Meanwhile, at Kamĩtĩ, the “lucky” political prisoner would be given half an hour’s notice to get ready to see his dear ones. He would quickly change into his civilian clothes (released from custody for the purpose), rush to the gates for the usual chaining ceremony by a contingent of armed police officers, and be driven in a blinds-drawn police vehicle to the door of the waiting room.
There, the chains would be removed, and he would be ushered into the waiting room for a five-minute chat with his spouse, surrounded on all sides by security men and civilian-clad prison guards. Then he would be whisked out of the room, put back into chains, and be driven back to Kamĩtĩ under heavy escort, to resume life in prison uniform. Thus without knowing it, the prisoner had participated in a gigantic lie to his family and to the entire Kenyan nation. Family members would now spread the lie that their relative had come by plane from a distant place. He was in civilian clothes, so therefore he was not really in prison and probably was not being treated badly after all.
I used to look at the faces of the political prisoners just before and after the visits. On going, they were all smiles. On coming back, they were all depression. They would carry their private grief on their faces for a few weeks more before hiding it inside and resuming the communal, contourless monotony of prison life. A family visit was not really a contact; it was more a renewal of the sorrow of separation.
But my main concern, even for the cherished family visits at the airport rendezvous, was still with the chains one was required to wear. I resolved that either they would let me see my family without chaining me as a condition, or they would not allow me to see them. At any rate, I was determined that, while I would participate in the charade of putting on civilian clothes, I certainly would not willingly accept the chains. I still had not yet developed wings faster than the bullets they all carried in their guns.
When the day and the hour finally came—again unexpected, just half an hour or so for changing clothes—I found that all the prison officers in charge of the compound were present. Plus a police contingent led by the escorting police superintendent with his American swagger, straw hat, and arms akimbo stance. Most of the other political prisoners had crowded into the compound. Now one of the prison officers came to my cell and shut the door behind him. He started lecturing me, as to a little child, about the virtues of family visits and how much good they did to all those concerned.
“Imagine all the little ones coming all that way and finding out that their daddy has refused to see them. I know you may want to prove to all these other political prisoners that you can stick to your principles. Principles are all right. But it is your wife and children you are going to see, and you shouldn’t care a damn how these others are going to view it. Some of these political prisoners, and I am telling you this in confidence, have only themselves to blame for their nonrelease . . . so obstinate. . . . Now these chains, they are really nothing, nothing at all. . . . Just be a man. . . . I wouldn’t want you to lose all the sympathy some people have for you.”
I listened to his monologue with all its suggestive hints, vague promises, and veiled threats, all harmonized into an avuncular plea for me to show common sense and willingly accept the chains. I politely thanked him for his advice and concern, but I reiterated my position that I would not accept wearing chains as a condition of seeing my family. It was almost a repetition of the earlier scene. I walked to the gates. I refused to wear the chains. They refused to let me see my family.
For weeks after, I was literally trembling inside, wondering what lies had been fed Nyambura and the children. I was not particularly worried about how my peasant mother would take it. I knew that from her experiences during the British-imposed State of Emergency, she would never believe the police version of events.
But Nyambura? And the children? It was a terrible three weeks; some of the political prisoners reproached me in silence, as if I had taken a joke too far, while a few others told me so to my face. How dare you refuse to see your family? How do you think they will take your stubborn refusal? Why increase their misery?
With these, I would patiently go over the arguments. I would tell them that I had not refused but that I had not been allowed. I would reiterate my strong feelings about the chaining of political prisoners. I would explain the necessity of struggling for democratic and human rights even in prison. I would explain the importance of a truly democratic Kenya in which the different classes and nationalities would freely debate the past, present, and future of our country without fear or favor or flattery. This democratic Kenya would not be given to people on a silver platter by the ruling minority class. It had to be struggled for. Kenyan people, wherever they were, under whatever circumstances, had to keep on insisting on certain irreducible democratic and human rights. If we did not do this, if we all succumbed to the culture of fear and silence, Kenya would have merely moved from a colonial prison into a neocolonial prison, while the more than seventy years’ struggle was precisely to release Kenyan people from economic, political, and cultural prison altogether. What was the real gain in moving from one prison, run by white guards, into the same prison now run by black guards? The difference was one of form and not of substance. The point really was to change the economic, political, and cultural substance, and this would never be possible without a struggle for democracy. This struggle was not a mere verbal abstraction. It had to begin where each Kenyan was: in our homes, in our schools, in our places of work, even in prisons.
There were a few, though, who understood my position, and they told me so. They even told me that chaining political prisoners was a recent development. It had not always been the practice. When Edward P. Lokopoyet first introduced it, they had tried to organize a collective stand against it, but a few political prisoners developed cold feet at the very last minute and readily jumped into the chains. They pointed out that, as a result of the disunity, now they were all exposed to extreme danger, especially when they traveled by air to Mombasa, because even in the plane they were still in chains!
But my main worry was still Nyambura and the children. I knew that I could never write down my version of events, because this would certainly be censored by the police and the prison authorities.
Then one day I received a letter from her. It was the best gift I could have gotten from anybody, but coming from her, from home, from my family, it touched my heart. I shut myself in my cell and studied every word, line, and paragraph to get at the unstated message. The letter, written after the airport fiasco, was in reply to another I had written months before on receiving news of Njoki’s birth. Now she referred to that letter and deliberately avoided references to the visit. Not a word of rebuke. No complaint. That in itself was a vote of confidence. . . . I read it over and over again:
Greetings from your big family. We are safe and sound. The children are still growing. Particularly our new baby. She is now very big. You surprised me in your last letter. Do you mean that you don’t know all my mother’s names? She is called Njoki but as you know that means being born again. So in the light of this, my mother has two names: Njoki, and Wamũingĩ. Very many friends of ours have been coming to see the baby. We miss you a great deal but we hope one day we shall be able to eat, laugh, discuss matters that concern us, and live together.
As you can see I have decided to write a rather long letter since unless things are relaxed we may not be able to see each other for a long time to come. So what I am now most concerned with are the exact reasons for your detention. When you were detained, we only gathered from the local and the international press that you are a political prisoner. I hope that you are being treated like a political prisoner. What gives me courage is because I know you are there not because of any crime you have committed. What gives me strength is my knowledge that you are not a criminal.
I hope you received the books and the money I sent through Mr. Muhindi. Some books were returned to me but that is all right, I understand.
I have sent a pair of s
andals and two pairs of underwear.
Hoping to read from you soon.
Mrs. Zirimu sends her greetings.
Salamia Wengine,
NYAMBURA
Nyambura’s previous letters had been very brief, businesslike. I could of course guess the source of their rigidity and hesitancy. She didn’t want to give anything that might conceivably be used against me. But this last letter was relaxed and informative, and had even ventured into political questioning—and so soon after the visit that never was!
From the letter, I deconstructed the message. Njoki, born again as Wamũingĩ, belonged to the people. By extension, this was true of the other children. I should not worry about them in isolation from all the other children and families in Kenya. By alluding to the local and international press, she confirmed what I had learned from hints and oblique comments by the guards: my detention and imprisonment had raised some national and international concern. By expressing the hope that I was being treated like a political prisoner, she was saying that I should insist on my rights as a political prisoner.
The letter considerably buoyed up my spirits. I showed it to other political prisoners. Thairũ wa Mũthĩga commented, “It is good to have a politically conscious wife!” I couldn’t help saying, “Amen.” She may not have been politically conscious, but she had started asking questions. Those outside the barbed wire and the stone walls must ask questions and demand answers. It’s the only way to defeat the culture of fear and silence. If a community of millions were to ask questions and demand answers, who would deny them?
Nyambura’s letter had freed me from a certain fear. I was now psychologically and emotionally ready for the never-ending struggle with the stony dragon. I went back to cell 16, went back to Warĩnga and continued writing my novel with renewed vigor. On toilet paper.
Perhaps Njoki would one day read it and say that at least her father was ready to join all the Wamũingĩs of modern Kenya to say no to the culture of fear and silence, no to exploitation, oppression, and imperialist control of Kenya, to end that which so many, from Koitalel to Kĩmathi, had died fighting. Yes, she might tell her friends that her father had said no to the repressive stifling culture of parasites in paradise.
7
Meditations
Life in prison is not all endless confrontations and “profound” meditations on history. It is basically a cliché: dull, mundane, downright monotonous, repetitious, torturous in its intended animal rhythm of eating, defecating, sleeping, eating, defecating, sleeping. It is the rhythm of animals in a cage waiting for slaughter or escape from slaughter at a date not of their own fixing.
* * *
It has, though, its surface joys on deep sorrows: laughter—sometimes very genuine and spontaneous—on hidden tears; petty quarrels and friendships in a community of lonely strangers; distinctions of nationality and class in a community facing a single enemy; petty debating points that open new wounds on old ones that have not yet healed; gibes and innuendos that remain burning in the brain like salt on an incurable wound, among people who know that their survival depends on not tearing one another down as intended and encouraged by their captors; moments of genuinely revealing dialogues against the knowledge that this is leading nowhere; dreams against the background of the long, continuous nightmare that is prison itself. It’s the dream that makes survival possible.
* * *
I seek comfort in José Martí: good is the earth, existence is holy, and in suffering itself, new reasons are found for living.
* * *
On arrival at Kamĩtĩ, I am received by a prison superintendent in a greenish long-sleeved shirt and khaki trousers, who ushers me into the chief guard’s office. Beside him is a fat guard in khaki shorts and a green shirt. . . . The superintendent takes down all the details—name, profession, social habits (“Do you smoke or drink?”), religion (“None? Really?”), location, district. He assigns me a number, K6,77, in exchange for my name. The number means the sixth to be detained in Kamĩtĩ in the year 1977. The superintendent is young, with a businesslike efficiency, but he is very polite. I had not in my mind associated prison service with youth, people with a future, and it now looks to me as if the young superintendent has strayed into the place, a stranger. But then I recall that two of my class of fifty-eight in Alliance High School opted for prison service. Business over, he raises his head—he has been sitting, and I have been standing—and says, “I have read all your books. I was planning to come to see Ngaahika Ndeenda. Then I read in the papers about the ban. Tell me, why really did they bring you to this place?” I say to myself, Here now begins the long-awaited interrogation. But his voice sounds sincere.
“I don’t know,” I tell him, adding, “but it could be because of Ngaahika Ndeenda.”
“What’s wrong with the play? What was it about?”
“Our history. The lives of peasants and workers.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I don’t know!”
“No, there must have been something else,” he says, as if he is talking to himself.
Then he suddenly shoots a question that is also a statement of his lingering doubts:
“Tell me the truth. Was the play really being acted by workers and peasants?”
“Yes. They all came from Kamĩrĩthũ village!”
* * *
As I am led into cell 16, literally opposite the chief warder’s office, I keep on wondering if I will be the sole occupant of this doleful place, presided over by a youthful-looking superintendent and a jelly-fleshed warder. No other human sight, no sound. Amid sepulchral silence, the warder ushers me into my new residence, and he locks the door from the outside. He then stuffs a piece of blanket into the bars on my door so that I cannot see anybody on the outside and nobody from outside the door can see me. Then suddenly the sepulchral silence is broken with wild shouts—“It’s Ngũgĩ! It’s wa Thiong’o!”—in Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili. “Wĩyũmĩrĩrie! Jikaze! Gũtirĩ wa Iregi ũtũire!” continue the shouts.
It’s the other political prisoners. They had been locked in their cells to free the warders to impose a state-of-emergency–type curfew in and around the prison. But the political prisoners had been peering through the iron-barred openings on the doors of their cells and some had witnessed my coming. It was Koigi wa Wamwere who, on recognizing me, started the shouts of regretful welcome. But this I don’t now know and the voices, suddenly coming from the erstwhile silent walls, sound eerie.
Later, the political prisoners are let out in groups. They remove the piece of blanket covering the bars, they crowd around my door, and they ask me many questions all at once. But one question stands out above the others:
“Is it true that Ngaahika Ndeenda was acted by peasants and workers?”
* * *
I am secretly thrilled by the knowledge that the Kamĩrĩthũ Community effort had already broken through the walls of Kamĩtĩ Prison to give hope to political prisoners, who before had never heard of Kamĩrĩthũ.
* * *
Yes, Ngaahika Ndeenda has preceded me in prison. Throughout my stay, I’ll get more inquiries about it. One comes from a warder of Kalenjin nationality who tells me the play was read and translated to him by his Mũgĩkũyũ friend who worked at a coffee plantation around Kĩambu. He tells me about the play and recounts the plot and mentions the names of several characters.
“I hope that I will one day be able to see a performance of the play,” he says wistfully.
He is voicing the hope of many Kenyans, and it feels good. Truth, a peasant once told me, is like a mole. You can cover its hole, but it will still reappear in another place!
* * *
The welcome I receive from the other political prisoners is touching. Wasonga Sijeyo gives me a comb and a pair of tire sandals. Martin Shikuku gives me a handmade cell calendar. Gĩkonyo wa Rũkũngũ, the same. Adam Mathenge, a kũngũrũ uniform. Koigi wa Wamwere, a Biro pen. Gĩcerũ wa Njaũ, a pencil. Thairũ wa Mũthĩga, a Biro pen.
Mũhoro wa Mũthoga, some writing paper with the prison letterhead. Later the pens and pencils will be confiscated, but the gesture to my intellectual needs is moving. Ali Dubat Fidhow, Hadji Dagane Galal, Hadji Mahat Kuno Roble, Ibrahim Ali Omer, Mzee Duale Roble Hussein—they all try to find something to give as a gesture of goodwill and solidarity. There’s a fellowship that develops among people in adversity that’s very human and gives glimpses of what human beings could become if they could unite against the enemy of humanity: social cannibalism.
* * *
In 1963 I opened a short story, “The Mubenzi Tribesman,” with this sentence: “The thing that one remembers most about prison is the smell: the smell of shit and urine; the smell of human sweat and breath.” This was fairly accurate for a young imagination. Prison has its own peculiar smell: a permanent pall of perpetually polluted air. On arrival at Kamĩtĩ, the smell hits me in the face, it descends on me, it presses me down, it courses down my nostrils and throat, I am gasping for breath, and I am really scared of an attack of asthma.
The smell of unsugared, unsalted, uncooked porridge is another. It is nauseating. I feel like vomiting. Was I a Mubenzi tribesman after all?
Mathenge gives me a share of his own prescription of sugar to ease me into the habit of eating unga for all seasons. Yes, it’s true: sugar, soup of boiled beans without fat or onions, what we called makerũro ma mboco, milk, tea, and rice are medicines given only on the orders of the prison doctor! Luckily I have never been choosy about what I eat.
There is also the smell of the warders and even that of the other political prisoners, and inwardly I am recoiling from the contact. Do they also feel the smell of the outsider? Is this how animals detect strangers in their midst?
Later I stop smelling all the smells. No matter how I sniff now, I don’t sense the smell. Did I earlier imagine it?