Berlin Reads, 2023: A Short Story by Idza Luhumyo

The International Berlin Literature Festival formally begins on September 6th this year, but 'Berlin liest' is a long running prefatory tradition that my bookseller mother has also celebrated once or twice.

'Berlin reads': People and businesses read aloud a book, for no more than 30 minutes, in public. It's a kind of 'amuse bouche' for the festival itself.

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There are few restrictions, but the organizers offered a few nudges. Why not read poetry by Dinçer Güçyeter, whose prose and poetry memoir Unser Deutschlandmärchen won the prize at the Leipzig Book Fair in April? Or Palestinian author and current New Yorker Ibtisam Azem, who wrote Das Buch vom Verschwinden as a reflection on the ongoing conflict in Israel and the Palestinian Territories? Salman Rushdie's Victory City is also on the list, in honour of the author who was notoriously attacked last year. Jeffrey Eugenides's Virgin Suicides and Middlesex are well known, Bora Chung's short stories in Der Fluch des Hasen (Cursed Bunny) imaginative works of fiction.

In the end I read the magical realist short story "Five Years Next Sunday." Idza Luhumyo won the Caine Prize for African Writing for it, in 2022. You can read it as well on the Prize's website.

It's short, but full of imagery, and the metaphors are so complex that I wasn't able to disentangle them fully. (If they are all metaphors; some things you can probably also understand literally, like acquaintances rudely pawing the protagonist's hair.) Pili, the main character, is being emotionally bled dry by the family (parents and teenaged brothers) and new friends around her. On one level she sees through their motivations, on another level she doggedly takes their purported affection at face value. At the same time, I think, Pili is scrambling for a chance to escape and to chase her own daydreams.

She keeps looking outside, reporting on the gathering of the clouds, the darkening of the day, the flight of the birds. “Rain is coming,” she whispers.

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.