The ways of the ridges, the ancient wisdom of the land, its song and ritual.
(Traditional tribal values as expressed by the wise old man, Chege, page 52)
The River Between is Thiongo’s second novel (although the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition tells us he wrote it first).
It opens with a description of the land, a land of ridges, two in particular, Kameno and Makuyu, between which flowed Honia, the river of life, ‘the river between’ the two ridges with their different settlements and people.
Back in prehistory here lived Gikuyu and Mumbi, father and mother of the tribe (p.17). They were made by Murungu, the Creator, who told the people he gave them the land in perpetuity. Here heroes arose, such as Mugo wa Kibiro the great seer, Wachiori the glorious warrior, Kamiri the powerful magician.
Two boys are fighting on the plain, Kamau and Kinuthia. Young Waiyaki with the goat scar tries to break it up. Waiyaki is the son of Chege who is a respected elder of the tribe, knows the history of the people and the land and the meaning of all the rituals. He warned against the coming of the white men but his peers didn’t listen.
It is the time when Nairobi was still growing and the railway was being built into the interior, so the Edwardian era? Some notable elders of the people of the ridges convert to the white man’s religion.
[To be honest I found the opening of the book, its description of the land and the two ridges with the river between, confusing. It was only by about page 50 that I had a clear sense that the village on one ridge – Kameno – will come to represent the old tribal ways, while the village on the other ridge – Makuyu – comes to be associated with Christianity and the new white man’s values.]
The day of Waiyaki’s ‘second birth’ arrives. Elders assemble, wine is drunk, a goat is slaughtered. Waiyaki sits between his mother’s legs, attached to her by an umbilical cord made from tendons from the slaughtered goat. A midwife cuts this symbolical cord and Waiyaki is born again.
Chege lives apart, in his thingira, the man’s hut. It’s pretty primitive, shared with sleeping goats and sheep. At daybreak wrinkled old Chege takes Waiyaki along the Honia river, then up the valley side, along a path to a holy hill, with a sacred tree and a great view across the land of ridges, with Mount Kerinyaga in the distance, the mountain of He-who-shines-in-holiness (p.17). Chege repeats the story of Murungu, the Creator, creating Gikuyu and Mumbi. Chege tells him about the great seer Mugo wa Kibiro, how he predicted the coming of the white man but nobody believed him. It is a visionary setting in which Chege predicts the coming of a ‘saviour’ who will drive the white man and restore the tribes to their rightful place.
In this visionary setting, Chege tells Waiyaki he must go to school at the Siriana Mission and learn the ways of the white man. And so he does, and is a star pupil, learning fast.
Cut to two young girls, Nyambura and Muthoni, daughters of Joshua, drawing water from the river Honia, river of the cure. Their father is Joshua who has converted to the white man’s religion. All of a sudden Muthoni confesses to her sister that she wants to be circumcised. The Christian tradition they’ve been baptised into isn’t enough for her. She wants to be ‘a real girl, a real woman’ (p.25). To get a man and be married, she must be circumcised ‘or how does a girl grow into a woman?’ (p.25).
Nyambura is worried because she knows their father will be furious if he finds out, considering it a throwback to pagan ways. But she agrees to keep it a secret and maybe even aid her visit to their aunt at Kameno, where she can get the deed done.
p.27 Profile of the girls’ father, Joshua, and the fervour of his Christian faith. Among the traditional round mud thatched huts on Makuyu, his house stands out for having four walls and a tin roof. He thinks most of his people, unconverted to Christianity, live in ‘the depth of darkness’.
Joshua’s Christian zeal means he intends to make his home a beacon of Christian values, which he enforces very strictly on his wife, Miriamu, and two daughters, to the extent of routinely beating his wife when she breaks any of the rules (p.30) (cf the monster controlling father in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus).
Christmas is approaching when he, of course, will celebrate the Christian feast, but most of the villagers, unconverted, will celebrate pagan festivals, particularly the annual ceremony of female circumcision which is, for Joshua, a particular abomination.
[The sense of the missionaries from the distant white city just beginning to impinge on traditional villages, making odd converts here and there who stick out in the sea of paganism, learn to despise their peers and pray for the white man’s ways to triumph, all this a) echoes descriptions of the exact same phenomenon in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and b) are obviously setting us up for a clash between zealous Joshua and his headstrong daughter. Whether this leads to tragedy, as in Things Fall Apart, or just domestic conflict, remains to be seen.]
It is a number of months after Muthoni confessed to her sister that she wants to be circumcised. It is a Sunday and Joshua gives a particularly long sermon. Afterwards Muthoni is nowhere to be seen. Joshua sends his wife and remaining daughter out to find her but she has gone. Under pressure, Nyambura admits that Muthoni has gone to the aunt in Kameno to be circumcised. Joshua goes mad.
Before she could run out Joshua was on her. He glared at her, shaking her all the time. He was almost mad and small foams of saliva could be seen at the sides of his mouth. (p.34)
Joshua orders Nyambura to go to her aunt’s at Kameno, to demand that Muthoni come home. Nyambura does so and returns the next day to announce that Muthoni will not come home. At which point Joshua declares that she is no longer his daughter.
Chapter 9 returns us to Chege, the elder of Kameno, giving us back story about how he survived a famine though his first wives died. The theme of circumcision is repeated.
Circumcision was the central rite in the Gikuyu way of life. Who had ever heard of a girl that was not circumcised? (p.37)
[So Joshua and Chege are non-too-subtly being lined up as polar opposites, new white values versus traditional tribal ways.]
Chege has great hopes for his son Waiyaki who is the last of his line and who Chege hopes will be the great saviour of his people prophesied by tribal seers. Admittedly he has sent him to the missionary school at Siriana (run by a missionary named Livingstone), but that is solely so he can absorb the ways of the white man in order to become more powerful, return and continue the life of the tribe. It is pretty obvious that Waiyaki is destined to grow beyond his tribal background and disappoint his father.
Waiyaki’s perspective: he is attending the tribal dances leading up to the ceremony of male circumcision. He is looking forward to testing his endurance and courage in the ceremony. The dance involves the whole tribe moving and swaying provocatively, going into a trance, possessed by the chanting and music.
At the same time Waiyaki has heard the news that Muthoni has run away from Joshua’s house. it isn’t a trivial domestic matter but a major piece of news which is gossiped about and commented on. And now she appears in the dance, doing what is traditional which is, apparently, telling stories of sex and acting them out, ‘scenes and words of love-making’ (p.41).
Waiyaki gives himself up to the rhythm of the dance, shaking his hips, then finds himself face to face with the rebel Muthoni. They dance wildly, passionately. But then Waiyaki notices his mother watching him from the crowd and the spell snaps. He leaves the dance, wanders through the gyrating crowd. He finds himself on the edge of the forest and then Muthoni is there too. If you’re expecting them to go into a passionate clinch, you’re disappointed. Instead he boyishly asks her why she ran away from her father’s house and she explains that she passionately wants to be circumcised, to become a woman, to be one of the tribe, to be like every other girl of her generation. Then leaves. Waiyaki goes to bed troubled.
Chapter 10: Waiyaki waits, sitting in the cold water of the Honia river, along with other boys, waiting for the circumcision ritual. [Presumably this is because cold shrinks the penis and makes the foreskin more labile and easy to stretch and cut. And numb so the boys don’t feel it?]
The village elder cuts Waiyaki’s foreskin off with a knife. Village women shout and cheer. He is wrapped in a white sheet. His penis drips blood onto the earth. This is important because it signifies the bond between himself and the tribal land which will never be broken.
The circumcised boys stay in a mud hit with grass for bedding while their inflamed penises well up and they moan in constant pain. If they complain the attendants threaten them.
[One threat is that they will bring a woman to the hut and have sex with her in front of the initiates. The point being they will get erections at the sight, the hardness pressing the swollen cut flesh, and make them howl in agony, page 45. There is a similar scene in Leslie Thomas’s novel The Virgin Soldiers, where three dim squaddies circumcise themselves under the misapprehension that this will get them a few weeks R&R. Instead they are just send to hospital where the nurses amuse themselves by bending low over the injured men or lightly caressing their feet and flirting, which gives the men erections, which makes them cry with pain, which makes the nurses stroll off laughing.]
All the boys make a full recovery and return to normal life. Chege is pleased his son passed the test. All the girls, too, except for Muthoni. Chege and the other elders discuss her case. they say it is the curse of the white man. If Joshua was still one of them he would simply sacrifice a black ram under the Mugumo tree and Muthoni would be healed.
Waiyaki goes to visit Muthoni in the dirty hut she’s sleeping in. [With the best will in the world it’s impossible not to be repelled by the extremely primitive conditions the tribe lives in and these barbaric practices. Both boys and girls risk fatal infections from the operation. Muthoni is sleeping on a ‘bed’ made of bamboo poles with grass, sacking and banana leaves for bedding. Long skeins of black soot hang from the ceiling.]
This is all in Kameno, presumably the hut belongs to the aunt? [Yes, this is finally explained on page 50.] Anyway, Waiyaki goes down into the valley and up the ridge opposite, to Makuyu to tell Nyambura that her sister is unwell, so Nyambura takes to visiting her every day. As Kameno is only half an hour’s walk away, and she knew Muthoni was staying with her aunt, it’s difficult to understand why Nyambura wasn’t visiting her already. Many times in Thiong’o’ books the characters just seem to be exceptionally stupid. For example, when she visits, all Nyambura is capable of saying, again and again and again, is ‘Why did you do it?’ ‘Why did you…?’ ‘Why?’ In fact she carries on mindlessly asking it even after Muthoni dies (p.51).
So Nyambura waits days and days, as Muthoni becomes iller and iller, until she’s actually gone into a delirium, before telling her mother who, very reasonably, cries: ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
Having waited until Muthongi was raving delirious, only then do Waiyaki and Nyambura decide she should maybe be taken to the nearest hospital, at the mission. The narrative is obscure. I think Waiyaki and ‘ten men’ carry her there, but we skip that part, skipping forward three days to when Waiyaki returns to tell the aunt, then Joshua’s family, that Muthoni died in the hospital.
All this has happened by page 52 of this 143-page novel so I think we could categorise the first third as The Tragedy of the Girl Who Wanted to be Circumcised and, in future, whenever I read about female genital mutilation, I’ll think of Muthongi and her motives for wanting to have it done (peer pressure, to be part of her year group, part of her tribe, part of her culture, accepted as a woman no longer a girl etc).
Still, I can’t help being struck by the basic stupidity of the characters. If they’d taken Muthongi to the white man’s hospital as soon as the wound became swollen and infected, they’d have cleaned and disinfected it and she would have lived. Instead they trusted to nature and the aunt’s herbal remedies, and she died. The whole thing is presented by Thiong’o as a Great Moral Choice that Muthongi had to make between the old world and the new world. I read it completely differently, as a symbol of ignorance, needless suffering and death.
Chapter 11
p.52 Chege ponders Muthongi’s death. In the doom-laden, symbolism-heavy, spirit-dominated worldview of the traditional tribal it is taken as a portent and the novel, of course, is soaked this worldview. In a sense the narrative is the story of young Waiyaki’s journey to liberate himself from this worldview, to step outside it and critique it.
p.53 Cut to the first description of Livingstone, the man who runs the Siriana Mission. Livingstone plays the same structural role as Mr Howlands in Weep Not, Child, namely The White Man, whose history, personality, motivation we have explained to us. But whereas Howlands was an angry landowner who turned into a sadistic District Officer during the Mau Mau rebellion (1952 to 1960), Livingstone is a different animal. Twenty-five years earlier he came to the land of the ridges as a missionary full of vigour and high hopes. Now he is old and fat and bald, with a double chin and much lowered expectations.
He has seen too much of ‘these people’, their witchcraft, superstition, leaving the bodies of cursed men who’ve died out to rot. He attended some of the dances preceding religious rituals and was horrified at their sexual explicitness, their ‘immorality’. And now this monstrous death of a young girl from circumcision without anaesthetic or medicine.
Then an assistant brings the news that Muthongi was the daughter of the famous convert, Joshua. For some reason this crystallises Livingstone’s dislike of ‘these people’, his feeling that he needs to combat their savage customs and barbaric practices more aggressively. The chapter closes with the typically melodramatic sentence, ‘the war was now on’ (p.54).
Chapter 12
Muthoni’s death crystallises opposition to the Christians among the traditional elders. One of the boys who carried her to the mission even claimed to have seen the Christians poison her. Rumours swirl. For them it is proof that associating with the white man and his religion brings only evil.
On the other side, Joshua preaches with fire in his eye, convinced that Muthoni was seized by an evil spirit as a warning to the faithful. He thunders that anyone associated in any way with circumcision will be cast out.
Waiyaki watches the two sides crystallise into sides, people being forced to choose a side. Some of the previous Christians, led by Kabonyi, abandon the faith and revert to tribal belief. Waiyaki, being the young hero of a novel, is unsure where he stands in the debate, as he has a foot in both camps, being the son of one of the most vehement tribalists (Chege who is, incidentally, ill with a stomach complaint) but attending the Christian Mission school where he likes the white teachers.
Livingstone strikes the next blow, declaring that anyone who defied the church and continued with their tribal customs, especially any part in circumcision, would be expelled from the Siriana school. Waiyaki returns home to find his father has just died.
Chapter 13
Three years later Waiyaki never went back to the mission school and in fact set up his own school, consisting of his office and one other building divided into four classrooms. It’s raining and the rain is coming through the thatched roofs forming pools of water.
The other major thing that’s happened is the alienating of all the land around the two villages to white settlers. Many families have been pushed off ancestral land they’ve inhabited for ages, or forced to work for the new white owners.
The two boys we encountered fighting on the plain at the start of the narrative, Kamau and Kinuthia, they are now Waiyaki’s teachers i.e. he is in charge of this little village school. And they still quarrel and Waiyaki is still the peacemaker. [It shows a fairly elementary sense of structuring for Thiong’o to open with a scene between boys which is then cannily echoed like this, 50 pages and ten years or so (?) later; reminds me of the same sort of thing being done in umpteen movies cf p.71[=-.]
They are said to have regular arguments about politics, but their understanding is painfully simple-minded. Kinuthia thinks it was a mistake to ever let the missionaries into the land because, once established, they invited their white brothers to come, who have now taken the land away from its rightful owners. This is bad, and the Giyuku people must take their land back. That’s it. Not much of a political analysis or program, is it?
So Kinuthia is one of many saying they must band together in order to clear the white man out. They will form a Kiami.
Chapter 14
Waiyaki’s school is called Marioshoni. It has become famous throughout the country as the first self-help school. The people are hungry for learning, hungry to acquire ‘the white man’s secret magic and power’ (p.65).
Use of the word ‘magic’ immediately alerts you to how very, very far they are from understanding the world, since the entire point of the white man’s learning is that it is utterly dis-enchanted, utterly secular, materialistic, mechanistic. The narrator describes the tribal people not wanting to abandon their old tribal ways but to acquire the white man’s learning. They don’t realise that the two cannot be reconciled.
Anyway, for his role in setting up the school Waiyaki finds himself being lionised as the man who will save his culture, ‘the champion of the tribe’s ways and life’ (p.67).
Chapter 15
Waiyaki can’t sleep, troubled by worries about the conflict brewing in his culture, about memories of Muthoni, gets out of bed, steps out of his hut, is dazzled by the big moon in the sky, enchanted, holds out his arms and wants to hold her, wanders down the ridge to the river, crosses it and climbs the other side towards Joshua’s village, Makuyu. Suddenly he bumps into Nyambura, and realises she is the ghostly figure who has been haunting his dreams…
Then we are shown Nyambura’s perspective, namely that she is lonely. Her sister, Muthoni, was her best friend and confidante. She’s still her father’s daughter i.e. a Christian, but she associates her father with her sister’s death. As to Waiyaki, he is now a name in the land but she finds him cold and aloof (we know he’s just nervous and shy).
Well, I’d bet £20 from this set-up that they end up falling in love. They walk a little together, under the mellow moonlight, both thinking their own thoughts, both strongly attracted. Then they go off to see family or friends they were en route to, but thinking about each other…
Chapter 16
Waiyaki had invited Nyambura to come and see his school but she fails to turn up. It is Njahi, the season of the long rains, the season which makes people happy because crops bud and grow. Women laugh as the do the field work. But in the last few years the seasons have become less predictable, Maybe it is the evil influence of the Christians.
Waiyaki is bothered by his father’s prediction that he would be the saviour of his people. Is it him, or is it Kabonyi, the one-time Christian convert who broke away and led the recidivists. Much older than Waiyaki, Kabonyi is a governor of the school and blocks Waiyaki’s wishes at every opportunity.
Sometimes he feels bound to endless service in the name of the tribe and yearns to be free. Then again, he knows his father would be proud of him setting up a school. And it doesn’t stop there, Waiyaki dreams of establishing a college for higher education.
Kinuthia comes to visit. They go to his mother’s hut where she’s made dinner, as all mothers and wives ought to. Kinuthia tells Waiyaki to watch out for Kabonyi, who is jealous of him.
Chapter 17
Two weeks later. Waiyaki goes to see Joshua preach. He is stronger than ever, more vehement and confident of his faith. Waiyaki has the same thoughts he always does, a feeling of yearning, the confusion of whether he is or isn’t the savour his father predicted. His thoughts are boring, the same one issue round and round. Also, he had hoped to see Nyambura in church.
Afterwards he walks a way with Kamau and they both see Nyambura walking in the distance. Kamau says she’s a beautiful woman and Waiyaki is stricken with jealousy. A little further on the track, once Kamau has left, Waiyaki and Nyambura meet. He desperately wants to tell her he loves her. She feels the same. Puppy love.
Chapter 18
Waiyaki is now known throughout the land of ridges as The Teacher. He is going to cross the learning of the white men with the values of the tribe. [We have been told this lots and lots of times without any indication whatsoever what this learning the white people involves. It’s not just a handful of tricks like reading that can be put in a box marked learning. It is an entire worldview and accompanying technical, scientific, mathematical, engineering, legal, accounting and financial knowledge. The more the narrator and Waiyaki talk about ‘the magic of the white man’ without giving any detail whatsoever as to what this involves, the more pathetically dim and naive they come across as.]
Parents day at the village school. The narrator rams home, yet again, that Waiyaki is now revered as THE TEACHER, the man who can infuse traditional ways with the white man’s magic.
The children sing a song about learning. Their parents burst into tears. Yet again the narrative tells us that Waiyaki is the saviour. The white man has come and appropriated their land. But now their children will be educated and will take it back from the white man. The sleeping lions of the ridges will awake yada yada yada.
When all the singing is over Waiyaki makes a speech saying the school buildings need a metal roof; the children need desks, pencil, paper; they need to build more schools; they need to train more teachers.
Kabonyi stands and makes an effective speech against Waiyaki, saying the land is oppressed and they live in poverty because of the white man. They must unite now to kick him out, not ignore the issue by building new schools. Who needs the white man’s education anyway?
But the people don’t cheer and when Waiyaki stands to make an impassioned reply, the crowd of parents and elders cheers him and starts chanting ‘The Teacher! The Teacher!’ (p.91)
Kabonyi makes his son, Kamau, help him home. He is seething after the public humiliation in front of the entire community. He openly says he wishes Waiyaki dead, and Kamau himself is angry that he and his father both are always being humiliated by Waiyaki.
Within months more schools are built on the surrounding ridges on the model of Waiyaki’s pioneering one and the people far and wide come to revere him.
Chapter 19
Things seen from Joshua’s perspective, namely that Waiyaki, having become the figurehead of the old tribal ways, is the biggest threat to Joshua’s Christian mission. So he 1) sets up some Christian village schools of his own and 2) takes his fight to the enemy, organising a large Christian rally in Kameno at which he preaches with marvellous fervour (p.95).
Waiyaki is conflicted (as he has been for the last 20 or 30 pages) between a self appointed mission to reconcile the two ridges, to reconcile Joshua and Kabonyi, and his deeper vocation, to spread education education education.
Waiyaki can see the big meeting going on from his own hut but goes for a walk. Walking down to the river he sees Nyambura. She is feeling this and he is feeling that. God, the trouble with these novels is the themes and ideas are really, really, really trite, I can feel myself becoming stupider as I read them. Not only that but the characters have the same handful of stupid thoughts and worries, over and over and over again until you want to scream.
Chimamanda Ndozie Adichie is an absolute joy to read because each sentence is elegantly shaped and freighted with intelligence and insight. Thiong’o is torture to read because his themes are obvious, his characters are stupid and his prose is clumsy. It figures that the central figures of this and the preceding novel are both children turning into teenagers, because their thoughts and ideas are so very juvenile. Nyambura feels alienated from her father. She feels sad about her dead sister. And she loves Waiyaki. We know this because the text tells us this again and again and again.
She could only be saved through Waiyaki. Waiyaki then was her Saviour, her Black messiah, the promised one who would come and lead her into the light. (p.98)
She is filled with doubt. Should she stay true to her father? Or give herself to Waiyaki? But she is afraid of her father. And she loves Waiyaki. Except she won’t allow herself to call it love. She asks God to help her. She asks God to forgive her. Should she stay true to her father? Or should she cleave to Waiyaki? But Waiyaki is a big man now, the Saviour of his people. Would such a big man be prepared to marry a woman who isn’t circumcised? She is filled with doubt. Should she stay true to her father? Or should she give herself to Waiyaki? She asks God to help her. She asks God to forgive her.
Round and round and round and round go the same tuppenny, trite thought process in these immature, uneducated peasants.
She walks away from her father’s house down to the river and prays. Waiyaki happens to be there and sees her. A kind of holy light emanates from her. She’s not far from where he was circumcised all those years ago. ‘The place would forever remain sacred to him’ (p.99).
He tries to sneak away but treads on a dry twig which cracks – as in thousands of cheesy TV shows and movies.
She raised her head and saw him. Waiyaki stood and looked at her. Nyambura still knelt. Their eyes met and they did not utter a word. Nyambura was afraid of the intense excitement that possessed her. (p.99)
Etc. Maybe I’m missing the point and this is all intended to be what publishers nowadays call Young Adult Fiction, written for people between the ages of 12 and 18. But even a 12 to 18 year old would burst out laughing when Waiyaki asks Nyambura whether she comes here often (p.100).
Waiyaki finally bloody takes her hand and declares that he loves her. Nyambura is confused, excited, embarrassed, feels a painful sorrow come into her heart, lets herself be embraced ‘in a moment of passion’ etc, and Waiyaki asks her to marry him.
She pushes him away and whispers ‘No’. Because of her father. She wants to stay loyal. She explains, crying. He stands stunned, crying. Then they part. As soon as they’ve left the clearing or spot where they were standing…out of the bush steps Kamau, Waiyaki’s deadly rival, who overheard every word of their conversation.
I smiled, because it’s as contrived as a scene from a Shakespeare comedy or a cheesy TV show. Kamau had followed Nyambura because he intended to tell her he loved her, but had been foiled by his rival! And Kamau then utters the cheesiest, tritest, most clichéd sentiment imaginable, when he says: ‘He’ll suffer for this!’ (p.102)
Chapter 20
Waiyaki goes from ridge spreading the news about education and meets final year students at Sisiana who he begs to join his crusade for education. His efforts are paralleled by Kabonyi, now the leading figure in the kiami, the group of elders representing the people. He is going from ridge to ridge making people take an ‘oath of allegiance to the purity of the tribe’ (p.103). Both sides, the traditionalists and the Christians, are growing and hardening their positions.
Waiyaki feels guilty (‘moments of self-blame’) that he didn’t carry out the work of reconciliation he kept thinking about but delaying in his fervour for education (just as he did in the previous chapter and the one before that).
Kinmuthia comes to see him and warns him that all kinds of rumours are spreading about Waiyaki, that he is betraying the tribe, that he was regularly attends Joshua’s services (he went once), that he is going to marry Joshua’s daughter (he proposed, she turned him down), that he went for a long meeting with the young men at the Siriana Mission (he went to ask them to join him as teachers). Kabonyi and Kamau are behind these rumours and they have loads of young men who have sworn to kill traitors.
Then the hut of one of Joshua’s newest followers is burned down. The Kiama have power everywhere. And now it looks like they’re about to put their extreme rhetoric into action.
Chapter 21
With the predictability of teen fiction, Nyambura comes to regret saying No to Waiyaki, and wishing she could relive the lovely feeling of wellbeing and safety she felt in his strong embrace etc. She loves him, she wants him, he is her saviour etc but she is scared of her father, scared of rebelling against her upbringing, as Muthoni did etc etc.
She goes to that patch of bush next to the river then sits in her favourite spot all day long hoping Waiyaki will come. But he doesn’t. When she gets home Joshua is furious with her, refusing to believe she hasn’t spent the day with him, and yelling that if he hears of her being seen with Waiyaki, he will disown her like he disowned Muthoni.
She is bitterly angry and mortified. She rejected Waiyaki precisely to stay loyal to her father and now her father is punishing her for it. She cries herself to sleep, as many a mooning teenager has before and since.
Chapter 22
Waiyaki delivers new teachers recruited from Siriana and becomes the god of the tribe and the region. Description of Kinuthia’s joy and awe at working for such a great man. But he knows the movement afoot throughout the people goes wider than education into political agitation to get rid of white farmers, white government, white missionaries.
Waiyaki, as for the last 70 pages or so, is wracked by uncertainty about whether he is the saviour (‘Was he that saviour? Was he the promised one?’ p.113) foreseen by the old prophet and his father or just a gifted educationist.
Christmas is coming, peak time for the Christian contingent but also the day of the festivals and rituals devoted to the circumcision.
Waiyaki goes to see his mother who is an old widow now, but wants to know if the rumours are true that he’s going to marry Joshua’s daughter. She warns him the Kiama is the voice of the people.
She’s barely finished doing this than, as in a cheesy TV show, Kamau arrives from the Kimia and says Waiyaki’s presence is required at a meeting of the elders and the Kimia going on right now.
Chapter 23
Kamau takes him to what turns out to be a kangaroo court of the Kimia and the Elders. Kabonyi mounts a sustained attack on Waiyaki, bringing up all the accusations we have, by now, heard loads of times – that Waiyaki attends Joshua’s church, he is going to marry Joshua’s daughter, he spends long meetings at the Christian Mission, in short he is conspiring to damage the purity of the tribe and the people contrary to the oath he’s taken.
Waiyaki loses his temper and storms out, handing victory of Kabonyi and his hate-filled son Kamau. The last few bits of dialogue record some of the worried elders aggressively saying that all the young girls and boys must be circumcised, by force, if necessary.
Chapter 24
A few days later Kinuthia bursts into Waiyaki’s hut and excitedly tells him the Kimia has relieved him of his status as The Teacher and they are talking about mounting an attack on Joshua’s house. Waiyaki immediately sets off down into the valley, across the river and up the other side, bursting into Joshua’s house as they are singing ‘When shepherds watched their flocks by night’. They are outraged at this blasphemy. Waiyaki says he only came to warn them there may an attack on them. Joshua stands and execrates Waiyaki, blaming him for his daughter’s death etc, and Waiyaki, mortified, steps to the doorway.
As he does so Kamau and the four tribesmen who had come to kidnap Nyambura and are hiding in the bush outside Joshua’s house, see Waiyaki exiting it. So he is a traitor! They will go back and inform the Kimia. Now it really is war between the tribe and Waiyaki (p.127).
Back inside Nyambura has watched all this and finally, thank God, makes her decision to opt for Waiyaki. She stands, walks between the congregation, takes Waiyaki’s hand and declares the loves him. Her father rails against her, disowns and banishes her from his house.
Nyambura and Waiyaki walk out into the darkness of the night. Kamau and his gang have gone. Both feel waves of conflict and emotion. They walk down the hill to the river and to their favourite spot and lay down on the grass where ‘a stronger throb, heart-rending, was sweeping away their bodies. Their souls joined into one stillness; so still that their breathing seemed to belong to another world, apart from them.’ (p.131). Does this mean they had sex?
They get up and continue up the hill to Mayuku where Kinuthia is waiting. Waiyaki tells him that the next day he will return to the sacred grove where his father made his prophecy, that a saviour of the tribe would arise and free them.
Chapter 25
Cut to the next day and Waiyaki at the sacred grove, in front of the ancient fig tree. He repeats all the doubts and self blame we’ve heard him recite so many times before. He then itemises the various factions, namely the Christians led by Joshua and the tribals represented by Kibonya and Kamau. the Montagues and the Capulets. The Jets and the Sharks.
Then he has a revelation. He realises Education is not enough, it was never enough. Education is only of value if it leads to political action to right the injustice of the people being thrown off their land by the whites. He sees it as a slogan or mantra: Education for Unity. Unity for political freedom. Education, Unity, Political Freedom. This finally squares the circle and unifies his interests and the needs of the people.
The novel climaxes with Waiyaki addressing a large meeting of the people he asked Kinuthia to organise, which Thing’o prepares in typically over-the-top tones:
Then there was a whisper which made everyone rise in excitement: ‘The Teacher! The Teacher!’ Then they sat down again and let Waiyaki pass, his head and broad shoulders indeed caught against the yellow beams that passed through the trees. And he looked powerful and beautiful and they were tense on both sides of the Honia river. Great hush fell over the land as he strode towards a raised piece of ground where the Kiama sat, where his destiny would be decided. (p.138)
Chapter 26
The confrontation scene where first Waiyaki and Kanyobi trade accusations. It’s the same stuff we’ve heard half a dozen times: Waiyaki took Muthoni to the white man’s hospital where they poisoned her; he came back without cleaning himself and so brought uncleanness into the tribe; he consorted with the white men at Siriana; he is going to marry Nyambura, and so on.
Waiyaki rebuts all this then goes on to remind them of the basics, repeating the creation story, how Murungu the Creator created Gikuyu and Mumbi, father and mother of the tribe, then gave the people the land in perpetuity (p.141).
He does all this in order to make his one big political pitch: they must unite, overcoming the differences between Joshua and Kabonyi, because only by being united do they stand a chance of kicking the white man off their land.
However, his best efforts are defeated by Kabonyi, who makes a massive deal about the central importance to their values of keeping an oath, especially the oath administered by the Kimia to maintain the purity of the tribe – and then shocks everyone by declaring that Waiyaki is going to marry Joshua’s daughter, thus bringing impurity into the tribe and breaking his oath. And at this moment he gets his son, Kamau, to bring Nyambura before the meeting and dares Waiyaki to renounce her.
Waiyaki steps over to Nyambura, takes her in his arms and there is a great big expectant silence. He is about to declare his love and explain that no oath can prevent love, when a woman screams ‘The oath!’ and the cry is taken up by all the others and all his efforts to speak are drowned out.
On the last part of the novel’s final page Waiyaki realises all his efforts have been for nothing, as he is drowned out in a torrent of catcalling and abuse. Members of the Kamia rise to say that he and Nyambura will be placed in the hands of the Kimia who will judge them and decide what to do.
The crowd melts away, guilty at what it has done to their great Teacher, until everyone has left the meeting place and night falls once again over the ridges of Makuyu and Kameno and only the steady throb of the river that runs between can be heard in the darkness.
What will happen to Waiyaki? In a sense it doesn’t matter, because his whole political pitch for unity among the people has been rejected for the shorter-term aims of Kabonyi who wants to beat the other black faction (the Chsistians). And Thiong’o doesn’t have to draw the moral that this is exactly what happened to post-independence African governments, who consistently put the triumph of their own ethnic, tribal or regional faction over the interests of the nation as a whole.
Thoughts
African disunity
That’s what the novel is a parable of, the inability of Africans to unify against the common enemy, the same theme as in Weep Not, Child where the black landowner throws in his lot with the white men against his own people. And this disunity carried on after independence in the form of political parties which reflected tribal and regional groupings and so could never be reconciled to work together. Divided they fell.
Thiong’o’s writing
African literature and Kenyan literature in particular, had to start somewhere, and Thiong’o went on to produce reams of novels, essays, plays, political commentary and criticism, setting an early model for Kenyan authors and activists. Well and good. And these early novels amply explain traditional tribal values from the inside, while dramatising the issues raised by the initial coming of the white man, and then the land theft of full-blown colonialism, with the agonising choices individuals caught in a changing world had to make. Good.
But, to be honest, these novels are weak. Weak with strong moments. At moments his intentions mesh with his limited style and produce scenes of force and conviction. But mostly his text lapses into laughable melodrama, simple-minded psychology and his prose becomes a tissue of clichés. All the characters experience their experiences and feelings directly, like children, with no detachment, irony or sophistication. They are angry. They are sad. They are happy. Like characters in a Janet and John book. No depth, no subtlety to savour and enjoy. Which makes them profoundly, stultifyingly boring.
And then I think I’m being too critical, and that Thiong’o was the first guy to really achieve this level of articulacy and publication in his entire country and culture, so maybe instead of picking nits I should be celebrating his achievements. Probably. But unlike Achebe, I wouldn’t recommend these books to anyone.
Credit
The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was first published by William Heinemann in 1965. References are to the 2002 Penguin Classics paperback edition.
Books & Boots 