In the House of the Interpreter (2 page)

Away with images of the past, I tell myself. Distractions will not help. Take your box and walk down the same path you used to take to school. Go down the slope. Walk across the dirt road in the valley below, past the permanent pool of muddy waters. Force feet to move. Yes, move. Move. Move. Move on. Drag the box along.

I come to the first line of houses. With some men in the mountains and others in prison, women have willed themselves into old and new roles: feed and clothe the kids; fetch water; work in the fields; stretch out your hands for meager wages; and build. Build new houses. Set up new homes. You don’t even have time to survey the work of your hands. You need a stranger, like me, to view what you have no time to see. The huts are in different stages of completion. Armed home guards patrol the paths of the new grass village. No respite for you, our mothers and sisters and children.

I ask people, anybody that comes into view, whether they have seen my mother. Some look puzzled and say they don’t know who I’m talking about; others shrug their shoulders or simply shake their heads and continue with the task at hand. But some ask me details about my family, the location of their old homestead, and then point to where I might get more information.

The old independent households from different ridges have been gathered into one concentration village, called Kamĩrĩthũ, without regard to the old neighborhoods. Somehow, eventually, I find my family. My mother and my brother’s wife are on the rooftop thatching, with my sister handing them bundles of grass from below. My younger brother and some young men I don’t know are filling up the walls with mud. A shout of recognition from my younger brother Njinjũ makes the neighbors stop to look. My sister Njoki wipes her hands on her dress and shakes my hand. My mother calls out,
Tuge nĩ woka
, so you have come back, as if she would rather I had stayed away. My younger brother says,
Karibu
. It is less a welcome to the comfort of
the family hearth than an invitation to join them in work. I find a corner, take off my Alliance uniform, and change into old clothes, and within a few seconds, I’m all mud. This is not how I had imagined my return.

And Alliance, where I have now lived eighty-nine days longer than I have lived here? What is it to me, now that this village confronts me as a stranger?

When I first stepped onto the grounds of Alliance High School on Thursday, January 20, 1955, I felt as if I had narrowly eluded pursuing bloodhounds in what had seemed a never-ending nightmare. Up to that moment, my life had been spent looking nervously over my shoulder. Since the declaration of the state of emergency in 1952, I lived in constant fear of falling victim to the gun-toting British forces that were everywhere, hunting down anticolonial Mau Mau guerrillas, real or imagined. Now I was inside a sanctuary, but the hounds remained outside the gates, crouching, panting, waiting, biding their time.

The stone buildings, so many in one place and all for us, seemed a veritable fortress, quite a change from the mud and grass-thatched huts I had lived in all my life. Our hosts, who I would later learn were prefects, took us on a tour of the grounds, eventually leading us to our different houses and dorms. Even the word
dorm
sounded splendidly safe and cozy. The beds were in two rows facing each other. Between them were drawers whose flat tops served as tables. My luggage,
one box, fit under the bed. The dorm reminded me of the ward in King George Hospital, where I was once admitted because of my eyes, except that it smelled not of hospital but of lavender. I had a real bed, my own, for the first time in my life. The following morning I felt like pinching my skin to convince myself that I was awake.

On Friday, my second day, we registered and sorted out tuition at the bursar’s office; on Saturday, we were each issued the school uniform of a pair of khaki shorts and shirts, two cotton T-shirts—white for pajamas, red for work—and a blue tie. With more boys continually arriving on the scene, that first weekend passed quickly as in a soft dream, everything swiftly losing its outline in a mist. The howl of the hounds hovered over the horizon, a distant echo.

Founded on March 1, 1926, Alliance High School was the result of a short-lived alliance of Protestant missions of the Church of Scotland, the Church Missionary Society, the Methodist Church, and the African Inland Mission.
^*
It was the first secondary school for Africans in the country and the only reminder of the missions’ feel-good moment of togetherness. African graduates of the elementary schools now had an alternative to vocational institutes.

The high school followed the recommendations of the
1924 Phelps-Stokes Commission for Education in East Africa, bankrolled by the New York–based Phelps-Stokes Fund and modeled on the nineteenth-century system for educating Native Americans and African Americans in the South. In 1924–25, just before his formal appointment as the first principal of Alliance, G. A. Grieves had gone to America on a Phelps-Stokes grant to study that system, which meant an almost mandatory pilgrimage to Tuskegee and Hampton. Virginia Hampton Institute, founded in 1868 by General Samuel C. Armstrong, the son of a missionary in Hawaii, and Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington, a graduate of Hampton and protégé of Armstrong, were the models. These schools inspired two almost contradictory educational visions: the notion of self-reliance and the aim of producing civic-minded blacks who would work within the parameters of the existing racial state.
^†
Alliance was set up with this animating spirit. The school motto, Strong to serve, and its anthem, celebrating strength of body, mind, and character, were a rewrite of Armstrong’s vision of integrating body, heart, and hands. The theme was repeated in the school’s prayer:
Have in thy keeping, O Lord, our God, this school; that its work may be thorough, and its life joyful. That from it may go out, strong in
body, mind, and character, men who in thy name and with thy power will serve their fellows faithfully
.

Although Alliance, initially a two-year institution, had literary education at its core, the vocational character of its American South model was maintained through classes in carpentry and agriculture. And like its models, it produced mostly teachers, some later employed in mission and government schools and the independent African schools, before their ban. This model was to remain fairly intact until 1940, when Edward Carey Francis took over as principal and grafted a four-year English grammar onto its vocational American stem.

Carey Francis saw Alliance as a grand opportunity to morally and intellectually mold a future leadership that could navigate among contending extremes, a view he articulated in a letter on April 24, 1944, to Reverend H. M. Grace, Edinburgh House, Eaton Gate:

In another write-up, Carey Francis tells how, on arrival in Mombasa in October 1928, a well-meaning acquaintance
from the voyage took him aside and advised him to be careful not to do any work himself, not even straightening out his mixed-up luggage, for that would mean “losing all prestige with the natives.”
^‡
Yet the African boys he met at his first post, as principal at Maseno High School, exhibited a natural friendliness and innate gentlemanliness, raw material that could be shaped in the right way.

Edward Carey Francis; taken from
Alliance High School:
75th Anniversary, 1926 to 2001
(110)

He must have carried that attitude with him to Alliance, and the school had indeed produced its fair share of an essentially cooperative leadership. But contrary to the conscious intentions of its founders, Alliance had also birthed
a radical anticolonial nationalist fever. Ironically, in its very structure, Alliance actually subverted the colonial system it was meant to serve, and Carey Francis, an OBE, would turn out to be the most consistently subversive of the colonial order. The presence of Africans on the staff as equals with the white teachers undermined, in our eyes at least, colonial apartheid and the depiction of the African as inferior. Indeed, some of them were more effective in the classroom than their white counterparts. But no matter what or how they taught, the African teachers were role models of what we could become. By insisting on high performance on the playing field and in the classroom, Carey Francis produced self-confident, college-prepared, intellectual minds. By the time I left Alliance, I felt that academically I could go toe to toe with the best that any European or Asian schools could produce.

But when I first arrived, in January 1955, I was not aware of the history behind the school nor of the confidence it would eventually inspire in me. Not that it would have mattered. It was enough for me to know that the hounds could not enter the grounds to disturb my sleep in Dorm Two of Livingstone House.

Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had lived a blessed time; for, from this instant, there’s nothing serious in mortality
. It was about five, on Monday, my fourth morning in Dorm
Two. Why this talk of death? I thought as I sat up, looking apprehensively around me. The morning crier stood in the common yard, outside. The rest of us were in varying degrees of wakefulness. Arap Soi, second year, next to my bed, calmed me down: It’s Moses Gathere, the house prefect, his way of welcoming a new day. Or rather, his way of telling the prefects of the four Livingstone dorms to get us moving.

Had I but died
, Moses started again. Another boy snorted loudly to nobody in particular, Nincompoop. That’s Stanley Njagi, Soi said. He doesn’t like to wake up, and he doesn’t like being woken up. He covers himself completely with a blanket and reads with a flashlight late into the night. He loves the word
nincompoop
.

By the time Moses was set to crow a third time, like the biblical rooster, everybody had jumped out of their beds, gone out to the bathroom outside, and come back to change from their pajamas into their work clothes, the garments we were given on Saturday. Some boys said they looked like those worn by prisoners, but I didn’t mind them. It’s clean-up time, Moses was saying again loudly, adding, Cleanliness is second to godliness. This generated laughter that relaxed the morning tension, except in the case of one boy who mimicked the crier:
Had I but a dagger in my hands
, he mumbled,
I would …

And that’s Stephen Mũrĩithi, Soi said. He resents authority. He’s always combative, as if trying to pick a fight, although he doesn’t let it get that far. But his I’m-ready-to-take-you-on stare can be intimidating.

The dorm hived with activity immediately. Without any Shakespearean dramatics, Bethuel A. Kiplagat, the Dorm Two prefect, calmly, efficiently, but authoritatively divided up the morning chores, with the new boys spread out among the veterans: some to clean the dorm; others to cut the grass with scythes and clear the compound; others to clean the toilets and bathrooms outside.

Stories about the toilets were passed on from the older boys, from long ago when they were first introduced. Some students had used the new seating toilets as if they were another version of the old pit latrines, squatting instead of sitting on them and thus often missing the bowl. Nobody would claim responsibility for the resulting mess, and no student volunteered to clean up. Threats of force were met with stony silence. No boy wanted to be thought of as a
chura
, a shit cleaner. Finally, in response, the white teachers took brooms and water and other material and did the work. The resistance was broken. Cleaning toilets became an accepted, normal part of the morning chores.

After cleanup, we came back inside and stood by our beds, while the house master, David Martin, accompanied by Moses Gathere, inspected the dorm, a kind of intrahouse competition among the four Livingstone dorms for tidiness and preparation for the
jembe
inspection.