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.

“I have just come back from Kenya where I was sent by the British Government. I have seen Emergency justice in operation. And now I can reveal the shocking truth, that I have seen African children, in British jails, sentenced to life imprisonment—for “consorting with armed persons” and “unlawful possession of ammunition.” [Quoted by the author: Quaker social worker Eileen Fletcher, writing in The Tribune, May 25, 1956]

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Kenya purportedly gained freedom from British rule in 1963. But Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o writes that, paradoxically, “By 1966 all the repressive colonial laws were back on the books.” Measures that the colonial rulers had taken to squelch actions against Her Majesty's government — measures which the Kenyan government distanced itself from after liberation, were adopted again; and these measures ruled Ngũgĩ's prison existence in 1978.

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Note: I am ~1/3rd of the way through the book.

It isn't an easy introduction to the 20th-century history of Kenya; Ngũgĩ helps you along with basic dates and biographies, but a lot of context is still missing. But it is (shockingly) funny anyway. Also, I imagine that anyone who did live in Kenya, struggled beneath the governments from the 1950s through the 70s and hated the mendacious colonial narratives, would find it immensely cathartic.

In general Wrestling with the Devil leaves me with the feeling that Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago did. (But maybe I'm sentimentalizing an unsentimental book by saying so.) It exudes the power of mental resistance, knowledge sharing, secret acts of helpfulness, and intellectual effort; and demonstrates their effect even in the face of terror and oppression.

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Once again, the colonial overlords banned these publications; they banished the authors, composers, and publishers to concentration camps, prisons, and cruel deaths.

But even behind the barbed wire and stone walls of the colonial Jericho, they went on composing new songs and singing out a collective defiance that finally brought those walls tumbling down [...]

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Additional information taken from "Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o" [Wikipedia]

P.S. Without straying into libel, I think it's fair to surmise that Ngũgĩ's observations about the bizarre ethics of at least one British Kenyan social set remain 'as true today as they were when they were written.' In his book he doesn't speak highly of the morals of Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere. A cursory look at Wikipedia reveals that, before dying young at the age of 48, the Baron's great-grandson Thomas P. G. (accidentally, he claimed) shot and killed not just one, but two, Kenyans in 2005 and 2006 respectively.