Dreams in a Time of War (2 page)

I was born in 1938, under the shadow of another war, the Second World War, to Thiong’o wa Ndũcũ, my father, and Wanjikũ wa Ngũgĩ, my mother. I don’t know where I ranked, in terms of years, among the twenty-four children of my father and his four wives, but I was the fifth child of my mother’s house. Ahead of me were the eldest sister, Gathoni; eldest brother, Wallace Mwangi; and sisters Njoki and Gacirũ, in that order, with my younger brother, Njinjũ, being the sixth and last born of my mother.

My earliest recollection of home was of a large courtyard, five huts forming a semicircle. One of these was my father’s, where goats also slept at night. It was the main hut not because of its size but because it was set apart and equidistant from the other four. It was called a
thingira
. My father’s wives, or our mothers as we called them, would take food to his hut in turns.

Each woman’s hut was divided into spaces with different functions, a three-stone fireplace at its center; sleeping areas and a kind of pantry; a large section for goats and, quite often, a small enclosure, a pen for fattening sheep or goats to be slaughtered for special occasions. Each household had a
granary, a small round hut on stilts, with walls made of thin sticks woven together. The granary was a measure of plenty and dearth. After a good harvest, it would be full with corn, potatoes, beans, and peas. We could tell if days of hunger were approaching or not by how much was in the granary. Adjoining the courtyard was a huge kraal for cows, with smaller sheds for calves. Women collected the cow dung and goat droppings and deposited them at a dump site by the main entrance to the yard. Over the years the dump site had grown into a hill covered by green stinging nettles. The hill was so huge and it seemed to me a wonder that grown-ups were able to climb up and down it with so much ease. Sloping down from the hill was a forested landscape. As a child just beginning to walk, I used to follow, with my eyes, my mothers and the older siblings as they went past the main gate to our yard, and it seemed to me that the forest mysteriously swallowed them up in the morning, and in the evening, as mysteriously, disgorged them unharmed. It was only later when I was able to walk a bit farther from the yard that I saw that there were paths among the trees. I learned that down beyond the forest was the Limuru Township and across the railway line, white-owned plantations where my older siblings went to pick tea leaves for pay.

Then things changed, I don’t know how gradually or suddenly, but they changed. The cows and the goats were the first to go, leaving behind empty sheds. The dump site was no longer the depository of cow dung and goat droppings but garbage only. Its height became less threatening in time and I too could run up and down with ease. Then our mothers
stopped cultivating the fields around our courtyard; they now worked in other fields far from the compound. My father’s
thingira
was abandoned, and now the women trekked some distance to take food to him. I was aware of trees being cut down, leaving only stumps, soil being dug up, followed by pyrethrum planting. It was strange to see the forest retreating as the pyrethrum fields advanced. More remarkable, my sisters and brothers were working seasonally in the new pyrethrum fields that had eaten up our forest, where before they had worked only across the rails in the European-owned tea plantations.

The changes in the physical and social landscape were not occurring in any discernible order; they merged into each other, all a little confusing. But, somehow, in time, I began to connect a few threads, and things became clearer as if I was emerging from a mist. I learned that our land was not quite our land; that our compound was part of property owned by an African landlord, Lord Reverend Stanley Kahahu, or Bwana Stanley as we called him; that we were now
ahoi
, tenants at will. How did we come to be
ahoi
on our own land? Had we lost our traditional land to Europeans? The mist had not cleared entirely.

My father, fairly aloof, talked very little about his past. Our mothers, around whom our lives revolved, seemed reluctant to divulge details of what they knew about it. However, bits and pieces, gleaned from whispers, hints, and occasional anecdotes, gradually coalesced into a narrative of his life and his side of the family.

My paternal grandfather was originally a Maasai child who strayed into a Gĩkũyũ homestead somewhere in Mũrang’a either as war ransom, a captive, or an abandoned child escaping some hardship like famine. Initially, he did not know the Gĩkũyũ language and the Maasai words he uttered frequently sounded to a Gĩkũyũ ear like
tũcũ
or
tũcũka
, so they called him Ndũcũ, meaning “the child who always said
tũcũ.”
He was also given the honorific generation name Mwangi. Grandfather Ndũcũ, it is said, eventually married two wives, both named Wangeci. With one of the Wangecis he had two sons, Njinjũ, or Baba Mũkũrũ, as we called him, and my father, Thiong’o, as well as three daughters, Wanjirũ, Njeri, and Wairimũ. With the second Wangeci, he had two other boys, Kariũki and Mwangi Karuithia, also known as Mwangi the surgeon, so called because
he later became a specialist in male circumcision and practiced his profession throughout Gĩkũyũ and Maasailand.

I was not destined to meet my grandfather Ndũcũ or grandmother Wangeci. A mysterious illness afflicted the region. My grandfather was among the first to go, followed quickly by his two wives and daughter Wanjirũ. Just before dying, my grandmother, believing that the family was under a fatal curse from the past or a strong bewitchment from jealous neighbors—for how could people drop dead just like that after a bout of body heat?—commanded my father and his brother to seek refuge with relatives who had already emigrated to Kabete, miles away, among them being their sisters Njeri and Wairimũ. They were sworn never to return to Mũrang’a or divulge their exact origins to their progeny so as not to tempt their descendants to go back to claim rights to family land and meet the same fate. The two boys kept their promise to their mother: They fled Mũrang’a.

The mysterious illness that wiped out my grandparents and forced my father to take flight only made sense when years later I read stories of communal afflictions in the Old Testament. Then I would think of my father and his brother as part of an exodus from a plague of biblical proportion, in search of a promised land. But when I read about Arab slave traders, missionary explorers, and even big game hunters—young Churchill in 1907 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 and a long line of others to follow—I reimagined my father and uncle as two adventurers armed with bows and arrows traversing the same paths, dodging these hunters, fighting off marauding lions, narrowly escaping slithery snakes, hacking
their way through the wild bush of a primeval forest across valleys and ridges, till they suddenly came to a plain. There they stood in awe and fear. Before their eyes were stone buildings of various heights, paths crowded with carriages of different shapes and people of various colors from black to white. Some of the white people sat in carriages pulled and pushed by black men. These must be the white spirits, the
mizungu
, and this, the Nairobi they had heard about as having sprung from the bowels of the earth. But nothing had prepared them for the railway lines and the terrifying monster that vomited fire and occasionally made a blood-curdling cry.

Nairobi was created by that monster. Initially an assembly center for the massive material for railway construction and the extensive supporting services, Nairobi had quickly mushroomed into a town of thousands of Africans, hundreds of Asians, and a handful of cantankerous Europeans who dominated it. By 1907, when Winston Churchill, as Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s parliamentary undersecretary of state for the colonies, visited nine-year-old Nairobi, he would write that every white man in the capital was “a politician and most of them are leaders of political parties,” and he expressed incredulity that “a centre so new should be able to produce so many divergent and conflicting interests, or that a community so small should be able to give to each such vigorous and even vehement expression.”
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The big houses in the plains affected the two brothers
differently. After staying with their auntie at Uthiru, my uncle moved away from the hurly-burly of town to seek his fortune in the more rural parts of Ndeiya and Limuru, with the Karaũ family as his base. But my father, fascinated and intrigued by the urban center with its white and black dwellers, remained. Eventually he got a job as a domestic worker in a European house. Once again details about this phase of his life in a white house were few, except for the story of how he escaped induction into the First World War.

From the time of the Berlin Conference of 1885 that divided Africa into spheres of influence among European powers, the Germans and the British had been rivals for the colonization of East African territories as exemplified by two adventurers: Karl Peters, founder of the German East Africa Company in 1885; and Frederick Lugard of the Imperial British East Africa Company, incorporated in 1888 by Sir William Mackinnon. The territories that these private companies carved out for themselves with the “reluctant” backing of their respective leaders, Bismarck and Gladstone, were later nationalized, which is to say colonized. And when the mother country coughed, the colonial baby contracted full-blown flu. So when in Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, a Serbian student, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and thus launched a European war among the emerging rival empires, the two colonial states, Tanganyika and Kenya, fought on the side of their mothers, hence against each other; the German forces, led by General von Lettow-Vorbeck, were pitted against the British, led by General Jan Smuts. But it was not just
the European colonists fighting one another—after all, they made up less than 1 percent of the population. They drafted many Africans as soldiers and members of the Carrier Corps. The African soldiers died, in combat and from disease and other ills, out of all proportion to the European soldiers. Their participation would be all but forgotten except for the fact that the places where they camped, in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, would bear the name Kariokoo, a Swahilinized form of Carrier Corps. Since the Africans were being forced into a war whose origins and causes the natives knew nothing about, many like my father did whatever they could to avoid the draft. Every time he knew he was going for a medical exam, he would chew leaves of a certain plant that raised his temperature to an alarming level. But there are other versions of the story suggesting the connivance of his white employer, who did not want to lose my father’s domestic services.

From this historical event, and my father’s age group, Nyarĩgĩ, I was able to calculate that he was born sometime between 1890 and 1896, the years that Queen Victoria, through her prime minister, Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, took over what was then a company “property” and called it East Africa Protectorate, and, in 1920, Kenya colony and protectorate. Immediate proof of effective British ownership was the creation of the Uganda railway from Kilindini, Mombasa—the highway of the monster that my father saw spitting out fire even as it roared.

The Nairobi where my father now worked was a product of that change in formal ownership and the completion
of the railway line that eased the traffic of white settlers into the interior from 1902 onward. After the First World War, which ended with the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919, white ex-soldiers were rewarded with African lands, some of the land belonging to surviving African soldiers, accelerating dispossession, forced labor, and tenancy-at-will on lands now owned by settlers, such tenants otherwise known as squatters. In exchange for the use of the land, the squatters provided cheap labor and sold their harvests to the white landlord at a price determined by him. The buttressed white settlerdom did meet resistance from Africans, the most significant movement at the time being the East African Association, founded in 1921, the first countrywide African political organization, and led by Harry Thuku, who captured the imagination of all working Africans, including my father. In him, an African working class, the new social force on the stage of Kenyan history, and of which my father was now part, had found its voice. Thuku forged connections with Marcus Garvey’s international black nationalism to the West, in America, and with Gandhi’s Indian nationalism to the East, the latter through his alliance with Manilal A. Desai, a leader of local Indians. His activities were closely monitored by the colonial secret police and discussed in the London colonial office as a menace to white power. Both Gandhi and Thuku had called for civil disobedience at about the same time in their respective countries. To suppress this Kenyan link between Gandhian nationalism and Garveyite black nationalism, the British arrested Thuku in March 1922 and deported him to Kismayu, now in Somalia, where
he languished for seven years. It is probably a coincidence, but an interesting one all the same, that Gandhi was arrested on March 10, barely a few days after Thuku. The workers reacted to news of Thuku’s arrest with a mass protest outside the Central Police Station in Nairobi. Aided by settlers who were drinking beer and liquor on the terraces of the Norfolk Hotel, the police shot dead 150 protesters including one of the women’s leaders, Nyanjirũ Mũthoni. I don’t know if my father was present at the mass protest and mass murder, but he certainly would have been affected by the subsequent call for a general strike by domestic workers, upon whose labor the white aristocracy depended entirely. My father fled Nairobi altogether, avoiding the emerging political turmoil in the same way he had escaped the plague, the way he had evaded the draft during the First World War. He followed his brother to the rural safety of Limuru.