Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo - Wrestling with the devil: a prison memoir

Table of Contents

Also by Ngg wa Thiongo

Novels (English)

The River Between

Weep Not, Child

A Grain of Wheat

Petals of Blood

Devil on the Cross

Matigari

Wizard of the Crow

Short Stories (English)

Secret Lives

Novels (Gky)

Caitani Mtharabain

Matigari ma Njirngi

Mrogi wa Kagogo

Plays (English)

The Black Hermit

This Time Tomorrow

The Trial of Dedan Kmathi (with Micere Mugo)

I Will Marry When I Want (with Ngg wa Mri)

Plays (Gky)

Ngaahika Ndeenda (with Ngg wa Mri)

Mait Njugra

Essays (English)

Homecoming

Moving the Center

Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams

Decolonizing the Mind

Something Torn and New (also issued under the title Re-Membering Africa)

Globalectics: Theory and Politics of Knowing

In the Name of the Mother

Secure the Base: Making Africa Visible in the Globe

Memoirs (English)

Dreams in a Time of War

In the House of the Interpreter

Birth of a Dream Weaver

Childrens Books (English)

Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus

Njamba Nenes Pistol

Childrens Books (Gky)

Njamba Nene na Mbathi Mathagu

Bathitora ya Njamba Nene

Rwmbo rwa Njk

Allegory (Gky)

Nyoni Nyonia Nyone

About the Author

One of the leading African writers and scholars at work today, Ngg wa Thiongo was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. He is the author of Wizard of the Crow; A Grain of Wheat; Weep Not, Child; Petals of Blood; and Birth of a Dream Weaver (The New Press). He is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

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It is past midnight, December 12, 1978. Unable to face the prickly bristles of three see-through blankets on a mattress whose sisal stuffing has folded into numerous lumps hard as stones, I am at the desk, under the full electric glare of a hundred-watt naked bulb, scribbling words on toilet paper. I can hear the bootsteps of the night guard, going up and down the passageway between the two rows of cells, which face each other.

Mine is cell 16 in a prison block enclosing eighteen other political prisoners. Here I have no name. I am just a number in a file: K6,77. A tiny iron frame against one wall serves as a bed. A tiny board against another wall serves as a desk. These fill up the minute cell.

One end of the passageway is a cul-de-sac of two latrines, a washroom with only one sink and a shower room for four. These are all open: no doors. At the other end, next to my cell, the passageway opens into a tiny exercise yard whose major features are one aluminum rubbish bin and a decrepit tenniquoit-cum-volleyball net hanging from two iron poles. There is a door of iron bars at this openingbetween the exercise yard and the block of cellsand it is always shut and locked at night. The block of cells and the yard are enclosed by four double stone walls so high that they completely cut off the skyline of trees and buildings, which might otherwise give us a glimpse of the world of active life.

This is Kamt Maximum Security Prison, one of the largest in Africa. It is situated near three townsRir, Kambu, and Nairobiand literally next door to Kenyatta University College, but we could as easily be on Mars. We are completely quarantined from everything and everybody, including convicted prisoners in all the other blocks, except for a highly drilled select squad of prison guards and their commanding officers.

Maximum security: the idea used to fill me with terror whenever I met it in fiction, Dickens mostly, and I have always associated it with England and Englishmen; it conjured up images of hordes of dangerous killers la Magwitch of Great Expectations, always ready to escape through thick forests and marshes, to unleash yet more havoc and terror on an otherwise stable, peaceful, and God-fearing community of property owners that sees itself as the whole society. It also conjures images of Robben Island political prisoners, Mandela among them, breaking rocks for no purpose other than breaking them. A year as an inmate in Kamt has taught me what should have been obvious: that the prison system is a repressive weapon in the hands of a ruling minority to ensure maximum security for its class dictatorship over the rest of the population, and it is not a monopoly exclusive to England and South Africa.

The menacing bootsteps come nearer. I know that the prowling guard cannot enter my cellit is always double-locked and the keys, in turn, locked inside a box, which promptly at five oclock is taken away by the corporal on duty to a safe somewhere outside the double wallsbut of course he can look into the cell through a small iron-barred rectangular window in the upper half of the door. The barred window is built so as to contain only the face.

The bootsteps stop. I dont have to look to the door to know that the guard is watching me. I can feel it in my bones. It is an instinct that one develops in prison, the cunning instinct of the hunted. I take my time, and eventually turn my eyes to the door. The face of the guard fills the whole window: I know nothing so menacingly sinister in its silent stillness as that trunkless face glaring at one through the iron bars of a prison cell.

Professor,... why are you not in bed? the voice redeems the face. What are you doing?

Relief! I fall back on the current witticism in the detention block.

I am writing to Jomo Kenyatta in his capacity as an expolitical prisoner.

His case was different, the guard argues.

How?

His was a colonial affair.

And this, a neocolonial affair? Whats the difference?

A colonial affair... now we are independentthats the difference, he says.

A colonial affair in an independent country, eh? The British jailed an innocent Kenyatta. Thus Kenyatta learned to jail innocent Kenyans. Is that the difference?

He laughs. Then he repeats it.

The British jailed Kenyatta. Kenyatta jails Kenyans. He laughs again, adding, Take it any way you like,... but write a good petition... you might get a hearing this time.... Your star shines bright in the sky... expolitical prisoner. He chuckles to himself. Does ex- mean the same thing as latehayati?

What do you mean?

Can I say the late political prisoner instead of the expolitical prisoner?