A Fool's Knot

by Philip Spires

  So when John opened the door, he found the apartment unusually quiet. Inside, Lesley sat with her parents. A tension that understated words of greeting only heightened, held them all in total attention. John’s arrival almost created a problem. Lesley’s father, conscious of being on another male’s territory, sprang to his feet in what might have been interpreted as an aggressive gesture. But John merely offered his hand humbly in greeting and, with a reluctance born of suspicion, the man shook it, but clearly remained ill at ease.

  What happened over the next few hours was no less than a revelation for John Mwangangi. How could he ever hope to overcome such complete misconceptions? He tried in vain, it seemed, to convince Lesley’s father that he was a Christian, a Roman Catholic, no less, that he would not marry another wife and relegate Lesley to second best, that he would marry her in a church, without recourse to witchcraft or curses. It seemed he could not convince them that he was just another person, flesh and blood like themselves. They seemed to assume that he was some dangerous throwback from prehistory on a mission to steal their daughter and transport her back in time, forever out of their reach. Try as he might to convince them that he had come to Britain to study and that he had almost completed the first stage, he felt that they still regarded him as a slave trader, who would sell their daughter as soon as she was his. They would not be convinced that Lesley’s children would be treated like any others, that they would not go naked, and that if they were sick they would go to a doctor.

  “I cannot understand why you think that life in Africa is so different,” said John eventually, his patience beginning to run short. “If we were to go and live in Kenya, Lesley and I and our children would live a life just like we would in England. The main difference would be that it would be warmer and the garden would be prettier! In any case, I have no plans to return. I will start a job with a legal firm in a couple of months and I expect to develop my career with them.”

  Lesley’s parents were eventually pacified, it seemed, though their fears were too deep-rooted to be dispelled. But they found themselves willing to accept John’s word, which was in itself progress. Lesley, however, was still frustrated with their continued unwillingness to meet them halfway and still deeply embarrassed by what she interpreted as her father’s ignorance.

  “Anyway,” she said, “who said anything about going back to Kenya, or having children, for that matter? We certainly didn’t.” Her pause proved too short to allow her father to interrupt. “We have planned what we are going to do and, up to now, you have got it all wrong. John has a good job lined up. I’m going to keep my own job and within a year we’ll have enough to put down a deposit on a small house. Then and only then will we think about children.”

  “What do you mean, girl?” said Lesley’s mother. “He’s a Catholic. If you marry him you’ll be pregnant for the rest of your life!”

  Lesley could take no more. “I don’t want to hear any more of your bigotry. You’re bigoted against John because he’s African. You’re bigoted against Catholics. Why can’t you accept people as they are? What on earth has John done to you to make you so against him? And if you were always so interested in what was good for me, then why did you bring us here? It doesn’t seem to have done that much good for any of us. And you go on and on about John’s people, his father and his family being backward or pagans, just because they are from Africa… I don’t want to hear any more.”

  And with that they left.

  “What do we do now?” asked John

  “We get married,” shouted Lesley.

  Chapter Thirteen

  December 1974

  Celebration was in the air. The small concrete box of a room was jammed with people speaking, shouting, singing, toasting their praise of the day’s events, events that had unfolded beneath a scorching December sun, events that were now celebrated beneath the hissing shadows of a pressure lamp. The dancing, which women had begun early in the afternoon was now continued less energetically by men, whose drunken steps and tipsy words masked their fatigue. The women, who had previously danced and sung prompted by the ululations of their adopted leader, had sweated in the sun before an attentive crowd of four thousand eager to be pleased. The men, now repeating the songs with their voices flattened by beer, sweated in the heavy air of the bar, ignored by all, it seemed, save for a brace of geckoes, glued to the wall by their fear of movement. Some, trying to talk, sat with a finger in one ear, trying to ignore the noise. Others, more intent on conversation, shouted abuse at the rabble, imploring them to fill their throats with more beer and then either be silent or choke. Mbuvu, a caustic old man who drank only bottles of stout and had the stomach to testify, leaned on the bar, half-turned towards the dancers and half towards the barman, Mwinzi who sat, as ever, on a high stool with elbows on the bar, his chin resting in his hands, and his face frozen in the cynical but long-suffering smile with which he tried to tell his customers it was time to leave.

  Mbuvu, an elder perhaps before his time, earned his living from a general store by the market, a store which provided sufficient income for him to devote much of his own time to local politics. His years of experience of council debates had cemented his face into an expression of cynical superiority. His mouth was curved like an upturned banana, and was heavily jowled with well-exercised and over-developed muscles, which tensed and twitched whenever he was forced to listen. When he spoke, his whole frame seemed to forge the words which flowed from him like a gale. In the past, the storms he spoke had cut all opposition to shreds, but recently his reputation had been harmed by a number of defeats at the hands of younger, more lively, more educated men, who withheld their respect for his age as a way of expressing how much they despised his ideals. Like an old dog in his kennel, he still ruled Migwani, but his influence was now smaller and shrinking. Janet only knew him as the overweight shop owner who took the money for the goods others served. Always seated behind his desk at the rear, his customers had to queue before him while he inspected his assistants’ handwritten receipts, checked the prices and re-tallied the totals. Only then did he take payment, stashing it in the rattling bottom drawer of his metal desk before applying his personally cut rubber stamp to the bill. Only then could the customer go back to the assistant and claim the newspaper-wrapped bags of sugar or tins of cooking fat they had bought. Michael also told her of rumours that he had once been so abusive to one old man that his adversary had gone mad as a result and had never regained his sanity or his health, but Janet had no real idea what he meant.

  In the corner of the room, below the place where the lizards hung to the wall, sat a group of people clustered around a square low table now overflowing with ash trays and bottles. The bar had long ago run out of glasses so beer was now drunk neat from the bottles, undiluted by the dregs of dirty washing-up water from the bowl behind the bar in which the glasses were habitually and fruitlessly rinsed. The laughing group had become the room’s elite, the recognised and much observed high table one must be invited to join, around which the hopeful hovered. John Mwangangi, resplendent in the khaki uniform of his office, was partnered by Lesley, his wife, who drank little and listened rather than spoke. Across the table, draped across his chair as if melting, sat Father Michael, dividing his time between conversation with the group and impromptu solo renderings of revolutionary Irish songs, performances that in any case no one could hear above the general din. Janet, locked in a necessarily shouted discussion with John, perched on the very edge of her chair. Patches of sweat had spread across her back, dark staining her pink T-shirt. A drunk who had been dancing behind her, repeatedly tried to apologise, thinking he had splashed her with his beer. Having received her acceptance of his remorse on the first time of asking, he had expected to suffer verbal attack and had been surprised by her smiling politeness, interpreting her kindness as an invitation. Consequently, during the last hour he had repeatedly offered the same apology at regular intervals, prodding Janet on the sh
oulder to secure her attention. As time passed, his advances included graphic and obvious references to his belief that she wanted to sleep with him, but still Janet could decipher not a word of what he said, and chose to ignore the rather obvious gestures, believing them to be ‘cultural’. So she continued to smile and nod, a tactic, which, of course, guaranteed yet another intervention from your man. The fact that through her smiles she was consistently saying, “Piss off, you drunken old sod,” made no impression whatsoever across boundaries of misunderstanding, since he spoke no English and she had no Kikamba. Each exchange thus ended with prolonged laughs and smiles, only to begin again a few minutes later.

  The last permanent guest at the table was Mwanza, the primary school headmaster, who, though never actually invited to any gathering, always endeavoured to muscle in to any function he deemed worthy of his presence. Tonight, as on most occasions, he was out of his depth and, listening with overstated interest to everything that was said, he played the role of spectator, feigning understanding by joining in with the other’s laughter and mimicking their frowns of concern. Sometimes invited guests from another part of the bar would join the group to offer a self-conscious opinion on demand, only to return to their own places when the topic was changed or the point registered.

  Occasionally singing, dancing and talking alike were halted by the re-emergence of a heated running argument conducted across the room between, at the bar, Mbuvu, and, in the opposite corner, one Councillor Ngandi, a younger, though by no means young man who had become Mbuvu’s arch-rival both in official circles and in commerce. They pulled no punches in their waves of verbal attack, reason playing no part in either of the protagonists’ rhetoric.

  Though the parties themselves remained deadly serious, everyone else listened because it was entertaining, like a double act providing a floor show on this night of celebration. Mwanza, for Janet’s benefit, gave an instantaneous translation, which probably made up in colour for what it lacked in accuracy. Michael and John listened to the original, of course. The proceedings were already at an advanced stage.

  Mbuvu spoke.

  “He is saying that the other man is no good,” said Mwanza, his lips almost touching Janet’s ear.

  Ngandi replied.

  “This man says that Mbuvu is a proud old man.”

  Eyes swung back to Mbuvu, who was overtly offended by this damnation with faint praise. His reply was spat towards the floor.

  “Mbuvu is saying that Ngandi is no more than a boy and should respect his elders and not disagree with them.”

  Ngandi hastily countered.

  “Ngandi says that Mbuvu can speak only faeces.”

  Mbuvu scoffed, spat, sniffed, slurped and swore before breathing deeply twice and offering his reply.

  When it came, its succinct clarity brought this particular round in the ongoing bout to an end, with himself adjudged the victor by the volume of laughter and applause from his captivated audience.

  “Mbuvu says that Ngandi’s words prove that the only thing he owns in life is his wife’s anus.”

  Mwanza laughed. Janet winced and checked with Michael, who suggested that Mwanza might have been a little out with the geography of his translation. Correcting the mistake, he caused Janet to laugh and Lesley to hide her face in an embarrassed smile.

  With the show over for an hour or so, the bar buzzed with frenzied repetitions of the punch line before the singing began again. Ngandi would return before long to renew the verbal warfare, armed with a different flavour of abuse. The feud would not be settled tonight, nor perhaps any other night.

  The conversation which had so engrossed Janet’s group was renewed. They spoke of contrasts, of similarities, of contradictions, of concordances between different ways of life. Opinions expressed neither agreed nor differed, they merely stated realities, reactions or experiences. This was not debate, it was phenomenology, lubricated by beer, with each contributor offering personal experience as gospel, with each concentrating on the complexities of their personal experience, those unexplained details which form the basis of non-communication. And, as the evening wore on, they began to realise, much to their collective surprise, that far from relating difference, they were converging towards similarity.

  John spoke of his years in London and Nairobi, contrasting them with his childhood in Migwani. What he accepted without question as a boy had suddenly been rendered meaningless, its currency converted to nothing. When education took him first to Nairobi, he learned what he thought were Western values. Then, in London, he quickly realised that they were no such thing. Janet listened with amusement and admiration when John described the English as an uncomfortably direct people, because they tended to ask for what they wanted and continue to do so until they got it. She cited their experience of Ngandi and Mbuvu’s argument in an attempt to disprove his assertion. That could not happen in Britain without blows, she said. But John pointed out that, though the disagreement had been graphic and loud, not once had either party cited the real source of their conflict. When Janet looked confused, he qualified by explaining that Ngandi had been selling maize in his shop at a price below the official, government-controlled rate, undercutting Mbuvu, whose business had suffered. Mbuvu had gone to law, officially accusing Ngandi of illegal profiteering. Ngandi had countered by saying that he was suffering, not gaining from his actions and that his motives were entirely philanthropic in this time of famine. And anyway, Mbuvu had been doing the same with beans, on which the profit margin was significantly greater, and for months had thus been systematically trying to undermine Ngandi’s business. The real cause of the argument was even more serious. Ngandi was now seriously undermining the monopoly of Migwani’s trade, a monopoly that Mbuvu had enjoyed virtually unchallenged since independence. Neither would give way since Mbuvu saw this as a threat to his influence in the town and Ngandi interpreted Mbuvu’s refusal to share the market as a personal slight, believing the other considered him unworthy of the status he had already achieved.

  “Why didn’t Ngandi just report Mbuvu to the ministry in the first place?” asked Janet. “Had he told them that Mbuvu was selling beans illegally, surely they would have taken away his licence?”

  John laughed. “This is what I mean about directness. Firstly, I am sure the idea never entered Ngandi’s head. He would be questioning the old man’s right to make his own decisions and therefore not showing respect to his elders. In any case, Mbuvu remains a rich and experienced man. Had Ngandi initiated an action, I am sure a sum of money would have changed hands, ensuring that the matter would be forgotten. This would have left Ngandi defenceless and Mbuvu would have bankrupted him. So it just simmers on.”

  “But that has nothing to do with directness. That is purely corruption and can be overcome by law,” said Janet.

  “But why do you say the man is corrupt?” said John. He knew he was being provocative. “It is not simply materialism. The man in the ministry is an educated young man who fears a person like Mbuvu for the same reason that Ngandi fears him. He is worthy of respect. He is rich. He is old. To act against his wishes is the same as disobeying his own father, which one cannot do. The situation arises because the official is part of a system that was imposed from outside in contradiction of existing cultural and social relationships. That is why the officials are corrupt and that is why the system doesn’t work. It is serving merely to amplify existing differences and bestow power upon people who are unable to exercise it for anything other than their own benefit. In a country like this, it is not governments that govern, but people like these old men, whose psychological hold over their relatives and the young in general enables them to manipulate the system. In the past they were paper tigers, no more than leaders of an age set, who competed with leaders of other sets and whose authority died with them. Nowadays their families grow rich and the power, now expressed economically, is passed from generation to generation. We are creating an aristoc
racy and no one can do anything about it. In Britain, a crook like Mbuvu would be put in jail. There would be structures, associations and even business partners who would object to his manipulation and exploitation of his privilege. But here, though we all know he is a crook, we allow him to run our lives.”

  The debate continued and Janet could almost feel the transformation in her outlook develop. What she had previously interpreted as a simple and perhaps natural life of subsistence was transformed by John’s words into a mêlée of complicated relationships, a sophisticated web of political brinkmanship, whose operation actively hindered most people’s ability to prosper or, to put it another way, to avoid famine. When people sold their goats and cows to provide money for the food their land could no longer grow, who bought them? Again, it was men like Mbuvu with their ministry-granted licence to transport animals to slaughter in Nairobi. There they would get ten shillings a kilo for the meat instead of six in Migwani. Having received their money, where did people buy their food? Mbuvu and the other traders simply reclaimed the money they had paid for the animals as people went to their shops to trade. So these people were buying cheap and selling dear with the animals, and then reclaiming their money on bought-cheap and sold-dear food. They probably doubled their money every time they transacted. And of course, when people had no more animals to sell, they still had to eat, so now families were parcelling off their land, selling it in pieces to fund their lives. And guess who was buying the land. Who, in this area, has the capital to buy land and the resources to manage it? It’s Mbuvu and his kind again, of course. And what do you think these people then do with the land? Do you think they make it productive in an attempt to ease the famine? No. They lease it back to peasants for cash rental and the cycle is preserved. The poor peasant has to gamble on the land producing something. He has no other option. If he wants to buy land, he has to borrow money. And where can he do this? Only from the traders, and then only at an exorbitant rate of interest. “‘A clever man buys a fool’s cows’ is what some people say when I discuss these things. But this ‘traditional’ attitude misses the point. No, it’s not wisdom that has an advantage over stupidity, but capital that rules poverty. Welcome to capitalism,” had been John’s intended closing remark, but he thought better of it. “Well, to be accurate, let’s call it mercantilism. These people are still at the stage of petty accumulation.”