‘I have never been in a house like that before. A wide road with tall jacarandas led to a yard of flowers of every kind. He took me round the house . . . a gentle person he was, and he showed me the various rooms . . . really, Europeans were not bad, not bad at all . . . he would stop at a picture and he would explain something about grapes or vines hanging from a window – all that. He took me to another room. Ooh, I cried out in sudden fear. There were two figures of men clad in strange armour and swords as if ready for a war fight or something. And on the walls were swords of various lengths and shapes . . . He touched the blades of a few of them and explained something about his hobby. I did not understand all this and anyway I was afraid of the swords and the armoured figures and I was wondering: how did he come to own this house and this collection if he only had just come from Germany? But before I could even ask him, he led me to his bedroom. There were mirrors on the wall, so many and so arranged that you became many many people scattered in endless lines. My heartbeat of fear returned. He must be very rich to have been able to hire such a house although he was only here on a search for a girl. Or I thought it could mean that he was going to stay here for some time, in which case . . . my head started counting again and I was lost in my dreams about money when, suddenly, beside me I saw or rather felt the presence of a dog staring at me with huge green eyes. I gasped in fear and stepped back. I was frightened and felt weak at the knees. I looked about me and I saw we were many many with many many dogs in endless space. I sat on the bed, or rather several of me sat on several beds in a dream. The man came over, or several men came over, and sat beside us on many beds and it was as if he or they were enjoying our fright. He told me not to worry . . . it was all right . . . and the animals came toward us, roaring a little, their green eyes fixed on us. I tried to control my trembling with difficulty. It stood there as if waiting for more orders from the master. And the master was now panting beside me, letting out a nasty smell and I could see by the movement of his fingers and his dilating eyes and his trembling lower lip that he was excited. I had grown roots to the bed of terror. Strength was ebbing out of me, it was as if the green-red glow of the dog’s eyes was sapping my energy and strength to resist. I was hanging in space . . . nothing. But behind the terror, behind this inexplicable thing that was affecting my nerves to a tingling something and the slow deathness, was another feeling of watchfulness. And the man was now fumbling with my clothes and the animal was growling and wagging its tail and the man was trembling. The watchful feeling became stronger and stronger, struggling with the deathness, and the animal was about to lick my fingers when somewhere inside me I heard my own voice exclaim: “Oh, but you know I left my handbag in your car.” The moment I heard my voice I knew that the deathness was defeated and I was returning to life. He said: “Don’t worry, I will get it for you.” I said: “No, a woman’s bag contains secrets, so could he take me to the car?” It was my voice all right but commanded by I didn’t know who inside me . . . I stood up. He led the way to the door. The animal followed behind. And now I was silently praying: give me more strength, give me more strength. He went out first and I quickly shut the door so that the animal was shut in. Even now I can’t tell where I got wings from. I flew and flew through the trees and the grass undergrowth and I only looked back once when I reached the main tarmac road . . .
‘A car screeched and stopped beside me. I jumped to the side, fearing it might be him. My friends . . . I have never been so grateful for the sight of another black skin. I was now crying and in between my sobbing, I must have told bits and pieces about my terror. He took me to a house in Nairobi West. He made me some coffee and gave me some tablets and showed me a place to sleep. I must have slept through the night and through the following day. He let me stay for another night and I told him my story and he asked me a few questions: would I know the house? Would I recognize him? Then he looked at one place and said: It is no use. This is what happens when you turn tourism into a national religion and build it shrines of worship all over the country. I did not ask him what he meant, but I know he sounded angry. The following day he took me to Machakos bus stop and I felt like crying now with gratitude because he had not so much as tried anything on me, and had treated me without any contempt. Now he gave me some money and he simply said: “Why don’t you return home to your parents? This city is no place for you . . . well . . . it is not a place for any of us . . . yet!” He told me where he worked and he gave me a card and he said that should I ever be in difficulties – but not like those of the other night, for he hoped that I would return home – I should not hesitate to go there, and he drove away without waiting for me to finish the words of gratitude I had started.
‘I would go home, I told myself, I should go home . . .
‘But when the bus I had taken stopped near my place I did not get off. I asked myself: how can I go home just like that, as if I have not been working all these years? I returned to Bolibo and to the life of a barmaid . . .’
2 ~ Abdulla became the hero of the journey. He seemed to continue revealing newer and richer aspects of his personality. For a start people were now grateful for his donkey. They kept on making comparisons between the donkey-pulled carriage and the bull-pulled wagons that the colonial settlers used to own. They too were on a mission of conquest – of the city.
Then, despite his crippled leg, Abdulla would not accept a ride in the cart. Let the children take their turns, was all he said. His stoic endurance infused strength and purpose into the enterprise. The sun persistently hit at them and the short stems of the elephant grass pricked their bare soles. Abdulla was very good with the children. He told them stories, especially in the evening when the moon was up:
‘Moon and sun are enemies. That is why one appears in the day and the other at night. But they were not always enemies. This is how it happened. Sun and moon went to bathe in a river. Scrub my back and then I shall scrub yours, said sun to moon. So moon carefully scrubbed sun to a brilliant shine. Moon said: Now it is your turn. Sun mixed spittle with soil and rubbed moon with it.’
In the daytime he told them the names of the various shrubs and grass: if the shrubs had not been dry, he would have shown them the uses of the different parts. He showed them tricks with a knife. Once he threw the knife and it split a thin stick into two. He acted as a judge in their competitions to see who was the most accurate with the catapults he had made for them. The boys were happy and they went on arguing as to who could bring down a bird from the sky. Indeed they seemed to gain from Abdulla’s reserve of strength, and for the first two days they too refused a lift and walked beside Abdulla.
Somewhere in the procession somebody started a hymn. They fumbled with the words, and after a few trials they were all singing it.
They say that there’s famine,
But they don’t say there’s famine
Only for those who
Would not eat the bread of Jesus.
Many houses, much land and property,
Money in banks, much education,
These will not fill hungry hearts unless
People eat the bread of Jesus.
Look at the wealthy, the poor and the children:
Aren’t they all staggering on a highway?
It’s because of the hunger in their hearts,
It’s because they would not eat the bread of Jesus.
The words and the pallid Christian message seemed a mockery of their present plight. But the voices in unison moved Abdulla: the spirit behind the singing awakened memories of other voices in the past.
Abdulla once again walked those other journeys and flights across the plains. Ole Masai, the tall half-Indian, led them. Then they too used to sing, reminding themselves of promises they had made at the taking of Batuni oaths in earlier times:
When Jomo of the black people was arrested in the night
He left us a message and a mission.
I will hold the donkey’s head, he told us:
Will you, my
children, endure the kicks?
Yes, yes, I said, and reached for my sword,
And I linked hands with all the children of the land.
And I vowed, tongue on a burning spear,
I will never turn my back on the cries of black people,
I will never let this soil go to the red stranger.
I will never betray this piece of earth to foreigners.
He had indeed endured thirst and hunger, briars and thorns in scaly flesh in the service of that vision which first opened out to him the day he had taken both the oath of unity and later the Batuni oath.
He was then a worker at a shoe-factory near his home, where strike after strike for higher wages and better housing had always been broken by helmeted policemen. He had asked himself several times: how was it that a boss who never once lifted a load, who never once dirtied his hands in the smelly water and air in the tannery or in any other part of the complex, could still live in a big house and own a car and employ a driver and more than four people only to cut grass in the compound?
How he had trembled as the vision opened out, embracing new thoughts, new desires, new possibilities! To redeem the land: to fight so that the industries like the shoe-factory which had swallowed his sweat could belong to the people: so that his children could one day have enough to eat and to wear under adequate shelter from rain: so that they would say in pride, my father died that I might live: this had transformed him from a slave before a boss into a man. That was the day of his true circumcision into a man.
Abdulla walked, or rather hobbled on his one leg: but they saw this glitter in his eyes, chin held high, face fixed on the distant mountains and they were again surprised, for in this hostile terrain and wilderness it was he who knew and led the way.
But images on images crowded in his mind, so that though he set the pace and kept his place at the head of the procession, he was not with them. Ole Masai . . . strange that it should be happening again in Ilmorog . . . happening again . . . an illusion? A bean fell to the ground and we split it amongst ourselves . . . how good it was that Karega had come to Ilmorog . . . a later messenger from God . . . Old Muturi said it . . . God puts wisdom in the mouth of babes . . . true . . . true . . . the conversation in his shop had changed since Karega’s arrival. For the last five months they would occasionally touch on names which were sweet to the ear . . . Chaka . . . Toussaint . . . Samoei . . . Nat Turner . . . Arap Manyei . . . Laibon Turugat . . . Dessalines . . . Mondhlane . . . Owalo . . . Siotune and Kiamba . . . Nkrumah . . . Cabral . . . and despite the sun and the drought and his anxiety over the fate of his donkey he would feel that Mau Mau was only a link in the chain in the long struggle of African people through different times at different places . . . Aaa! New horizons . . . again . . . like that time in the forest . . . with Ole Masai. They called him Muhindi, but now he did not mind that. He would often tell them how he had hated himself, his mother, his father, his divided self, how indeed at times he had wanted to kill himself, he who did not belong anywhere. It was not that he was poor . . . They lived in the better parts of Eastleigh . . . his Indian father often came and left them money and was paying for his education and had promised him a bit of his wealth . . . indeed had already opened a bank account in his name . . . but he still hated himself. He ran away from school, from home into the streets . . . Kariokoo . . . Pumwani . . . Shauri Moyo . . . playing dice and stealing a bit . . . fighting a bit . . . but he also had picked things from talks . . . and read a bit . . . Lal Vidyardhi’s papers, especially Habari za Dunia and Colonial Times. The arrest of Markhan Singh for identifying with African workers had cleared a bit of the mist in his eyes . . . He now sought ways of getting into the city underground. They had played a cruel joke on him . . . casually told him to take a parcel to a certain person standing at the corner of Khoja Mosque . . . He told them how he tripped over in River Road . . . how the parcel fell and he discovered, oh, he was carrying a revolver . . . he had trembled, excited, but he had also been afraid . . . he had guarded the revolver carefully until he came to the man . . . he was about to hand him the badly wrapped parcel when two European policemen in plain clothes laid hands on the man . . . Ole Masai whipped out the revolver and pointed it at the policemen . . . he was so excited he shouted for all the people to come and see him kill policemen . . . whose hands were up . . . but the man pulled him by the shoulder and they both disappeared among the Nairobi crowds . . . He was never to forget that moment, the moment of his rebirth as a complete man, when he humiliated the two European oppressors and irrevocably sided with the people. He had rejected what his father stood for, rejected the promises of wealth, and was born again as a fighter in the forest, a Kenyan, and his doubts were stilled by new calls and new needs. He had told them how later he had sent a letter to his father, ordering him off African people’s property . . . a remarkable man, Ole Masai was, Abdulla sighed. He had indeed read a bit, because they had talked of other lands, other peoples . . . China . . . Korea . . . Russia . . . and how the working people and the peasant farmers had arisen against their foreign and native overlords . . . Then suddenly Ole Masai was killed and he Abdulla, was shot in the leg. He would ever remember that day . . . they had carefully planned to capture a garrison in the heart of Nakuru Town, and free the prisoners in the adjoining prison, as earlier in the struggle Kihika had done at Mahee and Kimathi’s guerrillas at Naivasha. They had freed the prisoners. The garrison was about to surrender, when Ole Masai was shot and only . . . how fate could play tricks on a people’s destiny? . . . only because his gun was jammed . . . There was pandemonium everywhere . . . people were shouting . . . catch . . . catch . . . and for a second Abdulla had the illusion of a double vision.
For indeed, around him, the children were shouting catch, catch, meat, meat . . . then he too saw what they had seen. The procession had surprised a herd of antelopes which were now leap-leaping across the plains. Abdulla’s mind worked very fast.
‘Wait!’ he shouted at the children, and they obeyed the sudden authority in his voice. ‘Bring the catapult, and quick, get me some stones.’
They gave him the catapult he had helped to make earlier in the day, and also some stones. They stood aside, hushed with excited curiosity, but also sceptical about his power. He put a sharp-edged stone in the catapult and the rest in his pockets. He picked a bit of soil and threw it up in the air to see the strength and direction of the wind. He adjusted his support-walking stick and placed its seat more firmly under his right armpit. And all this time his eyes had not let go the antelopes, which had stopped and stood at a distance from them. He took out the stones in his pockets and asked Muriuki to hold them, on open palms. He held his lower lip and let out some sounds, made the animals suddenly turn and move toward them. But as soon as they saw the procession near, they again turned as if undecided on the next step, so that the sides of their bodies and necks faced the people. Abdulla set his arms, shut one eye, and pulled back the rubber string, before letting it go. Everything was happening so fast, a magic act in a dream. They never even saw the stones nor how he managed to put one and then another and yet another into the catapult and pull and let go. They only heard the sounds of the stones whistling through the air. Then they saw two antelopes jump high in the air, one after the other, and then land still for a second, before falling writhing to the ground. They could not believe it. Munira, Karega, Njuguna and the children ran to the scene. The two animals had been maimed in the legs. The rest was easy.
Abdulla stood in the same position, now transformed in their eyes into a very extraordinary being whom they had never really known. Immobile, like a god of the plains, Abdulla still rested his eyes on the distant hills which for years had been a home to him. He still dwelt on Ole Masai and their group’s desperate and fatal attempt to capture that soldiers’ garrison in Nakuru, to regain the initiative temporarily lost after Kimathi’s capture. Even the enemy papers admitted that it was a well planned and ambitious attempt. The glitter in his eyes became mo
re intense. He brushed them off with the back of his hand and threw the catapult to the ground.
They had a feast that night. Even long afterwards they were to remember it and talk about it as the highest point in their journey to the city. The children played around the fire and the elderly people sat in groups talking and reminiscing over old times and places. Njuguna teased Nyakinyua about antelopes, supposed to have been women’s goats which had run wild because the women could not look after them. Munira lay on his back counting stars, and felt for a time freed from that overwhelming sense of always being on the outside of things. There were still many questions in his head: about Karega for instance. He always felt ill at ease with him, but he had not yet defined his attitude to him. Maybe in the journey they would talk. He also would have liked to have a heart-to-heart talk with Wanja. He had thought that he and Wanja would take up the thread where they had left it, especially now that they had gone through almost identical baptisms by fire and terror. Wasn’t there some kind of destiny in the coincidence of their suffering? But instead he had felt her slipping away from him: where was she going? He watched her moves, but she obviously was not developing a relationship with anyone else. She always surprised him with her moods and the changing aspects of her character. What struck him most, listening to her the other night, was the way her experiences took the form of stories, a kind of ballad of woes with a voice that demanded and compelled a hearing, and which ended by binding the listener even more to her life and fate. He now listened to Abdulla and Nyakinyua talking. How could he have not seen this side of Abdulla? Munira, like the others, had witnessed an extraordinary feat of human skill and it had united them all, as if each could see a bit of himself in Abdulla. Wanja, sitting just behind Nyakinyua and Abdulla, was particularly happy: she had always felt that Abdulla had had a history to that stump of a leg. Now it was no longer a stump, but a badge of courage indelibly imprinted on his body. She listened to Abdulla telling the story of Ole Masai and their fatal attempt to capture the Nakuru garrison. Njogu’s heart glowed with pride. He had always felt ashamed of the fact that his daughter should have borne children to an Indian. They had heard of one Ole Masai but not from one who had worked with him. Njogu felt it was the blood from the black side which had asserted itself. A truly great night of revelations, even for Abdulla, who had not known that fate would later turn him into a shopkeeper on the premises once occupied by Ole Masai’s father. He now understood Njogu’s cryptic statements when he had first inquired about the shop. Wanja tried to picture this Indian, who at least had half-acknowledged his African woman and his son by her. She thought that maybe under different times and conditions it would not matter who married whom or who slept with whom, but suddenly, remembering her ordeal in the city, she started wondering. Her attention was now taken up by the turn of the conversation. It was not her alone. Even the children stopped playing and sat down to hear their new hero answer Karega’s question about Kimathi. At long last he was going to tell the story he had once refused to tell. Silence gripped the whole group, hanging on Abdulla’s lips. He did not hesitate for long and his voice was subdued, the tone matter-of-fact, almost drained of emotion.
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