And suddenly I realize that I am part of prison life. I am part of the life of the caged. Perhaps one does not remember the smell after all. To adjust is human. But not to accept evil.
* * *
Or perhaps it is the civilian clothes (on top of my forced segregation) that separate us. I look hard at the other prisoners in their tire sandals and their white kũngũrũs of collarless shirts and tight pants that match one’s buttocks and narrowing thighs to the knee. I watch how they circle one another aimlessly, how they walk to and fro within the same walls, and the image of madmen in a lunatic asylum, with their erratic aimless wanderings and gestures, steals into my mind.
Later, when I get into my own kũngũrũ white uniform and discard the civilian outfit, I feel like one of them. The clothes, as the popular Gĩkũyũ musician Joseph Kamarũ would say, have made us all equal. After a time, I begin to feel “natural” in them. I even begin to see huge differences between the immaculately clean kũngũrũs and the dirty ones (before they all appeared of the same hue) and even to distinguish between the various cuts, really very minute differences, but there all the same.
When my internal segregation is over, I join in the same erratic, aimless circles and wanderings, going everywhere and nowhere. The compound is too tiny to give anybody the feel of a purposeful walk or even the illusion of one. I am now one of the inmates of this once famed lunatic asylum.
It is not a joke, really. The compound used to be for mentally deranged convicts before it was put to better use as a cage for the “politically deranged.” In a sense, we are truly mad. Imagine anyone questioning the morality of man-eat-man in a state of man-eaters? Imagine anyone questioning the ethic of eating human flesh and drinking human blood when Western bourgeois civilization—God-given, universal, and final in its American form—has taught its worshippers that social cannibalism is the highest good! Madness, after all, is relative. It depends on who is calling whom mad. In a state of madmen, anybody who is not mad is mad. This is the truth in Chekhov’s literary masterpiece, “Ward No. 6.”
However, human sanity will never be drowned in a pool of inhuman madness, for if a country has a class of man-eaters, then it has to have men to be eaten, and will these victims of others’ greed always let themselves and their kind be eaten up forever? The fact is that the objects of social cannibalism will never accept the morality of man-eaters as the all-time universal morality, not even if it comes dressed in draperies marked Free World, Democracy, Christendom, Western Civilization, Global modernity, and other dazzling, platitudinous labels.
* * *
I arrive in Kamĩtĩ on Saturday, December 31, 1977. On January 13, 1978, four new political prisoners are brought in—Ahmed Shurie Abdi, Mohamed Nurie Hanshi, Mohamed Abdilie Hadow, and Mohamed Dahir Digale—all Kenyans of Somali nationality. Three days later, on January 16, the ex–senior chief of Garissa, Sugow Ahmed Adan, also of Somali nationality, is brought in.
I now feel like an old boy in relation to the newcomers. But a thought keeps on nagging at me. Could there have been more arrests and detentions in Limuru? I ask some of the newcomers, but they can’t recollect any such news. There is nobody else to ask. Not now, anyway.
* * *
My first contact with—or shall I say the first communication from—the outside world is a formal note from our family and childhood friend, lawyer Ndere wa Njũgi. It is a simple, to-the-point kind of letter sent through the office of the president and brought by hand by a police officer.
Greetings from Nyambura Ngũgĩ and the family. The purpose of writing this letter is to request you to sign a few blank cheques which Nyambura could use to draw money when need arises. You took your cheque book with you.
Everything is okay.
It is signed by Nyambura and the lawyer. I know their signatures, and they look authentic. The chief warder gives me back my checkbook—everything, including my driver’s license and a few shillings, had been signed in and kept under lock and key—and I sit down and sign all the leaves.
I study the letter. It is typed on plain paper—without a letterhead. It is dated January 10. The signatures are in ink. And they still look authentic. So Nyambura has already been in touch with the lawyer? There was a village teacher who once read to my Standard Four class at Manguũ (and later to the school assembly of students and parents) a composition I had written in the Gĩkũyũ language. “This is how to write,” he told them. But he became almost mad with anger when years later he heard that I had opted to study English—mere words—instead of one of the more substantial professional courses like engineering, medicine, or law. “Really, why don’t you take law?”
Now I recall all this as I keep fingering the letter. If I had taken law or medicine or engineering or architecture, instead of being drawn to mere words, would I be in Kamĩtĩ today?
Why not? Today more and more professionals are realizing that their sciences, which should serve people—for really, medicine, science, and technology were developed by working people to free themselves from the capricious tyranny of nature—are benefiting only the plutocratic class instead of the masses. Moneyless needs get indifference; moneyed greed makes all the difference. Discoveries and inventions, which are collective and social in origin, end up as private property.
A contented, pipe-smoking fellow sits on another’s back. Medicine, science, and technology, instead of going to the aid of him (and her) whose back is sat upon, rush to the aid of the fellow in the three-piece suit to ensure his health and strength so he can continue to ride on the backs of the others. Armaments go to protect the moneycrats against any challenges to the status quo. The law rushes to protect the property that the pipe-smoking fellow has stolen from those he rides.
Some Kenyan professionals are beginning to see the utter immorality of that structure and their own roles in servicing it. At the very least, they question and reject the comprador bourgeois ethic, which declares on roofs and mountaintops that the foreign is progress; the national is backward; deride the national.
Maybe even if I had taken law or medicine or engineering, I would have ended up in Kamĩtĩ, for probably I would at one time have been tempted to shout, “Foreign capital, go home!”
Well, I chose words. And now I am studying words asking me to sign a few checks to enable Nyambura to withdraw money as need arises. When I am released, I will learn that the checkbook was Nyambura’s first assurance that I had not been “sent to Ngong.”1
Words? What counts is the reality they reflect.
* * *
In the period of my internal segregation, I keep on studying the other political prisoners, and I am amazed to find that the different groups span the entire history of postindependence upheavals. I am not here talking about whether they were involved in the upheavals, which the ruling party saw as a challenge to its monopoly of power. I am not even concerned as to whether that challenge was real or imagined, but the excuses for detaining them can definitely be associated with the several major crises in Kenya’s period of independence. But the fact that the prisoners span many communities, social classes, and professions and cover the entire postcolonial history, from independence to the ban on Kamĩrĩthũ, speaks of continuous struggle.
There was another side to my detention: the growing anti-imperialist consciousness among peasants, workers, university lecturers, and students, and I was the sacrificial lamb!
Thought for despair? No! I am part of a living history of struggle. And without struggle, there is no movement, there is no life.
* * *
The thought is not original—I once read it in William Blake: without contraries there is no progression; attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. And later in Hegel: contradiction is the root of all movement and all life, and only insofar as a thing incorporates a contradiction is it mobile, does it possess impulse and activity. But it is true!
* * *
The warders talk of him with awe; the polit
ical prisoners, with a mixture of bitterness, contempt, and hatred. He is Edward P. Lokopoyet, the senior superintendent of prisons in charge of Kamĩtĩ Prison, and hence the detention block. Gradually I begin to comprehend the magnitude of this man’s relentless tyranny over the political prisoners, as narrated.
For over two years, this officer has waged a war to break the political prisoners en masse physically and mentally. He has had them locked up in the cells for twenty-three hours a day for two consecutive years, a complete negation of every single prison rule and regulation. He might order uncooked food to be brought to them; food with bits of grass and sand thrown in; ugali cooked in warm water; beans and yellow vegetables enriched with worms and other insects; and whenever he comes into the compound (rare!), it is to reprimand political prisoners for not showing proper respect to oppressive authority. Tall, strong, dark, and smooth faced, he struts about the compound, the very embodiment of all the written and unwritten oppressive laws of Kenya. He is himself the law. He is the mini-god, and he is genuinely puzzled why these political pariahs do not see this and act accordingly. So he daily redoubles and trebles and quadruples the previous efforts to make them see the light and understand who he is and which forces in society he represents. It was during his reign that the chaining of political prisoners was started. It was during his sovereignty over Kamĩtĩ that the radio and newspapers were denied to prisoners.
These actions have only generated a huge antagonism from the political prisoners, who do not mince words in his presence. They keep on reminding him about the inevitability of change. He once lectured a political prisoner for taking the initiative of extending a hand to him in greeting. He, the political prisoner, should have waited to be greeted. The humiliating reprimand backfires. Now, whenever he himself takes out his hand to greet the political prisoners, they turn their heads the other way so that his hand is left hanging in the air.
The political prisoners decide to write a collective memorandum of protest against the intolerable conditions. Their letter, dated January 1977, is addressed to Mr. Mũhĩndĩ Mũnene, the security officer in charge of the political prisoners, through Justice Hancox, the chairman of the Political Prisoners Review Tribunal:
The inhuman and difficult conditions to which we are subjected now are an extreme hazard to the maintenance of our minimum physical and mental health, health that is already strained by its efforts to survive under the basic Detention conditions, conditions that are abnormal to human living. Certain that the weight and roughness of these conditions are severely and cruelly bruising our physical and mental health, we are appealing to you to uplift these conditions now before they exact from our health the high toll of a conspicuous and irreparable damage. In appealing to you to free us from these conditions, we also appeal to you against the wisdom of thinking that damage upon physical and mental health must stick out a mile to count. Sir, by the time it sticks out a mile, it will no longer be damage but destruction and we hope and pray that this is not what the future holds in store for us.
But only a few eventually sign it; Major L.B. Mwanzia, Adamu Mathenge Wangombe, Ongongi Were, Gĩcerũ wa Njaũ, Koigi wa Wamwere, Thairũ wa Mũthĩga. And one of those signing it, Major Mwanzia, is immediately transferred to Shimo La Tewa prison in Mombasa.
But the mutual hatred, contempt, and antagonism continue. The letter is not answered. And nothing is done about their grievances about confinement, food, medication, mail, visits, handcuffs, radio, and newspapers.
Gradually the antagonism begins to tell on him. His rare visits become even rarer. Now he sneaks in, then quickly runs out as if safari ants were crawling all over the tiny compound. This however makes him even more repressive. He is incapable of seeing that there could be greatness in recognition of one’s mistakes and failures. Now he uses his juniors to execute what he has mapped out in the office.
Because he himself is hardly there in the compound, the antagonism between him and the political prisoners works out, in practice, as an antagonism between the guards and the political prisoners. Abusive language, innuendos, gibes, outright denunciation: the tension building up could literally be cut with an electric saw, and everybody is sure that sooner or later violence will erupt. At one time, so I am told, a more sensitive warder breaks down and weeps: “Some of us are really sorry about all this. Please understand that we are only carrying out orders. If I should lose my job, what will my children eat, where will they get their clothes and school fees? Where will they sleep?”
The other political prisoners tell me that the slight relaxation I see in the compound is because the ordinary guards have become bored and tired of carrying out the tyrannical commands of the prison sovereign. Of course, I do not see any relaxation, big or small. But if the harsh conditions of my three-week stay are any kind of relaxation, then their last two years were actual hell.
Wasonga Sijeyo, the longest resident at the compound, confirms this: “I was in colonial detention for five years. And now, after Independence, I have also been in this compound for nine years. But these last two years have been the worst of all the previous twelve years!”
* * *
This Edward P. steals into my cell one morning. He times the visit when all the other political prisoners are in their cells. He lectures me for an hour on the virtues of total submission. “Don’t copy some of these other political prisoners. Did you know any before you came here? Never mind. I will tell you the truth. They don’t really want to go home. Let me tell you, if you behave yourself, who knows, you might go home any day. Some political prisoners have gone home after only two or three weeks. Others, as you can see, have been here for nine years. It is all up to you.” He tries out the divisive politics of flattery and threats. “You see, you are the most highly educated person—well, I should say the only educated person, for what education have these others? Some are not even politicians—and so if anything that requires brains happens here, it will be blamed on you.” As he is about to leave, he says, “And remember, don’t attempt to write any poems here. Not unless I have given you permission. And even then I must see the poems and approve!”
He walks out*. The arrogance of power. The confidence of ignorance. And suddenly I know that I have to write, I must write. My main problem will be finding ways and means of hiding the written notes. And if caught, well, I get caught!
Wrote William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer’d: “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remained confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.
* * *
The Military Man. He has been here for three years. He keeps to himself; he hardly came to my door to say hallo, but the moment my internal segregation ends, he befriends me. This intensifies after we discover we both like chess—chess and checkers are some of the few games allowed. Checkers is the more popular. Some of the prisoners breathe and swear by it, but Military Man looks down upon it. He was used to a daily chess company of another military officer; the two used to play it with gripping intensity as if they were indeed commanding armies in a battlefield. Besides their military past, chess was what set them apart. Then the officer was transferred to Shimo La Tewa prison. So between the departure of the officer and my arrival on the scene, he has had nobody to play chess with, for Military Man does not deign to teach the others. Chess becomes the special knowledge that he possesses and the others, civilians, don’t. But I am a little different; being a professor and a writer compensate for my lack of a military background. Plus, I already know how to play chess, and he notices, after a few checkmates, that I am able to outmaneuver him on the chessboa
rd.
Initially, some of the others express an interest and the desire to learn, and I teach them the names of the pieces and their moves, much to the chagrin of Military Man, who likes it that it is a game known to a few, but he is not upset for long, for the moment the others discover that chess is not like checkers but calls for more concentration, they abandon it one by one, and in the end, only Military Man and I are left to it, confirming to the Military Man his view that chess calls for superior minds. At first, the others, even when they do not play, would watch Military Man and me play, but after a time, they don’t even stop at our sessions. Later I learn the rumor that has driven them away. A few even try to discourage me, for my own sanity. Chess and the concentration it calls for, even watching it, can make one crazy, and they think Military Man is a little crazed.
* * *
I don’t care. He regales me with stories, not so much of his actual military experience, but of the aura that surrounds it. He hints that he had indeed been privy to a military plot to overthrow the Kenyatta regime, and sometimes he himself was somehow in the thick of it, but he never divulges details of what, who, when, where, and how. But the very lack of details and his mysterious looks make his involvement seem bigger than he was letting on. The more I listened, the more extraordinary his hints and claims became. Sometimes he would tell me, without details, that he had trained with the PLO, that he had even met with Arafat. He talked about some of the leading figures in the organization. Just before my incarceration, there had been news of the arrest of two Palestinians at Nairobi airport. He swore me to secrecy; then he divulged the secret. They had been sent by the top PLO leadership to rescue him from Kamĩtĩ prison. Despite the setback, the plans to spring him from prison were still afoot. His stories make him look larger than life, although this was in contrast to his haggard prisoner bearing.
* * *