In the House of the Interpreter (16 page)

This led us to discuss racial issues, in terms not of economy and politics but of psychology. Social apartheid bred misunderstanding, which stoked the fear of the unknown, which in turn bred even more misunderstanding, in a vicious circle of endless mutual suspicion and animosity.
We agreed that greater social contacts could lessen racial tensions and stereotyping, our way of expressing satisfaction with the work camp. Years later, in my novel
Weep Not, Child
, the scene would reappear as the brief exchange between the fictional Njoroge and Stephen, relocated to a school compound.

The majority of the camp participants came from the Quaker-run Kamusinga High School in Western Province. I had met some of them before, as members of the Kamusinga choir that had once visited Alliance en route from a musical event in Nairobi. They were a truly joyous lot. They burst onto our compound as if hosts, not guests, announcing their arrival with singing:

They treated the body of their truck as a mobile drum, banging it in rhythm with their catchy tune. It was their energy and passion that made the melody live long in my mind. The group from Kamusinga at the Mutonguini Camp—among them David Wanjala Welime, David Okuku Zalo, Alfayo Ferdinand Sandagi, and Mabati Litaba—brought onto the site the same kind of energy and enthusiasm. The relationship between them and their white teachers seemed much more relaxed and interactive than any that I had seen before.

Our project involved constructing a social hall, the heart of what would become Mutonguini Community Center. From the European Quakers, already skilled in masonry and carpentry, we learned how to make bricks, bake them, make walls, and use theodolite and other tools of masonry and carpentry, a process that brought back memories of my days at Good Wallace’s workshop in Limuru. After a hard day’s work, we played soccer and volleyball with the community, often challenging local teams, not always successfully. Sometimes we had social evenings of discussion, again with the community. These quiet moments, the church services conducted by the local minister of the African Inland Mission, and our weekly excursions and climbing in the surrounding hills helped forge a genuine community spirit.

It was not my first time interacting with Akamba people. Although there had traditionally been border skirmishes between our two communities, the relationship between us was mainly one of trade. I remembered itinerant Akamba women traders being received by my mother and welcomed to stay for a night or two on their way to the next stop. This time I was part of their community. A few of the elders often came to our site. They were very much like the Gĩkũyũ elders I had known. I spoke Gĩkũyũ and the elders spoke Kikamba, two cognate languages. Precisely because of that similarity, however, there were some linguistic misunderstandings.

The elders, who seemed to genuinely like me, interspersed their address to me with the word
mutumia
, which in Gĩkũyũ meant woman. Why are they calling me woman?
I wondered, troubled. But neither in their tone nor in their body language could I detect any hint of malice or insult. Eventually I confided my unease to Stephen Muna, my classmate from Alliance, a resident of Mutonguini who, though he did not sleep at the camp, participated in the daily activities. He laughed at my predicament.
Mutumia
in Kikamba meant elder, not woman: they were showing me respect, accepting me, a young man, as one of them.

It was also during the camp that I learned and experienced the power of the drum. The drum was not a central musical instrument among the Gĩkũyũ as much as it was among the Akamba. One evening we heard the sound of a drum calling us to see the famed Akamba acrobatic dancers in their home area. We decided to go to the arena. It was pitch dark, the stars and moon the only sources of light. It did not matter. The insistent sound was clear and near. We followed the road toward Kitui town. Every time we rounded a corner or climbed up a ridge, thinking that was where the sound came from, we would be disappointed: the sound seemed to come from the next hill. Some gave up and went back to camp. Eventually only Welime, Okuku, and I were left, now determined more than ever to get to the source of this power.

After many miles of walking, we managed to trace the source to a bush off the road. Before us was a clearing, in the middle of which was a fire, and around the fireside some young men were drumming and others dancing. It was not the large spectacle we had imagined: these were neighborhood youth, out in the night. With my Gĩkũyũ
and Welime’s Kiswahili, we were able to explain ourselves. They welcomed us and continued drumming and dancing but now with greater vigor: they had a foreign audience in their midst. Our presence and obvious interest had injected a new life into what for them had been routine practice and self-entertainment. But still, for a time, there was nothing out of the ordinary. We were about to leave when the dancers we had thought cautious started doing somersaults in the air, sometimes two of them crossing in the air in skillful aerial acrobatics, made more mysterious by the firelight in the dark. Possessed, the drummers’ upper bodies shook as if they held no bones. Then they too jumped in the air, in turns, holding the drums tightly between their legs, hands still beating rhythmically. It was as if they were in contest, propelled higher and higher by the competing powers of their drums. Then suddenly, peace. The fire was now just red embers. They were obviously enjoying the gasps of admiration from their visitors. When the time came for us to leave, they told us that we were actually on the outer edges of Kitui Town. A drum at night can sound deceptively near, I learned. Thereafter I would always associate the Ukambani region and the Akamba people with drums by night and aerial maneuvers against a background of encroaching darkness, held in check by the glow of red embers.

I had enjoyed the communal experience so much so that when later the same year I heard of another youth initiative, organized by a new body, Kenya Youth Hostels Association, I promptly signed up. The camp was a weekend affair, intended to be the first of a projected series that would bring European, Asian, and African youth together. Participants were asked to bring the barest of beddings: it would be an education in survival, not an indulgence in luxury. I borrowed a bike from my half-brother, Mwangi wa Gacoki, and reached the site, in West Limuru, on a Friday evening. It was the longest journey I had ever undertaken on a bike.

The site was on an escarpment, in an abandoned railway station built in 1899. A rail track was half buried under the earth, still visible through the grass that had grown around and over it. Altogether the place looked forlorn, not a single hint of its old glory. I had hoped to find and interact with boys from all over Kenya, a much bigger affair than the one in Mutonguini. Instead, I found only an Indian boy, Govinda, and two European instructors, one from the church and the other from the army. The army man, young, still in his military khaki pants and shirt, walked with the swagger of his trade. He made me recall the officers who had once beaten me in 1954, as well as the ones who had interrogated me in the 1956 Nairobi Saturday fiasco. In my mind, I named him the General. He had come in a Land Rover
piled high with sleeping bags and other tools of survival. The churchman had come in his car. He was a bit elderly, in a safari jacket over a long-sleeved shirt. I named him the Archbishop. What a contrast: while the General walked as if he owned the earth, the Archbishop trod gingerly, as if afraid to hurt the ground under him. The General and the Archbishop had expected many more participants, at least more than this frail-looking Indian youth in long pants and his African counterpart in an Alliance uniform.

The Friday evening was a prep talk for Saturday, then into our different camp beds in the enormous hall, probably haunted by the spirits of hundreds of Indian workers who had lost their lives laying the railroad in this extremely steep escarpment that ended in the yawning Great Rift Valley below. Govinda and I talked about the adventures awaiting us on Saturday, even making a virtue of our numbers—we would get their undivided attention. But early the next morning Govinda collected his stuff, got on his bike, and left. Now I had two instructors all to myself. I would have their completely undivided attention, I consoled myself.

Armed with a map of the area, we trekked into the bush early Saturday morning, to learn to read maps and follow trails in the forest and other tips of survival. It was more like a scout camp without the name and with only one recruit. There was very little interaction between us. I just walked with my map in my hands, my two instructors reduced to talking to each other, except when I missed a trail, and the General would explain to me where I had misread the map or failed to notice small but significant landmarks. It was
quite exhausting, moving up and down the slopes in the woods, with nothing but a couple biscuits and water to eat and drink.

Once, while a few steps ahead of them, I overheard a heated debate between them about Mau Mau guerrillas and government forces. It was then I realized that even they had not known each other before and that they held profoundly different views on what was going on in the country. They disagreed, for instance, on the colonial policy of collective punishment. The Archbishop argued for individual accountability, while the General asserted that there was no other way of dealing with natives so given to secrecy. They increasingly based their arguments on hypotheticals. If you knew that one of them held information that would save or endanger lives and that he was hiding among the group, it would be prudent to hold the bloody lot to account, the General asserted. What then was the difference between what the colonial forces were doing and what Hitler did during the Second World War? the Archbishop countered. On and on they continued. I was invisible.

Suddenly I realized that they had stopped walking and stood facing each other. The exchange had moved from mental confrontation to the threat of physical combat. The elderly, slightly mustached Archbishop would be no match for the younger, clean-shaven army General, yet he was rolling up his sleeves. The sight of them about to duel with fists in the forest was ridiculous. I stood there, completely mesmerized. How could I intervene between two white people at war? Then I had a vision: I thought I saw the man of God
in a black cassock, a white collar around his neck, holding a huge Bible in front of him, as a shield against a gun pointed at him by a heavily armed military officer. It was so real that I felt terror. I coughed. They froze. The cassock, the Bible, and the gun were in my imagination, but my coughing had worked. They pretended that they were simply talking. I should go on till I came to another track, the General said. They followed me in silence.

When we returned to camp, I got on my bicycle and fled, a three-day hostel reduced to a single night and a day.

My mother used to tell me that traveling outside one’s home made a person realize that it was not only his mother who cooked tasty food. The volunteer youth initiatives confirmed that, despite their disappointments. Alliance, too, showed me the truth of it in relation to Kenyan communities.

Right from the start, Alliance’s national spirit was contrary to the state’s policy of dividing Africans along ethnic lines, and the school accepted students from different communities. But under Carey Francis, recruitment into Alliance on a countrywide basis became a consistent policy in theory and practice. North, central, east, west, and southern coastal Kenya were all represented on the Alliance compound. Most important, the African staff came from different Kenyan communities and were revered or reviled purely for their individuality, not for their ethnic origins.

This was the situation that prevailed at Alliance throughout my four years. In Limuru, many workers of different communities had come to our home, but they were visitors. This was the first time that I was living, interacting, competing, and quarreling on a daily basis with such diverse individuals. There was something to learn from every ethnic community and every person.

Of all the school captains of my four years, I found Bethuel A. Kiplagat the most intriguing. His personality seemed to transcend ethnicity. He was not readily identifiable with any one community. I once asked him about his middle initial: he told me it stood for Abdul. He used to be a Muslim before converting to Christianity. But why do you retain the name Abdul? I asked him. Because it is also my name, part of my life, he told me. Intriguing in a different way was the lovable Samuel Mũngai, the 1958 captain. He was very conflicted, not sure if he was a rebel or a leader. He enjoyed his cigarettes and other pleasures and often broke the rules that he was supposed to enforce. He was also a ladies’ man, who left a trail of broken hearts and a few in the family way. Though he would not have scored highly in the official moral estimate, he somehow held the school together. Altogether I learned that just as good leadership came from individuals of different communities, so also did mischief, troublemaking, and bad leadership.

I became a dorm prefect in 1957, a leader of the diverse communities in Dorm Two, Livingstone House, succeeding G. Shokwe. Shokwe, a Mtaita, loved boxing. He used to take part in amateur bouts in the lightweight division in Nairobi.
He also led the boxing club in the school, and he had often tried to make a boxer out of me. Eventually I agreed to go in the ring. I looked good, to myself at least, in the red gloves of a boxer. In my very first swing, I hit my more experienced, if thin and gangly, opponent on the cheek. The blow caught both of us by surprise. He fell down. I was horrified. I took off my gloves and left them, never to return to the ring. I just couldn’t see myself as victorious for hurting another, even in sport.

My appointment as a dorm prefect was equally and totally unexpected. I had never consciously behaved in a manner that courted such a consideration, but I took it in stride. Conscious that I was in the same dorm where Moses Gathere used to wake us up with his lines from
Macbeth
, I toyed with the idea of using another quote from Shakespeare but varying the lines
to be or not to be
, to become
to wake or not to wake
. I never actually tried it.