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.