BY KARAMAGI RUJUMBA - 24.03.2018
In 2013, five of the more than 5,000 Kenyans tortured in detention camps during the fight to reclaim their land and self-rule from the British won a landmark ruling in the high court of the United Kingdom, which ordered its government to pay 19.9 million pound sterling in costs and compensation to those who suffered in its detention camps in Kenya.
Yet, William Hague, the then British foreign secretary told the House of Commons that his government would continue to deny liability for the actions of its colonial administration in Kenya (1895-1963) and would defend itself against claims brought from other former colonies. Such is the nature of the boldface cognitive dissonance that typified the British colonial experiment around the world.
"WRESTLING WITH THE DEVIL: A PRISON MEMOIR"
By Ngugi wa Thiong’o
The New Press ($25.99)
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the acclaimed writer, scholar and playwright, lived under the British colonial regime in Kenya for the first 25 years of his life. In “Wrestling With the Devil: A Prison Memoir,” Mr. wa Thiong’o, currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, adds yet another important book to his literary canon, where he deconstructs the language of colonialism, as much as he continues pounding away at the ills of capitalism, religion and the neocolonial estate as tools of subjugation.
In colonialism, language is the first victim. In Kenya, for example, the elderly victims recently compensated by Britain were called freedom fighters of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. The white British settlers derisively called them Mau Mau rebels. The history and culture of this epic battle between the white settlers who saw Kenya and much of their African colonies as getaways for their sordid trysts — and the awakening of the oppressed Africans to wrestle colonial rule off them is one of the running themes so well documented in this book.
It is at once a gripping account of endurance through the mental torture that is detention without trial, an indictment of the British colonial system and the savage ways in which white settlers crushed the spirit of all aspects of Kenyan life. Ultimately, it is a book on the act of writing and how the transcendent power of art can itself be a form of defiance.
“I remind myself that the state has sent me here for my brain to melt into a rotten mess, and suddenly I feel the call to spiritual battle against its bestial purposes,” writes Mr. wa Thiong’o.
Culled from the notes of a previous book, “Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary,” published in 1982, the drama in “Wrestling With the Devil,” revolves around the struggle to be creative within the confines of the humdrum nature of prison life, a flashback on the events and activities that landed him in prison, and a look at how the injustices of colonialism continued well after its official end in Kenya.
Detained without trial by the Kenyan government from Dec. 30, 1977, to Dec. 12, 1978, the author wrote “Devil on the Cross,” in his native language, Gikuyu, “as a challenge to myself, a way of affirming my faith in the possibilities of the languages of all the different Kenyan nationalities, languages whose growth as vehicles for people’s struggles and development had been actively suppressed by the British colonial regime.”
Narrated as a flashback, Mr. wa Thiong’o’s memoir opens on the night he is released from the infamous Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, where he was sentenced. There, he joined other political prisoners after the authoritarian one-person, one-party rule of the government of Kenya at the time banned a community theater project, for which he co-authored a play, “Ngaahika Ndeenda.”
It was later translated into English as “I Will Marry When I Want,” and the state feared the play was an effort in community organizing as much as it was meant to awaken the consciousness of the masses to the rampant corruption and cynicism that undergirded the state of postcolonial Kenya.
“At midnight, December 30, 1977, they took me from my home and led me to Kamiti Maximum Security Prison in chains. For a whole year, I was to remain in cell 16 wrestling with multifarious demons in the dry wilderness of Kamiti Prison, contemplating the two dialectically opposed traditions of Kenyan history and culture and colonial aesthetics. They had raised colonial Lazarus from the dead,” he writes. “Who will bury him?”
Colonial Lazarus lives on through the corruption of the best, the once gallant freedom fighters who took on the oppressor only to become oppressors themselves. Mr. wa Thiong’o’s ideological leanings against capitalism and religion as tools of the colonizer drip off these pages. And yet as one considers the state of modern Africa, one wonders whether the colonial project has ever truly ended.
Karamagi Rujumba, a former Post-Gazette reporter, was born in Kenya and grew up in Uganda. He lives on the North Side. karamagi.rujumba@gmail.com.
