‘Mukami?’ Munira asked automatically. He deserved all this and more, and after today he would reform his ways. ‘Tell me, father . . . what really happened to Mukami? What drove Mukami to it?’
‘Bad company . . . bad company . . . Mariamu . . . bad woman . . . Her sons have been my ruin.’
His father’s voice broke at the memory. There was a minute of silence as he tried to regain his balance. Munira was sorry that he had raised the question and stirred painful memories. His father suddenly stood up, took his coat and beckoned Munira to follow him.
They walked to the top of the ridge looking down upon the vast estate. Waweru was always proud of this estate because it was the one he had acquired when he was beginning to accumulate, before the Second World War.
‘Do you see all this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Flowers. Fruit trees. Tea . . . cows . . . everything.’
‘Yes.’
‘It has not come into being just because of the strength of my limbs alone. It is the Lord’s doing. It is true that this land of the Agikuyu is blessed by the Lord. The prosperity has multiplied several times since independence. My son, trust in God and you’ll never put your foot wrong. God chooses the time of planting and of harvesting. He chooses His vessel for His vast design. Now listen my son. The old man is truly God’s vessel. He suffered. But when he came out, did he take a stick and beat his enemies? No! He only said: “Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Now all that prosperity, all that hard-won freedom is threatened by Satan working through other tribes, arousing their envy and jealousy. That is why this oath is necessary. It is for peace and unity and it is in harmony with God’s eternal design. Now you listen to me. I have been there. I used the Bible. I want your mother to go. She is refusing. But Christ will soon show her the light. Even highly educated people are going there, of their own accord. My son, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This KCO is not a bad thing . . . We shall even have a Church Branch. It’s a cultural organization to bring unity and harmony between all of us, the rich and the poor, and to end envy and greed. God helps those who help themselves. And He said that never again would He give free manna from heaven . . .’
Munira was not sure if he had heard his father correctly. He looked at his father, at his missing ear: he remembered his father’s denunciation of the oath in earlier times: whence this change to the same thing? Was it the same thing? He was again confused:
‘You mean that you . . .’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said quickly, almost impatiently. Munira for the first time tried to argue back with his father.
‘But before God there are no tribes. We are all equal before the Lord.’
‘My son,’ he said, after considering his words for a few minutes. ‘Go back and teach. And stop drinking. If you are tired of teaching, come back here. I have work for you. My estates are many. And I am ageing. Or join KCO. Get a bank loan. Start business.’
‘Here on our farm, since I was a child, I’ve seen so many workers: Luo, Gusii, Embu, Kamba, Somali, Luhya, Kikuyu – and they have all worked together. I have seen them praise the Lord without any ill-feeling between them.’
‘I don’t know why you came. I did not know that you had come to preach to your father. But I will repeat this. Go back and teach. These things are deeper than you think.’
And he went away.
Munira watched him walk down the huge farm. No, he had never known his father, he would never understand him: what was this about? What was this new alliance of the Church and KCO. No, it was better not to wade more than knee-deep into affairs that did not concern him. And he felt some kind of relief. It was as if he had been pulled back from the brink. He had postponed a decision. And yet he felt as if a decision had been made for him, because when he took his bicycle from against the walls of his father’s house, he did not cycle toward his home. He cycled toward Kamiritho Township – to have a drink. But he knew that later that day or night he would be returning to Ilmorog, to his waterless, rainless cloister, without the teachers he had set out to recruit.
The Kamiritho he now came to had changed much. Yesterday, so to speak, it was only a huge village. Now it had sprawled into a fast-growing shopping centre with more than a fair share of beer-halls and teashops. Outside, artisans, self-employed or employed by the slightly more well-to-do, beat corrugated iron sheets into various objects: huge aluminium water-tanks, braziers, charcoal-powered water-heaters, iron troughs for chicken-feed. Higher and higher rose up two huge mounds of scrap metal and waste iron from abandoned lorries and buses. Unemployed motor-mechanics lay on the grass watching cars pass by, hoping that one would develop a mechanical problem or something.
He stood outside the petrol station and looked across the shops to where the lorries used to go for Murram, to where Amina and others had erected Swahili majengo-type houses, and recalled that past humiliation. So long ago.
Then he turned round and he saw several lorries pass. On the boards were scribbles of KANU PRIVATE. He knew where they were coming from. His last night’s terror seized him. He cycled toward Safari, the nearest bar, and hid inside.
It was early, but he ordered a drink, cleared the first bottle very quickly and asked for a second. He started admiring the murals on the walls to keep his mind away from the outside and soon he was completely engrossed in the fantasy world of the artist:
A Masai Moran, a simi sword tied to his barely covered loins, fearlessly spearing a roaring lion accurately through the mouth; a man with a hat leisurely stretching his feet along the ground by an acacia bush in the Weru-wilds of Australia and giving a banana to a kangaroo carrying a baby in its belly pouch; city gentlemen and ladies sitting on chairs in a desert sipping Tusker and Pilsner; monkeys jumping from branch to branch with amused human eyes – what a yoking of far-flung elements which nevertheless seemed in harmony. On yet another wall was Bus No. 555 speeding along a road that led to a wide blue sea with baby-holding breasted mermaids rising from the sea. The surreal images flashed through his mind as he ordered yet another Tusker, remembering at the same time Abdulla’s place and Abdulla’s fears for his donkey . . . A surreal world . . . where he could be made a headmaster in a clean modern office one hour and be drinking tea of unity to protect a few people’s property in dark banana groves later the same day . . . where beautiful women appeared suddenly and made you happy for one or two months and as suddenly disappeared. He started reading the names of the drinks on the shelves behind the counter: Tusker, Pilsner, Muratina, Vat 69, Johnnie Walker, born 1820 and still walking in Kamiritho on a Sunday morning . . . somebody was playing a record from the juke-box . . . he turned his head . . . He saw the woman in a green dress wriggle her hips in slow motion and he could not believe his eyes . . . ‘Wanja! Wanja!’ he called out. ‘What are you doing here?’
3 ~ Thank you for this beer . . . it is strange that you should find me here today, this morning, or rather that I should find you here. I was coming back to Ilmorog. Maybe you don’t believe it. But it is true. I made up my mind this morning. Or I should say it was decided for me. Let me begin . . . where shall I begin? Before this . . . I used to work . . . it sounds so long ago. Doesn’t it? I am talking about last night, but it feels like many years ago to me . . . anyway before this morning I used to work at the Heavenly Bar near Bolibo Golf Club. It was quite an exciting place. All the big shots from the Bolibo Golf Club visiting the place to eat roasted goat’s meat and to buy five minutes of love. They came in Mercedes Benzes, Daimlers, Jaguars, Alfas, Toyotas, Peugeots, Volvos, Fords, Volkswagens, Range Rovers, Mazdas, Datsuns, Bentleys. It was like a parade ground for all the cars made in the world. Big shots from all the communities in Kenya. They would talk about their businesses. They talked about their schools. Many things. Anyway, it was a good place. But this was so before I left for Ilmorog that first time! I wish I had stayed in Ilmorog. After Ilmorog – that is, after I left you and Abdulla in Ilmorog – I went back to the same place. I found a
change there. Big shots from the different communities sat together and talked only in their own mother tongues. Sometimes in English or Swahili. The different groups didn’t mind us bar girls. So I could catch one or two things. Every group talked about the danger of other groups. They were eating too much. They are grabbing everything. Or they are lazy . . . they only drink mnazi beer . . . or wear suits or eat birds . . . or they have taken all the white highlands. Then about a month ago the groups from other communities suddenly stopped coming to the place. So the cars were fewer. Now the talk changed a little. We shall fight: we have fought before . . . the other communities want to reap where they never planted . . . No free things in Kenya. So we knew that something was happening. We started seeing these Kanu private lorries. The bar girls were the first to be rounded up. But I somehow escaped the net. I was ill or something on the night the girls were taken to tea. When they came back they were angry. Some were laughing mockingly. For to us what did it matter who drove a Mercedes Benz? They were all of one tribe: the Mercedes family: whether they came from the coast or from Kisumu. One family. We were another tribe: another family. Take my regular. He was a tall Somali. He was a long-distance driver. He worked with Kenatco and he knew so many places: Zambia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Malawi. He had so many stories about each place. Anyway I liked him. I liked the stories of all these places which he could make me see. He was really funny – never wore underwear – said they were too heavy for a daily traveller – but he was really generous. Well, he came yesterday and stopped his lorry at the place, as was his custom. I was off duty. So he hired a taxi and we drank from place to place. We really drank. I tried every mixture . . . whisky, cider, Tusker, Babycham, vodka . . . but somehow I was not getting drunk. It was not the way it used to be. My staying in Ilmorog had affected me, and last night I kept on thinking about it. Or it may have been the way people were looking at us. Or it could have been . . . I am at times very depressed. But it was not that even. Anyway I was not happy. He wanted to hire a room at Mucatha. But I told him, no, let us go back to my place. He was surprised because I had never before taken him to my room. It was a rule of mine never to take a man to my place. That way when your friendship with a person was over, he would not be coming to your place to trouble you. So he hired another taxi – I tell you long-distance drivers have got money – and we drove back, in silence. It may have been the drink or the moving from place to place or the whole atmosphere but we were silent all the way to my place. If something is going to happen to you, do you feel anything in your stomach, or in your hair, or any other part of you? The window of my room was smoking. I rushed to the door. A small fire had been started there but it had not caught the door. I tried to cry, to shout, but no sound would come out and no tears either. I just banged at the door as if waking up somebody inside . . . then I remembered I had the key in my handbag. I opened the door, tried to go in, but I was hit back by the heavy smell of wood-smoke. They must have used paraffin or petrol and whoever had done it had obviously wanted us both to be trapped in the room. I ran back to my friend, who had stood as if gummed to one spot. Take me to a police station . . . He said wait, let me pass water . . . I went back to the place. It was a stone building with only one room at the back. The others were about to be completed. So only the window and the door were burnt. I was still shaking. A few minutes later, I heard the huge lorry drive away, pressing hard on stone and tar . . . My friend had run away: but how could I blame him? Anyway I went to another girl’s place in another building. She told me that she had heard it said that I was arrogant: that I was going with a shifta, and that I had even refused to go to tea. But she had not taken it seriously, and anyway it was difficult to tell who had done it or ordered it done, and whoever it is I don’t really want to find out . . . It is better not to know . . . This morning I found that the bedding and my clothes were burnt: some petrol must have been thrown into the room. But it has made me think. Since I left Ilmorog this is the second serious thing to happen to me. I now want to go . . . I must go back to Ilmorog. So I took a bus to this place. I was now only playing some music to try and forget a little, before continuing my journey back to Ilmorog.
4 ~ The coincidence must have really impressed Munira, must have struck him as having a God-ordained significance, because years later, in the statement, he was to dwell at length on this strange encounter on a Sunday after a night of mutual baptism by fire and terror.
I was without words with which to respond to her story (he wrote years later). A kiruru and Chang’aa drinker drifted in from the rooms at the back and staggered to where we sat, demanding Tusker from me. I mechanically gave him a five-shilling note. He bowed several times and showered saliva in his hands, calling on heaven to bless me and save me from evil. I was wishing he would go away. I looked at the Masai Moran spearing through the jumping, roaring lion; at the kangaroo on the opposite wall; at the mermaids rising from the sea – breasts above the water, fishtails under the water – and all these suddenly appeared more real, more rooted to the earth and the paltry day-to-day happenings than Wanja, sitting over there, speaking in a small, low, lifeless voice in the same level tone. My heart beat and my stomach contracted, disgust and attraction alternated. Then, remembering my own ordeal in a hut hidden in a thick banana-grove, recalling too the lorries I had just seen earlier written Kanu Private, I relented a little and I felt that maybe we were all enmeshed in a surreal world. I wanted to drown all memories, all thinking, all attempts to understand, everything, in a pool of beer. Let’s go to another bar, I said. Let’s drink, drink, we shall go to Ilmorog tomorrow. I left my bicycle at the petrol station near Safari Bar. All day we drank. I did not now care even if my father or my wife found me.
We went to Mary’s Bar, Young Farmers’, Mount Kenya, Muchoru-i, Highlands, Mathare, drinking a beer in each place, hardly talking. Wanja watched everything, scouring every corner and every face as if for something lost, for a secret remembered. She had withdrawn into herself as if she was inwardly evaluating every face, every happening in the light of her recent encounter. Most bars were full: it was what they called a fortnightly pay-day for workers from a nearby factory. The huge smoking complex of machines and hides and skins and polluted air had come to dominate our lives, bringing even remoter villages within its money-protective orbit. Here and there, and especially at Kambi Bar, people recognized me and probably wondered how the Mwalimu they had known for his restrained habits and aloofness, a son of a prominent churchman and landowner, could be drinking like that, so openly with such a companion. Later in the evening, I suggested we go to Limuru Town proper. We hired a matatu from outside the Young Farmers’ Bar and drove round Kimunya’s corner to Limuru. Again we visited most of the drinking places, lingering longer at the New Alaska Bar, Paradise, Modern, and Corner Bars. By the time we got into the Friendly Bar, Night-club and Restaurant, I was really tipsy and full of stories.
I started telling Wanja about Limuru, mixing fact with fiction, and I was surprised that I knew so much about the place, jumping from the Tigoni lands stolen by Europeans from the people of Limuru and later becoming the storm-centre of Kenya’s history, to what later was called the massacre at Lari. The factory once again loomed large in my memory. There was once a strike, soon after the big war, and I always remembered the screaming workers as they were beaten to blood by plate-helmeted black policemen led by two gum-chewing white khakied officers. Black on Black, I now thought, remembering her recent ordeal and my own. I was drunk, I told myself, and ordered more Tuskers. I was feeling good, a little bit fascinated with myself and my stories and my bits of philosophical reflections. But Wanja was not really interested: what seemed to draw her out was people: young men gyrating their bodies in front of the juke-box; young men in tight American jeans and huge belts studded with shiny metal stars, leaning against the walls by the juke-box or at the counter by the high stools, chewing gum or breaking matchsticks between their teeth with the abandoned nonchalance of cowboys in the American Wild West I once s
aw in a film; young men and bar girls trying out the latest step. To hell with singers and dancers. To hell with Wanja and her stories. To hell with Abdulla, Nyakinyua, my family, everybody. We were all strangers . . . in our land of birth. No more prayers. No more praying over me. The music from the juke-box was oddly mixed with organ sounds in my mind carried from my days in Siriana. And my head was still protesting . . . No more singing over me, oooover meeeeeee, and before I become a slave – aaa slaaave – to hell with – with – the spinning tops in my head – Siriana – school – faces – the strike – expulsion – my father’s contorted face: you have brought shame to your family: you have disrobed your own father in public: do you think you are cleverer than the white man? Do you want to join the mikora who go on singing Ka – 40! Ka forty! and challenging the white man to a duel? – mother’s tears – my shame – teaching – Manguo – Ilmorog – Wanja! The warmth I now felt for her turned into fire, fire-tongues of desire. I wanted to make love to her there: on the Friendly floor: I wanted to hear her little screams and cries for help. Power. I had not a care in the world. Noooot a care in the—
And suddenly from a filmy-dimmy region in my mind I saw her eyes fixed on an object vaguely familiar. I looked harder. I saw him. He was gesticulating with an empty bottle of Tusker in his hand. His drunken voice rose above the others. They were arguing about the merits and demerits of Kamaru and DK. He was shouting: Kamaru sings about our past: he looks to our past, he wants to awaken us to the wisdom of our forefathers. What good is that to the chaos that is today? Another was arguing: his is the tinkling of a broken cymbal. But DK sings true – about us – the young – here and now – a generation lost in urban chaos. Another interrupted: we are not a lost generation. Do you understand? Don’t you go about abusing folk in a bar doing their thing. Geee – I gonna dance to Jim Reeves and Jim Brown and break a safe or two like some cowboys I saw in the Wild Bunch – Geee. Another came in, joined in the argument, putting as much venom and contempt in his voice as he could: look at our scholar, he could not manage to pass his exams, he was booted out, and here he comes to lecture us on things of a dead past.