In defiance, I start keeping a razor blade hidden in the cracks of my desk. I don’t need it. It’s simply a way of affirming my freedom and responsibility over my life!
* * *
An earth tremor. (I later learned that a minor earthquake shook the Eastern Highlands and Nairobi, measuring over 5 on the Richter scale!) Wish it were a social tremor to bring an end to the system and to this prison!
* * *
Games. Tenniquoit. Ludo. Chess. Checkers. Walks on the side-pavements.
* * *
We organize story-telling sessions. Ali Dubat and Wasonga Sijeyo are mines of folklore.
* * *
Singing, too! Religious hymns. Popular tunes. Political songs.
* * *
There is a guard who hardly ever talks. But when we start reading news of the exploits of the Red Brigades in Italy, his mouth suddenly opens. He can talk endlessly about them. With only one constant refrain. “And they are not touching the poor,” he would say, laughing until tears flow down his cheeks. Then he would describe graphically, in minute detail, how they shot this or that rich Italian person, as if he had been present when the deed was done. “And to know that they are not touching the poor!” he would repeat. About Kenya or Africa, however, he is absolutely mum. No words. No opinions.
* * *
The new SSP releases old issues of Time and Newsweek. They are given to Kamĩtĩ Prison by the United States Information Service in Nairobi. For a week or so we revel in world events as seen through American eyes. But the pleasure of a newspaper or a news magazine is reading between the lines, if you know the publisher’s or the writer’s general view. There can be no totally objective newspaper—much less an American one.
I come across a Newsweek carrying an interview with Kofi Awoonor, the Ghanaian novelist and poet who had been incarcerated by the military dictator Ignatius Kutu Acheampong for a year without trial. I first met Kofi at Makerere, Kampala, during the historic 1962 Conference of African Writers of English Expression,3 attended by, among others, Wole Soyinka, Chris Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Langston Hughes, Saunders Redding, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Arthur Maimane, Bloke Modisane, Grace Ogot, Rebecca Njau, and Jonathan Kariara. I was then a student at Makerere just beginning to write: one or two published stories, two unpublished manuscripts, but with hope, great hope for an East African literary renaissance. What I remember most about the conference was the energy and the hope and the dreams and the confidence: after all, we were part of a continent emerging from a colonial era into . . . what? We never answered the question, but the hopes and dreams and the confidence remained. Now we have no doubt, two decades later, about the answer.
Now as I look at Kofi’s picture in Newsweek at Kamĩtĩ Prison, I remember that Chris Okigbo, who led the conference with the paper “What Is African Literature?” is dead, a victim of an intrabourgeois war, which, in the words of Kole Omotoso, was merely for “redefining the land boundaries rather than redefining the quality of life for those who live within the existing boundaries,” a war in which only the Americans, the British, and the French emerged as victors. I remember that Wole Soyinka and Kofi Awoonor have served prison terms for saying that things that aren’t right are not right, and I remember that many African writers have witnessed and recorded the terrible anguish of Africans killing innumerable Africans so that Euro-American capital can thrive on grounds made more fertile by African flesh and blood!
Bitter memories—but it’s good just to see Awoonor’s picture4 and know that he is free and is continuing to denounce Africa’s tin gods who jump at any little criticism of their corrupt regimes. This earth, our earth, my brother!
* * *
In another Newsweek, I come across a story about my detention without trial. The main story has been censored, but the censor had forgotten that the story ran on to a different column on a different page. Newsweek quotes “usually reliable” Nairobi intellectual circles as describing me as “a naive ideologue” for not knowing the limits of dissent and therefore not living within the restrictive walls of self-censorship.
I laugh at this! A naive ideologue? For writing in a Kenyan language? For joining hands with peasants to build a modern people-based Kenyan theater? For communicating with at least a few peasants? This is not dissent even. Not yet. Ideologue? And them, counter-ideologues. That’s fair.
If sophistication means writing in a foreign language and taking a pro-imperialist, anti-Kenyan line in national and international affairs, then avaunt, sophistication! Quit my sight! If naïveté means writing about the heroism of Kenyan people in their centuries of struggle against any and every form of foreign economic, political, and cultural domination, then come, naïveté, let me embrace thee forever.
The Kenyan peasants were described as “naive” by their educated brethren when they challenged the might of the British empire, on whose shores the sun never set. Led by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, the naive peasants took up arms against British imperialism in Kenya when their sophisticated brethren, fresh from seats of learning in Makerere, Harvard, Cambridge, London, Oxford, and elsewhere, were crying out (in sophisticated languages of course): hold it, we have been taught that imperialism is mighty and we should willingly become its slaves and get international prizes for being its faithful spokesmen.
Intellectual slavery masquerading as sophistication is the worst form of slavery.
Viva the “naive” peasants and workers of Kenya! Viva the glorious history of Kenyan people! I shout loudly in my heart, in my cell later.
* * *
I hear a siren from the other side. It’s a mournful, terrible sound, like a mother bereaved of all her children. In this case, I’m told it’s the prison alert for escaped prisoners.
I used to teach Dennis Brutus’s book of poems, Sirens Knuckles Boots, but I never really understood the title. Now I do. I read his Letters to Martha more avidly. His opening letter captures very accurately the emotions of a new political prisoner:
After the sentence
mingled feelings:
sick relief,
the load of the approaching days
apprehension—
the hints of brutality
have a depth of personal meaning;
exultation—
the sense of challenge,
of confrontation,
vague heroism
mixed with self-pity
and tempered by the knowledge of those
who endure much more
and endure
* * *
Tuesday, June 13, 1978: Gĩcerũ corners me to give another lesson in body language. He tells me, “Now I would like you to watch the faces of the same warders, A, B, and C. See how they walk? See how they laugh? It is not good for us!”
It is early in the morning. And yes, they walk jauntily, they are laughing, and they are being a bit too jovial with political prisoners.
At three o’clock, we learn that the police have intervened. The radio is disconnected. And we can no longer buy or read newspapers.
When he is later confronted by political prisoners about this vindictiveness, the political prisoners’ security officer, Mr. Mũhĩndĩ Mũnene, replies, “What would then be the meaning of detention?”
Ah, well: at least it’s good to know that the ill treatment and torture in prison are not the result of personal aberration on the part of a few guards and officers, but that it is calculated and directed from the top.
But we shall never forget the relative humaneness of Mũhĩndĩ Mũnene, the new SSP.
* * *
We go back to our games, to our books, to our pens, to our religions, to our story telling, to our monotonous lives, to our dreams of freedom.
* * *
Then Kenyatta died. And suddenly our dreams of freedom grew wings.
*To be fair to Edward Lokopoyet, I am reporting what the others told me about his deeds prior to my encounter with him. He was never rude to me, personally, but of course I also suffer
ed under the atmosphere he had created.
8
Dreams of Freedom
1
For those who wait in prison, as for those who wait outside, dreams of freedom start at the very minute of arrest. Something might just happen; maybe somebody will intervene; and even when everything seems against any possibility of release, there’s the retreat to the final bravado: the plight can end only in either death or freedom, which I suppose are two different forms of release. So release of one sort or other is eventually assured.
But when? One of the cruelties of detention without trial and conviction—unlike ordinary imprisonment—is precisely this not knowing when one will get out. As for ordinary convicted prisoners—we are not talking of the fairness or unfairness of the trial, the so-called justice involved—they know the duration of their sentence, and no matter how long it is, their emotions and intellect can adjust to the fact and the reality. Not so the political detainee: they can be released after an hour, a day, a week, or after fifty years! So whether they like it or not, every minute, every hour of the day, the question lurks somewhere in their consciousness: Could it be now, today? Every guard’s clinking of chains, every unexpected knock at the door, brings this question to the fore: Is it now, today? When? Some people ask, were you tortured in detention? But detention without trial is itself torture, and the greatest part of it is this ignorance of when. Yes, torture not only for those inside, but even for those outside the prison walls.
On September 19, 1978, Nyambura wrote me a letter in which she told me about the progress that Thiong’o, Kĩmunya, Ngĩna, Ndũcũ, Mũkoma, and Wanjikũ were making in their different schools. Then she added:
“In your letter you told me that the state authorities have never asked you about your writings: what do they ask you when you go for questioning? I hear that all political prisoners are questioned or that their cases are reviewed every three or six months. How has your case been?”
She was asking about the Detainees Review Tribunal, so much trumpeted by the Kenya ruling authorities whenever questions of release of detained persons were raised in world councils. The eight-member Detainees Review Tribunal chaired by Justice Alan R.W. Hancox (a British ex-judge of the Kenyan High Court) met every six months, and served three political purposes: as a public relations team to allay national and international fears regarding the government’s prison conditions; as a screening team, just like those of the Emergency era in colonial Kenya; and finally but basically, as an instrument of torture, part of the state’s psychological terror wielded against the individual political prisoner and the nation as a whole.
As a hoax to national and world opinion, the tribunal was excellent: its very existence and its six-monthly motions of pretense at review—expenses and the trip to Mombasa fully paid—gave the intended impression that those not released had somehow not satisfied this very impartial tribunal. And to many, the fact that the Detainees Review Tribunal was chaired by a foreigner was the final evidence of its impartiality. Its carefully nursed impression of impartiality, its quasi-judicial character (in theory a political prisoner could have the services of a lawyer)—tended to establish a prima facie case against the poor political prisoner. Either the prisoner had refused to cooperate or the tribunal, after carefully weighing the evidence, had, in its judicial wisdom, found the petitioner still unfit for “human” company. The political prisoner was tried (for unknown crimes of course) and found wanting.
The fact was that in its entire membership, the eight-man Review Tribunal was a wholly civil service affair. And the fact that it was chaired by a foreigner, far from inclining it to impartiality, would the more likely have inclined it to partiality toward the state of which the tribunal was a part. In my case, my unstated reasons for detention were my consistent opposition to the foreign control of our economy and culture, and to the mental colonialism in the ruling comprador bourgeoisie, which gives them a childlike faith in foreigners per se, especially if such foreigners happen to be British or American. The foreign chairmanship of the tribunal was to me one more proof of my correct position. Could one then expect colonial foreigners to make judgments against themselves?
By the very nature of their position, foreigners tend to feel that it is not for them to make controversial pronouncements on the basic questions of democratic and human rights in the country of their temporary but well-paid adoption. “We gave them independence; let them make a mess of it if that’s what they want,” tends to be the general attitude of those from an imperialist country working as “experts” in a former colony. Yet they are thoroughly enjoying the fruits of that mess. Why care? Who cares?
Such a foreigner might even pretend not to feel or not to see the mess. At any rate, there is no way such a foreigner can feel loyalty to the Kenyan history of struggle or feel the pressures for democracy that loyalty demands. There is a chance that Kenyans, depending on their class sympathies, might feel these pressures and loyalty, and perchance their sense of duty to the nation might compel them to arrive at a position similar to the one held by the Indian Supreme Court: “Preventive detention is a serious invasion of personal liberty and such meagre safeguards as the constitution has provided against the improper exercise of the power must be jealously watched and enforced by the courts.”
In our case, there was no hope of such a pronouncement. For even assuming that the tribunal was impartial, it had only advisory powers; its advice to the government was never made public, and it was never communicated to political prisoners.
It was in its proceedings, however, that the tribunal’s role as a screening team came through. As far as I know, no political prisoner was ever told of the government’s charges against them. The tribunal sat there and simply asked the political prisoners to tell them whatever it was that they wanted communicated to the government. It was a most weird experience. Not only were the prisoners prejudged to be guilty, but the burden of self-prosecution fell on them. In other words, one was to be one’s own accuser, prosecutor, and witness against oneself.
But even after going through all that, one could never be sure of release. The prisoners had to prove themselves guilty beyond any and every reasonable doubt and to crown this confession with abject pleas for presidential mercy and clemency. Even then, they were not sure of release, and after six months the tribunal would come for more proofs of one’s assumed guilt and more pleas for mercy, without deigning to say what had been the reception of the previous self-prosecution and abject pleas. The Detainees Review Tribunal, then, clearly saw its role as one of receiving a political prisoner’s list of confessions and pleas and carrying them to the government for a thorough scrutiny by the Special Branch.
Its being an instrument of mental torture consisted in its raising of false hopes. Twice a year, the Detainees Review Tribunal would meet, raise people’s hopes, and then dash them to the ground. Even when a political prisoner intellectually convinced themselves—after four or six or twenty appearances—that the tribunal was at best an ineffectual body for a government cover-up and at worst a screening team, they still retained a faint hope that maybe this time . . . After three or five years, a number of political prisoners had resolved not to see the tribunal again and had written to say so.
I appeared before the tribunal twice. The first appearance, after fourteen days at Kamĩtĩ, was in the SSP’s offices. Incredible as it might seem, despite what the other political prisoners had told me about it, I still went there with some hope: since what I had done had been completely aboveboard in a democratic society, maybe someone might have thought it over and decided on the futility of detaining truth. Once the tribunal told me about the charges against me, I would be able to convince them of my innocence.
The first tribunal, at Kamĩtĩ—I and a few others were not flown to Mombasa as was the usual practice—was chaired by Acting Justice Abdul Majid Cockar in the absence of Justice Alan Hancox, who was then reportedly on leave in Britain. After polite introductions, they simply stared at me
. I asked them why I was detained. They didn’t know. What were the accusations against me? They didn’t know. But now the chairman spoke. Had I anything I wanted to tell the government?
The second tribunal, also at Kamĩtĩ, was held in July, and this time it was chaired by Justice Hancox. This time I had written a memorandum, putting in writing my verbal complaints to the first tribunal and expanding on them. I wanted to state my position vis-à-vis issues of language, literature, culture, and foreign domination very clearly and very finally. In my memorandum, it was the government that was on trial. My detention without trial for advocating a national culture, free from imperialist domination, was major evidence against the regime. Again the same silent stares. And the same question: What more, apart from what was in the memorandum, did I want to tell the government?
The only difference between the first session in January and the second in July was in the chairmanship. Justice Cockar had been a bit more patient; he was at least willing, or seemed willing, to listen. He noted down anything that I wanted to say. Then the whole interview lasted slightly more than five minutes. Justice Hancox was impatient, yawned several times and kept looking at his watch. This time the interview lasted less than three minutes.
I always looked at the faces of other political prisoners, and I could see the anxieties occasioned by the nearness of the tribunal. Dreams of freedom were eating into their peace of mind. I myself found it difficult to sleep on the eve of the two sessions. But after the interview, an incredible hollowness would seize me. It took more than two weeks to compose myself into waiting for the next session. I was determined, though, that the second appearance would, for me, be the last. I would thereafter join those who had said that they would not be a party to the gigantic judicial hoax. It was far better to nurse one’s dreams of freedom in privacy and know that they were only dreams and wishes, rather than have them used against you, like Tantalus of old: you were shown the way to quench your thirst for freedom, but on arrival at the gate the way was but an iron barrier and the Detainees Review Tribunal merely watchmen at the gate.