A Fool's Knot

by Philip Spires

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I have much to learn and hope that you can help to educate me. ‘Please’ is not a word that exists in my language.”

  The explanation, though acceptable to Helen as an apology, reinforced her developing opinion that had formed as a result of other things that had transpired. When John spoke of a Kamba woman’s life of hard labour and of what she interpreted as his people’s lack of politeness, she found it hard to believe how anyone from that background could possibly be regarded as ‘educated’. In fact, John had said nothing to create these images. The meaning was entirely in her imagination and, perhaps, in the collective imagination of her own people, a code of assumptions that few were ever called upon to question.

  Later, with the meal finished and the evening still quite young, Bill suggested that the three of them should adjourn to the lounge. John rose, picking up the napkin he had completely ignored until then and used it, after dipping it into his glass, to wipe his hands, as if it were a small towel. Like any other skill, this was another he would have to learn. Immediately, and to Bill’s consternation, he expressed his desire to leave.

  “Well actually,” said Bill, “I had wanted to talk to you about this piece you gave me today…” So saying he walked briskly into the other room and returned with his sheaf of papers.

  But as he re-entered the dining room, a confused-looking John Mwangangi Musyoka confirmed that he must leave. “It is right,” he confirmed. And go he did.

  “What did he mean when he said that? ‘It is right’,” asked Helen.

  “I have not the faintest idea,” admitted Bill. It was not until fifteen years later that Bill would understand. Then, seated in John’s father’s house and having eaten rice and soup, he watched as the host stood up to announce the end of the meal. “We must leave now,” John whispered to Bill. “It is an insult to the cook to stay when the food is finished. It is like saying the meal was poor and you expect more.”

  Chapter Seven

  January 1975

  Oh Mwanza, John thought. If only life were a mirror! What image would you see of yourself?

  Mwanza lived within a whirlwind of his own making. It accompanied him wherever he went and sucked in those unfortunate enough to come within range. To spend time with him was to contract activity like it was an infectious disease. No one was immune, but each person he knew had found an individual way of coping with the challenge. Janet, who saw a lot of him socially, found it best to head straight for an armchair after showing him out. There she would sit for ten minutes or more to convince herself that she was still capable of relaxing. She thought him rather like a dog chasing its own tail, living life by turning ever decreasing circles, always on the move and preferably in two places at once. Nevertheless, he was always warm and hospitable and had invited Janet to eat with his family at home on several occasions. She valued these experiences because it gave her the opportunity to sit and talk with Mwanza’s wife, Rose, in her own home, where she felt relaxed. Rose was the opposite of her husband: quiet, restrained, thoughtful and considerate. She was also wise, and Janet had learned much from their conversation.

  For Father Michael, who had known him longer, Mwanza’s novelty had worn off long ago. The two men met very often, too often for Michael, since, besides being headmaster of a primary school sponsored by the Catholic Church, Mwanza was also a tireless worker for the project, involved in committees for fund-raising and sports events, as well as the compulsory school governors. Invariably, ten minutes of Mwanza left Michael either exhausted or angry. In search of any respite, Michael would make excuses or tell lies about having an engagement with someone else, just to get away from the man. Michael would bid goodbye, usually three or four times out of sheer necessity, and then, without risking a single backward glance, would make a dash for his motorcycle, muttering, “Stupid whore,” under his breath. On a number of occasions, a mile down the road with his throttle full open, Michael had realised that he had left Mwanza alone in the mission, having offered the excuse that he, Father Michael, was in a rush to get home. One could rest assured, however, that Mwanza would simply move on to his next appointment without ever registering the contradiction. Mwanza’s fame was universal and everyone would express the same opinion when his name was mentioned. “That man talks very much.”

  John, on the other hand, had only recently met him and had grown quickly impatient. He had tried repeatedly to impress upon him that the District Officer was a very busy man, that he had business to attend – a rank untruth that day – and that he had expected him to have prepared a written statement that could be read verbatim to the court. But no, Mwanza had monopolised the morning and left it, along with John Mwangangi, tired, limp and unproductive. John had been informed about the productivity of each family’s farm and the headcount of goats and cows owned by each of the farmers. He had been told about a brother of one of the accused, who led the singing in church every Sunday by beating time on a five-string guitar, which he had traded some years before for a copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary made redundant by his leaving school. John had heard more, and more and yet more.

  Eventually John had raised his arms and demanded he stop, following this with a sharp slap of the palms on his desk. “Mr Mwanza!” John had pleaded. He found the silence that followed such unexpected bliss that he refused to break it for some time, but when he continued, his words were almost shouted. “I invited you to this office today in your capacity as head of Nzawa Primary School. I stated clearly in my letter that I wanted you to provide character references for the students from your school who are now in custody, and also for the two teachers who have brought the action against them. Since it is merely an administrative matter, please return to Nzawa, write the references and send them by mail to me at this Office, DO Mwingi. If you can manage to complete them by tomorrow, then you can send them to me via my Land Rover, which will pass through Nzawa in the afternoon on the way back from Kathiko. I will instruct the driver to call at the school and ask for you. Thank you, Mr Mwanza.”

  And with that John rose to his feet and offered his hand across the desk. Mwanza shook hands and left, giving the door an unintentional but almighty slam. He mounted his bicycle and set off along the road, ringing his bell almost constantly and greeting all passers-by, like some be-wheeled town crier. Before he had cycled a quarter of a mile, he met Janet, dismounted, and set off back along the road with her to return to John Mwangangi’s office.

  John heaved a massive sigh of relief when Mwanza left. He sat quietly for a minute or more to collect the thoughts that Mwanza had scattered and then, half-turning in his chair, he leaned back to push open the sliding door in the wall. “Syengo,” he called, “you can take lunch now.”

  Syengo replied quickly, causing John to turn just a little more so that he could see through the hatch and scan part of Syengo’s front office. “Sir, there is a teacher here to see you.” John’s heart sank as he caught sight of Mwanza hovering in front of Syengo’s desk. “Shall I send her in?” There was no answer. “She has come all the way from Migwani to see you, sir. It’s about the disturbance at Nzawa School.”

  John looked at his watch for a moment, relieved that at least it wasn’t Mwanza who again wanted another audience. “Send her in.”

  Janet entered the office to find John reopening the file on the case. It was already thick with papers. On seeing her, he stopped abruptly, his impatience instantly changing to a warm smile of recognition. “You are... Miss Rowlandson from the secondary school in Migwani?”

  “That’s right. I am very pleased to meet you again, Bwana Mwangangi.”

  There followed some minutes of light conversation. “We met about a month ago, I think. Yes, it was after your school’s Harambee Day,” he said. His voice had a lightness of tone that almost communicated relief. “Father Michael introduced us.” He enquired about her impressions of Kenya, of how she had come to teach in Migwani and how she f
ound teaching Kenyan children compared to English. They even shared a few words about London, a place both of them knew intimately, it seemed. It was Janet who feigned impatience this time.

  “Bwana Mwangangi,” she said, “do you think we could get down to business? A friend of mine is waiting for me outside and we are going to have lunch together.”

  Remembering his own impatience with Mwanza, John apologised and invited her to state her business.

  Janet explained that she had been told a student of hers had been arrested following the disturbance at Nzawa. She had come to ask whether the student might be released so that he could attend an important interview for a place in the Village Polytechnic in a few days’ time. She, herself, would provide any bail that might be necessary. She had brought the money with her.

  “Let me first check if we have in fact arrested your student. A lot of those originally detained were sent home after the identification parade. What is the boy’s name, Miss Rowlandson?”

  “Joseph Munyolo,” she replied, straining in her chair in an attempt to read the names on the paper John held.

  “Let’s see,” he said as he prepared to read the list. “Kiloo Mbiti, Mbusya Mwanga, Kimanzi Munovo…”

  “That’s him,” said Janet.

  John said nothing, He looked at her across the desk in some confusion. “I thought you said his name was Munyolo?” He stressed the second name and then spelled it out.

  “His Kamba name is Kimanzi,” said Janet. “Joseph Kimanzi Munyolo. That’s him, all right. The police officer who wrote down his name must have spelt it wrongly.”

  John scanned every paper in the file, seeking out every reference to the boy. It took time. Janet suspected that he was deliberately stalling. She started to fidget, running her thumb along the edge of the desk. “There is some mistake,” he said. “The name is Munovo throughout, not Munyolo. I cannot make an order for release on bail if there is any confusion over the prisoner’s identity.” He began to flick back through the papers.

  On the outside, Janet remained calm. Inside she had begun to boil a little, heated by what she considered to be trivial bureaucratic nonsense. “Would it help if I checked with the police officer who took the boys’ names? He might have made a mistake.”

  “Yes, we could try that,” said John still fingering through the papers. He then leaned back and banged on the hatch door. There was no reply so he banged again, much harder than before.

  Now we’ll have to wait for the inquest on why there’s no answer, thought Janet, her frustration growing. This is just to put me off. “Shall I go across to the police station?”

  “I think you had better,” said John. “My clerk has gone for lunch.”

  Janet rose from her chair and left the office, the increased speed of her movements giving away her lack of trust in the current process. Outside, she broke into a run, telling the waiting Mwanza that she would be back in a minute. She did not stop to reply to his enquiry.

  Across the road, she had some difficulty locating the officer who had made the arrests. The policeman on duty was convinced that he had gone for lunch. The officer in charge, whom she immediately demanded to see, was in the adjoining room. He declared that the officer in question was away ‘investigating’. The action was left open-ended, as if the policeman had embarked on a mission to seek out misdemeanours. Janet’s impatience became visible as no progress was made. After ten minutes of more indecision, the man she sought appeared. He had simply been to the toilet at the far end of the compound and had stayed on for a quick cigarette. One by one the runners sent out to look for him returned with their negative reports stifled in mid-sentence by his presence. Still more time was needed, however, to establish once and for all that this officer was the one who had documented the case and taken the boys’ statements, and more still to establish the veracity of the claim that the District Officer wanted to see him, there being, of course, no documentary evidence of this fact. But eventually Janet’s persuasive attributes overcame the collective reluctance and the officer crossed the road with her back to the DO’s compound.

  John explained that there might be some confusion over one of the names on the Nzawa list. The policeman answered in Kikuyu - no wonder he got the spelling wrong, Janet thought - confirming that he had written the names exactly as each of the accused had instructed. Munovo was the correct name.

  John turned to face Janet. She thought he looked sincere, but was not convinced. “Well, Miss Rowlandson, I am afraid I cannot issue a bail notice for this boy. I suggest that you come to the preliminary hearing on Friday so that you can identify the boy in person. If you travelled to Kitui to do that, then the officer in charge would have to notify me of the result in writing before I could act. It would be Friday at the earliest before I received his reply. So come to the hearing on Friday, speak on the boy’s behalf and then I will consider your request for bail.”

  Janet agreed, but her calm exterior was a conscious mask to hide an inner fury. “Of course it’s the same boy” went around and around, unspoken in her head. In a final attempt to convince Bwana Mwangangi, she went out to the reception and returned with the boy’s mother, who had accompanied her from Migwani and who had waited patiently and silently throughout in the waiting area. There followed a protracted argument between her and John in Kikamba, but there was no change in his position. The aging woman, who spoke no English and only a little Swahili, scoffed and left in a temper without waiting for Janet.

  John watched her leave, shook his head and said, “I am sorry, Miss Rowlandson, but I simply cannot do it. These are simple people …” he began, raising his arms to signify what Janet interpreted to mean all people outside the confines of his office, “and it is difficult to explain the law to them because they have no concept of how it works.”

  They are not the only ones, thought Janet, scathingly.

  “Come to the hearing on Friday with the boy’s mother and we will see what can be done then.” There was a finality about his tone.

  Janet got up and left the office, bidding John Mwangangi a curt goodbye and not offering a handshake. John placed the wad of papers in a file and locked it in his cabinet. As he closed the office door, pulling it hard to ensure the latch engaged, his thoughts passed from Nzawa School and came to a rueful rest on contemplating the half-hour of his lunch break he had just lost.

  After rejoining Mwanza and Munyolo’s mother outside, Janet suggested they go into town and find a teashop. She felt disinclined to talk about what had happened, regretting most of all the waste of a whole morning and the necessity to devote perhaps another whole day on Friday. The three of them took lunch together. Janet spoke very little Kikamba and so could communicate with the boy’s mother only via Mwanza, who revelled in his position as interpreter.

  “The woman is saying, Miss Rowlandson, that the man is doing something very wrong because in Kikamba the names Munovo and Munyolo are the same.”

  Janet’s impatience was obvious. “He’s obviously just another of these jumped-up government employees sitting in his office and creating bureaucratic complications to help justify his position. He has to do that, otherwise he would have nothing to do!”

  For once Mwanza remained silent, Janet’s tirade being beyond his translation skills. When he did speak, Janet’s attention wavered at first, as it always did when Mwanza piped up, thinking that he might be changing the subject and starting to gossip in his usual way, but she soon began to register what he meant and was deeply shocked.

  “Miss Rowlandson, I would love to ride a motorcycle like Father Michael’s. I have a friend who can sell me one at a very fair price. He has bought it, but does not have enough money to buy petrol for it, so it just sits at his house not being used. He has asked me several times if I want to buy it, but I have said no, and I have said no because of one reason. I have enough money to buy the motorcycle, but I do not yet have a licence to ride it and
I would not be able to afford to pay the bribe needed to get one. This man today is not making trouble because he feels that there is any difference between the names. He is using the policeman’s mistake to ask for a bribe. There is no difference between the names.”

  Janet felt suddenly enlightened, but not comforted. “If that’s true, then he might not even grant bail on Friday if I do not bribe him.”

  “That is true,” Mwanza agreed. “Let me tell you the experience of a friend of mine…”

  Janet nodded from time to time but was not listening.

  The journey home to Migwani was hotter and stuffier than ever. The bus waited a full hour in Mwingi market while more than two hundred people jostled and pushed to get on. Though she had travelled on such packed buses many times, her unacknowledged desire to preserve a personal space, and her deeply felt though unconscious revulsion when it was not granted, added to produce a sum of great embarrassment and discomfort. She was lucky in that, as usual, the crowd parted at the first sight of her white face to allow her to get on first, a favour which on most occasions she refused with a sharp but polite shake of the head. But today she simply accepted, because she knew she would get a seat. An hour or more later, after being squashed hard up against a jammed window on the sunny side of the bus, she wished she had refused, stayed outside and tried to beg a lift from a passing truck or Land Rover. Perhaps she might have been home by now.

  Mwingi market had been packed that day. The marketplace resembled a nest of human ants without the soldiers. People had brought their cows and goats. It seemed that everyone wanted to sell these days. People needed the cash to buy food to supplement what their shambas could not grow. Famine caused by the failure of the last rains was starting to bite and it was now very much a buyer’s market. So the hopeful had stood all day in the sun with their animals, repeatedly turning away the small but canny band of purchasers. By the end of the day, prices had fallen to rock bottom, and goats were being hurriedly sold for as little as twenty shillings, the thought of walking home to an empty cooking pot having got the better of many sellers. As businessmen brought around their lorries and pick-ups to load up the animals they had bought, animals whose meat would sell for ten shillings a kilo in a Nairobi butcher’s shop, those people who had rejected all offers began to untie their animals ready for the long walk home. Few had bought, but many had sold, and it was they who queued for the bus holding the half sacks of maize or, for the lucky ones who had sold a bull, sacks of beans to fill their families’ bellies until the next market day, when the entire scene would be repeated, repeated that is until all of the family’s animals had been sold. Then there was not much to do except find a suitable tree, sit, and wait for the next rain, not due for some months.