The River Between Read online

  MESSAGE FROM CHINUA ACHEBE

  Africa is a huge continent with a diversity of cultures and languages. Africa is not simple—often people want to simplify it, generalize it, stereotype its people, but Africa is very complex. The world is just starting to get to know Africa. The last five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light, and now the time has come for Africans to tell their own stories.

  The Penguin African Writers Series will bring a new energy to the publication of African literature. Penguin Books is committed to publishing both established and new voices from all over the African continent to ensure African stories reach a wider global audience.

  This is really what I personally want to see—writers from all over Africa contributing to a definition of themselves, writing ourselves and our stories into history. One of the greatest things literature does is allow us to imagine; to identify with situations and people who live in completely different circumstances, in countries all over the world. Through this series, the creative exploration of those issues and experiences that are unique to the African consciousness will be given a platform, not only throughout Africa, but also to the world beyond its shores.

  Storytelling is a creative component of human experience and in order to share our experiences with the world, we as Africans need to recognize the importance of our own stories. By starting the series on the solid foundations laid by the renowned Heinemann African Writers Series, I am honored to join Penguin in inviting young and upcoming writers to accept the challenge passed down by celebrated African authors of earlier decades and to continue to explore, confront, and question the realities of life in Africa through their work; challenging Africa’s people to lift her to her rightful place among the nations of the world.

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE RIVER BETWEEN

  NGUGI WA THIONG’O was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. One of the leading African writers and scholars at work today, he is the author of Weep Not, Child; The River Between; A Grain of Wheat; Homecoming; Petals of Blood; Devil on the Cross; Matigari; Decolonising the Mind; Moving the Center; Writers in Politics; and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, among other works, which include novels, short stories, essays, a memoir, and plays. In 1977, the year he published Petals of Blood, Ngugi’s play I Will Marry When I Want (cowritten with Ngugi wa Mirii and harshly critical of the injustices of Kenyan society) was performed, and at the end of the year Ngugi was arrested. He was detained for a year without trial at a maximum-security prison in Kenya. The theater where the play was performed was razed by police in 1982.

  Ngugi’s numerous honors include the East Africa Novel Prize; UNESCO First Prize; the Lotus Prize for Literature; the Paul Robeson Award for Artistic Excellence, Political Conscience and Integrity; the Zora Neale Hurston–Paul Robeson Award for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement; the Fonlon-Nichols Prize for Artistic Excellence and Human Rights; the Distinguished Africanist Award; the Gwendolyn Brooks Center Contributors Award for significant contribution to the black literary arts; and the Nonino International Literary Prize for the Italian translation of his book Moving the Center. Ngugi has given many distinguished lectures, including the 1984 Robb Lectures at Auckland University, New Zealand, and the 1996 Clarendon Lectures in English at Oxford University. He received the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Cabinet for “his uncompromising efforts to assert the values implicit in the multicultural approach embracing the experience and aspirations of all the world’s minorities.” He has taught in many universities, including Nairobi, Northwestern, and Yale. He was named New York University’s Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Languages and was professor of comparative literature and performance studies. In 2003 Ngugi was elected as an honorary member in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Currently he is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

  UZODINMA IWEALA is the author of the award-winning novel Beasts of No Nation and is one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, and New York City.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Publishers Ltd, 1965

  This edition with an introduction by Uzodinma Iweala published in Penguin Books 2015

  Copyright © 1965 by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Uzodinma Iweala

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1938–

  The river between / Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-0-698-16677-6

  1. Kikuyu (African people)—Kenya—Fiction. 2. Kenya—History—1895–1963—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9381.9.N45R5 2015

  823'.914—dc23 2015006434

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph: Nigel Pavitt/Getty Images

  Version_1

  Contents

  Message from Chinua Achebe

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Notes

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  In The River Between the form of Gikuyu is used correctly for the people and language of the Kikuyu area.

  Introduction

  Free Your Mind

  My first encounter with Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s writing came relatively late for a person who considers himself a student of African literature. A friend of mine, a painter from South Africa, left a copy of Ngugi’s essay collection Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature in my apartment with the instruction to read it if I wanted to “free my mind.” These days it is hard to read such words without thinking first of the 1999 blockbuster science fiction movie The Matrix, in which humans have become slaves to technology, which has imprisoned them in a picture-perfect virtual world. While most people in the film move around oblivious to the fact that they are literally sleeping through life, a select fe
w experience discontent with the perceived order and long for something more. They are offered a choice between the blue pill, a chance to erase all indications of their discontent, and the red pill, an opportunity to explore the twists and turns of an enlightened life. Their problem is that freeing the mind requires that they embrace a contradiction: their world is built on a fallacy and this fallacy provides a foundation for what can be an expansive—if difficult—new life.

  Ngugi’s body of work, from his 1965 novel The River Between to his 2012 memoir In the House of the Interpreter, is the red pill, delivering readers from a simplistic understanding of the forces of colonialism in Africa to a complicated imagining of Africa before, during, and after colonialism. Decolonising the Mind, first published in 1986, some ten years after he wrote Petals of Blood, the last novel he wrote in English, is Ngugi’s self-described “farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings,”1 and it provides great insight into the motivation for all of Ngugi’s writing, but especially for The River Between and his other early novels.

  In Decolonising the Mind, one of the most marvelous analyses of the colonized (or formerly colonized) person’s existential predicament since Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth or Black Skin, White Masks, Ngugi explores the role that language plays in the process of colonization and in the long and incomplete struggle to emerge from colonialism’s shadow. It is not an easy text, primarily because it advocates abandoning many assumptions that the postcolonial African (which is to say every living African) has about the struggle for freedom and the institutions that structure everyday life. Ngugi’s unpacking of the damage done to independence movements by Africans being forced to use the colonizers’ languages to express discontent calls into question the authenticity of the work he chose to write in English, but such is the attitude of Ngugi, a writer profoundly allergic to the simple. Ngugi describes African existence as a struggle between two competing forces, an imperialist tradition and a resistance tradition:

  The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.2

  For Ngugi, imperialism extends well beyond the period of European expansion into Africa following the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884–85, which divided the continent’s peoples among European fiefdoms. Ngugi’s imperialism is not a time-bound event. It is an infectious mind-set that radically corrupts self-perceptions and sociohistorical narratives, a constant and dynamic process initiated to cause

  despair, despondency and a collective death wish. Amidst this wasteland which it has created, imperialism presents itself as the cure and demands that the dependant sing hymns of praise with the constant refrain: “Theft is holy.” Indeed, this refrain sums up the new creed of the neocolonial bourgeoisie in many independent African states.3

  A disease that offers itself as its own cure? A problem that presents itself as its own solution? This is the circular reasoning against which Ngugi argues in his critical nonfiction and his fiction. His oeuvre is unapologetically ideological while at the same time concerned with the aesthetics that distinguish art from propaganda. Ngugi describes his approach to writing like this:

  First of all let me say [that] writing out of ideological convictions, of course, is very important. One has important ideas that arouse one’s anger, passion [and] commitment. . . . But of course when one is actually writing fiction or poetry and so on it is very important that one lets those ideas emerge from concrete reality. . . . In other words, to try and not necessarily impose those ideas on the situation. . . . So the fictional narrative has to be artistically compelling to the reader and I would say this is a challenge to fiction writers. Because there is no way we can simply impose your views, your ideology, no matter how much you are convinced of that ideology, onto a situation. Rather the situation concretely should be the one that generates those ideas.4

  • • •

  It is with this in mind that we can now turn to Ngugi’s The River Between, the first novel he wrote—and the second to be published—in a career that spans numerous works in multiple languages. It is perhaps one of the first pieces of African fiction to deliberately address the complex thoughts and feelings of Africans about living under colonialism.

  Written during Ngugi’s final years as a student of English at Makerere University, an affiliate of the University of London in Kampala, Uganda, The River Between was first published a year after his novel Weep Not, Child (1964), which he wrote after The River Between. It represents an inflection point in his life, marking his transition from amateur artist to professional craftsman. More important, it presents evidence of an evolution of his attitude toward the colonial apparatus that would eventually lead to his decision to write only in Gikuyu as a means of celebrating African literary and cultural traditions while escaping the bubble of a petite bourgeoisie readership in favor of a readership of the masses.

  Ngugi has chronicled his literary and personal growth in several memoirs that speak both fondly and critically of the colonial education he received. He developed a love of the English literary canon and Christian religious traditions while living through numerous pre-independence upheavals—the Mau Mau rebellion among them—in which the British, who were responsible for his education and for introducing him to the Christian church, imprisoned his brother and tortured his mother during a state of emergency. In a sustained exploration of how James Ngugi, admirer of Conrad and the Bible, became Ngugi wa Thiong’o, firebrand postcolonial novelist and imperialist critic, the scholar Carol Sicherman suggests that Ngugi’s personal experience along with an undercurrent of campus revolutionary spirit gave rise to a transformation that finds expression in his early work. She also cites the 1962 African Writers Conference, which exposed for Ngugi and other East African writers the lack of literary material produced in their region as compared to southern and western Africa.5 It was around this time that Ngugi ventured to show his manuscript of The River Between to Hugh Dinwiddy, a British faculty member at Makerere. Dinwiddy remembers saying, “It’s time we had some African novelists. We can’t go on with Elspeth Huxley.” His recollection continues:

  And so about three weeks later, at ten o’clock at night there came a knock on our front door, and there was James [Ngugi]. He said, “I’ve done something awful.” I said, “What can I do? How can I help?” He said, “I’ve started writing a novel, and I’ve got stuck! There it is.” He’d brought the manuscript with him, stacks of paper. I said, “For goodness sake, come in.”6

  The River Between distills this atmosphere of urgency, self-questioning, and change into a beautifully compact and almost dystopian bildungsroman set in a vaguely fictional historical context around the time of the push by the British colonial religious infrastructure to eradicate female circumcision. At first its subject seems to be Waiyaki, a young boy who is supposed to mature into a beacon of hope and renewal for the Gikuyu community he inhabits as it processes its first encounter with the newly arrived white man, but really its subject is the tension surrounding this community as it confronts change.

  Writers have never been an easy lot. More than anyone—except perhaps soldiers or mercenaries—they thrive on conflict, viewing it as an integral part of any society. Ngugi is no exception. In fact, he is a master at placing conflict at the center of his narrative, almost at the expense of the characters who must live through it. In its account of a small community’s interaction with imperial powers, The River Between offers us not the idea that there was peace before the white man and will be peace when Africa expels him, but the notion, however disturbing, that we owe this colonial conflict not resolution but understanding or even, if you will, respect.

  The River Between begins like this:

  The two ridges l
ay 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.

  This opening has long fascinated scholars because of its privileging of geography, place, and their mythological significance over characters as a narrative force. The novel starts slowly, almost frustratingly so, building tension in its imagery of opposition, of the ridges Kameno and Makuyu—villages that we come to learn have competing philosophies—as lions in extended slumber. What is so important about Ngugi’s world is the suggestion that this tension predates colonialism. “It began long ago,” he writes, and we are introduced not to a precolonial utopia, unsophisticated in its social dynamics, but to a complex environment. Colonialism is not the start of history, nor will it be its end; it exacerbates existing tensions, embodied in an opening scene by a fight between two boys from different ridges: Kamau, the son of Kabonyi, the closest thing to the novel’s villain, and Kinuthia, the fatherless youth who later serves as the voice of clarity for an increasingly isolated Waiyaki. It is a young Waiyaki who breaks up the fight, and in so doing establishes himself as the presence through which readers will access subsequent struggles in the narrative.

  Waiyaki is introduced as a typical hero. As a boy he is “already tall for his age,” with a “well-built, athletic body” and a scar from an errant goat. Most important, he has the right curiosity and bloodline. He role-plays the mythological heroes of the tribe while attending to his daily duties but gains real insight into his supposed purpose and the turmoil it will bring through his father, Chege, a weary prophet and elder statesman from the Kameno ridge. Chege is privy to secrets of the tribe—the prophecy that the white man will come like butterflies, that the tribe will produce a savior to deal with him, and that this savior will come from his own lineage, a prominent bloodline that includes the seer Mugo wa Kibiro.