Secret Lives & Other Stories

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

  And the rain went on falling. But she did not hear. She had lain asleep under the protecting arms of God’s tree. The spell was on her again.

  Mukami woke up with a start. What! Nobody? Surely that had been Mumbi, who standing beside her husband Gikuyu had touched her – a gentle touch that went right through her body. No, she must have been dreaming. What a strange beautiful dream. And Mumbi had said, ‘I am the mother of a nation.’ She looked around. Darkness still. And there was the ancient tree, strong, unageing. How many secrets must you have held?

  ‘I must go home. Go back to my husband and my people.’ It was a new Mukami, humble yet full of hope, who said this. Then she fell asleep again. The spell.

  The sun was rising in the east and the rich yellowish streaks of light filtered through the forest to where Mukami was sitting, leaning against the tree. And as the straying streaks of light touched her skin, she felt a tickling sensation that went right through her body. Blood thawed in her veins and oh! She felt warm – so very warm, happy and light. Her soul danced and her womb answered. And then she knew – knew that she was pregnant, had been pregnant for some time.

  As Mukami stood up ready to go, she stared with unseeing eyes into space, while tears of deep gratitude and humility trickled down her face. Her eyes looked beyond the forest, beyond the stream, as if they were seeing something, something hidden in the distant future. And she saw the people of Muhoroini, her airu and her man, strong, unageing, standing amongst them. That was her rightful place, there beside her husband amongst the other wives. They must unite and support rurirī, giving it new life. Was Mumbi watching?

  Far in the distance, a cow lowed. Mukami stirred from her reverie.

  ‘I must go.’ She began to move. And the Mugumo tree still stood, mute, huge and mysterious.

  AND THE RAIN CAME DOWN!

  Nyokabi dropped the big load of firewood which she had been carrying on her frail back. The load fell on the hard floor outside the door of her hut with a groaning crash. She stood for a few seconds with arms loosely akimbo, and then sat on the load, letting out a deep, enigmatic sigh. It was good to be home again. It was good and sweet to rest after a hard day’s work, having laboured like a donkey.

  All her life she had worked, worked, and each day brought no relief. She had thought this the best way to bury her disappointments and sorrow, but without much success. Her life seemed meaningless and as she sat there looking vacantly into space, she felt really tired, in body and spirit.

  She knew she was getting old. Only a few weeks back she had looked at her reflection in a mirror only to find that her formerly rich black mass of hair was now touched with two or three ashy threads. She had shuddered and consequently swore never to look in a mirror again. So old. And no child! That was the worry. It was unthinkable. She was thata.

  She had vaguely known this a long time back. The knowledge, with what it meant to her and her social standing, had given her pain in the soul. A fat worm of despair and a sense of irredeemable loss wriggled in the very marrow of her bones and was slowly eating her away.

  It was a kind of hopelessness and loss of faith in human life, that comes to a person whose strong dreams and great expectations, on which he has pinned his whole life, have failed to materialize.

  Nyokabi’s expectations had been many. But their unvarying centre had always been ‘so many’ children. Ever since her initiation, she had had the one desire, to marry and have children. She always saw herself as an elderly woman with her man, sitting by a crackling fire at night, while their children, with wonder-stricken eyes and wide-open mouths, sat around listening to her yarns about her people. She had got her man, the kind of husband she had wished for, but … but … Murungu had not sent her anything. He had not answered her cry, her desire, her hope. Her great expectations had come to nought.

  A biting jealousy was born in her. She avoided the company of the other women of the Ridge and also the ‘healing’ touch of any child. Had the women, men and children not banded together against her? Were they not all winking at one another and pointing at her? All she wanted was to shut herself in her own world.

  Even the old companion of her girlhood, Njeri, who had been married and lived on the same Ridge, had suddenly become an enemy. Nyokabi’s jealousy forbade her to visit Njeri or call on her whenever she gave birth, as was the general custom. Nyokabi knew nothing about Njeri’s children. So you see, her fatigue was not of an hour past, but the accumulated fatigue of a lifetime. Nyokabi remembered some little lines her mother had always been fond of chanting.

  A woman without a child, a child,

  Must needs feel weary, a-weary.

  A woman without a child must lonely be,

  So God forgive her!

  She sighed and looked fixedly at her mud hut where she and her man had lived for so long. It occurred to her that her mother had been singing of her. Maybe she was cursed? Maybe she was unclean? But then her man had taken her to many doctors and none had offered a real cure.

  Suddenly the pain that had filled up her heart, rose and surged up her soul, up her throat. It was all real, this Thing. It was choking her; it would kill her. The nameless Thing was too much for her. She rose and began to hurry away from her hut, away from the Ridge, going she knew not whither. She was like a creature ‘possessed’, driven on. The fire-eye of the sun, high up in the sky, was now on its way to its own place of rest. But the woman was hurrying away from home, unable to sit or rest. The Thing would not let her.

  She went up the Ridge. She felt and saw nothing. The cultivated strips of land sprawled before her, stretching down to the valley, merging with the bush and the forest. Women going home could be seen climbing up the slope carrying various loads. Njeri was amongst them. Mechanically, or as if by sheer instinct, Nyokabi avoided them. She cut across the fields and soon was in the valley. Through the bush she went, avoiding the beaten paths. The thorns tore her flesh but she pushed on, forcing her way through the labyrinth of the wild undergrowth and creeping plants. The wildness of the place, and the whole desolate atmosphere seemed to have strangely harmonized with her state of madness. Even now, she did not know where she was going. Soon she found herself in a part of the forest where she had never been before. No light shone through and the heavens seemed to have changed. She could not see the smiling clouds any more, for the forest was very dense. For the first time, she hesitated, fearing to plunge deeper into the mysteries of the forest. But this nameless Thing urged her on, on.

  A long rock stood in the forest. It looked inviting to a weary traveller. Nyokabi sat on it. She was beginning to come to her senses but she was still very confused and physically worn out. She could hardly tell the time or how long she had been walking. A voice spoke to her, not loudly, but in whispers –

  ‘… Woman, if you stay here, you’ll die – the haunted death of a lonely woman.’

  She did not want to die. Not just yet. She stood up and dragged herself up. The heavy cloud of forlorn despair still weighed on her. But at last she managed to pull herself into the open. Open? No. The whole country looked dull. The sun seemed to have died prematurely and a dull greyness had blanketed the earth. A cold wind began to blow and carried rubbish whirling up in the air. The heavens wore a wrinkled face and little angry clouds were gathering. Then flash, flash and a deafening crash! The heavens shook and the earth trembled beneath her feet. And without further warning the rain came down.

  At first she was too amazed, too overpowered to move. A tickling sensation went right through her as the first few drops of rain touched her skin. Yes! The first delicate drops of rain had a soothing effect and she felt as if she could open her cold heart to the cold rain. She wanted to cry or shout ‘Come! Come rain! Wash me, drench me to cold death!’

  As if the rain had heard her dumb cry, it poured down with great vigour. Its delicate touch was gone. It was now beating her with a growing fury. This was frightening. She had to hurry home if she was not going to be drenched to death. She was now ru
nning frantically with all the vigour she could muster. She gasped with fear and all her life seemed to have become concentrated into one struggle – the struggle to extricate herself from the cold fury of the rain. But she could not keep up the struggle. The rain was too strong for a weary woman. So, when she approached the top, she decided to walk and abandon herself to the rain.

  And then she heard the delicate but passionate cry of a human voice. Her womanly instinct told her it was a child’s cry. She stopped and looked to the left. The rain had ebbed a little and so the cry could be heard clearly, coming from a small clustered bush just down the slope. The idea of going down again when her goal was so near was sheer agony for Nyokabi. This was a moment of trial; the moment rarely given to us to prove our worth as human beings. The moment is rare. It comes and if not taken goes by, leaving us forever regretful.

  Virtually worn out, her goal under her very nose, the old jealousy came and gnawed at her even more sharply. To save another’s child! She began to climb up … up … But the rain came down again with renewed vigour, and a howl, at once passionate and frightened, rose above the fury of the rain. Nyokabi’s heart almost stopped. She could not take another step. For the cry remained ringing in her heart. She turned round and began to go down the Ridge to the little bush, though she was tired and knew not whether she would be able to climb up again. The child, about two or three years old, lay huddled in a small shelter that had, until a few moments before, protected him from the rain.

  Nyokabi did not ask anything but took the child in her arms. She tried to protect the child with her body as she began to climb up again, barely able to lift her legs. But, oh, the warmth! The sweet revitalizing warmth that flows from one stream of life into another! Nyokabi’s blood thawed and danced in her veins. She gained renewed hope and faith as she went up, treading dangerously over the slippery ground. She cried, ‘Let me save him. Give me time, oh Murungu, to save him. Then let me die!’ The rain seemed not to heed her prayer or to pity her because of her additional weight. She had to fight it out alone. But her renewed faith in living gave her strength and she was nearing the top when she slipped off the ground and fell. She woke up, undaunted, ready for the struggle. What did it matter if the child was not hers? Had the child not given her warmth, a warmth that rekindled her cold heart? So she fought on, the child clinging to her for protection. Literally dragging her legs along, she reached the top. Then the rain stopped.

  Wholly drenched, weary and hungry, Nyokabi trudged quietly across the Ridge towards her hut. Victory surged in her blood. A new light shone in her eyes, as if challenging the coming dusk. Her victory had overcome her very real physical exhaustion. She reached her hut, fell on the bed.

  Her man was frantic with fright and worry. Nyokabi did not seem to see him. She only pointed at the child, and he wrapped him in dry clothes. He also brought some for his wife and added more wood to the bright fire, all the time wondering where Nyokabi had got the child.

  Nyokabi had fallen into a sort of delirium and she was muttering ‘… Rain … Rain … came … down …’ Then she would lose herself in some inaudible words.

  After a time, he took a better look at the child. Nyokabi had by now fallen asleep and so could not see the look of surprise in her husband’s face as he recognized the child as being no other than Njeri’s youngest. At first he could not understand, and wondered how his ‘jealous’ wife could have come into contact with the child.

  Then he remembered. He had met Njeri running frantically all over the Ridge looking for her child, who she said had eluded the other children. Great pride surged in Nyokabi’s man as he went out with the sleeping child to break the news. To think his wife had done this!

  GONE WITH THE DROUGHT

  At long last, I also came to believe that she was mad. It was natural. For my mother said that she was mad. And everybody in the village seemed to be of the same opinion. Not that the old woman ever did anything really eccentric as mad people do. She never talked much. But sometimes she would fall a victim to uncontrollable paroxysms of laughter for no apparent reason. Perhaps they said so because she stared at people hard as if she was seeing something beyond them. She had sharp glittering eyes whose ‘liveness’ stood in deep contrast to her wrinkled, emaciated body. But there was something in that woman’s eyes that somehow suggested mystery and knowledge, and right from the beginning shook my belief in her madness. What was the something and where was it? It may have been in her, or in the way she looked at people, or simply in the way she postured and carried herself. It may have been in any one of these, or in all of them at once.

  I had occasion to mention this woman and my observations about her to my father. He just looked at me and then quietly said, ‘Perhaps it is sorrow. This burning sun, this merciless drought … running into our heads making us turn white and mad!’

  I didn’t then know why he said this. I still believe that he was not answering my question but rather was speaking his thoughts aloud. But he was right – I mean, right about ‘whiteness’.

  For the whole country appeared white – the whiteness of death.

  From ridge up to ridge the neat little shambas stood bare. The once short and beautiful hedges – the product of land consolidation and the pride of farmers in our district – were dry and powdered with dust. Even the old mugumo tree that stood just below our village, and which was never dry, lost its leaves and its greenness – the living greenness that had always scorned short-lived droughts. Many people had forecast doom. Weather-prophets and medicine-men – for some still remain in our village though with diminished power – were consulted by a few people and all forecast doom.

  Radio boomed. And ‘the weather forecast for the next twenty-four hours’, formerly an item of news of interest only to would-be travellers, became news of first importance to everyone. Yes. Perhaps those people at K.B.S.fn1 and the Met. Department were watching, using their magic instruments for telling weather. But men and women in our village watched the clouds with their eyes and waited. Every day I saw my father’s four wives and other women in the village go to the shamba. They just sat and talked, but actually they were waiting for the great hour when God would bring rain. Little children who used to play in the streets, the dusty streets of our new village, had stopped and all waited, watching, hoping.

  Many people went hungry. We were lucky in our home – unlike most families – because one of my brothers worked in Nairobi and another at Limuru.

  That remark by my father set me thinking more seriously about the old woman. At the end of the month, when my mother bought some yams and njahi beans at the market, I stole some and in the evening went about looking for the mud hut that belonged to the woman. I found it. It was in the very heart of the village. That was my first meeting with the woman. I have gone there many times. Yet that evening still remains the most vivid of all. I found her huddled in a dark corner while the dying embers of a few pieces of wood in the fireplace flickered slightly, setting grotesque shadows over the mud walls. I was frightened and wanted to run away. I did not. I called her ‘grandmother’ – though I don’t think she was really so old as to warrant that – and gave her the yams. She looked at them and then at me. Her eyes brightened a little. Then she lowered her face and began wailing.

  ‘I thought it was “him” come back to me,’ she sobbingly said. And then: ‘Oh, the drought has ruined me!’

  I could not bear the sight and ran away quickly, wondering if my father had known it all. Perhaps she was mad.

  A week later, she told me about ‘him’. Words cannot recreate the sombre atmosphere in that darkish hut as she incoherently told me all about her life-long struggle with droughts.

  As I have said, we had all, for months on end, sat and watched, waiting for the rain. The night before the day when the first few drops of rain fell was marked with an unusual solitude and weariness infecting everybody. There was no noise in the streets. The woman, watching by the side of her only son, heard nothing. She just sat o
n a three-legged Gikuyu stool and watched the dark face of the boy as he wriggled in agony on the narrow bed near the fireplace. When the dying fire occasionally flickered, it revealed a dark face now turned white. Ghostly shadows flitted across the walls as if mocking the lone watcher by the bedside. And the boy kept on asking, ‘Do you think I’ll die, Mother?’ She did not know what to say or do. She could only hope and pray. And yet the pleading voice of the hungry boy kept on insisting, ‘Mother, I don’t want to die.’ But the mother looked on helplessly. She felt as if her strength and will had left her. And again the accusing voice: ‘Mother, give me something to eat.’ Of course he did not know, could not know, that the woman had nothing, had finished her last ounce of flour. She had already decided not to trouble her neighbours again for they had sustained her for more than two months. Perhaps they had also drained their resources. Yet the boy kept on looking reproachingly at her as if he would accuse her of being without mercy.

  What could a woman without her man do? She had lost him during the Emergency, killed not by Mau Mau or the Colonial forces, but poisoned at a beer-drinking party. At least that is what people said, just because it had been such a sudden death. He was not there now to help her watch over the boy. To her this night in 1961 was so different from such another night in the ’40s when two of her sons died one after the other because of drought and hunger. That was during the ‘Famine of Cassava’ as it was called because people ate flour made from cassava. Then her man had been with her to bear part of the grief. Now she was alone. It seemed so unfair to her. Was it a curse in the family? She thought so, for she herself would never have been born but for the lucky fact that her mother had been saved from such another famine by missionaries. That was just before the real advent of the white men. Ruraya Famine (the Famine of England) was the most serious famine to have ever faced the Gikuyu people. Her grandmother and grandfather had died and only she, from their family, had been saved. Yes. All the menace of droughts came to her as she watched the accusing, pleading face of the boy. Why was it only her? Why not other women? This her only child, got very late in life.