Wrestling with the Devil in (Post-)Colonial Kenya

Right now I am reading Wrestling with the Devil [originally entitled Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary], a memoir that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o published in 1981, after he was imprisoned for a year without trial, for being an intellectual with whom the government of Kenya disagreed.

The imprisonment of the author is part of a pattern that anyone who has read case descriptions published by Amnesty International in the 1990s would know well; and he was in fact adopted as a prisoner of conscience by the organization.

“Armed members of the Intelligence, then known as the Special Branch, who swarmed my study amid an awe-inspiring silence, were additionally guarded by uniformed police officers carrying long-range rifles. Their grim, determined faces lit up only a little whenever they pounced on any book or pamphlet bearing the names of Marx, Engels, or Lenin.”

Ngũgĩ sketches his transfer to prison — the midnight raid of his library for incriminating material, abduction by car, the lack of knowledge of his family what had become of him — with irony. Life in prison itself — fellow prisoners, guards, the general purpose of it in the eyes of the government — he describes with less detachment.

And then he presents a biting portrait of the grand inspiration for this unjust application of the law: the British colonial government.

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University of Nairobi (c. 2006)
Ngũgĩ was a professor here for 10 years
via Wikimedia Commons
Public domain

When I read Karen Blixen's Out of Africa in Canada, my fellow students and I were given an essay from Ngũgĩ's Decolonising the Mind to read alongside it. To my recollection, it was a meditation on the importance of writing in native languages (for example Ngũgĩ's Gĩkũyũ, not just English) and being exposed to something beyond British literature.

Little did I know that the Kenyan writer had in fact also written a sharp denunciation of Out of Africa and Blixen, directly.

There's also a blighting portrait of Louis Leakey, whom I'd heard about in far more flattering terms when I grew up:

"In science, they [British Kenyan society] could of course display Louis Leakey, undoubtedly a great archaeologist. Leakey’s specialty was in digging up, dating, and classifying old skulls. Like George Eliot’s Casaubon, he was happier living with the dead. [. . .]

"Colonel Leakey, and even Louis Leakey, readily proposed ways of killing off African nationalism, while praising skulls of dead Africans as precursors of humanity."

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Ngũgĩ sketches the history of Kenya from the 1800s to the late 1960s. He mentions the labour camps; the British figures like Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, who asked resistance fighters to peace talks but then killed them, and who massacred an entire village; and the irregularly-prosecuted murders of native Kenyans when British Kenyans were drunk or angry. A British social worker or politician would travel to Kenya every now and then, peer behind the scenes, and write an aghast report — perhaps effect changes. But as Kenyan independence from Britain grew nearer, colonial laws and their application did not become fairer.

Solito/Solita: Escape and Fetters Across the Border

In June I am going to be burrowing through a heap of 'To-Be-Read' books that have gathered online and 'in real life.'

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But Solito/Solita, the anthology of stories of asylum seekers (and a few economic migrants) from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, is already read. I stopped between stories because I needed to rest. Parental abuse, knife crime, blackmail, robbery of migrants at gunpoint, and so on and so forth, are not light subjects.

I think there is little redemption in the book. The exception is, of course, that a few interviewees reach a point where they are happy where they are in their lives. For a few it is already a relief not always to fear being gunned down by a gang.

It is true that, after their country of birth is far behind, a few people who tell their stories in the book may have found better conditions: an apartment of their own, college tuition, etc. But I think the book illuminates in likewise absurdist ways the social, moral and political vacuum in the country to which they have fled.

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"U.S. Customs and Border Protection provide assistance
to unaccompanied alien children
after they have crossed the border into the United States.
Seen here is a Rio Grande River rescue." (2014)
[U.S. Customs and Border Protection, via Wikimedia Commons]

Note: It needs to be considered that this photo comes from a government source.
Also: It may not have been the photographer's intention
that this photo be used for a skeptical article.

The interactions with Border Patrol recorded in the book
run the spectrum of positive to negative.
License: Public domain

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In their annotations, the editors don't 'grind axes' against any political party; or at least they don't appear to grind axes. It is emphatically stated that the Obama administration was more damaging than the Clinton, Reagan, or G.W. Bush administrations, to the welfare of Latino-Americans who were residing in the USA but were 'undocumented.'

"A Border Patrol Riverine Unit conducts patrols in an Air and Marine Safe-Boat
in South Texas along the Rio Grande river.
They rescue a child who is stranded on the river bank of the Rio Grande." (2013)
[U.S. Customs and Border Protection, via Wikimedia Commons]
See notes above

(PRESIDENT Trump, however, published the infamous order that let authorities take children, and babies, away from parents who were believed to be 'illegally' stepping across the border. Whereas law that President Obama passed near the end of his administration was milder: e.g. the DACA order permitted foreign citizens who had been brought into the US as children to legally reside there, and legally work.)

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— On a personal note: The book describes many acts and institutions of charity, which are all (at times almost literally) life-giving oases in deserts of indifference and brutality. But I wish that societies as a whole were more focused on achieving human justice and respecting basic human rights, less eager to trust to impulses of benevolence. —