Table of Contents Message from Chinua Achebe About the Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction Notes CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CHAPTER NINETEEN CHAPTER TWENTY CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX MESSAGE FROM CHINUA ACHEBE Africa is a huge continent with a diversity of cultures and languages. Africa is not simple—often people want to simplify it, generalize it, stereotype its people, but Africa is very complex. The world is just starting to get to know Africa. The last five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light, and now the time has come for Africans to tell their own stories. The Penguin African Writers Series will bring a new energy to the publication of African literature. Penguin Books is committed to publishing both established and new voices from all over the African continent to ensure African stories reach a wider global audience. This is really what I personally want to see—writers from all over Africa contributing to a definition of themselves, writing ourselves and our stories into history. One of the greatest things literature does is allow us to imagine; to identify with situations and people who live in completely different circumstances, in countries all over the world. Through this series, the creative exploration of those issues and experiences that are unique to the African consciousness will be given a platform, not only throughout Africa, but also to the world beyond its shores. Storytelling is a creative component of human experience and in order to share our experiences with the world, we as Africans need to recognize the importance of our own stories. By starting the series on the solid foundations laid by the renowned Heinemann African Writers Series, I am honored to join Penguin in inviting young and upcoming writers to accept the challenge passed down by celebrated African authors of earlier decades and to continue to explore, confront, and question the realities of life in Africa through their work; challenging Africa’s people to lift her to her rightful place among the nations of the world. PENGUIN CLASSICS THE RIVER BETWEEN NGUGI WA THIONG’O was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. One of the leading African writers and scholars at work today, he is the author of Weep Not, Child; The River Between; A Grain of Wheat; Homecoming; Petals of Blood; Devil on the Cross; Matigari; Decolonising the Mind; Moving the Center; Writers in Politics; and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, among other works, which include novels, short stories, essays, a memoir, and plays. In 1977, the year he published Petals of Blood, Ngugi’s play I Will Marry When I Want (cowritten with Ngugi wa Mirii and harshly critical of the injustices of Kenyan society) was performed, and at the end of the year Ngugi was arrested. He was detained for a year without trial at a maximum-security prison in Kenya. The theater where the play was performed was razed by police in 1982. Ngugi’s numerous honors include the East Africa Novel Prize; UNESCO First Prize; the Lotus Prize for Literature; the Paul Robeson Award for Artistic Excellence, Political Conscience and Integrity; the Zora Neale Hurston–Paul Robeson Award for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement; the Fonlon-Nichols Prize for Artistic Excellence and Human Rights; the Distinguished Africanist Award; the Gwendolyn Brooks Center Contributors Award for significant contribution to the black literary arts; and the Nonino International Literary Prize for the Italian translation of his book Moving the Center. Ngugi has given many distinguished lectures, including the 1984 Robb Lectures at Auckland University, New Zealand, and the 1996 Clarendon Lectures in English at Oxford University. He received the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Cabinet for “his uncompromising efforts to assert the values implicit in the multicultural approach embracing the experience and aspirations of all the world’s minorities.” He has taught in many universities, including Nairobi, Northwestern, and Yale. He was named New York University’s Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Languages and was professor of comparative literature and performance studies. In 2003 Ngugi was elected as an honorary member in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Currently he is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. UZODINMA IWEALA is the author of the award-winning novel Beasts of No Nation and is one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, and New York City. PENGUIN BOOKS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Publishers Ltd, 1965 This edition with an introduction by Uzodinma Iweala published in Penguin Books 2015 Copyright © 1965 by Ngugi wa Thiong’o Introduction copyright © 2015 by Uzodinma Iweala Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1938– The river between / Ngugi wa Thiong’o. pages ; cm ISBN 978-0-698-16677-6 1. Kikuyu (African people)—Kenya—Fiction. 2. Kenya—History—1895–1963—Fiction. I. Title. PR9381.9.N45R5 2015 823'.914—dc23 2015006434 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover photograph: Nigel Pavitt/Getty Images Version_1 Contents Message from Chinua Achebe About the Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction Notes CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CHAPTER NINETEEN CHAPTER TWENTY CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX In The River Between the form of Gikuyu is used correctly for the people and language of the Kikuyu area. Introduction Free Your Mind My first encounter with Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s writing came relatively late for a person who considers himself a student of African literature. A friend of mine, a painter from South Africa, left a copy of Ngugi’s essay collection Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature in my apartment with the instruction to read it if I wanted to “free my mind.” These days it is hard to read such words without thinking first of the 1999 blockbuster science fiction movie The Matrix, in which humans have become slaves to technology, which has imprisoned them in a picture-perfect virtual world. While most people in the film move around oblivious to the fact that they are literally sleeping through life, a select few experience discontent with the perceived order and long for something more. They are offered a choice between the blue pill, a chance to erase all indications of their discontent, and the red pill, an opportunity to explore the twists and turns of an enlightened life. Their problem is that freeing the mind requires that they embrace a contradiction: their world is built on a fallacy and this fallacy provides a foundation for what can be an expansive—if difficult—new life. Ngugi’s body of work, from his 1965 novel The River Between to his 2012 memoir In the House of the Interpreter, is the red pill, delivering readers from a simplistic understanding of the forces of colonialism in Africa to a complicated imagining of Africa before, during, and after colonialism. Decolonising the Mind, first published in 1986, some ten years after he wrote Petals of Blood, the last novel he wrote in English, is Ngugi’s self-described “farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings,”1 and it provides great insight into the motivation for all of Ngugi’s writing, but especially for The River Between and his other early novels. In Decolonising the Mind, one of the most marvelous analyses of the colonized (or formerly colonized) person’s existential predicament since Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth or Black Skin, White Masks, Ngugi explores the role that language plays in the process of colonization and in the long and incomplete struggle to emerge from colonialism’s shadow. It is not an easy text, primarily because it advocates abandoning many assumptions that the postcolonial African (which is to say every living African) has about the struggle for freedom and the institutions that structure everyday life. Ngugi’s unpacking of the damage done to independence movements by Africans being forced to use the colonizers’ languages to express discontent calls into question the authenticity of the work he chose to write in English, but such is the attitude of Ngugi, a writer profoundly allergic to the simple. Ngugi describes African existence as a struggle between two competing forces, an imperialist tradition and a resistance tradition: The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb.