Below this were more tributes and denunciations.
But the one that most held Munira’s interest was another news item captioned: MP to lead a Delegation of Protest. ‘The MP for Ilmorog and Southern Ruwa-ini, The Hon. Nderi wa Riera, yesterday told a press conference that he would be leading a strong delegation to all cabinet ministers and to even higher authorities if necessary to demand a mandatory death sentence for all cases of theft, with or without violence. He would also seek the same mandatory death sentence for all crimes that were politically and economically motivated.
‘Speaking over a wide range of subjects, the MP called for a total and permanent ban on strikes. Strikes generated an atmosphere of tension which could only lead to instability and periodic violence. Strikes should be regarded as deliberate anti-national acts of economic sabotage.
‘Calling on Trade Union leaders to be unselfish, he asked them to refrain from demanding higher and higher wages without proper regard for the lower income groups or the jobless, who would be the sole beneficiaries of a more equitable reallocation of what would have gone into unregulated wage increases. It was time that Trade Unions were told in no uncertain terms that they could no longer hold the country to ransom.
‘Referring to the proposed delegation, the MP called upon teachers, employers, Churchmen, and all men of goodwill to join it to demonstrate their unity of purpose in abhorring recent dastardly acts which would only scare away tourists and potential investors. Even local investors, he warned, might find it necessary to invest their capital abroad if the situation were left to deteriorate.’
The MP was fond of press statements and government by delegations and petitions, Munira thought. He recalled the picture of the MP ten years back pontificating in a solemn suit and tie and then dashing across Jeevanjee Gardens, abandoning all pretences to dignity, with a group of the city’s unemployed in hot pursuit, and he probably praying for a miraculous intervention. Munira started laughing. He laughed until the newspaper fell from his hands. He turned his eyes to the other side and he caught the three youths also laughing and looking in his direction. Their eyes met. He stopped laughing. He had recognised Muriuki. And so he, Munira, had educated Muriuki to make him ready for robbery and jails?
‘Why my sudden doubt?’ he wrote, answering back the temptation of the night before. ‘Everything is ordained by God. The vanity of man’s actions divorced from a total surrender to the will of the Lord! We went on a journey to the city to save Ilmorog from the drought. We brought back spiritual drought from the city!’
There was an element of truth in Munira’s interpretation of events that followed their journey to the city. An administrative office for a government chief and a police post were the first things to be set up in the area. Next had come the church built by an Alliance of Missions as part of their missionary evangelical thrust into heathenish interiors. Only that, for him, so many years later, this irony of history was just the manner in which God manifested himself.
2 ~ Even the rain that fell a month after all the charitable individuals and organizations had packed their bags and returned to the city was, later for Munira, the way God chose to reveal himself in all his thunderous and flaming glory. It was this way of showing that men’s efforts could only come to nought and could never influence God’s will. Only total surrender . . . But for Nyakinyua, Njuguna, Njogu, Ruoro, and the others who knew about Mwathi’s powers, the rain had clearly been God’s response to the sacrifice and it signalled the end of a year of drought. They heard Afric’s God wrestling with the Gods of other lands. They heard and listened in wonder to the Gods’ fearful roar and the clashing of their swords which emitted fire from heaven.
The whole school came out and in supplication to the heavens, sang with expectant voices:
Mbura Ura Rain pour down
Nguthinjire So I’ll slaughter you
Gategwa A young bull
Na kangi And another
Kari Iguku With a hump
Guku Guku Hump, Hump!
The rain seemed to hear them. The earth swallowed thirstily, swallowed the first few drops and gradually the ground relaxed its hardness and became soft and sloshy. The children splashed their feet in muddy pools and slid smoothly on slopes and hills.
Wanja was possessed of the rain-spirit. She walked through it, clothes drenched, skirt-hem tight against her thighs, revelling in the waters from heaven. She would at times sit or stand still on her hut’s verandah and look, wonder-gaze, at her life in droplets of rain falling from the roof. What was the meaning of her life? Where was the continuity of purpose? Why should she go through life an unfulfilled woman? She wanted to cry for . . . she knew not what. She and Nyakinyua were now close, very close, mother and daughter more than grandmother and granddaughter, and when the rain subsided they would wander about Ilmorog, would go to the shamba to break the clods of earth and of course plant together.
In the evening people would crowd Abdulla’s place and talk about the rain blessings. Baada ya dhiki faraja; and Abdulla wished he could truly believe this. The older folk told stories of how Rain, Sun and Wind went a-wooing Earth, Sister of Moon, and it was Rain who carried the day, and that was why Earth grew a swollen belly after being touched by Rain. Others said no, the raindrops were really the sperms of God and that even human beings sprang from the womb on mother earth soon after the original passionate downpour, torrential waters of the beginning.
This waiting earth: its readiness powered Wanja’s wings of expectation and numerous desires. Feverishly, she looked out for tomorrow, waiting, like the other women, for earth to crack, earth to be thrust open by the naked shoots of life.
And indeed came the sunshine, and the rain stopped, the earth steamed, the earth opened, and the seeds germinated, bean ears flapping free in the breeze, maize-blades pointing skywards, green potato leaves spreading out and wide in the sun.
Karega, Abdulla, Munira often met at Abdulla’s store. They sat outside, basked in the sunset beams over the new growth, warm bellies, drowsy heads, dreams over a Tusker beer, and their hearts would beat suddenly at the sight of Wanja coming toward them from the fields.
But brooding not too far below their tranquil existence was their consciousness of the journey and the experiences which spoke of another less sure, more troubled world which could, any time, descend upon them, breaking asunder their rain-filled sun-warmed calm. They did not talk about it: but they knew, in their different ways, that things would never again be the same. For the journey had presented each with a set of questions for which there were no ready answers; had, because of what they had seen and experienced, thrown up challenges that could neither be forgotten nor put on one side, for they touched on things deep in the psyche, in their separate conceptions of what it meant to be human, a man, alive and free.
Karega said to Abdulla: Joseph will get far. He is doing extremely well in school and we have asked for him to join Standard IV.
School had resumed almost as soon as the city crowd dispensing charity and promises had gone, almost as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving behind the kind of restless silence that is felt after an abrupt cessation of numerous high-pitched voices. Karega once again threw his weight into teaching, to avoid answering anything to himself, but the same questions came back, with greater unsureness than before: where, he asked himself, was the unity of African people?
There was a time when he used to be sure of things: there was a time for instance when he thought that contact with a loved one could solve everything, was the key to the world. And indeed in those days when his heart beat in rhythm with Mukami’s, he had seen a world without knots and riddles opening out, a world which, bathed in the floodtide and light of their innocence, promised eternal beauty and truth. He was soon to know, shockingly so, that there were those who waited in shadowy corners to suffocate growth with their foul breaths with the fart and shit of their hypocrisy and religious double-dealing. But even after Mukami had gone from his life he had retained some kind of
expectation, an irresistible need to have faith in at least the decency of those who had known suffering in the past, those who had heroically stood up to oppressive forces. The existence of people like Chui, even though only in the school’s popular lore, had strengthened his faith in deeds of heroes. Hero-worship of those he thought could clear the air of suffocating man-made foul smells had gradually replaced his earlier faith in the universal healing power of love and innocence. But in Siriana he had watched the transformation of Chui from a popular hero into a tyrant who thought that his power came from God and foreigners. Karega had gone though all these experiences including his fruitless search for jobs in the city and his even more humiliating venture of selling fruits and sheepskins to tourists. Why then had he not learnt from these? Why had he urged a whole community to undertake a journey which he should have known would end in futility and added humiliation? Yes, Njuguna had been right: they had all gone begging in the streets!
Alone, in his one-bedroomed house a few yards from Munira’s, he could not readily fall asleep. In class, he did not feel that glow he had felt before the journey to the city. The same thought would buzz in his head: so it was not he, alone, as an individual: so a whole community and region could be condemned to only giving! And when their store was exhausted, through philanthropy to cities and idle classes, or through the fatigue of the soil, or poor tools, or drought, they had nothing and nowhere to turn to! A whole community of direct producers reduced to beggary and malnutrition and death in their country! He would recall Nyakinyua’s words before the journey and she too was right. Wanja too was right. Everybody had been right except himself with his enthusiasm and idealism: where now the solidarity and unity of blackness?
Amidst this chaos and whirlwind of thought, the figure of the lawyer would suddenly stand out, clean, splendid in his dedication and understanding.
He one day sat down and wrote to him. Send me books, he appealed, for somewhere in the high seats of learning in the city somebody was bound to know. For two weeks he waited not so much for the books as a word which would restore his faith and his belief. But the lawyer did not say anything. He just sent him books and a list of other titles written by professors of learning at the University. ‘See what you can make out of these,’ the lawyer had scribbled. Karega did not know what it was that he really wanted to get, but he vaguely hoped for a vision of the future rooted in a critical awareness of the past. So he first tried the history books. It had seemed to him that history should provide the key to the present, that a study of history should help us to answer certain questions: where are we now? How did we come to be where we are? How did it come about that 75 per cent of those that produce food and wealth were poor and that a small group – part of the non-producing part of the population – were wealthy? History after all should be about those whose actions, whose labour, had changed nature over the years. But how come that parasites – lice, bedbugs and jiggers – who did no useful work lived in comfort and those that worked for twenty-four hours went hungry and without clothes? How could there be unemployment in a country that needed every ounce of labour? So how did people produce and organize their wealth before colonialism? What lessons could be learnt from that?
But instead of answering these, instead of giving him the key he so badly needed, the professors took him to pre-colonial times and made him wander purposelessly from Egypt, or Ethiopia, or Sudan, only to be checked in his pastoral wanderings by the arrival of Europeans. There, they would make him come to a sudden full stop. To the learned minds of the historians, the history of Kenya before colonialism was one of the wanderlust and pointless warfare between peoples. The learned ones never wanted to confront the meaning of colonialism and of imperialism. When they touched on it, it was only to describe acts of violent resistance as grisly murders; some even demanded the rehabilitation of those who had sold out to the enemy during the years of struggle. One even approvingly quoted Governor Mitchell on the primitivity of Kenyan peoples and went ahead to show the historical origins of this primitivity, or what he called undercivilization. Nature had been too kind to the African, he had concluded. Karega asked himself: so the African, then, deserved the brutality of the colonizer to boot him into our civilization? There was no pride in this history: the professors delighted in abusing and denigrating the efforts of the people and their struggles in the past.
He turned away in despair: maybe it was his ignorance and his lack of university learning. What of the resistance of African peoples? What of all the heroes traversing the whole world of black peoples? Was that only in his imagination?
He tried political science. But here he plunged into an even greater maze. Here professors delighted in balancing weighty rounded phrases on a thin decaying line of thought, or else dwelt on statistics and mathematics of power equation. They talked about politics of poverty versus inequality of politics; traditional modernization versus modernizing traditions; or else merely gave a catalogue of how local governments and central bureaucracies worked, or what this or that politician said versus what another one said. And to support all this, they quoted from several books and articles all carefully footnoted. Karega looked in vain for anything about colonialism and imperialism: occasionally there were abstract phrases about inequality of opportunities or the ethnic balancing act of modern governments.
Imaginative literature was not much different: the authors described the conditions correctly: they seemed able to reflect accurately the contemporary situation of fear, oppressions and deprivation: but thereafter they led him down the paths of pessimism, obscurity and mysticism: was there no way out except cynicism? Were people helpless victims?
He put the books in packets and posted them back to the lawyer with a note: why had he sent him books which did not speak to him about the history and the political struggles of people of Kenya? And now ironically he got a rather long letter from the lawyer:
‘You had asked me for books written by Black Professors. I wanted you to judge for yourself. Educators, men of letters, intellectuals: these are only voices – not neutral, disembodied voices – but belonging to bodies of persons, of groups, of interests. You, who will seek the truth about words emitted by a voice, look first for the body behind the voice. The voice merely rationalizes the needs, whims, caprices, of its owner, the master. Better therefore to know the master in whose service the intellect is and you’ll be able to properly evaluate the import and imagery of his utterances. You serve the people who struggle; or you serve those who rob the people. In a situation of the robber and the robbed, in a situation in which the old man of the sea is sitting on Sindbad, there can be no neutral history and politics. If you would learn look about you: choose your side.’
What did he mean look about you? Choose your side? He did not want any more masters – he just wanted to know the truth. But what truth? Weren’t they all, shouldn’t they all be on the side of blackness against whiteness?
He looked out of the window and saw the green crops, the new growth: crops will flower and later we shall harvest, he muttered to himself but his questions remained unanswered: was that the kind of African studies he and others had gone on strike about?
Munira could not understand the new motion of things, the new mood of the village after the journey. Wanja and the other women on the ridge had formed what they called Ndemi-Nyakinyua Group to cultivate and weed the land and earth the crops, working in common, on one another’s fields in turn. Munira and Karega were busy teaching, but on certain selected days the whole school joined in the collective enterprise. At first some were suspicious, but on seeing how much a Kamuingi could accomplish within only a few weeks, they joined the group.
They all felt the stirrings of a new birth, an unknown power riding wings of fear and hope. The previous certainty had deserted the village. They now knew that forces other than droughts posed new types of threats but nobody wanted to quite voice their new fears.
He looked at Wanja, at her face, and marvelled at her ready involve
ment in practical labour. He looked at her hands, now cracked, nails broken, and he could hardly believe any of the stories she had told about the city and about her wanderings. He wanted her now, to possess her, and it pained him that she kept him at a distance. But then she seemed equally distant to everybody and this consoled him and made him bide his time. He himself was possessed of a new thirst to find out about things. His desire to read had gradually come back and whenever he and Karega went to Ruwa-ini to collect their salary they would pass by a bookshop to buy books. He was on the verge of being inside things and he felt good and generally grateful.
Petals of Blood Page 28
