The River Between Read Free

from his own lineage, a prominent bloodline that includes the seer Mugo wa Kibiro.
    The moment of revelation of the prophecy sets Waiyaki on a path of growth but also reveals more tension, the specter of Kabonyi, the opportunist who will later come to haunt Waiyaki and highlight intergenerational political tensions that are as much a problem as the arrival of colonizing forces. Hidden here in this moment is the fatal flaw passed from father to son, the belief that the upheaval created by the white man can be stilled by incorporating into daily life the white man’s philosophy and using it against him. Waiyaki is told to “Learn all the wisdom and all the secrets of the white man. But do not follow his vices,” and later tries to establish education as the basis for the community’s self-reconciliation and simultaneous salvation.
    More than anything else, it is the white man’s religion, Christianity, that exacerbates existing tensions within the community. There are those who reject it, like Chege; those who see it as a tool to achieve status, like Kabonyi; and those who become fervent believers, like the fanatical Joshua, a preacher from Makuyu so enraptured by it that he would disown his children for existing outside his narrow interpretation of its tenets.
    We are not given a concrete reason for Joshua’s conversion, told only that he is consumed by his devotion and disconnected from the geography of the tribes. Life for Joshua is complete—except that it is not. The trouble with Joshua comes through in a description of his residence that demonstrates Ngugi’s narrative brilliance:
    Joshua’s house was different. His was a tin-roofed rectangular building standing quite distinctly by itself on the ridge. The tin roof was already decaying and let in rain freely, so on top of the roof could be seen little scraps of sacking that covered the very bad parts.
    The passage recalls the biblical parable of the man who built his house on sand. It does not take long for Joshua’s reality to cave in on itself: His second daughter, Muthoni, ignores his prohibition against the “sinful” practice of female circumcision. Her embrace of the tribal initiation ceremony that will make her a woman and the resulting rupture in her home and community make gender a subject of major conflict in the novel.
    While not set at a particular time,
The River Between
maps loosely to the turmoil resulting from a 1929 decree by the Church of Scotland Missionprohibiting circumcised individuals from attending mission schools. The Church of Scotland Mission is represented in the novel by Reverend Livingstone, the sole white character given voice. Attending some of the dances on the eve of circumcision, he
    was horrified beyond measure. The songs he heard and the actions he saw convinced him beyond any doubt that these people were immoral through and through. He was thoroughly nauseated and he never went to another such dance. Circumcision had to be rooted out if there was to be any hope of salvation for these people.
    A wide swath of the community that Livingstone condemns stands in opposition to his thinking and finds a voice in the prophet Chege, who reflects: “Circumcision was the central rite in the Gikuyu way of life. Who had ever heard of a girl that was not circumcised? Who would ever pay cows and goats for such a girl? Certainly it would never be his son. Waiyaki would never betray the tribe.” Both female and male circumcision, as coming-of-age rites for the youth of Kameno and Mayku, play a central role in the novel, but it is female circumcision that is of greater consequence, because of its importance to the institution of marriage—a means of wealth transfer in almost every social group. The Church of Scotland Mission’s prohibition of circumcision amounted to a prohibition of tribal life and of the future itself.
    Jomo Kenyatta, the first leader of Kenya, tried to explain the