Ngugi Kabiro

Ngugi “Solomon” Kabiro, aged 17, entered Nairobi in 1947 seeking employment and ameans to further his education. Working first as a dispatching clerk, briefly trying his hand at a South African correspondence course, living in over-crowded rooms, Ngugi drifted through a number of jobs and periods of unemployment over the next few years, eventually settling into the con-jobbing work of an insurance salesman. Racial abuse, the “culture” bar, discrimination in wages, and that pervasive and unsurpassed contempt with which the British relate to “inferior races”, moved Ngugi toward a hatred of the Europeans which was combined uneasily with a craving for the outward material comforts and privileges of that dominant class-caste vis-a-vis the masses of African peasants and workers. And it is this contradiction, this colonized mentality embracing resistance to a hated and oppressive colonial-settler system alongside a narrow petty-bourgeois self-interestand opportunism, which led Ngugi to “join” the underground movement in 1950, play out his role as gun-runner, petty broker and go-between for “Mau Mau” guerrillas after the fighting started, and finally to accept employment as a member of a government “rehabilitation” team in a detention camp.