They laughed. They became a little relaxed.
‘Go wash off the dust first. Else you’ll drive away my customers. They will take you for a daughter of the drought.’
2 ~ Karega worked as a UT – an untrained teacher – in Ilmorog Primary School under its new headmaster, Godfrey Munira. Munira had taken him to the HQ and Mzigo, after his usual inquiries and promises to visit the area, had agreed to hire him ‘on the strength of Mr Munira’s recommendation and assurance about your character and good behaviour. Mr Munira has set very high standards and I would like you to follow his example of selfless dedication to a noble profession.’
The school was now divided into four sections, Standards I to IV: two classes meeting in the morning and the other two in the afternoon. For Standard IV, which contained bigger and brighter boys who had been taught off and on by teachers who never stayed for long, Karega arranged extra classes after five to make up for lost time.
Standing in a classroom in front of those children released something in Karega. It was like continuing with the dialogue he had started with himself at Siriana and which had been interrupted by his expulsion and one year’s slavery to watalii. He was concerned that the children knew no world outside Ilmorog: they thought of Kenya as a city or a large village somewhere outside Ilmorog. How could he enlarge their consciousness so that they could see themselves, Ilmorog and Kenya as part of a larger whole, a larger territory containing the history of African people and their struggles? In his mind he scanned the whole landscape where African people once trod to leave marks and monuments that were the marvel of ages, that not even the fatal encounter of black sweat and white imperialism could rub from the memory and recorded deeds of men. Egypt, Ethiopia, Monomotapata, Zimbabwe, Timbuctoo, Haiti, Malindi, Ghana, Mali, Songhai: the names were sweet to the ear and the children listened with eager enthusiastic wonder that was the measure of their deep-seated unbelief. He made them sing: I live in Ilmorog Division which is in Chiri District; Chiri which is in the Republic of Kenya; Kenya which is part of East Africa; East Africa which is part of Africa; Africa which is the land of African peoples; Africa from where other African people were scattered to other corners of the world. They sang it, but it seemed too abstract. And it was this struggle to believe him that he found so disquieting, that made him realize that there were questions they posed by their very struggle and enthusiasm, for it had to do with the doubt that was in him too, that had haunted him even in Siriana. The African experience was not always clear to him and he saw the inadequacy of the Siriana education now that he was face to face with his own kind, little children, who wanted to know. His one year as a seller of sheepskins and fruit to watalii seemed, in retrospect, less demanding, less frustrating than the present ordeal. For to confront Ilmorog, this poverty – and drought-stricken, depopulated wasteland; to confront the expectant eyes of those who tomorrow would run away to the cities whose cruelty he had experienced and where they would face a future which held the hope of a thousand mirages, was at once to confront himself in a way more profound and painful because the problem and the questions raised went beyond mere personal safety and salvation. It seemed to him, looking at the drought, at the tiny faces, at the lack of any development in the area – where, he wondered, were the benefits of modern science? – a collective fate to which they were all condemned.
It was hopeless: it was a gigantic deception. He and Munira were two ostriches burying their heads in the sand of a classroom, ignoring the howling winds and the sun outside. Was this not the same crime of which they had accused Chui in Siriana? How could they as teachers, albeit in a primary school, ignore the reality of the drought, the listless faces before them? What had education, history and geography and nature-study and maths, got to say to this drought?
He came out of the classroom late one day at the end of March and found a group at Abdulla’s shop.
‘Ruoro’s goat died last night,’ Nyakinyua explained. ‘And he cried. We looked at one another because a grown man’s tears can only portend ill. But we knew he could not help it, and we sat with him as at a wake.’
3 ~ By the end of April it still had not rained. Cows and goats and sheep were skeletons: most herdsmen had anyway moved across the plains in search of fairer and kindlier climes wherein to shelter. They hoped that May would bring rain. But by mid-May which was the last hope for rains which would save them, two cows died; vultures and hawks circled high in the sky and then swooped in hordes, later leaving behind them white bones scattered on stunted and dry elephant grass.
Wanja waited for Karega and Munira outside the school.
‘It has been decided. The elders went to see Mwathi wa Mugo: he said that the donkey must be taken across the plains although a sacrifice of a goat will still be necessary. We must help Abdulla. The donkey’s death will also be his death.’
‘Did they say when?’ Munira asked.
‘They will be meeting soon to decide on the day.’
‘Did he say how they would take it across the plains?’
‘No . . . But there is talk of the whole village scourging it . . . men, women, and children taking part.’
‘But what can we do?’ asked Munira and nobody answered the question.
4 ~ Haunting memories from the past; the year of the locust; the year of the armyworms; the year of the famine of cassava: the Ngigi, Ngunga and Ngaragu ya Mwanga circumcision-groups still bore these names of woe, a witness that uncontrolled nature was always a threat to human endeavour. There was of course another lesson. In 1900, only six years after the year of locusts, the famine was so bad it put to a stop all circumcision rites for the year. No group now carried a name as memorial to the famine of England, so called, because it had weakened people’s resistance to the European marauders of the people’s land and sweat. The famine of cassava itself was a bitter funeral dirge for their sons lost in North Africa, the Middle East, Burma and India fighting against the Germans and the Japanese, thus prompting the young to sing:
When I came from Japan
Little did I know
I would give birth
To a stillborn child
Flour of cassava.
Thus history and legend showed that Ilmorog had always been threatened by the twin cruelties of unprepared-for vagaries of nature and the uncontrolled actions of men.
These thoughts mocked at Karega as he was carried along by the grandeur of the people’s past, the great cultures that spread from Malindi to Tripoli. He confided: The Earliest Man, father of all men on earth, is thought to have been born in Kenya . . . Lake Turkana . . . and he stood back and expected a gasp of disbelief or a few questions.
‘Yes, Muriuki,’ he pointed to a child whose hand seemed raised.
There was a great rustling of books, noise from the benches, children clambering from their desks. Muriuki had fallen down.
‘Move away, move away,’ Karega urged the children, pushing them aside. He felt the prostrate form of Muriuki. ‘He is just hungry,’ one boy said. ‘I know, he told me he was hungry.’ Karega got the hint: he took him to the house where he concocted something – a mixture of an egg and milk from a tin.
Just now, Karega thought, people in the city and other places were drinking and laughing and eating and making love out of excess of fullness, and here people were fainting with hunger and malnutrition.
He talked to Munira, Munira asked the same question:
‘What can I do? It is not my fault. It is not anybody’s fault. We can only close the school until better times.’
‘Accepting. Even defeat?’
‘It can’t be helped. An act of God.’
‘An act of God? Why should people accept any act of any God without resistance? God, it is said, helps those who help themselves.’
‘How?’
‘We can go to the city!’ he said, as if he had already thought about it. But in fact it had just come into his mouth.
‘The city?’
‘Yes, and seek help.’
‘No, Karega. I left those places. I don’t really want to go back,’ he said suddenly remembering the terror.
‘Why?’ Karega asked, astonished by Munira’s prompt refusal.
‘You talk as if you didn’t go to tea.’
‘Did you?’ Karega asked.
‘Yes. I was so ashamed. I was cheated into it and I cheated my wife into it, and now she can’t believe that I didn’t know,’ he answered quietly . . . ‘But even if I had not been led into it, I wonder if I would have had the mettle and the stamina to refuse, and this frightens me even more.’
Karega thought for a little while. His voice was a little hard:
‘I did not. But it is not that I would have been ashamed of it. As I sold sheepskins to watalii I asked myself, how could a whole community be taken in by a few greedy stomachs – greedy because they had eaten more than their fair share of that which was bought by the blood of the people? And they took a symbol from its original beautiful purpose . . . and they think they can make it serve narrow selfish ends! Make poverty and stolen wealth shake hands in eternal peace and Friendship! And what do we do with people who are hungry and jobless, who can’t pay school fees; shall we make them drink a tinful of oath and cry unity? How easy . . . why, there should then be no problems in Ilmorog, and in all the other forgotten areas and places in Kenya.’
‘I can see your point,’ Munira said. ‘You had better talk it over with Wanja and Abdulla. Why,’ he added suddenly, enthusiastically, ‘we can go and tell Nderi wa Riera that we are all members of KCO.’
The fact was that Karega’s heated ridiculing of the whole thing had made Munira feel better and more calm inside. It had given form in words to thoughts in Munira’s mind.
The more Karega thought about the idea which took form in the course of his talk with Munira, the more it seemed the right thing to do. He felt restless, eager to effect the plan. It was this very restlessness which had always driven him on, often bringing him into trouble, but he could not help the inner voices of discontent. He would have to face the drought as a challenge and also as a test. But whatever the decision, he would not be able to teach under these conditions where theory seemed a mockery of the reality.
He broached the plan to Munira, Wanja and Abdulla.
‘It seems to me that we all have our reasons for coming to Ilmorog. But now we are here. There is a crisis facing the community. What shall we do about it? The elders are acting in the light of their knowledge. They believe that you can influence nature by sacrifice and loading all our sins on Abdulla’s donkey. Why – I even heard Njuguna say that the sacrifice will also bribe God to shut his eyes to the Americans’ attempts to walk in God’s secret places. I believe we can save the donkey and save the community.’
Anything which would save his donkey was welcome to Abdulla. So he asked eagerly: how?
‘This place has an MP. We, or rather they, elected him to Parliament to represent all the corners of his constituency, however remote. Let us send a strong delegation of men, women, and children to the big city. To the capital. We shall see the MP for this area. The government is bound to send us help. Or we can bring back help to the others. Otherwise the drought might swallow us all.’
‘And the donkey?’ asked Abdulla.
‘We shall take him with us. We shall repair the cart. We shall bring back food and things in it.’
Wanja was stabbed with pain: Go back to the city, the scene of her other humiliation? She fought against the faintness at the remembrance of her double terror.
‘Can’t we send one person? You, for instance? You can go on Munira’s bicycle,’ she suggested wildly.
‘Me? He would not listen to one person. He would think it a trick or something. But I am sure he can’t ignore a people’s delegation.’
Abdulla readily agreed with the idea. Wanja was thinking: that time last year I went to the city to seek sudden wealth for my own self. Now I am going for the people. Maybe the city will now receive us more kindly.
Munira could not see what an MP would do for them. He was thinking: I seem unable to settle: I keep on moving, driven by other people’s promptings: can I never will my own actions and decisions? But since Wanja and Abdulla had agreed, he also accepted. At the same time he saw a chance to finally still the occasional voices of guilt since his midnight tea at Gatundu. It would also be good to test if there was anything to this KCO and its call for unity and harmony of interests.
The next problem was the elders. They had called a meeting for the following day to announce the verdict on Abdulla’s donkey and also announce the day for the sacrifice of a goat. Wanja would that night talk to Nyakinyua, who in turn would discuss it with a few more elders before the crucial meeting.
The meeting was well attended: Njuguna told the people what Mwathi wa Mugo had said:
‘We send this donkey away. We sacrifice a goat. Nobody has the mouth to throw words back at Mwathi. You know he is the stick and the shade that God uses to defend our land. You know that since that fight for Ilmorog a long time ago we have not had many plagues in our midst. Nobody can throw words back at him. So we did not ask him how! He did not tell us how. He knows we are not children. If it was a goat we would beat it and then send it away and ask it to pass the plague to others. This animal is not a goat. But we are using it for the same illness: I say we shall beat it and when it is about to die we shall send it away into the plains to carry this plague away.’ A few other elders spoke and agreed with the idea: a donkey was truly the stranger in their midst!
‘But perhaps the teachers of our children might have a modern cure for an old illness,’ another suggested.
Karega trembled a little. In school debates he had talked and argued. But he had never before talked to a gathering of elders. He could not now think of an appropriate proverb, riddle or story with which to drive home his points. So he made a plain speech.
‘A donkey has no influence on the weather. No animal or man can change a law of nature. But people can use the laws of nature. The magic we should be getting is this: the one which will make this land so yield in times of rain that we can keep aside a few grains for when it shines. We want the magic that will make our cows yield so much milk that we shall have enough to drink and exchange the rest for things we cannot grow here. That magic is in our hands. Tomorrow when it rains: we should be asking the soil: what food, what offering does it need so that it will yield more? If we kill Abdulla’s donkey we shall all be cutting our other leg in a season of drought. I come from Limuru where donkeys have proved to be motorcars that don’t drink petrol. When the last grain in your stores is finished, will any of us be able to walk afar and fetch food and water on our backs? Let us rather look to ourselves to see what we can do to save us from the drought. The labour of our hands is the magic and the wealth that will change our world and end all droughts from our earth.’
He told them the idea of a delegation, singing a bit too glowingly the virtues and duties of an MP. ‘We give him our votes so that he can carry our troubles. But if we do not show him that we have troubles so he can pass them to the government, can we blame him?’
They started talking and whispering among themselves . . . Yes, that was right . . . We should let those in authority know. Maybe if they knew . . . Yes, yes, maybe if they knew of our plight they would not be sending men to only collect taxes and others to demand money for organizations the villages knew nothing about . . . This your teacher . . . Hardly been here two months . . . Where did he get such words?
Njuguna stood up and opposed the idea of going to the city.
‘My ears have heard strange words. That we should send a whole community to beg. Have you ever heard of a whole people abandoning their land and property to go and beg on strange highways? The young man has youthful blood: we shall send him to the city and he will tell the MP to come to us. Yes, it is the MP who should come to us instead of his sending us envoys and children as his spokesmen,’ he added, glancing at Karega.
&
nbsp; Njuguna’s idea seemed simple, direct and it upheld the dignity of Ilmorog. There was renewed argument. Nyakinyua stood up:
‘I think we should go. It is our turn to make things happen. There was a time when things happened the way we in Ilmorog wanted them to happen. We had power over the movement of our limbs. We made up our own words and sang them and we danced to them. But there came a time when this power was taken from us. We danced yes, but somebody else called out the words and the song. First the Wazungu. They would send trains here from out there. They ate our forests. What did they give us in return? Then they sent for our young men. They went on swallowing our youth. Ours is only to bear in order for the city to take. In the war against Wazungu we gave our share of blood. A sacrifice. Why? Because we wanted to be able to sing our song, and dance our words in fullness of head and stomach. But what happened? They have continued to entice our youth away. What do they send us in return? Except for these two teachers here, the others would come and go. Then they send us messengers who demand twelve shillings and fifty cents for what? They send others with strange objects and they tell us that they are measuring a big road. Where is the road? They send us others who come every now and then to take taxes: others to buy our produce except when there is drought and famine. The MP also came once and made us give two shillings each for Harambee water. Have we seen him since? Aca! That is why Ilmorog must now go there and see this Ndamathia that only takes but never gives back. We must surround the city and demand back our share. We must sing our tune and dance to it. Those out there can also, for a change, dance to the actions and words of us that sweat, of us that feel the pain of bearing . . . But Ilmorog must go as one voice.’
She sat down to a thought-charged silence. They were all affected by her words. She had touched something which they all had felt: yes, it was they outside there who ought to dance to the needs of the people. But now it seemed that authority, power, everything, was outside Ilmorog . . . out there . . . in the big city. They must go and confront that which had been the cause of their empty granaries, that which had sapped their energies, and caused their weakness. After her, there was not much argument. They all talked of going to the city. Long ago when their cattle and goats were taken by hostile nations, the warriors went out, followed them, and would not return until they had recovered their stolen wealth. Now Ilmorog’s own heart had been stolen. They would follow to recover it. It was a new kind of war . . . but war all the same.