In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir Read online

  Brilliant in many ways and able to evoke the dramas of history, our teachers, like those in other schools, were following a syllabus laid out by the Cambridge Examination Board. I don’t believe they deliberately distorted the story; they simply offered their objective history of Africa from an imperialist point of view. We crammed the notes, facts, viewpoints, and all because, even then we understood that the correct answers to the often-biased questions determined the future. Our future was made in England.

  This pedagogy may have had some unintended benefits: the glamour of the far away and long ago contrasted sharply with the gloom of the near and present. An escape into wintry snow, flowers of spring, mountain chalets, and piracy on the high seas of those times and places carried my mind away from the anxieties of the moment.

  But whatever their fascination, these images of the past could not hold off time. The school vacation finally started on May 10, which for me revived the fear that this could be my last day at Alliance: I would not be allowed back without a clean bill of political health.

  21

  For the first few days of the break, I put off the inevitable confrontation with the chief. Hinga had succeeded his sadistic brother, Ragae, who had been assassinated under dramatic circumstances. Mau Mau agents had stalked him from Limuru market and shot him. They did not kill him, but much later, disguised as hospital assistants, they followed him to Kĩambu hospital and shot him dead through a pillow they used as a silencer. Though Chief Hinga did not exhibit the same level of cruelty as his brother, I assumed that he must harbor resentments against his brother’s assassins. As the end of the break approached, I decided to be done with it, but not without much agonizing. Would he require me to go before yet another screening team to prove that I had not taken the oath? How could I prove that, here in the new Kamĩrĩthũ, where everybody knew about Good Wallace? The chief was sure to be prejudiced against the brother of a Mau Mau guerrilla fighter.

  It was a lonely walk through the narrow streets of the village, to the military post, built on the highest part of the ridge. As I approached the gate, I felt its threatening watchtower looming larger and larger over me. Since its construction in 1954, the post had been a site of torture, its walls built to muffle the cries and moans of the victims. My mother had been incarcerated there for three months answering questions about my brother’s disappearance and again afterward, from time to time, at the whims of the powers.

  Suddenly, from apparently nowhere, I heard a command: halt. After an eerie silence, the drawbridge was lowered. My stomach was very tight as I walked over it. Under the bridge was a cavernous moat covered with barbed wire and jutted with sharp wooden spikes. At the gate, armed with papers and my school uniform, I made my purpose known, and they let me in. Home guards and administrative police, guns slung over their shoulders, moved about the yard, with others cleaning their guns or playing dice or checkers. Still others, wearing vests for shirts, put their clothes on the lines to dry. I was inside an armed camp, my sole protective armor being the Alliance uniform I wore. I was taken to the chief’s office, in the administrative square building with walls of stone and an iron roof.

  I could not believe my eyes. The new chief was Fred Mbũgua, Kenneth’s father, my old teacher at Manguo Elementary who had once noticed and praised my composition. There had been a recent change, apparently, and the illiterate chief had been replaced by one with formal schooling. I did not know what to make of my old teacher as a colonial chief, I was just glad that he did not ask me any questions, simply writing a letter in his clear cursive stating that I had been screened and found not to have taken the oath. I was elated as I left the office and the precinct, even when I realized that although he had signed the letter, he had not marked it with an official stamp. Regardless, I still had to make an expedition to Tigoni district assistant’s office for the final official confirmation of my political cleanliness.

  A fortified home guard post, at Kiajogu in Nyeri District, with watchtower and staked moat

  Tigoni police station, the location of the regional district office, was a few miles from Limuru township, past Loreto Girls School, in an area where Europeans and Africans claimed the same lands, White Highlands to the former, Black People’s Country to the latter. The entrance to the district assistant’s office was a couple yards after the main entrance, and I joined the line waiting for service. Other people came and stood behind me, forming a long queue, and two police officers saw to it that people did not jump the line.

  My turn finally came. A white officer sat behind the desk, bending over a folder. A black police officer, a rifle by his side, stood near him, looking at me suspiciously, as if my Alliance uniform were a fake. Eventually the white officer raised his eyes. He looked young but put on a grave face, performing authority. In my mind, I named him Johnny the Green, Johnny being the generic reference we used for British soldiers. I handed him my Alliance papers and the chief’s document that affirmed my innocence. He glanced at the documents and the letter in silence, then looked at me askance, wondering why I brought him documents that simply confirmed that I was from Alliance and had not taken the oath. I explained, haltingly, that the letter needed his official seal, a requirement before I could be issued a passport. He glanced at it again, took a stamp on the table, and applied it, but as he was about to hand the document back to me, he stopped and looked at it yet again. He must have realized that it was not written on the chief’s letterhead and certainly did not carry the chief’s seal. He gave me the document with the order: Wait outside. You’ll be screened again.

  This was the end of the road for me, I thought. There was no way I was going to pass the bar before a white stranger or the police officers he would ask to screen me. I stood on the veranda for a while. For some reason, none of the officers seemed unduly bothered with me. I even tried making eye contact, without any discernible response. They were clearly more concerned with those in line than with me. I faced a dilemma: wait and fail the screening or walk away and risk arrest. The document with the official seal was in my pocket. Why wait?

  I started moving backward, a step at a time, and nobody attempted to stop me. Two. Three. Four. I was now off the veranda, outside. I turned my back to the building and walked, slowly, unhurriedly, onto the track that led to the main road. I turned left, past the main entrance to the police station. I decided, if caught and taken back to the office, to swear that I had not understood Johnny the Green’s English accent, but the mere thought of being caught broke my armor of carefully cultivated insouciance. Suddenly panic seized me. I heard footsteps. Sirens? Gunfire? Sweat broke out. I started running, not daring to look back to confirm, and did not stop until I was back in Kamĩrĩthũ. The pursuing footsteps, the sirens, and the sounds of gunfire had been in my mind only.

  22

  Back at Alliance at the beginning of August, and now possessing a clean bill of political health, I was issued my passbook. The passbook aimed to further tighten government control of the movement of the Gĩkũyũ, Embu, and Meru communities in the entire country, and to put a wedge between their members and non-GEM Africans. Not even our teachers were exempt.

  By giving the illusion that some communities were more privileged, the state hoped to buy their loyalty. But in reality, when it came to sudden raids, blackness, not passbooks, was the uniform profile and identity of the suspect. It was only after the raids that IDs would help sort out the GEMs and non-GEMs. And by then all would have suffered some form of harassment and humiliation.

  At Alliance, life was back to normal. But the passbook confirmed that the seemingly unconnected rhythms of life in the school, the country, and the world would sometimes cross and impact our lives in the sanctuary directly, making me realize that perhaps the boundary I had assumed to exist between them, like the pursuing sirens of my escape, had all along been in my mind only.

  At any rate, it was clear, by mid-1956, that the rest of my life at Alliance would be a series of crossings between the conflicting realiti
es of the school and the new village. I was coming to terms with the awareness that whatever relief the sanctuary offered me was not permanent, that both locations, Alliance and Kamĩrĩthũ, would always remind me of loss. Incrementally, I also resolved that even in times of fear, I must not succumb to fear completely. The venture inside the Kamĩrĩthũ home guard post, all alone, and my later instinctive escape from Johnny the Green, stoked the nascent defiance within me, urging me to dare outside the walls of the sanctuary, even during term time, despite the hounds at the gate. It was such a crossing, one too many, that eventually earned me a summons to the principal’s office for my first face-to-face encounter with Edward Carey Francis.

  23

  On one special Saturday, students were free to be away from the compound all day, provided they returned to school by six. It was called Nairobi Saturday, probably because many students, particularly those who came from distant places and therefore could not go home, went to the capital city instead. In the first year, I did not take advantage of Nairobi Saturday; my experiences during the term breaks had only increased my reluctance to leave the safety of the school compound. But in the second year, Wanjai persuaded me to accompany him and Leonard Mbũgua to Limuru.

  Wanjai assured me that he and his friends had often walked the ten or fifteen miles and back on previous Nairobi Saturdays without any adverse effects. Besides, his father, Reverend Jeremiah Gitau, had a car and would drive us back. Not that he, or I for that matter, had been in touch with anybody at home: it was always a matter of gamble, hope, and chance.

  The first part of the trip went smoothly. We decided to visit my mother’s place first and end up at his father’s for the transport back. It turned out that my mother was in the fields near Limuru town, on a strip of land that had long been hers to cultivate, even before villagization. I had known the big Mugumo tree in its center since childhood. It symbolized a continuity in my life, and I felt like I was bringing the others to my real home. She fed us her famous potatoes roasted on an open fire.

  Feeling good about ourselves, still sure that we had plenty of time, we decided, at Wanjai’s insistence, to walk to Loreto Girls School just to see them in their flaming red uniforms. Wanjai and his friend wanted to confirm that the girls had hot showers, as the rumors claimed, instead of the cold ones we had at Alliance. After Loreto we would pass by Wanjai’s home and then ride back to school, in style, in his father’s car. So simple.

  At Loreto we let the nun on duty at the office know that we had not come to visit anybody in particular, we just wanted to see the school. Uniformed Alliance boys coming just to visit? Not only did we get an escort to show us around, we were treated like stars, with the girls ogling us, some even whistling, strange in my ears, because I thought only boys did that. Unlike over a year ago, when I took my intermediate school exams at that location and all the girls seemed equally beautiful, this time I was able to tell some differences in their personalities, despite their red uniforms. Wanting to prolong the moment of adulation, we even accepted late afternoon tea with them, dismissing any suggestion that we might be late getting back by saying that we had a ride. When we finally left for Limuru, Wanjai stilled our worries: his father was certain to come to the rescue.

  Well, he did not. Though he never raised his voice in anger, he was not amused and asked Wanjai why he brought his guests home so late in the day. In his calm preacher voice, he said that as we had not asked his permission to waste time, we must have had a plan to get back to Alliance, and we had better follow through with it. We were late back. The next Saturday we were confined to the school to cut grass as punishment. It was a lesson on how not to plan on the expectations of what others will do for you.

  In time, and with each telling, the tale of our visit to Loreto became more dramatic, the inconveniences, fatigue, and dangers of walking alone in the dark morphing into a thrilling adventure. Wanjai must also have sung praises of my mother’s art of roasting potatoes in the open because later many of his friends hinted that they would not mind going to Limuru with me on the next Nairobi Saturday. And was it really true that Loreto Girls School was not too far from where I lived? But since I could not count on somebody being at the new home, I always deflected the hints. I did not want to walk a guest the ten or fifteen miles and back on hungry stomachs. Besides, I could not conjure up another Loreto visit, which was obviously the main attraction.

  24

  In the second term, on another Nairobi Saturday, I broke my self-imposed restraint and invited Johana Mwalwala. Johana, a Mtaita, and I were classmates, he in B and I in A, but both residents in Dorm Two, Livingstone House. He was always polite and considerate, and this drew me to him. I confessed to him that I had no way of alerting home about the visit, that we were chancing it, and he understood. I think he just wanted to get away from the compound on a Nairobi Saturday.

  We set out after breakfast, and by the early afternoon we could see Kamĩrĩthũ. I was confident that if my mother was at home, she would find a way of feeding us her roasted potatoes at least. We would eat quickly, drink some porridge or tea, and walk back to school. This time there was no expectations of another person’s car: we were going to rely on our feet. And there was no question of visiting Loreto or indulging in any other distraction. If we stayed within these parameters, everything would work out as hoped, and the nearer we got to Kamĩrĩthũ, the more certain I was of a good outcome. But our plans never came to be.

  Just before we reached the turn to my new home, we were caught up in a military dragnet. Armed black and white soldiers in camouflage, red berets, and green military vehicles and Land Rovers surrounded a huge crowd squatting in the sun in the plain below the village. I had hoped the Alliance uniform would make us invisible, but it didn’t, and we were forced to join the captives. Mwalwala, being a Mtaita, was allowed to leave, but I had a long wait, weighed down by the anxiety I always carried: that my connection with a guerrilla fighter might keep me from returning to Alliance, ever. Every time I seemed to conquer that fear, other events would crop up to mock me with, Not so fast.

  Eventually my turn came. I had learned my lessons from the past and answered all the questions about my brother and whether I knew his contacts, calmly pleading sincere ignorance to most of them, shielding myself behind being away at Alliance, a boarding school. Despite all my bravado about not letting fear rule me, I could not believe that this was happening to me on the only Saturday I had brought a visitor home by myself. Finally, they released me.

  Wisely, Mwalwala had already headed back to school. I hurried home to tell my family what had happened, but they already knew. My mother said that it was really not necessary to come home before the end of the term. I grabbed whatever food there was and left. Shaken and disappointed, I walked back to school in the dark, alone. I was late, very late. I had committed the same offense twice. On Monday I was called to the principal’s office.

  25

  I was sure that I was going to be caned, even expelled from the school. Since my admission, I had always wondered how long it would be before the fact of my brother being in the mountains caught up with me. Somehow, after that Churchill speech, I could not get rid of the image of Carey Francis as a defender of the British Empire. After all, he was an OBE. The image of the empire loyalist and the legend of the disciplinarian were in my mind as I entered the office.

  He was in his eternal khaki wear. I stood before him, and his eyes pierced me the whole time. Why had I broken the school rule so badly that I had returned to school at midnight? This was the second time. Did I know how serious this breach of school rules was? Nairobi Saturday did not mean breaking rules. He appeared calm, but it seemed to me that he might, at any time, start stepping, rolling his tongue in his cheek, and fuming. I eyed the door and the windows.

  I faced a dilemma. The whole of last Saturday lay before me. I could tell him about the raid, but did I have to talk about the questions and my responses? If I told him that my brother was out in the mountains f
ighting against Churchill’s empire, I could be expelled from the sanctuary and have to return to the village and the community prison I had helped to build during my very first break as an Alliance student, the place that always reminded me of loss. Still, I decided to tell him everything.

  There! At long last, my secret was out. I was relieved. It was my turn to dare him, silently, looking straight into his eyes, resigned to my fate. You are an officer of the British Empire. My brother is sworn to end the empire. Send me back to my mother, if you so wish, but I will never deny him. Not for you. Not for Alliance. My brother is a good man. All he ever asked for was the right to be free. Had your Churchill not fought Hitler so that his people would not be ruled by the Germans? You see, sir, my brother wants the same thing for his people. All he ever wanted was—Carey Francis cut off my flow of thoughts.

  Had I been in my Alliance uniform last Saturday? he asked. It was the last thing I expected from his mouth. Alliance uniform? Of course, yes, with the badge and the logo, AHS, I said. He did not ask any more questions. You can go, but in future, be more careful. Some of those officers are scoundrels! he added, gritting his teeth.

  I was completely taken aback, confused even, by his reaction. I was relieved and grateful that he did not dole out any punishment, but to call the British officers scoundrels? In the world of Carey Francis, politicians were either statesmen or scoundrels. Bureaucrats were either statesmen or scoundrels. Those who had detained me, even though white officers, were scoundrels for discounting the evidence of the Alliance uniform.