In the House of the Interpreter (19 page)

He admired philosopher-kings in politics. I could not tell who he liked more, Nkrumah the politician or Nkrumah the intellectual. Though impressed by Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism and commitment to a continental African Union government, evidenced by his vow to surrender Ghana’s sovereignty to such a union, Gaitho talked with equal if not more enthusiasm about his idol’s studies in philosophy and theology, among other pursuits. He had read Nkrumah’s autobiography,
Ghana
, and knew that Nkrumah had given up the lure of worldly possessions that his education could have secured him, for a life of service. It may have been this aspect of Nkrumah’s learning and dedication to service that led him to another intellectual who had studied philosophy and theology, among other things, and given up his academic posts in Germany for a life among the sick and the poor in Africa: Albert Schweitzer.

Gaitho talked about Schweitzer with genuine awe: a musician, a philosopher, a theologian, an expert on organs, and a medical doctor. Can you imagine him giving up all that to build a hospital in Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa?
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But it was not his philanthropy that most intrigued
Gaitho: it was Schweitzer’s thoughts on Jesus, the historical and the eschatological. I had never heard of the word
eschatological
. He lent me Schweitzer’s book,
Out of My Life and Thought
. This was my second encounter with an autobiography.

The quest of the historical as opposed to the eschatological Jesus dominated our discussions. Schweitzer’s review of the history of research on the life of Jesus, what he called
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
, intrigued me. I would have liked to have read a complete biography of Jesus, but not coming across one, I was left with the bits and pieces found in the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The engagement with Schweitzer coincided with my growing doubts about evangelical Christianity and its stress on a personal experience of sin and a personal link to Jesus. What Jesus? The Son of Man or the Son of God? Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount or Jesus of the end of the world and final judgment? From my experience, evangelical Christianity placed too much stress on the end of the world, the second coming, and judgment of sinners. Jesus the child prodigy, who lived on earth, escaped with his mother into Egypt, learned carpentry, walked with fishermen, cautioned people not to judge else they would be judged, challenged people to cast the first stone, and talked about service to the least among us, was much more real and appealing than the apocalyptic Jesus. I did not want to see the end of the world. Or entertain the idea of people burning in hellfire from the Day of Judgment to eternity.

And then Gaitho came up with a solution. The historical
and the eschatological were one. The historical was the social experience of today; the eschatological, a vision of tomorrow. The historical Jesus foresaw the fall of Rome, the old world, and the coming into being of a new world. One order would give way to another. Imperial Rome and the social groups that allied with its domination would be judged. The historical Jesus was also universal because his message of the end of the old order spoke to all situations of the oppressor and oppressed, past, present, and future. We applied this to the colonial situation, where London was Rome and Governor Evelyn Baring, the modern Pontius Pilate. The home guards who worked with the colonial regime were the modern-day Pharisees. This was an eye-opener. The eschatological Jesus spoke to me: the colonial world was bound to fall. We shall be free.

This was of course our conclusion, not Schweitzer’s. I often wondered about my enthusiasm for him. It was partly due to Gaitho’s infectious passion. But I may have detected some parallels between him and Carey Francis. Both accepted Jesus as the center of their lives. Both had given up high academic positions for service in Africa. But Carey Francis was clearer that he wanted to serve
the least among us
. Schweitzer wrote autobiographies; Carey Francis would never do an autobiography or any writings that drew attention to himself. Schweitzer studied the life of Jesus; Carey Francis followed the life of Jesus. But on one thing they were completely united: service to the community driven by their relationship to Jesus, no matter what their interpretation of that relationship. My love of volunteer
work may have been inspired by the devotion to service manifested in the lives of two disparate missionaries on opposite sides of the continent.

There was no way one could hide from Shakespeare at Alliance. His characters had become my daily companions, as were his insights into social conflicts. Inside and outside the classroom, over the last four years, Shakespeare was an integral part of my intellectual formation. I had come to understand Gathere’s recitation of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
every morning.

I always looked forward to seeing which Shakespeare would show up at the end of the year. But the
King Lear
production in 1958 held more than the usual fascination: it was going to mark the end of one era and the beginning of another. I did not take part in the production, but I could not help but admire my classmate Andrew Kaingu’s courage in auditioning for and accepting so big a role: Lear dominates the play in the number of scenes in which he appears and the lines he speaks. Kaingu had to cram all of this and appear in nearly all the rehearsals, while also preparing for Cambridge exams that would determine his future. But he did it. The last performance was an incredible feat of stamina and a convincing display of the whole gamut of emotions, from the comic to the tragic, in the life and actions of Lear.

Kaingu’s hair had been powdered gray to give his nineteen years a touch of age, but he did not need gray hairs to display his skills and talent. In the storm scene, with only the Fool and blind Gloucester as his audience, Kaingu’s Lear rose to the occasion, mixing reason with palpable madness:
Plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it
. The lines and delivery captured the ongoing practice of colonial justice outside the walls of Alliance.

Shakespeare may have been beloved by the colonial establishment, pure art to be liberally dished out to schools, but his portrayal of blatant power struggles, like conflicts between the feudal and the new social order dramatized in
King Lear
, spoke directly to the struggles for power in Kenya at the time. The play accurately reflected the bloody struggle between the Mau Mau guerrillas and the forces of the colonial state. Fundamentally, Shakespeare, by extension, questioned the assumed stability of the state; he dramatized, for all the world to see, that power came from and was maintained by the sword. Shakespeare gave birth to student writers of drama: Henry Kuria, Kimani Nyoike, Gerishon Ngũgĩ, and Bethuel Kurutu.

But though they lacked obvious political themes, the students’ efforts laid a foundation for a tradition of plays in African languages, Kiswahili in particular, and of theater as community involvement. While the English-language productions targeted school audiences and were often attended by the English-speaking colonial elite, the Kiswahili productions targeted the community as its main audience.
Still, it was Shakespeare who had inspired the local tradition, one that demonstrated, in practice, that Kiswahili was an equally legitimate vehicle of creative imagination.

Despite the welcome Shakespearean distraction, I had not forgotten the big academic hurdle still before me. Alliance had annually sent its graduates on to Makerere University College, in Kampala, Uganda, in numbers and regularity that attracted the admiring notice of even the most rabid intellectual settler-philes. A few Alliance graduates had secured places abroad, but the most coveted was admission to Makerere, which depended entirely on one’s performance in fiercely competitive exams. I wanted to be among the chosen.

So for the rest of the year, I hid inside book covers and class notes. There were students who memorized dates when it came to history, formulae when it came to physics with chemistry, and facts of plant and animal life when it came to biology. And as before all other exams, some talked as if they were quite certain of the passages from Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw, or H. G. Wells, on which literature questions would be based. I was bad at cramming facts, worse at retaining and recalling them. I was more interested in understanding processes. So whenever I would hear other boys talk about geography or history, spouting these numerous facts and figures, I would feel slightly nervous,
despite the fact that I had been through similar fears before.

In one area, however, I accepted and embraced challenge openly. All eight subjects, including math, were compulsory; one had to take an exam in each. But there was also one optional paper, additional math. It did not count for the final grade or college acceptance. It was for one’s intellectual ego. Additional math was a notch higher and more challenging than the regular. Most students avoided it largely because of the reputed difficulty and quite frankly because it meant extra hours of preparation that could otherwise usefully go to what counted. On an impulse, I mentioned to my friend Joseph Gatuiria that I was undecided about taking additional math. Gatuiria laughed outright. There is no way you can pass additional math. You are not Asinjo, he said, referring to the best mathematics student in the class of 1958. Asinjo had more precision: my path to a solution meandered and was cluttered with debris, while Asinjo’s was tidy and short. Gatuiria’s skepticism became a challenge. I would take additional math.

The Overseas Cambridge School Certificate exams began Monday, November 24. But the final assembly and speech, starring Carey Francis, took place on Thursday, December 4, a day before the last paper. The scene was a little reminiscent of Jesus sending out his disciples to go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Carey Francis read our commission, the same, no doubt, that he had read to all those who Alliance had sent out since he took over the headship in 1940:

That was it. Formal divorce from the House of the Interpreter. So on December 5 I sat the last paper as an occupant of a liminal space, neither an Alliance nor quite an ex-Alliance; neither of the school nor of the world. After it I knew, without a shadow of doubt, that my Alliance days had ended.

One last piece of business remained to mark my final and formal severance from Alliance: the Leaving School Certificate. Carey Francis personally gave these out to each student, one on one. As I went into the office, I recalled all my previous encounters with him, on the grounds, in the chapel, the classroom, everywhere, for he was everywhere even when he seemed to be nowhere.

The fact is that the Alliance of my time was Carey Francis, and Carey Francis was Alliance. His personality was stamped on everything: the grass that was always well trimmed; the parades of cleanliness as second only to godliness; the tidiness of mind and heart reflected in the body
beaten into shape by sports and rigorous tests in endurance; the everyday of prayers in the morning to the preps in the evening. It was stamped on the behavior of faculty and students alike, especially in his presence. Even dignitaries who came to the school, from the governor and high government officials to visiting British MPs, put on an air of gravitas in his presence. It was not that he demanded obeisance; it was simply the way he lived his life as the head of an Alliance Family and the reputation it had generated. He ran the Family with the guidance of the only one master he accepted and to whom he had pledged his obedience: Jesus. In a 1944 letter to Reverend H. M. Grace about S. G. Young, Carey Francis expressed what he expected from teachers at Alliance:

He was describing himself. His single-minded devotion to that ideal gave him an inner stability whose weight could be felt by those around him. He seemed every inch the Kiplingesque character who would walk with kings and yet not lose the common touch, the rock that could not be moved, by disaster or triumph.

Only once did I see a crack in the rock. It was the afternoon of Tuesday, February 22, 1958, during a visit by his old college mate at Cambridge, Bishop Stephen Neill. Even the way Carey Francis introduced him to us in Form Four A told us that he looked up to him. Bishop Neill talked about the Anglican Church, probably a summary of ideas in his book on Anglicanism. Suddenly, touched by some words Neill had uttered, Carey Francis began to weep, tears flowing down his cheeks. I could not tell what exactly Neill had said to move him so. Maybe it was the phrase
via media
, which would translate as the middle way between extremes, the core of the Franciscan outlook. Whatever the case, it was almost as if Neill had just come from a conference with Jesus and were delivering a message from Heaven. Neill did not seem surprised. He did not even change his tone of voice. He must have seen it before. But I was shocked. This was a face of Carey Francis I had never seen.

He embodied other contradictions. Once, during a math lesson, he said that in all his time at Alliance, he had met only one boy, David Wasawo,
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who could be accepted in Cambridge on the basis of merit alone. And yet here was a person who devoted his life to making Alliance boys excel in whatever they undertook and was delighted when they beat the daylights out of Wales and York in anything competitive. In a talk that he gave at a joint meeting of the Royal African and the Royal Empire societies in London on March 31,
1955, he said that, apart from Africans coming from poorer, less endowed homes,