In the House of the Interpreter (21 page)

And then a sudden break in the rhythm. Good Wallace and my half-brother Joseph Kabae come to visit. I feel tears at the edges of my eyes. Kenneth has obviously passed on the news.

Whenever I now think of Good Wallace, the image of us talking to each other, a wall of barbed wire between us at Ngenia, pops up, but this is quickly offset by the other of him at home, a family reunion again after his ordeals in the mountains and concentration camp. We realized how narrowly he had escaped harm when, in March, news splashed across the world about the massacre of eleven political inmates at Hola Camp. Dubbed hardcore for continually resisting, they had been bludgeoned to death. The Horror at Hola suddenly alerted the world to the reality Kenyans had been enduring for seven years since the declaration of a
state of emergency in 1952. Even from the hallowed halls of Westminster, Labour MPs demanded an answer from Harold Macmillan. After all, Kenya was still a British colony. On Good Wallace’s release, though, he had told us that he had been lucky, that throughout his stay in the camps, he never faced a situation like the Horror at Hola.

Good Wallace never ceased to amaze me. On his release late in 1957, he had reinvented himself from a former carpenter, guerrilla fighter, and war prisoner to a market trader, buying and selling foodstuff and managing to float just above the water. He refused to bow down to hardship. And now, only a few months after, he is here, for me, with Joseph Kabae. I note that Good Wallace stays a step behind Kabae, who does all the talking. Even in civilian clothes, Kabae has never lost his military bearing, a remnant of his days as a member of the King’s African Rifles, during World War II. His chain smoking, crushing the cigarette ends under his shoes slowly and deliberately or flinging them away expertly, gives him an air of authority. Used to command, he has no difficulties in inducing subservience and getting permission to speak to me. They let me step out; Kabae keeps the guards in conversation to buy Good Wallace and me time to talk. He quickly tells me a few more details of the day he left the mountains and gave himself up to Chief Karũga.

Good Wallace tells me that on the eve of his presenting himself at Karũga’s house, he had slept, cold and hungry and all alone, under coffee bushes not far from here, not knowing whether, if caught, he would be shot dead on the
spot or be sent to the gallows at Gnthũngũri. He is trying to encourage me to keep hope alive. He assures me that Kabae will use his contacts in government to secure my release. His mention of cold and hunger has awakened my stomach. They will bring me some food, he tells me, which they do: a loaf of bread, shortly after. Kabae reiterates that I have not broken any law; he will ensure my release. The guards he talked to were underlings with no authority to do anything about the inmates, so negotiations for my release will have to await the new day.

As I watch them leave, the irony does not escape me. Not so long ago, they were on the inside and I on the outside, gazing helplessly at their brotherly dance of death, with Kabae on the government’s side and Wallace in the mountains. The glow of the spirits I felt in their presence wanes. But they have assured me of release: it is matter of enduring the night.

We are massed together, standing room only, in the dark. I don’t know what to do about the toilet. I follow what I have seen others do: shout for permission to go to the toilet outside, under a guard. My voice is too weak, and the others express solidarity by hollering to the guard for me. My bladder relieved, I am back inside, standing again. No, it’s too much for my feet; I push my way to a corner, slide to the floor, and sit, my back against the wall.

By now word has spread that among the inmates is a captive from Alliance. They turn to me, ghostly voices in the dark, curious. To their questions, I can only say, I don’t know, tears in my eyes, occasioned by their pity. I may be the youngest among them, but I must not succumb to tears, not even silent sobs. I can hold back only by remaining deaf to even the most insistent whispers of sympathy. I retreat into myself. Would it have helped if, in the bus, I had kept quiet about being a college-bound graduate of Alliance? I doubt it. I feel like I have gone through this before, that what is happening to me fits into a pattern that has dogged my path since that January afternoon four years ago, when the gates of Alliance opened and I entered. I recall my return to Limuru after my first term to find my old homestead a wasteland.

The sage who once said that the events of history appear twice, first as tragedy and then as farce, could have been talking about my current situation. Thĩmbĩgwa post, where I am now held, could have been a replica of the community prison I helped to build four years back. The shock of that first return had the ring of tragedy. The present is a comedy without laughter. What can top this absurdity of my being held in a garrison for nothing more criminal than stating that I have been to Alliance?

Wrestling with these memories has neither helped numb the pain I feel nor blunted the humiliation. After ten there is no going outside for relief. Darkness hides the identity of those who use the walls to ease pressed bladders. But it does not cover up the stench. My mother used to tell us that even
the longest night ends with dawn. I cling to the hope that in the morning I will leave this stench behind me.

A bugle accompanying the raising of the Union Jack interrupts the restless stream of images in my mind. I hope that this day will be kinder and gentler than yesterday. As if in response, dawn brings back Good Wallace, Kabae, and a loaf of bread. The inmates depend on relatives to bring them food. Those without anybody who knows their whereabouts depend on what they can get from the others. I break the bread with those near me.

Kabae is at his impressive best, with curls of smoke issuing from his mouth and crushed cigarette ends under his boots. The guards are apologetic as they explain that their white boss is not yet in but will definitely appear. As they leave, promising to return later in the morning, Good Wallace tells me that they worked through the night and contacted important people, by which I understand that they bribed those who claimed to have influence. Kabae assures me that something good will happen today.

The white district officer, who apparently does not spend nights in the post, finally drives in. Perhaps this is a testament to Kabae’s power and influence. Life visibly stirs all around. The police stand at attention, saluting their boss,
calling him
effendi
, in what amounts to a visual absurdity. The officers are tall, big, older, armed. Their boyish boss is shorter, thinner, and civilian clad, looking harmless except for the pistol hanging from his hip, which he keeps touching as if he is afraid of his own officers. The inmates reiterate to each other for the umpteenth time their innocence and certainty of release once the white officer hears the truth. Whites are more understanding than their black underlings, a case of the kindly master who does not know that his ferocious dogs have their fangs open at innocents.

One at a time, the inmates go into the office and then come back into custody in the same order with the same complaint: the officer listens only to the policeman, his sole informant, translator, and interpreter. There is no more talk of the difference between the master at home and his dog at the gate. They are the same colonial shit.

Eventually, it is my turn into the office. The officer is playing stern and serious, probably to impress his authority on his much-older African underlings. Even the way he bends forward over an open file, holding a pen, seems a performance to impress an audience, a behavior almost identical to that of Johnny the Green, three years ago. Without looking up, he asks why I did not pay taxes. Having heard what those before me said about the police interpreter, I hasten to speak for myself. I recently left school, I answer him in English. I have papers to prove it, I add quickly, not to give space for the interpreter to intervene. A pause, a slight pause, then with his eyes still bent over the file, he stretches his hand for the documents. I give him my college
admission papers, which include my performance on the Cambridge exams. He studies them intently, and now he looks up at me. Do I detect surprise on his face? A blush even? His name suggests itself: Johnny the Red.

Alliance?

Yes.

Bound for college, I see?

Yes.

Johnny the Red leans back, seemingly relaxed, as if ready to hold a conversation on a theme more to his taste than the sordid business of probing if poor farmers, men older than him, have paid taxes or are telling the truth.

You have beaten me to it, he says, with something like a smile. I am waiting to hear if I have been accepted at Oxford. I am a graduate of Duke of York, your nemesis in hockey, he adds with a hint of pride.

The conversation I had with Andrew Brockett a year ago in Mutonguini flashes across my mind. The young officer sitting in judgment over my fate is waiting to go to college? His job in government, like mine at Kahũgũinĩ, is temporary. Our situations are similar. But we are on opposite sides of the table, a gun between us, I remind myself, as I listen to him. He is still into sports. He can remember the last victorious hockey engagement with Alliance. He was a member of the team, he says, and I congratulate him as if the victory has just occurred. I want to remind him that last November in four soccer engagements, two home and two away, Alliance beat York, but I don’t think I should be reminding him of defeat. I simply add that indeed York is better than both
Alliance and Wales in hockey, which puts him in an even better mood, to the continued chagrin and incomprehension of the police interpreter. All because of sports, I am thinking, still anxious and uncertain about my fate. Finally he asks me what I have been doing since I left Alliance. I tell him. As far as I can see, your papers are in order, he says handing them back to me. You can go, he continues almost wearily.

I am also weary but elated as I leave the premises. On the way out, I see one of the arresting officers, Mr. Rifleman, head toward the room hurriedly. I ignore him and wave to my fellow inmates. I don’t look back. I am already in transition from incarceration to celebration, hoping that I might meet with my brothers and save them from having to come all this way for nothing. Their mission has been accomplished.

I am about to round the corner and vanish when I hear footsteps behind me. It is the police interpreter. He stops me. Bwana officer wants you, he tells me.

Maybe I have left one of my papers behind, I think as I walk back, the policeman behind me. One glance at the erstwhile gentleman, and I know that his mood has changed. Johnny the Red, the hockey-loving-college-student-in-waiting has resumed his authoritarian look of a British colonial officer determined to enforce law and order. He has found something more morally uplifting to enforce than chasing poor farmers for poll tax.

So you were resisting arrest? Even fighting my own officers? Do you think that Alliance has given you license to
attack a police officer doing his duty? He does not let me explain. Take him back to his kind, he orders. Mr. Rifleman is still in the room, actually standing by the side of his young boss, and I can see a triumphant glint in his eyes.

Nobody earns the young officer’s clemency. New, inexperienced, with little knowledge of the laws he is enforcing, he relies almost wholly on the words of the police, who have been in the field many more years.

In the evening, the police huddle us into a truck. Under armed escort, the truck leaves the precinct. They don’t tell us where we are, headed. For all I know, they may be taking us to a quarry to open fire on us. Throughout the state of emergency, I have heard of people detained on whatever suspicions, released in a forest and told they were free to go home, then shot in the back as terrorists in a running battle. It is only when the truck stops by a barbed-wire fence and the gates open to swallow us that I know from the others that we are in Kĩambu Remand Prison.

Talk of comedy! Yesterday, Friday, I was here in Kĩambu to collect the largest wages of my life. I was with friends. Now I am back in the same town, without the money, and nobody knows me. The prison guards shake their heads to every question concerning the fate that awaits us. A Saturday in ruins, I note in my mental diary.

On arrival at Kĩambu Remand Prison, we are made to stand in line and take out whatever valuables we have—money, watches, and other personal items—and hand them over to reception, where they are counted, recorded, and put in different bags that are labeled and put aside behind the counter. We are distributed among strangers to different rooms, already holding other inmates awaiting trial. It feels like a family separation. So when three of us from Thĩmbĩgwa are pushed into one cell, I feel lucky. They lock the door from the outside.

A few minutes later they open it and throw in some blankets, and we grab whatever we can lay our hands on. We sit on the cold cement floor, our bodies almost touching, blankets wrapped around our feet and knees. The room, designed for four, now holds eight. An electric bulb deep in the ceiling lights up the room, but not too well. Soon we get used to it and are able to see a clearer outline of each other.

The inmates already in our room could be my age, but their faces are hardened. They look at us warily as if we are intruding into their home. Two of the Thĩmbĩgwans are clearly elderly, at least compared with the rest of us. For some time, the earlier inmates only murmur among themselves, but the inevitable questions about why we have been brought here eventually break the barrier between the old and the new. I don’t participate, but one of the Thĩmbĩgwans
reveals that I am from Alliance. They all shake their heads, murmuring disapproval as if my arrest, so obviously wrong, proves that they too have been held by mistake. It’s the evil character of the colonial police. This state of emergency has given them the license to do whatever they want. They don’t want to see us black people educated.