Wrestling With the Devil: A Prison Memoir Read online

  I had neither the time nor the necessary energy to tell him that I had had a premonition, that I had just returned home from Nairobi after saying a rather elaborate farewell to my drinking buddies at the Impala Hotel, that I had even firmly and repeatedly refused a beer, that I had driven from Impala Hotel, Nairobi, to Limuru at a snail’s pace, literally no more than twenty-five miles per hour the whole way, that on arrival home, instead of putting on my pajamas and slipping into bed beside Nyambura, I just lay on the cover fully clad, staring at the ceiling and turning over the recent events since public performances of my play Ngaahika Ndeenda had been banned, and that when I heard the knocking at the door and put on my shoes and went to the window and saw uniformed police officers, I felt as if I had been expecting the scene all along.

  This I could not tell him, even if I had had the necessary energy or desire, because a few seconds after his query, some other police came for me, put me in another car, and drove me away. These were not among the ones who arrested me, and they didn’t utter a word to me or to each other. It was only after what seemed an eternity that we reached another police station. Kĩambu!

  The same ritual. Into an empty room, in silence. They leave and I hear them lock the door from the outside. I was not alone for very long. A tall slim man came in and, still standing, staring straight ahead, almost past me, made the formal announcement:

  “I am Superintendent Mbũrũ attached to Kĩambu Police Station, and I am under instructions to arrest and place you in detention. Have you anything to say?”

  The whole exercise, executed in an emotionless tone, had a slightly comic side: So between Limuru and Kĩambu I was not under police arrest?

  “Do your duty!” was all I said.

  He didn’t handcuff me. As he walked me toward a yellow Volvo not marked with police colors, an onlooker would have thought that he and I were old friends. Mbũrũ drove; I sat in the passenger seat next to him. I almost relaxed at the respite from the show of armed terror! Mbũrũ even started a conversation:

  “Did your family originally come from the Rift Valley?” he asked.

  “No!” I said.

  “I have had that impression from reading your books.”

  “I only write about it,” I said.

  It was so casual, so ordinary, that it felt as though Mbũrũ was only giving me a lift to Nairobi instead of taking me to an unknown destination.

  Then the ordinariness of the situation began to disturb me. He and I were alone in the car. Though in civilian clothes, he was still a police officer, an agent of the state. He was armed, it was night, and there were no other vehicles on the road. Suddenly, what had once happened to Josiah Mwangi Kariũki crossed my mind. On March 2, 1975, JM, a prominent populist nationalist, was taken by police from a Nairobi Hotel in the daytime, and his body was later found mutilated in Ngong Forest. Could Mbũrũ be on a similar mission?

  My wife knew only that I had been taken by Tigoni police. The Tigoni police knew only that they had handed me to Kĩambu police. And the police who brought me to Kĩambu hadn’t even seen Mbũrũ walk me to the car. The breaks in the chain of custody began to seem eerily sinister. None of those in that chain could ever tell more than they knew. And now there was no eyewitness to anything that might happen to me. The torturous thoughts ended only when I saw him stop at Kilimani Police Station, in Nairobi, the capital city.

  The following morning—it was now Saturday, the last day of 1977—a Mr. Munene Mũhĩndĩ, who I later came to learn was an assistant commissioner of police in charge of the Nairobi area and also the political prisoners’ security officer, served me with detention orders. No sooner did he leave than some police came in and suddenly grabbed me and roughly put me in chains. I was then shoved from behind into the backseat of a blue car between two hefty police officers armed with a machine gun and a rifle, while a third one, equally well equipped, sat in the front seat beside the driver. Blinds were drawn on all sides except the back, but anybody looking would have seen only the police officers, not the prisoner sandwiched between them. They drive through the heavy traffic in Nairobi to the gates of the infamous Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison.

  The driver almost smashed his way through the heavy closed outer doors of the giant prison. Realizing his mistake, he quickly backed into a small bush, under a tree, car blinds still drawn, so that none of the people walking about could see who or what was inside the Black Maria.

  The whole area around Kamĩtĩ was put under curfew—suddenly at noon! I saw innocent men, women, and children dive for cover pursued by baton-waving prison guards, and within seconds, there was not a single civilian standing or walking in the vicinity. The poor folk had unknowingly made the mistake of peacefully going about their daily chores during the ceremony of detention and imprisonment and no doubt paid for the pleasure with a few bruises here and there. I had last seen such a scene in colonial Kenya during the barbaric State of Emergency when similar terror tactics were a daily occurrence.

  Even the huge prison gates, which, like the jaws of a ravenous monster, now slowly swung open to swallow me, reminded me of the colonial past. Those walls still dripped with the blood of the many Kenyan nationalists, fighters, and supporters of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, derisively labeled Mau Mau by the colonial settler state. They had died as mere numbers on prison files. Even now, still belonging to nameless numbers, their bones, including Dedan Kĩmathi’s,13 lie in that foul place, unwept and unremembered by ungrateful inheritors of the power they paid for with their lives. They had lost their names, forever.

  Ironies of history: it was now my turn. From Saturday December 31, 1977, I had died to my name of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Henceforth I would only answer to a lifeless number on a file among many files. K6,77 was my new identity.

  6

  Later I would learn that for two weeks after my abduction, my family and the nation were kept in ignorance of my fate. Every police and government official pleaded ignorance until my detention was announced in the Kenya Gazette of January 6, 1978 (though this issue was held and not released until January 14).

  Even then my whereabouts remained a secret known only to an initiated few. The government went to ridiculous lengths to hide all our whereabouts, like convening the Detainees Review Tribunal in Mombasa and flying the political prisoners there. Yet virtually all the members of the tribunal were transported from Nairobi, only ten minutes’ drive from Kamĩtĩ. Or like the mystery surrounding a political prisoner’s meeting with family at Embakasi Airport, Nairobi, giving the family the impression that their prisoner son had been flown there from afar. For the duration of the visit, a police officer was present. And whenever a political prisoner went out and came in, curfew was clamped on the entire prison.

  Why all the mystery, the suspense, the secrecy? Did they really fear that people would storm Kamĩtĩ Prison to free political prisoners by force?

  The ruling clique knows it has a monopoly of all the instruments of coercive violence, but it also knows that no force on earth can finally put down the organized power of an awakened people—hence the imperative to raise people in a culture of fear and silence,14 to make them feel weak and helpless before the might of the state. The state assumes the malevolent character of a terrifying supernatural force that can be placated only by the supplications of a people on their knees, appeased only by the sacrifice of human flesh by assassinations, as in the cases of Pio Gama Pinto15 and J. M. Kariũki,16 both progressive nationalists.

  The rituals of mystery and secrecy are calculated exercises in psychological terror aimed both at the whole people—part of the culture of fear—and at individual political prisoners—part of the strategy to break them. The first is harder to see, for it can only be understood by delving into history, our history, to trace the roots of the current ruling-class culture. That will come later. It is to understand it that I am writing this account. The latter is easier to see, however, for it is part of the daily trials of a political prisoner.

  The r
ituals, seemingly petty and childish but rigorously followed to the letter by decorated guards and bemedaled officers, serve to make political prisoners feel that they have been completely cut off from the people and hence from group solidarity—the sense of being one with the people—which alone keeps men and women going, even when menaced by truncheons, nailed boots, tear gas, and death whistling bullets. They must be made, not just to know, but to actually feel that, with the links cut, they are now adrift in an ocean of endless fear and humiliation. They are not introduced into the ocean gradually. They are thrown into it to swim and stay afloat any way they know—or plunge into the depths and drown.

  In the first month, I was locked up in cell 16 for twenty-two hours every day. The remaining two hours were distributed to cover the daily chores of emptying the chamber pot full to the top with shit and urine; gulping down the breakfast, lunch, and supper of porridge, ugali corn meal and beans; and getting sunshine and exercise. How had the other political prisoners coped with these conditions? I would ask myself. How had they managed to stay afloat?

  For the first three weeks of that month, I was also under internal segregation. This simply meant that no other political prisoner was allowed near me. During meals, I was made to sit apart from the others, often with a guard between us. During my ration of sunshine, I had to sit in my corner, often with a watchful guard to ensure that there was no talking or other contact between me and any of the others.

  Because we were all in the same block, it wasn’t easy for the warders to enforce total segregation. The other political prisoners would break through the cordon by shouting across to me or by finding any and every excuse for going past where I was sitting and hurriedly throwing in one or two words of solidarity. Or they might assure me of their solidarity as they walked past my cell—the other political prisoners were let out for sunshine in groups of twos or threes for short periods, and a few for much longer periods, though no more than three of them were allowed into the yard at once, on doctor’s orders. This was always very touching coming from people who were in no better conditions.

  Sometimes two political prisoners would stand just far enough away not to be accused of being with me but near enough for me to hear everything. They would talk to each other about various aspects of prison life, sometimes offering advice or hints on how to cope, but I knew that this was meant for me. And at night, or when inside our cells in the day, there was no way of preventing the others from shouting messages and anecdotes through the walls or keep me from shouting back news of what had been happening in the world up to the time of my arrest.

  Despite the best efforts of my fellow political prisoners to break the walls of segregation, however, the feeling of being alone would often steal into me, and I would be seized with the momentary panic of a man drowning in a sea of frothy terror. I often felt like lepers in medieval Europe, who had to carry small bells around their necks to announce their leprous presence to the healthy, or the Osu, the Untouchables, well portrayed in Chinua Achebe’s novels, who had to jump into the bush to let a freeborn pass. In my case, I was being denied the social fellowship of even the other political untouchables.

  Months later, when I told the other political prisoners about my feelings during those weeks of January, they laughed and told me how lucky I was to have had them around me, that the sense of isolation is a thousand times more intense for those in solitary confinement.

  Mũhoro wa Mũthoga, popularly known as Fujika, told me that his own initiation into prison life at Kamĩtĩ was through a six-month solitary confinement in a ghostly cell in what was known as the isolation block. Every effort was exerted to make him live and feel the reality behind that phrase. His only contacts were the guards who brought him food, let him out for an hour of sunshine and exercise, and guarded the empty silent corridors. One guard always walked on tiptoe. Another would open the cell door, push food inside, and then jump back quickly, shutting the door as if the inmate were a dangerous animal in a cage. Yet another guard, the most liberal, would speak to him words through clenched teeth as if the words were being painfully pulled out of his tongue at some cost, and even then the words would come out as whispers. Otherwise the others communicated with him only in gestures.

  He started doubting himself: Could he possibly and unknowingly have done something more terrible than just asking for application forms from the attorney general to legally register a new democratic political party? Could he have misread the Kenyan constitution, which, on paper at least, allowed more than one political party? The application forms had been sent to him, all right. He had sent the forms back with the constitution of the intended party. In answer, he was arrested and sent to Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison. Maybe intentions to form new political parties to represent classes other than the comprador17 bourgeoisie had been banned, and he had failed to read the relevant gazette! He told me that he always felt as if he was under a death sentence, awaiting execution.

  Gradually he grew into the habit of also speaking in whispers or gesturing whenever he wanted to ask for something. On a few occasions, he caught himself walking on tiptoe, even when alone. When he was finally let out of the six-month ordeal and met the others in the main detention block, he was really scared of them, as if they were beings from another world. He started speaking to them in whispers!

  I was never subjected to this form of torture. My own initiation into prison life took the psychological form of internal segregation. Nevertheless, the constant reminder of my social apartness, this cruel human isolation in the midst of fellow humans, a case really of water everywhere and not a drop to drink, began to tell on me. I became edgy. Voices of guards, even when seemingly friendly, would grate on my nerves unpleasantly; murderous thoughts would suddenly seize me. Fortunately for me (and others), these thoughts found no physical expression. But soon they found an outlet in words!

  7

  The first verbal “victim” was the prison chaplain, who one morning came into my cell staggering under the weight of two huge Bibles—The Living Bible in English and Ibuku Rĩa Ngai (The Holy Bible) in Gĩkũyũ—plus a bundle of revivalist tracts from the American-millionaire-rich evangelical missions. He was in a prison officer’s uniform of khaki trousers and jumper coat with aluminum buttons and a decoration of two or three stones on the shoulder flaps. He also carried the hallmark of all prison officers and warders—a cord over the left shoulder carrying a whistle hidden in the breast pocket. Underneath these symbols of oppression, he wore the holy uniform of a reverend: a black cloak with a white collar around the neck. I held my tongue and let him talk.

  “Sometimes,” he said, after sitting on the edge of the desk seat with me on the bed, “God chastises us for our own good. . . . Take Mau Mau, for instance. . . . Mau Mau was God’s scourge with which he lashed Kenyans to teach them a good lesson. . . . The fruit of this lesson, well learnt, is the stability we now enjoy and which is the envy of our neighbors.”

  I could hardly believe my ears: KLFA, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, or Mau Mau, as the British called the soldiers of liberation, who, with their sacrifice and courage, wrote the most glorious chapter in our nation’s long history of struggle, was to this man with the cloak of a priest beneath a prison officer’s uniform, a huge sjambok (whip) with which God flagellated Kenyans into humble submission to his eternal will.

  “We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God,” he said. “Who knows, maybe this is a unique God-created chance for you to meet with Christ.” He went on: “God works in mysterious ways, his wonder to perform,”

  He didn’t see the anger seething inside me. In my silence, he could see only a being about to be smitten to the ground by the thunderbolt of the Lord, like Saul in the New Testament. But to me, his attempts at verbal comfort sounded like prayers of thanksgiving for being chosen to be the earthly instrument of God’s mysterious ways of performing his wonders, and his attempts at converting me were trumpets of victory over a fallen foe of imperialist Christendom. br />
  My silence lured him on. He now presented me with the two Bibles.

  “The Bible is the only book in the world containing within its hard covers a complete library,” he said, fingering each Bible lovingly as he placed it on the desk. “Sixty-six books in one . . . how many people can boast of a home library that big?”

  He then handed me two religious tracts—one of which was God’s City in Heaven or some such title—with obvious awe at the American-manufactured weightless leaves of holiness.

  Despite my mounting anger, I beat a hasty retreat from his verbal onslaught and actually took the leaves. I really felt weak before the moral certainty of a man who had walked the same path over and over again and hence knows every sharp corner and dangerous bend, every nook and brook on the way, a man who knows clearly, from years of experience, where this path leads to: a prisoner’s acceptance to carry the cross forever without a murmur of discontent, because he now has the spiritual satisfaction of having Christ for a personal savior.

  The visit had been beautifully timed. For over two weeks now, I had not engaged in any debate; indeed, I had hardly talked to anyone at any length since the night I was abducted from home. I had been denied human company. At the time of his visit, all the older political prisoners except Martin Shikuku, had gone to Shimo La Tewa Prison in Mombasa to meet the review tribunal. I was totally alone. I felt as if I were on the run, relentlessly pursued by an invisible silent malignant force that, despite my every effort to outdistance it, had finally caught up with me and was now transforming me, a free agent able to make decisions, into a passive creature panting and cringing for mercy at the feet of the twin warders of body and soul. My hard anger had now melted into a kind of spiritual lethargy and intellectual torpidity. What’s the point of talking back? Isn’t it easier, for me, for everybody, but mostly for me, to buy peace with silence?