In the House of the Interpreter (6 page)

Carey Francis came to Alliance in 1940, a kind of wartime principal, where he started by imposing strict discipline. He did not like the lax ways of Grieves’s ancien régime and vowed to overthrow it and reconstruct Alliance in his image. Under the new regime, everything was going to change drastically, as in a revolution, the first act being the replacement of the students’ knee-length khaki shorts, maroon fez, and black tassels with plain khaki shorts and shirts. He expelled teachers, especially Africans, who would not fall in line. Others simply left in protest. The students grumbled over the loss of their teachers and even more over the loss of their maroon fez and black tassels. But the breaking point between the new principal and the students came over the Franciscan call for them to grow vegetables in allotted gardens to contribute to the British war effort. Someone removed the notice the new principal had put up, and no student would own up to the impudence or snitch on another.

Carey Francis responded with a mixture of expulsions and caning, the boys readmitted, on a one-by-one basis,
only after each of them accepted in writing that they were wrong, promised to obey the new rules of discipline, and said thank you sir for the punishment. He used the crisis to reorganize the day-to-day running of the school by separating the academic from the administrative, and the classroom from the dorm: teachers would still be in charge of curricula and related activities, but the student prefect system would handle student life outside the classroom. The principal was, of course, the head of both the academic and the administrative hierarchies. The legend of a disciplinarian was born, to mingle in school lore with stories of love and war and magic.

Once, while taking a walk through one of the villages not far from Alliance, Carey Francis stopped to chat with a crowd of African children. He asked a boy to let him see the coin he was holding. With all their eyes on him, Carey Francis made the coin disappear and then reappear behind the ear of another boy. The children did not wait for more but streamed home to tell about the magic and the man.

One Saturday evening I saw the full display of his magic. I could not believe that the person on the stage was the stern principal I thought I knew. Time and again he made cards and golf balls disappear into thin air and then reappear, seemingly from nowhere. Most startling were the rabbits and doves he pulled from his hat. But at the end of it, perhaps mindful of the village incident, he was careful to explain that he was playing magic, not practicing it: his acts were conjuring tricks. It was my first experience of such tricks, and whenever, in later years, I witnessed more amazing
conjuring feats from professional magicians, I always recalled that first Night of Magic with Edward Carey Francis at Alliance.

What I would later have no doubts about was his magic as a reader. During one of his Friday assemblies, he introduced us to a book,
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)
, by Jerome K. Jerome, an account of a boating trip on the Thames River. At first I was skeptical: who wanted to hear of boats on rivers that one had not seen? But when he started to read, I suddenly found myself engrossed in the humorous trials and tribulations, including the drama of making an Irish stew out of unpeeled potatoes, a cabbage, half a peck of peas, half a pork pie, a bit of cold boiled bacon, potted salmon, and other leftovers.

By the time he finished the excerpts, I felt part of the imaginary boat ride on a river I did not know, laughing. It was a moment more magical than the night of conjuring tricks. I found it difficult to reconcile the images of the tongue-eating, stumping conjurer of storms; the tongue-in-cheek conjurer of illusions; and this loose-tongued conjurer of life from a book published in 1889.

Carey Francis did not teach the lower forms. He remained a towering figure who was everywhere, who could generate fury, fire, and fun in turns. I would have liked to know him as a teacher, but I had to make do with the occasional sermon
in the chapel and the Friday assemblies, during which he would discuss current affairs, national, continental, and international, his way of keeping in touch with the entire student community.

Winston Churchill’s resignation from his Conservative prime ministership in November was the subject of such an assembly soon after Carey Francis returned from leave. Churchill was one of the leading statesmen in the world. Even the fact that throughout his career he had changed parties was a testament to his independent character: he was more loyal to principles than to parties. By keeping his head cool when all about him were losing theirs, Churchill had rallied the world to defeat Hitler. He offered
blood, toil, tears, and sweat
, where a scoundrel would have promised Heaven. His alliance with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign the Atlantic Charter in 1941, in a secret meeting on the British battleship HMS
Prince of Wales
, had changed the aims of the war from just a victory over Hitler to one for human freedom, reaffirming people’s right to choose the government under which they lived.

Churchill’s words came across with such force of conviction that it was easy to be carried away by his assertions. But inside me was always the cautionary voice of Ngandi
^*
, my beloved mentor of earlier years, who had drawn a different picture of Churchill: as a fighter for the preservation of the empire. Ngandi had complained of Churchill’s ingratitude in allowing Governor Baring to declare a state of emergency
in Kenya and send British troops to crush the very Kenyans who had helped him fight Hitler and now wanted freedom. It was Churchill’s Conservatives who reproduced, in Kenya, Hitler’s concentration camps. Ngandi might have disappeared from my life, but his way of looking at the world, questioning the assertive correctness of authority, stayed with me. I did not need Ngandi’s presence to add to the list of imperial evils in the concentration villages all over central Kenya, for I had just come back from one. Churchill had caused me to lose my home. The loss lurked inside me, stoking fears of more unexpected and sudden interruptions of my life. Governor Baring’s doomsday, the day he demanded the Mau Mau surrender or else, set for June 10, hung over my second term at Alliance, made heavier by the fact that I could not share my anxieties about Good Wallace with anybody.

However, the drama of daily life and learning at school was enough to distract me from thoughts of the new village, the doomsday, and my brother in the mountains. By August 4, when the second term ended and I returned to the village for break, the doomsday had come and gone. But it had hit my home: my mother had been detained in the home guard post for questioning. She talked very little about the ordeal she had undergone, and I felt sure that there were many more things my family hid from me, to save me from the burden of knowing what they knew. They treated me as an outsider who could not bear too much reality. In protecting me, they made my estrangement much harder to overcome.

Suspects rounded up by British soldiers during a sweep through part of Nairobi’s Eastlands, 1953

Though its propaganda planes stopped dropping leaflets, the state intensified bombings on Mount Kenya, conducted arbitrary raids in towns and rural marketplaces, and carried out mass arrests and public hangings. This had happened so regularly that the new village seemed to have incorporated them into an eerie semblance of normality. But the normality did not lessen the melancholy that seemed captured in the blue canopy of smoke hovering over the huts.

I returned to school for the third and last term of my first year on August 4. There was a slight change in the staff, with the departure of Allan Ogot and his replacement by a new teacher, A. Kilelu. Classes would continue as before,
but this change threatened the stability that I had hoped for in the sanctuary.

The third term did not carry the curiosity and expectation of my first arrival, or the Franciscan drama of the second term, but I could now see the light at the end of the tunnel of my freshman status. The existential condition of always being merely tolerated by older students would end and their bullying along with it. The exam fever, more intense than at any time before, emphasized the coming of the end. For me, I felt the pressure, going into the second year, to keep my place among the top ten in stream A. I was not looking forward to the end of the year or leaving the premises, even for a few weeks, but the intensity of preparation for exams took my thoughts away from the hounds waiting outside the gate.

The prep rooms were always packed, the grounds full of students reading under the shade of trees. More and more students were caught trying to read by the light of their flashlights under their blankets when they were supposed to be sleeping. The school had turned into a space for bookworms. It came as a surprise, then, when I learned that rehearsals of Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
were going on, that even some seniors were involved.

The Alliance dramatic society had been founded in 1939, and Shakespeare became an annual fixture in the 1950s,
with
Henry V
in 1952,
Macbeth
in 1953, and
Julius Caesar
in 1954, productions that had become part of the school’s lore. The older students told of Joseph Mũngai’s role as Macbeth with awe, that when he left the stage after the line
Is this a dagger which I see before me
, he was shaking as if he still held the bloodstained weapon. After the performance, he was in tears, as if he could see blood everywhere. For a week afterward, he kept to himself, still in character, haunted by the blood of his victims.

Mũngai had already graduated from Alliance and gone to Makerere University College, but his Macbeth had left a mark, perhaps even inspiring Moses Gathere’s mornings of
Had I but died an hour
, which had once startled me. I looked forward to the forthcoming
As You Like It
, hoping, vaguely, for similar drama on and off the stage. The dining hall had been changed into an auditorium with chairs facing the stage, itself transformed, with a proscenium extension. Arden did indeed look like a forest through which the actors in their rich colorful costumes wandered. Boys played both male and female roles, as in Shakespeare’s time. It was fascinating to see dresses, earrings, and head scarves turn boys into beautiful ladies of the court. Equally fascinating though strange was the sight of Africans dressed in sixteenth-century English costumes, speaking in iambic pentameter.

But what the performance lacked in social authenticity or anything resembling local history, it more than made up for as a spectacle of other histories, far away and long ago. When I heard Mwangi Kamunge, as the melancholy Jaques,
say:
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts
, I had a momentary vision of the world as a vast village of the old type with numerous paths, their entries and exits beyond the horizon.

As I followed the action, just about everything I saw and heard, from scenery, to lines delivered, to dress and gait, triggered my imagination. I could not help comparing the pairs of exiles in Arden to my brother, Good Wallace, wandering in the forests of Nyandarwa and Mount Kenya or wherever in the mountains he now lived. I could imagine the guerrillas carving coded messages for each other or reading the pamphlets dropped from the sky. But my mental meanderings did not take away from my overall enjoyment
of this first experience of staged Shakespeare. Maybe the play’s happy ending could portend … but dwelling on that possibility raised the other possibility.

A scene from Alliance High School’s 1955 production of Shakespeare’s
As You Like It

Thoughts and images of my guerrilla brother often stole into my mind at the most unexpected times, triggered by any association, but most often by Oades. Ever since he had taken us to his house for our first English lesson, I could not forget that, as a member of the Kenya Police Reserve, he could have come into a deadly face-to-face with my brother. Oades was a kindly person, and I could not imagine him in a shoot-out with anybody, but when I learned that he would return to England in December, I felt some relief.