‘Where have you been?’ she asks him, trying to remove the KAR hat pin-folded on one side from his head.
‘Burma . . . India . . . Japan . . . lands far away, soldier fighting for the king.’
‘Whom were you fighting?’
‘Italians, Germans, Japanese.’
‘You had a quarrel with them? Oh, you must have been angry.’
‘Nop.’
‘Why then were you fighting them?’
‘A soldier does not ask questions . . . he obeys orders and dies, dies fighting for the king.’
‘Which king? Does he also fight?’
‘Oh, stop it, little girl. You ask too many questions. Let’s go play in the yard . . . soldier fighting for the king.’
They go out and into his workshop and there are many iron pipes of different sizes and lengths. He is heating some over a fire. He beats them into all sorts of shapes. He is so skilful and nimble with his hands, so clever he can make any pipe of the hardest possible steel bend to his every whim and shape in his head.
‘Oh, father, where did you learn all this?’
‘In the war, my daughter . . . a terrible waste of life . . . the bombs . . . the planes . . . these white men, my daughter, it is only human lives they cannot create. But I was only a soldier fighting for the king.’
He starts singing. This time, a hymn. He is joined in the singing by her mother. Mother . . . mother, who always says that she taught herself to read and write in order to read the book of God and avoid the shame of having her letters written or read for her. The singing voices alternate with the noise of iron on iron. Father explains the intricacies of plumbing. Wanja is laughing because she is happy and her father has brought her things from Nairobi. Sweets, cakes. But now he is no longer in the army. He wears a dirty long coat and he carries the heavy tools of his trade and is always counting the amount of money he has made, always ticking crosses against those who owe him money and ticks against the names of those who have paid. Suddenly the scene changes. She is a little bit bigger and mother and father no longer sing together and when they do it is liable to change into intense whispering and quarrelling.
‘Let’s move away from Kabete, away from nearness to the wicked city,’ she pleads.
‘Where do you want to go, woman?’
‘To Ilmorog . . . to your mother and father . . . our parents. You have only seen them once or twice since you came back from the war.’
‘Go back to ignorance and backwardness?’
‘Are you scared of what he told you? What he saw in the light?’
‘Woman. Shut your mouth.’
Her father is trembling – and pleading at the same time. He reasons with her mother.
‘Listen, woman. I have been to war. I know how strong the white man is. What does father know about the Englishman? Only that he carried the guns in 1914. And that there he had heard of Maji Maji and Africans standing up to the white man. What happens? They were wiped out as they waited for bullets to turn to water. I was in India. Indians are cleverer than we are. They were ruled by the British for four hundred years. Has father ever seen a bomb? I have. I will tell you about the true secret of the white man’s power: money. Money moves the world. Money is time. Money is beauty. Money is elegance. Money is power. Why, with money I can even buy the princess of England. The one who recently came here. Money is freedom. With money I can buy freedom for all our people. Instead of this suicidal talk of guns and pistols and oaths of black unity to drive out the white man, we should learn from him how to make money. With money we can bring light into darkness. With money we can get rid of our fears and our superstitions. No more stories about Ndamathia giving us shadows: no more superstitions about animals of the earth that vomit out light. Money, woman, money. Give me money and I can buy holiness and kindness and charity, indeed buy my way to heaven, and the sacred gates will open at my approach. That is the power we want.’
‘What money will you make as a traitor in this war?’
Her mother is crying now . . . no, they are both in church praying and asking God forgiveness for past sins and the sins of those who had taken the law into their hands and were challenging God’s divine message to all mankind . . . Aamen . . . But still the tension in the home increases, the nightly quarrels multiply. For her mother would not refuse to visit her sister next door in the new village of lined huts along trodden pathways and roads. Her sister is reputed to have links with men in the forest.
‘You would bring God’s wrath into this house.’
‘You mean the white man’s wrath?’
‘Your sister is helping the Mau Mau. Can’t you tell her, can’t you remind her what happened to her husband when he was caught with home-made guns?’
‘At least he put his skill in plumbing to better use. He was not a coward. And my sister is not a coward, like me, because I know the truth and I cannot face it. I have seen injustice and I can’t speak out. I can’t take the oath and yet I don’t see anything wrong in it. So I take refuge in God’s church and pray for deliverance, but I am not willing to be the vessel of this deliverance.’
‘Remember the good book. Thou shalt not bow to idols. Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not . . .’ her father warns her mother.
‘Yet you worship golden coins: it is God’s image which is imprinted on the coins? A white God called George? And you killed. You murdered for white men,’ her mother says.
‘That was different,’ says her father.
‘Different! Different! Is killing not killing? You were brave and strong to kill for the race of white people: didn’t you retain a little courage, a little strength to lift a finger for your people, your clansmen? What did your father tell you? In his line were no cowards: in his line there had never been traitors against the people. His words frightened you. Is this not really why you never went back? Not even to see him hanged like a dog by the same white man you faithfully served in the war?’ Wanja has never seen her mother like this.
‘Woooman . . .’ Her father shouts and hits her mother once, twice, then he loses his head and beats her, hits her, claws her, foams with bitter rage and . . . and mother is crying helplessly and she, Wanja, is speechless with terror and her mother suddenly lets out a piercing cry for help . . . ‘Heeelp . . . Heeelp . . . Fire! Fire! House burning . . . oh, oh, oh, oh, my sister, my only sister . . .’
And her father is glaring at her mother saying:
‘I told you. It’s punishment from the Lord.’
And it is her mother’s turn to be speechless with terror and hatred of his father because of the words. And the hut is still burning. Wanja now finds her voice and joins her cousin newly arrived from the city in a terror-filled voice: ‘Help! Heelp! Heeelp! Karega! Karega! Heeeelp!’
She woke up still crying to Karega for rescue from the fire. She was frightened and looked about terrified by the red flames in her mind. Nyakinyua was standing by the bed.
‘What is it, my daughter? What is it?’ Wanja was at first without words. Gradually she recalled her minutes of glory on a hill. She laughed uneasily. She asked:
‘Tell me, please, tell me: why is it my father never came back? What really happened to my grandfather, how did he die? I want to know.’
3 ~ So many experiences, so many discoveries in a night and a half. Harvest-time for seeds planted in time past. The exhaustion of the body. But he is light, buoyant within. He feels in himself the power of an immense dewy dawn over Ilmorog. How is it that a certain contact with a woman can give one so much peace, so much harmony with all things, can open up this sense of immense promises and a thousand possibilities? He tries to sleep. His body is ready. But the mind races on, sailing swiftly but gently on low waves of memories of flesh in flesh. He is aware that he has only uncovered the first layer of a great, infinite unknown and unknowable, and yet he feels that he has known Wanja all his life, that what has gone before has a logic and a rhythm inevitably leading him to that moment of candour in the flesh. He tries to fathom out
this link, this inner continuity, but the thread is lost in a distant mist surrounding his childhood. But silhouettes of certain scenes and events and figures begin to form out of the mist and gradually one stands out and refuses to go. He is a little child playing with sand near his mother. Oh, you wicked child, you have thrown sand into my eyes, she cries. Then women with pangas and folded mikwa-straps in their hands come into the compound and say: Mariamu, let’s go and get firewood. Mariamu, his mother, turns to him: Go over to Njeri’s place and play with the others till I return. He howls with fury. Tears of felt betrayal gush out of his tiny eyes. The other women laugh at him. They say: What a baby you are, and then they soothe him by calling him a man: Now, now, our man, go and play with the girls, they are all waiting for you, oh, oh, he is a sly one, a devil with women, eh? He is not easily soothed. He lets them walk a little distance. He trots behind them down into Mukuru-ini wa Kamiritho up another hill and down to Ngenia. They reach a bend and turn toward Kinenie and then maybe into the bush, because he cannot now see them any more. He goes into the bush. He runs this way. He runs that way. He suddenly finds himself in a green mubage bush. Fear grips him. He shouts out her name. He hears a mocking almost endless repetition of his voice thinning into the distant heart of the forest. He is desperate. He is scared of this total silence made more silent by the noises of insects and birds. To be alone, so alone in a world without human voices. He cries in protest against this total isolation, as if to say: He feels he will die, he is dead, and he cries out for help, for a hand to rescue him, for a chance to play one, one more game with the other children. He has probably cried himself to sleep for when he wakes up he finds himself in bed, his mother sitting beside the bed, and he can see the pity and tenderness in her eyes. But is she sitting by the bed or is his memory playing him false? It is another scene at another time, for she is not really sitting but bending over a bush of pyrethrum daisy flowers as if in prayer and devotion. So still. He is busy moulding balls from mud made from soil mixed with his urine. The field of pyrethrum daisies belongs to Mukami’s father. Tired of making balls, he looks up, is frightened by this cessation of motion-activity in his mother. He shouts out her name with a strength amounting to panic and desperation. She raises her bent back and attempts a smile on dry lips. My head went round and round . . . let’s go home . . . it is nothing, she says. But with a child’s sure instinct he suspects that it is not nothing . . . she is hungry and tired under the baking sun. They reach their hut in the village – when did they cease living as ahoi-squatters on Mukami’s father’s land? In the evening women visit her and he is sent to bed, but he listens. They whisper long into the night and he falls asleep and wakes up to find them whispering and the only words he can make out are Githunguri and bullets and freedom. Anyway they look at him with strange eyes, with tearful eyes, and Mariamu tells them to kneel down and they pray and sing a hymn, Kuu iguru gutiri mathina, and then pray again in a low monotone and this makes him sink back to sleep . . . he sinks deeper and deeper into a slumbrous land of hazy mist . . . encountering more familiar faces and scenes. For it is Mukami who is really praying, and afterward he and she stand on a hill and watch thabiri birds soar high over Manguo Marshes and then fly away with the beautiful sunset of a thousand smouldering fires . . . They are sitting on the hippo humps at the centre of Manguo and he stretches his hand to touch her . . . But she floats away from him, and he is amazed: how can she float so easily, without wings, over the reeds they call huyo cia Nguu? Then he realizes that she is flying with the thabiri birds and he is so sad: how can he lose her at the very moment of reach? Aah, it is not her at all . . . it is Wanja . . . but where has she suddenly come from? She had eaten more salt than he had because she is really Nyakinyua and Nyakinyua knew Ndemi and Ndemi . . . but there must be something wrong with him? How can he mistake his pupils for Wanja and Mukami and Nyakinyua? He is in a classroom. Today, children, I am going to tell you about the history of Mr Blackman in three sentences. In the beginning he had the land and the mind and the soul together. On the second day, they took the body away to barter it for silver coins. On the third day, seeing that he was still fighting back, they brought priests and educators to bind his mind and soul so that these foreigners could more easily take his land and its produce. And now I shall ask you a question: what has Mr Blackman done to attain the true kingdom of his earth? To bring back his mind and soul and body together on his piece of earth? They are actually – how strange – on a raft of banana stems drifting across oceans of time and space. And he is no longer Mwalimu but Chaka leading induna after induna against the Foreign invader. He is L’Ouverture, discarding the comfort and the wealth and the false security of a house slave to throw his intellect and muscles at the feet of the field slaves ready for a united people’s struggle against the drinkers of human sweat, eaters of human flesh. Children, he calls out: see this new African without chains on his legs, without chains on his mind, without chains in his soul, a proud warrior-producer in three continents. And they see him over and over in new guises Koitalel, Waiyaki, Nat Turner, Cinque, Kimathi, Cabral, Nkrumah, Nasser, Mondhlane, Mathenge – radiating the same message, the same possibilities, the same cry and hope of a million Africans . . . And look: who is that unknown soldier following behind carrying three live bullets in the hand? That . . . look children . . . do you know my brother . . . tireless toiler, tireless worker, do you know him? Nding’uri . . . Heh, Nding’uri. He stops.
‘Don’t you know me?’ Karega asks, anxiously.
‘I do . . . why else am I here?’
‘That is strange. Did you know that we were coming? Did you really know of our journey?’
‘Yes.’
‘That is even more strange.’
‘Why?’
‘Imagine. I would never have thought—’
‘Thought what?’
‘That you would know me. I mean I was so small . . . I must have been . . . I may not even have been born!’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Seedlings from the same womb. Kinsmen. Mumbi’s children. Nyumba ya Mumbi. It does matter, or is it not so?’
‘Why are you adrift on a raft?’
‘I wanted to find you . . . to show you that I have grown big . . . And . . . and . . . that I know your secret . . . I know Abdulla.’
‘But who are you?’
‘I thought you said you knew me and of our journey.’
‘Yes. I know of your journey. I know the journey of search and exploration undertaken by all my brothers and sisters. For have we not travelled this road together? Tell me one black man who is not adrift even in the land of his birth. But you? For a second I thought I knew you. Listen, my brothers, the true house of Mumbi, Mumbi the mother creator, is all the black toiling masses carrying a jembe in one hand and three bullets in the other, struggling against centuries of drifting, sole witnesses of their own homecoming. That is why in 1952 we took the oath.’
‘Why did you?’
‘Our land . . . our sweat . . . our bodies . . . our minds . . . our black souls,’ he says, and carries on following the other soldier-toilers of the continent.
Karega shouts behind him: ‘I want to follow you! Do you hear me? Let us journey together.’
Nding’uri stops and he is now both weary and angry.
‘What kind of teacher are you? Leave your children adrift? The struggle, brother, starts where you are.’
He dissolves into the mist of time. And Karega feels the full impact of that last rebuke. How foolish of me . . . how foolish . . . Foolish Africans Never Take Alcohol . . . FANTA . . . Teachers’ Union Says Karega Evades Responsibility . . . TUSKER . . . what foolish answers. He sees that more children have raised their hands to ask questions.
‘Yes, Joseph.’
‘You have told us about black history. You have been telling us about our heroes and our glorious victories. But most seem to end in defeat. Now I want to ask my question . . . If what you say is true, why then was it possible for a handfu
l of Europeans to conquer a continent and to lord it over us for four hundred years? How was it possible, unless it is because they have bigger brains, and that we are the children of Ham, as they say in the Christian Bible?’
He suddenly starts fuming with anger. He knows that a teacher should not erupt into anger but he feels his defeat in that question. Maybe the journey has been long and they have wandered over too many continents and over too large a canvas of time.
‘Look, Joseph. You have been reading eeh, American children’s encyclopedia and the Bible. They used the Bible to steal the souls and minds of ever-grinning Africans, caps folded at the back, saying prayers of gratitude for small crumbs labelled aid, loans, famine relief while big companies are busy collecting gold and silver and diamonds, and while we fight among ourselves saying I am a Kuke, I am a Luo, I am a Luhyia, I am a Somali . . . and . . . and . . . There are times, Joseph, when victory is defeat and defeat is victory.’