Ngugi wa’ Thiongo is one of Kenya’s pre-eminent writers. Known for Devil on the cross, first published in 1980, and writing in his native Gikuyu, wa’ Thiongo was arrested in 1977 for his part in producing Ngaahika ndeenda (I will marry when I want), a play written and acted by and for workers themselves. Throughout his year in prison, wa’ Thiongo spent his time ‘wrestling with multifarious demons in the dry wilderness’ contemplating ‘two dialectically opposed traditions of Kenyan history and culture’ (82); the ‘colonial culture of fear and silence’ (107); and the ‘people’s revolutionary culture of outspoken courage and heroism’ (40). Devil on the cross is recast as a verdict between these two versions of history in wa’ Thiongo’s new prison memoirs, Wrestling with the devil: a prison memoir. He recounts writing the novel on toilet paper while wrestling with the uncertainty, isolation and immiseration of prison life. Ultimately, wa’ Thiongo shows that it is through resistance, even small acts of such, that one cultivates the resilience to defeat attempts by reaction to demoralise and disenfranchise revolutionary spirits.
The book begins where it ends, with wa’ Thiongo ‘at the desk, under the full electric glare of a hundred-watt naked bulb, scribbling words on toilet paper’ (15). The writing of Devil on the cross runs as a thread through chapters that traverse a gamut of thematic and substantive terrains. Right from the start wa’ Thiongo characterises writing as an act of resistance: ‘a daily, almost hourly, assertion of my will to remain human and free despite the state’s program of animal degradation of political prisoners’ (18). Such resistance, far from being a vain and hopeless gesture, constitutes ‘the only way political prisoners can maintain their sanity and humanity’ (40). Political imprisonment is essentially exemplary punishment, and ‘[e]very aspect of prison is devised to reduce them [political prisoners] to a condition in which they finally say, The masses have betrayed me. Why should I sacrifice myself for them?’ (40). Therefore, to resist ‘even at the level of merely asserting one’s rights, of maintaining one’s ideological beliefs in the face of a programmed onslaught’ (40) is to negate one’s punishment; is to undermine ‘attempts [of reaction] to bring up the Kenyan people in a reactionary culture of silence and fear’ and to assist the ‘people’s fierce struggle […] to create a revolutionary culture of outspoken courage and heroism’ (40).
It was the understanding of his positionality in the wider struggle of the Kenyan people for liberation from capitalism–imperialism that saw wa’ Thiongo through in the end. He traces the history of this struggle, beginning with settler attempts to impose a reactionary culture of fear on the native population. Settler culture, he argues, was essentially one of ‘hedonism without morality, a culture of legalized brutality’ (47). And thus, the Kenyans had to be taught the ‘beauty of submission and blind obedience to authority’ through the carrot of religion as much as the stick of force (55). Wa’ Thiongo then goes on to survey resistance to this culture of fear and submission. He highlights the role of exemplary colonial resistance movements like the ‘Giriama people’s resistance’ led by female general ‘Me Katilili’, a veritable Che Guevara of the Kenyan heartland (58). Betrayed were these valiant struggles, wa’ Thiongo argues, by ‘Colonial Lazarus raised from the dead’ (64): the rehabilitation of colonial-era laws of repression and reaction in postcolonial Kenya. As he languished in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, wa’ Thiongo wondered whether ‘prison [was] our destiny as a Kenyan people’ (64). But knowledge of the Kenyan people’s history of struggle, and memories of his own experiences cultivating the culture of courage that fed it, dissuaded him from such doldrums.
Wa’ Thiongo recalls his efforts as part of the ‘Kamirithu Community Education and Cultural Centre’ to implement ‘a new ambitious program for […] adult education […] cultural development […] material culture […] and health’ (76). Through ‘work […] the great democratic equalizer’ (78), he and his comrades manage to produce Ngaahika ndeenda, the play for which he would later be arrested: arrested like Harry Thuku and Jomo Kenyatta, anti-colonial leaders who, unlike wa’ Thiongo and others, said ‘yes to that which only yesterday was most repugnant to their seemingly progressive selves’ (93). Wa’ Thiongo juxtaposes these fallen cadres of the Kenyan revolution with the ‘other type of political prisoner’ who, ‘[l]ed down the ladder of despair by the demons of surrender […] turned their eyes away from the valley of white bones and looked up to their people’s history and culture of struggle and determination and gained the strength to say no to the colonial culture of fear and its ethic of submissive silence’ (94). This knowledge wa’ Thiongo combined with a praxis of insisting on his elementary rights. He insisted, for instance, that he receive his full ration of sunshine; he refused to receive medical treatment in degrading human chains; he even refused to see his family in such chains, drawing the ire of other prisoners who knew well the value of such precious visits. His family, though, understood his resistance. It allowed him the strength to say ‘no’ to colonial culture of fear and submission:
Yes. No. Ndio. La. Two of the tiniest words in any language. But one had to choose between them. To say yes or no to unfairness, injustice, wrongdoing, oppression, treacherous betrayal, the culture of fear, and the aesthetic of submissive acquiescence, one was choosing a particular world and a future. (97)
The book ends as suddenly as wa’ Thiongo’s prison sentence. After a chapter of ‘meditations’, a compilation of notes that reflects the ambiguity and uncertainty of prison life, wa’ Thiongo recounts the weeks and months leading up to President Jomo Kenyatta’s death, and the release of political prisoners concomitant to it. Wa’ Thiongo’s prison memoir grips the reader with its presentation of the gritty facts of prison life, as much as it enlightens her with a lucid articulation of the dialectic of resistance and resilience at the heart of every revolutionary’s struggle to struggle on, in a thankless and often bleak capitalist–imperialist world. This is a must-read for anyone interested in Kenya’s history of revolutionary struggle, in wa’ Thiongo’s work, in the struggle against political imprisonment, and/or in the philosophy of revolution in the most general sense.