At Kamĩtĩ, virtually all the political prisoners are writing or composing something, on toilet paper, mostly. Now the same good old toilet paper—which had served Kwame Nkrumah in James Fort Prison, Dennis Brutus on Robben Island, Abdilatif Abdalla in G Block, Kamĩtĩ, and countless other persons with similar urges—has enabled me to defy daily the intended detention and imprisonment of my mind.

I now know what Brutus meant. Writing this novel has been a daily, almost hourly, assertion of my will to remain human and free despite the state’s program of animal degradation of political prisoners.

Privacy, for instance. I mean its brutal invasion. A warder trails me waking and sleeping for twenty-four hours. It is unnerving, truly unnerving, to find a guard watching me shit and urinate into a children’s chamber pot in my cell, or to find him standing by the entrance to the toilet to watch me do the same exercise. The electric light is on all night long. To induce sleep, I tie a towel over my eyes. This ends up straining them, so that after a month they start smarting and watering. But even more painful is to wake up in the middle of the night, from a dreamless slumber or one softened by sweet illusion or riddled with nightmares, to find two bodiless eyes fixed on me through the iron bars.

Or monotony: the human mind revolts against endless sameness. In ordinary social life, even the closest-knit family hardly ever spends a whole day together on the same compound in meaningless circles. Man, woman, and child go about their different activities in different places and meet only in the evening to recount their different experiences. Experiments done on animals show that when they are confined to a small space and subjected to the same routine they end up tearing each other apart. Now the Kenyatta government was doing the same experiment on human beings.

At Kamĩtĩ, we daily see the same faces in the same white prison uniforms we call kũngũrũ; for food, we are on corn and beans in the morning, at noon, and at three o’clock. Our life here goes through the same motions, day in day out, in a confined space of reliefless dust and gray stones. The two most dominant colors in the detention block are white and gray, and I am convinced these are the colors of death.

The officials cannot have been ignorant of the possible results of these experiments in mental torment: Valium is the most frequently prescribed drug. The doctor expects a political prisoner to be mad or depressed unless proved otherwise.

There is a history to it. I was told a harrowing story of one political prisoner in this very block but before my time who had had a mental breakdown. The authorities watched him go down the drain, till he was reduced to eating his own feces. Yet the regime kept him in that condition for two years.

A week after my incarceration, Wasonga Sijeyo, who has been in that block for nine years but has managed to keep a razor-sharp mind and a heart of steel, eluded the vigilant eyes of the warder then guarding me, and within seconds he told me words that I have come to treasure:

“It may sound a strange thing to say to you, but in a sense I am glad they brought you here. The other day—in fact a week or so before you came—we were saying that it would be a good thing for Kenya if more intellectuals were imprisoned. First, it would wake most of them from their illusions. And some of them might outlive jail to tell the world. The thing is … just watch your mind.… Don’t let them break you and you’ll be all right even if they keep you for life, … but you must try … you have to, for us, for the ones you left behind.”

Besides being an insurrection of a detained intellect, the writing of this novel has been one way of keeping my mind and heart together.

2

I had given myself a difficult task. I would write in Gĩkũyũ, a language that did not yet have a modem novel, 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 (1895–1963) and now its postcolonial successor. I had resolved not to make any concessions to the language. I would not avoid any subject—science, technology, philosophy, religion, music, political economy—provided it logically arose out of the development of the novel’s theme, character, plot, story, and world view. Furthermore, I would use everything I had ever learned about the craft of fiction—allegory, parable, satire, narrative, description, reminiscence, flashback, interior monologue, stream of consciousness, dialogue, drama—provided it came naturally in the development of character, theme, and story. Content—not language and technique—would determine the eventual form of the novel.

Easier said than done: where was I to get the inspiration? Writers need people around them. They thrive on live struggles of active life. Contrary to popular mythology, a novel is not the sole product of the imaginative feats of a single individual but the work of many hands and tongues. Writers just take down notes dictated to them by life among the people, which they then arrange in this or that form. In writing a novel, I love to hear the voices of people working the land, forging metal in a factory, telling anecdotes in a crowded matatu (public minibus), gyrating their hips in a crowded bar before a jukebox or a live band—people playing the games of love and hate and fear and glory in their struggle to live. I need to look at different people’s faces, their gestures, their gait, their clothes, and to hear the variegated modulations of their voices in different moods. I need the vibrant voices of beautiful women: their touches, their sighs, their tears, their laughter. I like the presence of children prancing about, fighting, laughing, crying. I need life to write about life.

But it is also true that nobody writes under one’s chosen conditions with one’s chosen material. Writers can only seize the time to select from material handed to them by history and by whomever and whatever is around them. So my case now: I had not chosen prison; I was forced into it, but now that I’m there, I will try to turn the double-walled enclosure into a special school where, like Shakespeare’s Richard II, I will study how I might compare:

In this literary target, I am lucky to have for teachers the other political prisoners and a few guards, who are cooperative and very generous in sharing their different mines of information and experience. But mostly I pick a lot from ordinary meandering conversations, when in groups we talk of women of various careers—barmaids, secretaries, teachers, and engineers—as well as different aspects of social life and bourgeois rivalry in Nairobi. Women may be absent from the block, but they sure dominate regular talk among us, mostly as absent actors in titillating narratives of strange encounters, rejections, broken hearts, and conquests.

Not only discussions, direct inquiries, and riveting dramas of the heart, but also whispers of happenings outside the walls often provide me with material that I weave into the fabric of the novel. In fact, hints of the main theme and story line emerged when I learned of two members of parliament serving sentences after being convicted of coffee theft. Tidbits about the South African heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard’s³ visit and his racist pro-apartheid views, promulgated on public platforms his Kenyan hosts had generously provided him, have prompted the philosophical discussion in a matatu about “life to come” and the problem of rival claims to the same heart on the day of resurrection. These bits of news also have led to my satirical depiction of one robber character who longs for a world in which the wealthy few gain immortality by buying spare organs, leaving death as the sole prerogative of the poor.

In the daytime, I take hasty notes on empty spaces of the Bible, one of the books freely allowed in the cells. I scribble notes on the bare walls of my cell, and in the evening try to put it all together on toilet paper.

Sometimes the bug of literary boredom and despair bites me, and I experience those painful moments when writers begin to doubt the value of what they are scribbling or the possibility of ever completing the task in hand—those moments when writers restrain themselves with difficulty from setting the thing on fire, or tearing it into pieces, or abandoning it all to dust and cobwebs. These moments—the writer’s block—are worse in prison because here, in this desolate place, there are no distractions to massage the tired imagination: a glass of beer, a sound of music, or a long walk in sun and wind or under a calm starry sky.

But at those very moments, 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 a spiritual battle against its bestial purposes. Time and again, the defiance charges me with new energy and determination: I must cheat them out of that last laugh; I must let my imagination loose over the kind of society that those in this class, in nakedly treacherous alliance with imperialism, are building in our country, in cynical disregard of the wishes of many millions of Kenyans.

Because women are the most exploited and oppressed of all working people, I would create a picture of a strong, determined woman with a will to resist and struggle against her present conditions. Had I not seen glimpses of this type in real life among the women of Kamĩrĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre, with whom I worked to produce the play Ngaahika Ndeenda?⁴ Isn’t Kenyan history replete with this type of woman?—Me Katilili wa Menza,⁵ Muraa wa Ngiti,⁶ Mary Mũthoni Nyanjirũ,⁷ and the women soldiers of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army? Warĩnga will be the fictional reflection of the spirit of women’s resistance and resilience in Kenyan history.

Warĩnga ngatha ya wĩra, Warĩnga heroine of toil … there she walks haughtily carrying her freedom in her own hands.…

Now I am on the last chapter. I have given myself December 25, 1978, as the deadline. The date has a special significance for me. In February or early March, I had told the other political prisoners that we would all “eat Christmas” at home. I even invited them to a Christmas nyama choma party at my home in Gĩtogothi, Bibirioni, Limuru. Like so many other prison wagers related to dreams of eventual liberty, the goat-meat roasting party at Christmas was announced half in jest, but I secretly believed in it and inwardly clung to the date, though becoming less and less openly assertive about it as days and nights rolled away. Now only twelve days remain. Twelve days to eat Christmas at home. Twelve days to meet my self-imposed literary deadline!

But tonight something else, an impulse, a voice, is urging me to run this last lap faster. The voice is not all that secret. Maybe it is born of the feverish expectation of early release, which has been building up in the block for the last four months, though now nobody is sure of its ifs and whens. Maybe it is also born of a writer’s usual excitement at seeing the light at the end of a long, hazardous tunnel. Maybe it’s a combination of both, but whatever its source, the voice remains insistent.

The heart is willing. The hand that has been scribbling non-stop from about seven o’clock is weak. But the voice is relentless: Write on!

I rise to stretch my legs. I walk to the iron-barred rectangular window and peer into the passageway. The two guards are playing checkers, but they are murmuring more than they are playing. I ask the same guard about the time.

“Half-past twelve,” he says, and then adds, “Why do you want to know the time, Professor?”

“I wanted to know if my star is still shining in the sky,” I answer.

“You better have some sleep. You might need it.”

No. I don’t feel like any sleep tonight. I go back to the desk to resume the race to the literary tape, now only a couple of paragraphs away. Free thoughts on toilet paper!

3

In front of me is a photograph of my daughter Njoki, meaning “she who comes back from the other world”; or Aiyerubo, meaning “she who defies heaven and hell”; or Wamũingĩ, meaning “she who belongs to the people.” Later, when I am out of Kamĩtĩ, I will see her and hold her in my arms and learn that she was named Wamũingĩ by the peasant women of Limuru, Aiyerubo by Wole Soyinka and the Writers of African Peoples in Nigeria, but just now she is only a name and a photograph sent through the mail.

Njoki was born on May 15, 1978, five months after my abduction. When her photograph arrived in Kamĩtĩ, sometime after that defiant break into life, Thairũ wa Mũthĩga, a fellow inmate, nicknamed her Kaana ka Bothita, Post-Office Baby.

In saying that the post office has brought us luck, Thairũ spoke a truth I felt more than thought. Njoki is a message from the world. A message of hope. A message that, somewhere, outside these gray walls of death, people were waiting for me, thinking about me, perhaps even fighting for my release with whatever weapons they had. A protest, a hastily muttered prayer from the lips of a peasant, a groan, a sigh, wishes of helpless children: today such gestures and wishes may not be horses on which seekers of freedom may ride to liberty, but I embrace them as offerings of a much needed moral solidarity with us and with the issues for which we have been jailed. One day the organized power and united will of millions will transform these moral wishes into people’s chariots of actual freedom from ruthless exploitation and naked oppression, but just now merely sensing them through Njoki’s photograph is a daily source of joyful strength.

The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things. It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from abroad, their nationally televised charitable handouts and breast-beatings before the high altar, their high-sounding phrases and ready-to-shed tears at the sight of naked children fighting cats and dogs for a trash heap, that all have seen these performances of benign benevolence for what they truly are: a calculated sugarcoating of the immoral sale and mortgage of a whole country, its people and resources, to Euro-American and Japanese capital⁸ for a few million dollars in Swiss banks and a few token shares in foreign companies.

Their vaunted morality is nothing more than the elevation of begging and charity into desirable moral ideals. There is a newfound dignity in begging. Charity, for them, is twice-blessed; it deflates the self-esteem of the recipients and their will to fight, and it inflates the self-image of the giver.

Recourse to imprisonment, with or without a trial, is above all an admission by the ruling minority that people have started to organize to oppose the plunder of the national wealth and heritage. It fears that the people might rise in arms, and therefore acts to forestall such an uprising, real or imaginary.

Thus detention and imprisonment more immediately mean the physical removal of progressive intellectuals from the people’s organized struggles. Ideally, the authorities would like to put the whole community of struggling millions behind bars, as the British colonial authorities once tried to do with Kenyan people during the State of Emergency,⁹ but this would mean incarcerating labor, the true source of national wealth. What then would be left to loot? So the authorities do the simpler thing: pick one or two individuals from among the people and then loudly claim that all sins lie at the feet of these “power hungry,” “misguided,” and “ambitious” agitators.

Any awakening of a people to their historic mission of liberating themselves from oppression is always denounced by the oppressor with the religious rhetoric of a wronged, self-righteous god. Suddenly, these “agitators” become devils whose removal from society is portrayed as a divine mission. Chain the devils! The people are otherwise innocent, simple, peace-loving, obedient, law-abiding, and cannot conceivably harbor any desire to change this best of all possible worlds. It is partly self-deception, but also an attempted deception of millions.

Political detention and imprisonment, besides their punitive aspects, serve as exemplary ritual symbolism. If the state can break such progressive nationalists, if they can make them come out of prison crying, “I am sorry for all my sins,” such an unprincipled about-face would confirm the wisdom of the ruling clique in its division of the populace into the passive innocent millions and the disgruntled subversive few. The “confession” and its expected corollary, “Father, forgive us our sins,” become a cleansing ritual for all the past and current repression. For a few tidbits, directorship of this or that statutory body, the privilege of running for parliament on the regime’s party ticket, such an ex–political prisoner might even happily play the role of a conscientious messenger sent back to earth from purgatory by a father figure more benevolent than Lazarus’s Abraham, “that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.” The forgiving father sits back to enjoy international applause for his manifold munificence and compassion.

Even when they find that such a political prisoner is not in a position to play the role of an active preacher against the futility of struggle (they may have damaged him or her beyond any exploitable repair), they can still publicize this picture of a human wreck as a warning to all future agitators: they couldn’t stand it; do you think you are made of sterner steel? The former hardcore patriot or matriot is physically, intellectually, and spiritually broken, and by a weird symbolic extension, so is the whole struggling populace. All is well in imperialist heaven, for now there is peace on neocolonial earth, policed by a tough no-nonsense comprador¹⁰ ruling class that knows how to deal with subversive elements.

The fact is that imprisonment without trial is not only a punitive act of physical and mental torture of a few individuals; it is also a calculated act of psychological terror against the struggling millions. The aim is a psychological siege of the whole nation. That is why the process from the time of arrest to the time of release is deliberately invested with mystifying ritualism. My arrest, for instance.

4

They came for me at midnight. It was December 30, 1977, at Gĩtogothi, Bibirioni, Limuru. Two Land Rovers with police officers armed with machine guns, rifles, and pistols drove into the yard. A sedan flashing red and blue on its roof remained at the main gate, very much like the biblical sword of fire polic-God,who didn’t want humans to eat from the tree of knowledge. The stability of Adamic Eden depended on its residents remaining ignorant about their condition. Behind the sedan were others that, as I later came to learn, carried some local administrative officials and a corps of informers. The latter remained lurking in the shadows for fear that, even at such a dark hour, some peasants around might recognize them and denounce them to the people.

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. I tried to lift the weight of silence in the room by remarking that if Lenin, Marx, or Engels were all they were after, I could save them much time and energy by showing them the shelves where these dangerous three were hiding. The leader of the book-raiding squad was not amused. He growled at me, so I took his “advice” and let them do their work without verbal interruptions.

I kept on darting my eyes from one raider to the other in case they planted something illegal, like banned pamphlets, so as then to claim they found them hidden among my other books. But I was alone and they were many, all over the study. I soon realized the futility of my vigilance, like the persona in a poem who warns the reader that:

Nevertheless, in helpless silence, my eyes never strayed from the raiders’ activities. To the list of works of the Dangerous Three, they now added Kim Chi Ha’s Cry of the People, and any book whose title contained the words “scientific socialism.”

And then they saw a pile of copies of Ngaahika Ndeenda. They crowded around it, each taking a copy, flipping through it, and then added the copies to the loot. They had arrested the playscript. It seemed they had accomplished their mission.

The conversation in my living room went something like this:

This was an abduction. Still, I couldn’t help musing over the fact that the police squadron was armed to the teeth to abduct a writer whose only acts of violent resistance were safely between the hard and soft covers of books.

5

Tigoni was the local police station, about six miles away. I was pushed into an empty room with bare walls where I was guarded by only one member of the abducting team. Now he smiled rather slyly and he asked me, “How come that as soon as we knocked at the door, you were already up and fully dressed?”

I had neither the time nor the necessary energy to tell him that I had had a premonition, that I had just returned home from Nairobi after saying a rather elaborate farewell to my drinking buddies at the Impala Hotel, that I had even firmly and repeatedly refused a beer, that I had driven from Impala Hotel, Nairobi, to Limuru at a snail’s pace, literally no more than twenty-five miles per hour the whole way, that on arrival home, instead of putting on my pajamas and slipping into bed beside Nyambura, I just lay on the cover fully clad, staring at the ceiling and turning over the recent events since public performances of my play Ngaahika Ndeenda had been banned, and that when I heard the knocking at the door and put on my shoes and went to the window and saw uniformed police officers, I felt as if I had been expecting the scene all along.

This I could not tell him, even if I had had the necessary energy or desire, because a few seconds after his query, some other police came for me, put me in another car, and drove me away. These were not among the ones who arrested me, and they didn’t utter a word to me or to each other. It was only after what seemed an eternity that we reached another police station. Kĩambu!

The same ritual. Into an empty room, in silence. They leave and I hear them lock the door from the outside. I was not alone for very long. A tall slim man came in and, still standing, staring straight ahead, almost past me, made the formal announcement:

“I am Superintendent Mbũrũ attached to Kĩambu Police Station, and I am under instructions to arrest and place you in detention. Have you anything to say?”