitho talked mainly history and ideas and was more likely to cite the authority of a book or a magazine.
He admired philosopher-kings in politics. I could not tell who he liked more, Nkrumah the politician or Nkrumah the intellectual. Though impressed by Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism and commitment to a continental African Union government, evidenced by his vow to surrender Ghana’s sovereignty to such a union, Gaitho talked with equal if not more enthusiasm about his idol’s studies in philosophy and theology, among other pursuits. He had read Nkrumah’s autobiography, Ghana, and knew that Nkrumah had given up the lure of worldly possessions that his education could have secured him, for a life of service. It may have been this aspect of Nkrumah’s learning and dedication to service that led him to another intellectual who had studied philosophy and theology, among other things, and given up his academic posts in Germany for a life among the sick and the poor in Africa: Albert Schweitzer.
Gaitho talked about Schweitzer with genuine awe: a musician, a philosopher, a theologian, an expert on organs, and a medical doctor. Can you imagine him giving up all that to build a hospital in Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa?* But it was not his philanthropy that most intrigued Gaitho: it was Schweitzer’s thoughts on Jesus, the historical and the eschatological. I had never heard of the word eschatological. He lent me Schweitzer’s book, Out of My Life and Thought. This was my second encounter with an autobiography.
The quest of the historical as opposed to the eschatological Jesus dominated our discussions. Schweitzer’s review of the history of research on the life of Jesus, what he called The Quest of the Historical Jesus, intrigued me. I would have liked to have read a complete biography of Jesus, but not coming across one, I was left with the bits and pieces found in the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The engagement with Schweitzer coincided with my growing doubts about evangelical Chri
stianity and its stress on a personal experience of sin and a personal link to Jesus. What Jesus? The Son of Man or the Son of God? Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount or Jesus of the end of the world and final judgment? From my experience, evangelical Christianity placed too much stress on the end of the world, the second coming, and judgment of sinners. Jesus the child prodigy, who lived on earth, escaped with his mother into Egypt, learned carpentry, walked with fishermen, cautioned people not to judge else they would be judged, challenged people to cast the first stone, and talked about service to the least among us, was much more real and appealing than the apocalyptic Jesus. I did not want to see the end of the world. Or entertain the idea of people burning in hellfire from the Day of Judgment to eternity.
And then Gaitho came up with a solution. The historical and the eschatological were one. The historical was the social experience of today; the eschatological, a vision of tomorrow. The historical Jesus foresaw the fall of Rome, the old world, and the coming into being of a new world. One order would give way to another. Imperial Rome and the social groups that allied with its domination would be judged. The historical Jesus was also universal because his message of the end of the old order spoke to all situations of the oppressor and oppressed, past, present, and future. We applied this to the colonial situation, where London was Rome and Governor Evelyn Baring, the modern Pontius Pilate. The home guards who worked with the colonial regime were the modern-day Pharisees. This was an eye-opener. The eschatological Jesus spoke to me: the colonial world was bound to fall. We shall be free.