Divided loyalties

On his first day at boarding school in Kenya in the early 1950s, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o stood to attention as the Union Jack was raised on the school flagpole. Afterwards the boys sang Psalm 51 which contains the line, ‘Wash me Redeemer and I shall be whiter than snow.’ Then came a tour of the
headmaster’s house during which they were invited to gaze in wonder at his electric cooker and his gleaming pots and pans.

The weirdness of this was not lost on Thiong’o, especially as his brother, Good Wallace, was fighting for the Mau-Mau guerrillas at the time. At the end of his first term, Thiong’o returned home to find that it no longer existed. His whole village had been razed and his family packed off to a detention camp.

All this was part of a policy called ‘Villagisation’, a policy which led to all the inhabitants of central Kenya being displaced — their homes either burned or bulldozed — in order to try to starve out the Mau-Mau guerrillas in the mountains.

As he tried to settle down at school, Thiong’o felt, not surprisingly, as if he was leading two completely separate lives. At assembly, he listened to the headmaster read out extracts from Three Men in a Boat. He also heard Shakespeare for the first time as senior boys rehearsed the school play — As You Like It.

But watching Rosalind and Celia wandering round the Forest of Arden, Thiong’o couldn’t help thinking about Good Wallace on the run from the British in the forests of Mount Kenya. And as he read about Winston Churchill in his history books, he found one half of his heart swelling with pride, while the other half scrunched up in resentment.