Green City in the Sun

by Wood, Barbara

  Muchina clenched his jaw. "You speak, then, of your own father, Chief Mathenge."

  "I do. It was through his stupidity and the stupidity of our fathers that we now have no land. They had no right to sell our inheritance to the white man."

  If David had physically struck the chief, he could have not caused a greater insult, for John Muchina was older than a hundred harvests and therefore was of David's father's generation, and so he, too, had sold his land to the white man in exchange for the badge of office he wore today.

  "You are being led toward the prison by your impudent tongue, boy." Muchina lowered his voice so that only David could hear. "If I put you behind bars, you will never see daylight again."

  David suppressed a shudder. He turned to the crowd and said in a strong voice, "Look at your chief who tries to run with the impala and hunt with the lion!"

  Muchina gestured to the askaris. They started to come forward.

  Inflamed, meeting Wanjiru's fiery eyes, David shouted, "Our chiefs are like dogs! They bark when other dogs bark, but they do tricks when they want their British masters to feed them!"

  When two soldiers seized David by his arms, his voice rose. "Chief Muchina is a Judas Iscariot!"

  "Arrest him."

  David struggled against the men who held him. "Listen to me!" he cried to the crowd, which was growing nervous and agitated. A few men had picked up stones; the elders were suddenly hefting their walking staffs and realizing how much they felt like the spears of the old days. "Why do we want to become like Europeans?" David cried. "How many Europeans have you seen who wish to become like the Kikuyu?"

  "Eyh!" cried the mob.

  Muchina raised his silver-tipped cane to silence them, and when order prevailed, he opened his mouth to speak. Instead, the crowd heard David say, "Remember, brothers, that the man who does not love his country does not love his mother and father and the people of his country. And a man who does not love his mother or father or his own people cannot love God!"

  The silver-tipped stick came slamming down on David's head. It made a great obscene cracking noise in the morning stillness. David's head snapped back, but he recovered and turned a venomous eye on the chief. They glared at each other for one cold instant; then Muchina gestured for David to be taken away.

  But the crowd was suddenly disrupted. From the rear a commotion began, and it rippled to the front until the chief had to call for order again. This time, when the crowd obeyed, they parted in two halves, forming a path down the center, and at its end stood the reason for the commotion.

  It was David's mother, Wachera.

  When the chief saw her, a few in the crowd caught the brief tremor in his stolid demeanor. It was no secret that John Muchina went often to the medicine woman's hut in the middle of the night to confer on grave tribal taboos. If everyone in the district was afraid of Chief Muchina, Chief Muchina was afraid of Wachera.

  David focused his blurred eyes on her, tried to see her through the blood trickling into his eyes from the wound in his scalp. She appeared to him as almost unreal, as if she were an ancestress who had been conjured up from the mists. She stood in her soft leather dress and aprons, her heavy layers of bead necklaces and bracelets and anklets, her ceremonial belts with their magic charms sewn on. Wachera's smoothly shaved skull was held high as her eyes looked across the space between her and her son. She spoke to him with that look; she said things to him no one else could read.

  And he knew in that instant that his mother was not going to rescue him from prison and certain torture.

  "White injustice will be the forge that hammers you into manhood, my son," she had said once, and her eyes said it again now. "Suffer first; then you will have the strength and courage to reclaim our land."

  When Chief Muchina realized that Wachera was not going to interfere, he barked an order at the askaris and hurried away with his prisoner, leaving behind a confused mob, a mother filled with love and pride and pain, and, on the giant stump of the fig tree, forgotten, a transformed seventeen-year-old Wanjiru, who clutched her hands to her breast and, watching David Mathenge being marched away, saw the new purpose in her life.

  30

  A

  RTHUR TREVERTON PRAYED HE WOULDN'T HAVE A SEIZURE. Today's parade was going to be the biggest ever held in Kenya, and he was going to be the most important person in it. The eyes of the colony, it seemed to the anxious fifteen-year-old, would be upon him as he officially launched the week of celebrations. It was going to be the first chance in his life to prove himself finally.

  A red ribbon had been strung across Nairobi's main street, and at an appointed moment Arthur, riding ahead of the parade, was to gallop down the dirt street with his saber held high, swoop upon the ribbon, and cut it before hundreds of spectators, thus marking the official renaming of Central Road to Lord Treverton Avenue.

  Arthur was nervous and excited. The grandstands that had been erected on either side of the road, between the Stanley Hotel and the Post Office, were filled with officials and visiting dignitaries. His mother, Lady Rose, was already under her special canopy, smiling serenely and queenlike. Next to her, his father, the earl, was seated beneath a portrait of the King. The boy knew that his father would watch him with the critical, dispassionate gaze Arthur had grown up fearing and adoring.

  But even more vital to Arthur than pleasing his father was his performance today in front of Alice Hopkins, who, by virtue of owning the second-largest ranch in Kenya, had also been given a seat in the coveted grandstands.

  Alice Hopkins was twenty-two years old, remarkable neither for beauty nor for charm, but something of a legend in East Africa because of her single-handed taking over of a ninety-thousand-acre ranch upon the sudden death of her parents six years ago, when she was only sixteen. Everyone had said at the time that she could never manage the enormous holding alone, and speculation had run high upon who would be the lucky purchaser of the land. Valentine Treverton had been among the prospective buyers and one of the many who had been impressed by young Alice's fight to keep her land and work it with no more help than a few loyal Africans and her brother, Tim, younger by five years. Against immeasurable odds she had saved the sheep and the sisal, had stayed out of debt, had not played into the hands of the fortune hunters who came around, and had emerged solidly successful and independent at age twenty-two.

  And she had paid only one price: her femininity.

  It was the hard and dour Alice Hopkins, whose mouth had forgotten how to smile, sitting in her khaki trousers and homespun shirt, her sunburned face hidden beneath the wide brim of a man's bushwhacker's hat, whom Arthur Treverton hoped to impress and win over on this August afternoon, because Alice stood between him and her seventeen-year-old brother, Tim Hopkins, with whom Arthur was desperately in love.

  The staging area for the parade was the grounds of the Norfolk Hotel. Tables loaded with champagne and food stood beneath trees, and music came from a gramophone. It was mostly young people who had constructed the floats and who would ride on them, and they rushed about now making last-minute adjustments to costumes and checking the engines of the cars pulling the floats, their laughter and excitement filling the cool August morning.

  "Do I look all right, Mona?" Arthur asked his sister as he ran his hands down the immaculate jodphurs of the borrowed hunting clothes.

  "You look smashing!" Mona said, giving him a hug.

  It had been marvelous, she thought, of Hardy Acres, Jr., the banker's son, to lend Arthur his complete hunting outfit. The minute Arthur had put it on, he had seemed to grow two feet. Mona prayed that her brother would perform successfully today. Opening up this parade meant so much to him.

  Arthur had no idea that his sister was responsible for his having the honor of cutting the ribbon. When she had heard that that distinction was being awarded to the governor's nephew, and when she had seen how her brother's face had glowed with envy at the news, she had launched a secret campaign to persuade her father that the privilege of ope
ning up Lord Treverton Avenue should, after all, fall to a Treverton. Valentine had finally conceded, not so much, Mona knew, because he agreed with his daughter or because he cared what she thought as because she could be such an annoyance when she took up a cause. Mona knew how to handle her father. She didn't use his love for her as a means of getting her way, as other daughters might, because she knew there wasn't any love there. What Mona did was persist until he gave in, to be left in peace.

  And in the end her father had confessed that while the thought of the spectacle of his son galloping down Central Road waving a saber did not appeal to him, he had to admit that at least Arthur would be doing something manly for a change.

  Arthur knew none of this. Mona sheltered him from life's bruising realities and from much of his father's disappointment in him. All Arthur knew was that for some reason the governor had reconsidered using his nephew and had invited Treverton's heir to open the celebrations instead. That had been four weeks ago, and Arthur had been a changed boy ever since.

  "I will be all right," he said to his sister as she straightened his collar, "won't I?"

  "You'll be wonderful."

  "What if I have a seizure?"

  "You won't! You haven't had one for a year, have you? Oh, Arthur, you'll be marvelous! I'm so proud of you!"

  He beamed. He couldn't recall when anyone had been proud of him last. It was probably never. He adored his sister; she always managed to give him confidence. He was glad she was out of school for good now and living at home. His secret hope was that she wouldn't marry Geoffrey Donald because then she would move to Kilima Simba and he would be all alone at Bellatu again.

  "Would you do me a favor?" he asked quietly, looking around at the crowd getting ready to line up for the parade.

  "You know I will." Mona would do anything for her younger brother. After all, with their mother living her own life in the eucalyptus glade and their father rarely at home, all they really had in the world was each other. Mona was also glad she was home from school for good, and by coincidence, she, too, was thinking that she didn't want to marry Geoffrey Donald. "What's the favor, Arthur?"

  He pulled an envelope from out of his sleeve and pressed it into her hands. "Give this to Tim, will you?"

  She slipped it into the bodice of her harem costume. Mona was their go-between. She was glad Arthur finally had a friend, despite what everyone whispered about their relationship.

  "A kiss for luck," she said, and pecked her brother on the cheek. Then, pausing to look at him, at the tender boy's face beneath the hunting cap, and thinking how she was going to take care of Arthur from now on, Mona gave her brother one final hug and went off in search of Tim Hopkins.

  The theme of the pageant was the opening up of Africa by the white man. Although the British had been present on the coast of Kenya for more than a hundred years, the year 1887, fifty years before, had been chosen as the "founding date" because that was when the first real settlement of missionaries was established in Mombasa. Geoffrey Donald, who was to ride on the Vasco da Gama float with Mona, enjoyed a unique reputation in that his grandmother had been among those first missionaries, while his father, Sir James, having been born in 1888 to the missionary woman and her explorer husband, enjoyed the singular honor of being one of the first white men born in Kenya.

  Dressed in Elizabethan doublet and padded jacket for his portrayal of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, Geoffrey circled the float and inspected the papier-mâché replica of the town of Malindi and its braces of coconut palms, wishing his father were on hand for today's celebrations. The parade was just the beginning of a week of festivities, and it was only proper that Sir James Donald be here to enjoy the prestige and recognition that were rightfully his. But there had been another outbreak of blackwater fever in Uganda, and Geoffrey's parents were in the jungle, helping the stricken tribes.

  He finished his inspection of the float, satisfied that it was the best of them all and that it was going to represent a perfect reenactment of the historic meeting in 1498 between da Gama and the sultan of Malindi, and having made certain that the truck hitched to the massive wagon was capable of pulling it down Government Road, Geoffrey searched the crowd once more for Mona.

  He spotted her across the lawn, laughing with Tim Hopkins. Geoffrey pursed his lips. Why was she wasting her time on Tim Hopkins when it was no secret that Tim had eyes only for her brother?

  Geoffrey's annoyance dissolved when he took in her costume.

  Beneath her head-to-foot wrap of bright pink silk he could make out the harem skirt of such transparent material that one could almost see Mona's legs. He could also see the tight bodice that was like those which Asian women in Nairobi wore—edged in gold and cut high to leave the midriff bare. While it was true that Mona's face was modestly veiled and the pink silk wrap covered her head and that nearly nothing else of her showed, except for hands and feet, Geoffrey realized in mild shock that it was an extremely daring and provocative costume.

  Tim Hopkins, dressed in an old-fashioned safari outfit and Victorian pith helmet, was to portray the famous explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley. On a float decorated with trees and jungle vines, he was going to strike a historic pose with Hardy Acres, Jr.—Dr. Livingstone—commemorating the day in 1871 when the explorer found the "lost" doctor.

  As Geoffrey walked up to fetch Mona back to their float, he tried to avoid getting into an exchange with the handsome young Tim, who made him decidedly uncomfortable. But it was unavoidable. As soon as Geoffrey came near, Tim turned his bright smile to him and said, "We've just been talking about the Fort Jesus crowd, Geoff!"

  "Oh? Come on, Mona. The parade's about to begin."

  "Look at them, Geoff!" she said, pointing to the wagon that supported a balsa replica of the coastal fort. The scenario was supposed to depict the year the Portuguese came down with the plague, and those climbing on board in their costumes looked as if they were playing the part rather realistically.

  "Got a bit too heavy-handed with the champagne last night," Tim said. "They've all got hangovers!"

  Geoffrey took Mona's arm. "Your brother's getting ready to ride off. We'd better get aboard our float."

  "He's not even on his horse yet," Mona said, drawing away, smiling to hide her irritation. Geoffrey's possessiveness was becoming tiresome. "I must find Aunt Grace. She has a pair of earrings to finish off my costume. Remember, I'm the sultan's chief wife!" Turning quickly so that Geoffrey wouldn't see, Mona tucked a folded piece of paper into her bodice—something from Tim which she would give to her brother after the parade. "See you at the float, Geoff!"

  Grace was on the hotel veranda, looking, with a troubled expression, across the road at the King's Way Police Station.

  Something seemed to be going on. There was an unusual amount of activity around the grounds. Too many policemen ...

  There were quite a few people with her on the veranda—those who hadn't been accorded seats in the grandstands and who didn't feel like standing along the roadside to watch the parade. They preferred to sit in comfort with their gins and watch the parade depart. While she kept an eye on the police station, Grace overheard pieces of conversation.

  "I say that the Italian invasion of Ethiopia is the best thing that's happened to us," came the voice of a cattle rancher whom Grace knew. "I'm making money right and left, supplying the Italian Army with beef. You ask Geoffrey Donald. His ranch hasn't done this well in years!"

  "It's done us all some good," said his companion. "Provided the Eyeties don't decide to push on down and invade Kenya."

  "No fear of that, Charlie."

  "There's war brewing in Europe. You mark my words."

  Startled, Grace looked at the two men. War brewing...

  "If there's anything I can't stand," said another voice from the far end of the veranda, "it's an educated wog that comes up from Nairobi in a suit and loud tie, talking court English and thinking he knows everything about everything."

  Grace returned to s
taring at the tin-roofed building of the police station. David Mathenge was in there, behind bars. She had been upset to hear of his arrest last week because she knew how much Chief Muchina hated the boy and how certain "special" prisoners were treated in jail. Grace was fond of Wachera's son; she had watched him grow into a fine, educated young man. He had never allowed friendship with Grace, but there was a sort of wary respect between them. Whenever Grace saw him, she could not help recalling the night of the first Christmas party at Bellatu, nearly eighteen years ago, and Chief Mathenge's tragic death.

  He is very like his father, she thought now.

  A truck pulled up in front of the station, and uniformed men with guns climbed into the back. As it sped off down the road, Grace felt her anxiety rise.

  Was trouble anticipated?

  An officer emerged through the front door of the police station, adjusting his cap and giving orders to someone inside. As he struck off down the street, Grace called out to him.

  "Good morning, Dr. Treverton," he said, coming up to her.

  "Can you tell me what's going on, Lieutenant?"

  "Going on?"

  "Your men seem particularly active this morning. Surely it isn't for the parade!"

  He smiled. "Oh, it's nothing to worry about, Doctor. Just a bit of native business up country. Something we're looking into."

  "What sort of business?"

  "We got word that there's a gathering of Kikuyu outside Nairobi. Coming from all over, I'm told. Some from as far north as Nyeri and Nanyuki. We're just going out there to keep an eye on them."

  Grace felt herself go cold. Kikuyu coming from as far away as Nyeri. "What do you suppose it means?"

  "Who knows? But I assure you it's nothing to worry about, Doctor. We'll see they don't interfere with the parade. Good day to you."