The moment of revelation of the prophecy sets Waiyaki on a path of growth but also reveals more tension, the specter of Kabonyi, the opportunist who will later come to haunt Waiyaki and highlight intergenerational political tensions that are as much a problem as the arrival of colonizing forces. Hidden here in this moment is the fatal flaw passed from father to son, the belief that the upheaval created by the white man can be stilled by incorporating into daily life the white man’s philosophy and using it against him. Waiyaki is told to “Learn all the wisdom and all the secrets of the white man. But do not follow his vices,” and later tries to establish education as the basis for the community’s self-reconciliation and simultaneous salvation.
More than anything else, it is the white man’s religion, Christianity, that exacerbates existing tensions within the community. There are those who reject it, like Chege; those who see it as a tool to achieve status, like Kabonyi; and those who become fervent believers, like the fanatical Joshua, a preacher from Makuyu so enraptured by it that he would disown his children for existing outside his narrow interpretation of its tenets.
We are not given a concrete reason for Joshua’s conversion, told only that he is consumed by his devotion and disconnected from the geography of the tribes. Life for Joshua is complete—except that it is not. The trouble with Joshua comes through in a description of his residence that demonstrates Ngugi’s narrative brilliance:
Joshua’s house was different. His was a tin-roofed rectangular building standing quite distinctly by itself on the ridge. The tin roof was already decaying and let in rain freely, so on top of the roof could be seen little scraps of sacking that covered the very bad parts.
The passage recalls the biblical parable of the man who built his house on sand. It does not take long for Joshua’s reality to cave in on itself: His second daughter, Muthoni, ignores his prohibition against the “sinful” practice of female circumcision. Her embrace of the tribal initiation ceremony that will make her a woman and the resulting rupture in her home and community make gender a subject of major conflict in the novel.
While not set at a particular time, The River Between maps loosely to the turmoil resulting from a 1929 decree by the Church of Scotland Mission prohibiting circumcised individuals from attending mission schools. The Church of Scotland Mission is represented in the novel by Reverend Livingstone, the sole white character given voice. Attending some of the dances on the eve of circumcision, he
was horrified beyond measure. The songs he heard and the actions he saw convinced him beyond any doubt that these people were immoral through and through. He was thoroughly nauseated and he never went to another such dance. Circumcision had to be rooted out if there was to be any hope of salvation for these people.
A wide swath of the community that Livingstone condemns stands in opposition to his thinking and finds a voice in the prophet Chege, who reflects: “Circumcision was the central rite in the Gikuyu way of life. Who had ever heard of a girl that was not circumcised? Who would ever pay cows and goats for such a girl? Certainly it would never be his son. Waiyaki would never betray the tribe.” Both female and male circumcision, as coming-of-age rites for the youth of Kameno and Mayku, play a central role in the novel, but it is female circumcision that is of greater consequence, because of its importance to the institution of marriage—a means of wealth transfer in almost every social group. The Church of Scotland Mission’s prohibition of circumcision amounted to a prohibition of tribal life and of the future itself.
Jomo Kenyatta, the first leader of Kenya, tried to explain the controversy over female circumcision in his anthropological study of Gikuyu culture, Facing Mount Kenya:
The real argument lies not in the defence of the surgical operation or its details, but in the understanding of a very important fact in the tribal psychology of the Gikuyu—namely, that this operation is still regarded as the very essence of an institution which has enormous educational, social, moral and religious implications, quite apart from the operation itself. For the present it is impossible for a member of the tribe to imagine an initiation without clitoridectomy. Therefore the abolition of the surgical element of this custom means to the Gikuyu the abolition of the whole institution.7
Today the practice is widely referred to as female genital mutilation, a term coined by its mostly Western and white opponents who have succeeded in framing the debate. What appears in the novel to be a full-throated defense of it seemingly puts Ngugi and his characters on the wrong side of history in a debate about female equality and autonomy, even though Ngugi is generally seen as progressive in his views of women as agents of change.8 But the discomfort we feel at the way the novel addresses the subject is part of a larger point Ngugi is making: that female circumcision, whether a primitive practice or an institutionalized custom, should be the subject of intratribal discussion, not prohibitive decree; that indeed conflict about tradition and culture can exist within a society.
Muthoni thinks there is a middle ground—that she can be true to her father’s interpretation of Christian faith while at the same time becoming through circumcision “a real girl, a real woman, knowing all the ways of the hills and ridges.” She offers her body as a locus of compromise for two competing worldviews, attempting to reconcile them, and to bring about a utopia, through simple force of will, unaware that most utopias can accommodate only one grand vision. The end result for her is dramatically unfavorable. For the scholar Apollo Amoko, Muthoni’s character makes sense only when she is seen “to repudiate shallow ill-conceived multiculturalism”9—in other words, when she is seen to resolve conflict without respect for the complexity of human relationships. This applies also to Waiyaki. In the wake of the controversy over Muthoni’s circumcision, Waiyaki single-mindedly pursues education as a means of uniting the communities of Kameno and Makuyu. It is an approach encouraged by his father’s insistence that he learn the white man’s ways, solidified by his time spent in missionary educational institutions, and finally unleashed by his self-aggrandizing (self-deluding?) belief that he is the savior his people have been waiting for.
Waiyaki becomes a powerful symbol for the community and a fixture in local politics. He finds himself in constant conflict with Kabonyi, who represents the older generation—in this case one without strong convictions or belief in the primacy of Gikuyu culture, and with greater interest in proving itself right, however opportunistically, than in improving the lot of its people. Waiyaki is elevated to a leadership position in the Kiama governing body, and he understands the Kiama’s importance as well as the source of his power within it—his Western education. What he fails to see are the limits of a Western education in effecting change. He is so confident that education will solve everything that he resigns from the Kiama to pursue the expansion of schools. Waiyaki’s ultimate fate owes itself to this dogged push for resolution to a conflict that has much deeper roots than he chooses to grasp.10
It is through Waiyaki that we see the question that animates Ngugi’s body of work: How can you possibly cure the disease with the disease itself? The ills of colonialism cannot be treated with the tools of colonialism. Ngugi pushes this idea further, suggesting that to assume that colonial tools can heal cultural rifts is to exhibit a lack of respect for indigenous cultures. When Waiyaki aggressively promotes education in a meeting with the Kiama, the community responds, “Will education give us back our land? Let him answer that.”
• • •
This slim book—which, as a first novel, begs to be underestimated compared to some of Ngugi’s later, longer works, such as Petals of Blood or Wizard of the Crow—is too important to take lightly. Although occasionally heavy-handed in its symbolism and perhaps too concerned with the formality of language, it has an undeniable power to deliver us from unhelpful binaries of pre- and postcolonialism and from simplistic solutions for emerging from the shadow of imperial rule. It takes its reader on a journey out of the colonial matrix and into
the world of the real, showing us life reclaimed in all its complexity from the simplifying template of colonialism.
You can put this book down and return to the life you had before, or you can read it and see just how deep the rabbit hole is. Ngugi offers us a truth. Whether to seek it out and free your mind—that choice is yours.
UZODINMA IWEALA
Notes
1. Ngugi famously decided to stop writing fiction in English and instead to write in his native Gikuyu so that he could reach a more class-diverse audience. He continued to write criticism in English.
2. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: J. Currey, 1986), 3.
3. Ibid.
4. D. Venkat Rao, “A Conversation with Ngugi wa Thiong’o,” Research in African Literatures 30, no. 1 (1999): 164.
5. Carol Sicherman, “Ngugi’s Colonial Education: ‘The Subversion . . . of the African Mind,’” African Studies Review 38, no. 3 (1995): 22.
6. Ibid., 30.
7. Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 128.
8. For an excellent consideration of Ngugi’s treatment of gender and sexuality in his novel Petals of Blood, see Bonnie Roos’s “Re-Historicizing the Conflicted Figure of Woman in Ngugi’s Petals of Blood,” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 2 (2002): 154–70.
9. Apollo O. Amoko, “The Resemblance of Colonial Mimicry: A Revisionary Reading of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between,” Research in African Literatures 36, no. 1 (2005): 43.
10. Ibid., 41.
CHAPTER ONE
The two ridges lay side by side. One was Kameno, the other was Makuyu. Between them was a valley. It was called the valley of life. Behind Kameno and Makuyu were many more valleys and ridges, lying without any discernible plan. They were like many sleeping lions which never woke. They just slept, the big deep sleep of their Creator.
A river flowed through the valley of life. If there had been no bush and no forest trees covering the slopes, you could have seen the river when you stood on top of either Kameno or Makuyu. Now you had to come down. Even then you could not see the whole extent of the river as it gracefully, and without any apparent haste, wound its way down the valley, like a snake. The river was called Honia, which meant cure, or bring-back-to-life. Honia river never dried: it seemed to possess a strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes. And it went on in the same way, never hurrying, never hesitating. People saw this and were happy.
Honia was the soul of Kameno and Makuyu. It joined them. And men, cattle, wild beasts and trees, were all united by this life-stream.
When you stood in the valley, the two ridges ceased to be sleeping lions united by their common source of life. They became antagonists. You could tell this, not by anything tangible but by the way they faced each other, like two rivals ready to come to blows in a life and death struggle for the leadership of this isolated region.
• • •
It began long ago. A man rose in Makuyu. He claimed that Gikuyu and Mumbi sojourned there with Murungu on their way to Mukuruwe wa Gathanga. As a result of that stay, he said, leadership had been left to Makuyu. Not all the people believed him. For had it not always been whispered and rumored that Gikuyu and Mumbi had stopped at Kameno? And had not a small hill grown out of the soil on which they stood south of Kameno? And Murungu had told them:
“This land I give to you, O man and woman. It is yours to rule and till, you and your posterity.”
The land was fertile. It was the whole of Gikuyu country from one horizon embracing the heavens to the other hidden in the clouds. So the story ran in Kameno. Spiritual superiority and leadership had then been left there.
Kameno had a good record to bear out this story. A sacred grove had sprung out of the place where Gikuyu and Mumbi stood; people still paid homage to it. It could also be seen, by any who cared to count, that Kameno threw up more heroes and leaders than any other ridge. Mugo wa Kibiro, that great Gikuyu seer of old, had been born there. And he had grown up, seeing visions of the future and speaking them to the many people who came to see and hear him. But a few, more cynical than their neighbors, would not go to him. They called him an impostor. Then one night, when people were asleep, he vanished from the hills. “He was soon heard of in the land beyond; in Nyeri, Kiambu, Muranga; in fact all over the Gikuyu country. And he still spoke aloud his message and cried:
“There shall come a people with clothes like butterflies.”
These were the white men.
Or there was that great witch, Kamiri, whose witchery bewildered even the white men at Muranga. His witchery and magic, before he was overcome by the white men with smiles and gifts, had won him resounding fame. He too, it was said, had been born at Kameno. Like Mugo before him, he had disappeared from the hills to the country beyond. He could not be contained by the narrow life of the ridges.
Another was Wachiori, a great warrior, who had led the whole tribe against Ukabi, Masai. As a young man he had killed a lion, by himself. When he died, at the hands of a straying white man, he left a great name, the idol of many a young warrior.
• • •
The ridges were isolated. The people there led a life of their own, undisturbed by what happened outside or beyond. Men and women had nothing to fear. The Ukabi would never come here. They would be lost in the hills and the ridges and the valleys. Even other Gikuyu from Nyeri or Kiambu could not very well find their way into the hills. And so the country of many ridges was left alone, unaffected by turbulent forces outside. These ancient hills and ridges were the heart and soul of the land. They kept the tribes’ magic and rituals, pure and intact. Their people rejoiced together, giving one another the blood and warmth of their laughter. Sometimes they fought. But that was among themselves and no outsider need ever know. To the stranger, they kept dumb, breathing none of the secrets of which they were the guardians. Kagutui ka Mucii gatihakagwo Ageni; the oilskin of the house is not for rubbing into the skin of strangers.
Leaders of the land rose from there. For though the ridges were isolated, a few people went out. These, who had the courage to look beyond their present content to a life and land beyond, were the select few sent by Murungu to save a people in their hour of need: Mugo, the great seer; Wachiori, the glorious warrior; Kamiri, the powerful magician.
They became strangers to the hills. Thereafter, the oilskin of the house was not for them. It was for those who lived inside. These were the people whose blood and bones spoke the language of the hills. The trees listened, moaned with the wind and kept silent. Bird and beast heard and quietly listened. Only sometimes they would give a rejoinder, joyful applause or an angry roar.
CHAPTER TWO
The hills and the ridges now lay behind. This was a plain, the only such level stretch of land in this country. If you strained your eyes and peered into the misty distance you could see the land of Ukabi. It was all peaceful on this plain, which was said to have been a field of battle, once long ago. A few cattle pulled and mauled the grass while others lay down looking vacantly into space, chewing.
Suddenly, two boys emerged from the bush. They began to fight. One was tall and his unusually long neck and limbs made him appear older than he really was. He was Kamau, son of Kabonyi from Makuyu. The other, Kinuthia, was shorter with surprisingly strong muscles. His slow wide eyes well matched his smooth forehead. He lived with his uncle at a village beyond the two ridges away from Makuyu. His father had died early.
At first the boys fought with the sticks they had gone to fetch from the bush. The green sticks caught each other in mid-air several times and were soon in pieces. The boys threw them away and one piece touched a cow, which stood up quickly, frightened. It moved a few paces from the struggling pair, waking two others on the way. Then it looked in the opposite direction, unconcerned with the fight.
Kamau and Kinuthia were now wrestling. Their arms were interlocked and the two boys went round and round without either getting the better of the other. Kinuthia tried to lift Kamau off the ground and then trap him with his right leg. The attempt always failed. Kamau had his struggles too. Though not usually voluble, today he was eloquent with threats.
“You will know who I am,” he warned, at the same time using his right knee to hit Kinuthia’s stomach.
“Cow,” cried Kinuthia with pain.
“Hyena.”
“Even you,” Kinuthia hissed back.
Kinuthia appeared much more collected, and an observer would have thought that he would win. But he tripped over a sharp stone and soon was lying prostrate on his stomach. Kamau bent over him and pinned Kinuthia’s hands behind his head. His face was grim and contorted as he used his head to dig into Kinuthia’s face, making his nose bleed. The boy underneath Kamau’s knees felt pain. He thrust his legs in the air hoping to catch Kamau by the neck between the legs. Blows fell on him and he was bewildered, not knowing when and where the next blow would follow.
Two cows that had moved away together turned their heads and watched the struggle for a while. Then they bent their heads, thrusting out their tongues to pull and maul the grass like the others.
Just then, another boy came running from a group of cows a distance away.
“Stop fighting!” he shouted breathlessly as he stood near the pair. Kamau stopped, but he still sat on Kinuthia.
“Why are you fighting?”
“He called me names,” answered Kamau.
“He is a liar. He laughed at me because my father died poor and . . .”
“He called my father a convert to the white man.”