A Fool's Knot

by Philip Spires

  “They were in Nairobi for a few days last week,” Michael told Janet over a sobering cup of coffee. “John had some business in the Ministry, some course or other. Since it’s school holiday time, their daughter was at home, but she didn’t want to go back to Nairobi because she had only just arrived from there a few days ago. The plan was for her to spend the time with John’s family in Kamandiu. She’s been there a few times. She must have arrived home today.”

  “Lesley was certainly very upset,” said Janet. “But wouldn’t say a word while any of us were around.”

  “It must have been something I said. What was I talking about?” he said, his eyes searching his memory. “Something triggered it, something we were talking about…”

  The two were silent for a while. The only sounds that crossed the room’s shadows came from the ecstatic wing beats of a moth which hovered near the candle flame.

  “I can’t remember,” he said scolding himself, “I can’t remember what we were talking about…”

  Chapter Fourteen

  May 1975

  The sun sets in contrasts these days. The western sky is vivid blue at sunset, an azure memory of daylight’s intensity, melting slowly to the soft haze of grey-turquoise half-light before this procession of darkness from the east. Kirinyaga, as if reborn with each sunset, rises through the evening mist to show itself anew to unbelievers for just a few short moments before one’s eyes, peering through the gathering gloom, cannot be convinced it ever existed. This mountain pap feeds the sky, gives light to the suckling sun it hides, so that new day might follow otherwise endless dark. It is evidence of land’s motherhood. We, all living things, amid false pride and blinded pity, are again revealed as no more than we are: as yet unweaned pups crawling the thicket of our mother’s belly towards the summit nipple that can feed us. For these few minutes each night we see our way. We plot our course and reflect on the fruitlessness of our day, when our task was forgotten and we slipped further from our goal. As if to stoke life’s resolve to survive, the mountain comes now to give us hope, to replenish the energy to succeed, to point us toward the end of our path. But in our sadness, as we mourn the death of the sun, we see that, like the horizon, our nurture has receded, our path is still long and, until another day, we have lost our way. For how long can the mountain feed the sun? For how long can someone wander before his aim, too, is dead?

  To the north and west rises Kirinyaga, pointed, a silhouette with a silver edge that swallows the sun. To the south and east is Kilimanjaro’s distant cone, flat-topped, menacing and brooding, its summit snows lime-lit by watery daylight, its base already rejoicing in eagerly grasped darkness. Mountains cannot meet. They are eternally alone in their confrontation, but they are bridged. For no longer than it takes a man to stand, look and notice, cirrus clouds high in the roof of the sky glow yellow, burn crimson, fade grey to prepare for night and then, mysteriously, the air itself begins to shine. Incandescent, the paths to our forefathers bridge the peaks, pass intangible and separate overhead and disappear to a near-joined infinity beyond the horizon, growing ever closer, but never finding a place in this world to meet. Only souls may go there. Only the dead can walk these paths to the junction of earth and sky from whence they came to the place where the sun is re-lit and the harvest forever cut.

  But those paths are only for the privileged, for those who have a family to mourn their passing, to remember a name for just long enough to re-energise the morbid soul. The way is long, the journey difficult, the pitfalls and dangers as hazardous as those in life. So the liberated soul must rest for a while to be nurtured by the memories of the living. But a different fate awaits those who cannot be mourned. They must wander this earth forever, without hope of even starting their journey. These are the spirits we fear, their eternal imprisonment firing them to envy, an anger they seek to vent on the living.

  In darkness the world is transformed. No more is it the land that nurtures men. No more does it offer the comfort and safety of a familiar home. Night is the world of the spirit, the time when the dead visit the living to see names continued, to see the unchanging preserved, to protect and reward the virtuous, to try and punish the wicked. Night is the time when people sleep, and thus themselves mimic death, so if it should come to them they are already close to knowing its ways and will not fear its call. And if it beckons, their souls will walk the paths in the sky led by those who already know the way. But if they should see death while waking, its clutches would be those of a claw, and their spirit would be cast down on the earth to wander, tormented, like one still alive. Some of those led along the celestial paths will join their forefathers to then watch over the safety of those who bear their name. Some cast to the earth will live on, trapped by the form of a snake or an insect. The dead, the ones who forged the curse, are powerless to break the spell. Only the living, and one appointed by descent, may free the soul from its bondage and relieve those who have survived it from the torment of evil. The names of the dead must never be spoken. They may not be dead and they may hear.

  Had this been an ordinary day, Migwani would have dozed through the day. There had been no market today, no point to focus the life of the town. Buses would have come and gone in their clouds of dust bringing with them their momentary panic before vanishing again, leaving only an odd traveller and the smell of their smoky black Diesel in the still hot air. Barely fifty people would have walked the track between the shops today. A handful of women, released for the day from the necessity of working in the fields and having come to sit, ignored, in the shade of an acacia, would have returned home with their unsold handfuls of softening fruit. The cobbler would have sat patiently all day in the shade of the market shelter’s tin roof, quietly fashioning his fabled pairs of ‘squirrel catchers’ from the stretched rubber and tread of old car tyres. As the sun lowered, he would have transferred the day’s products to the shelves of a nearby and as yet unoccupied concrete box of a shop he had recently rented as a base for his trade. Tomorrow he would return to repeat the day, which would prove as fruitless as the rest, but, like everyone in the sleepy place, he did as he knew, repeated his chores, relived his role, with thought for neither success nor failure. Today, as ever, cows and goats were the town’s most frequent visitors. Ambling down the hill past the shops to the point where the path dipped along the floor of a deep rain-cut gulley away from the road and towards the dam, they could find their way by instinct and practice. The small boys, whose task it was to drive their fathers’ stock to water, strolled along with the straggling column, stick in hand, sometimes far behind the herd, often diverted for minutes by the sight of a man mending a bicycle or the sound of a blacksmith forging a hoe. For the animals, nothing had been strange today. Mulindu’s cows had been driven to water and had returned to their grazing in front of the mission. The businessman Mbuvu’s massive herd of goats, newly bought at the previous week’s market for sale in Nairobi, had been driven to water and had returned to their grazing behind the chief’s camp. But for Migwani, this had been no ordinary day.

  At seven the wind had begun as no more than a breath of breeze. By nine it had grown to its usual howling gale, blowing dust like a blizzard. To sit beneath a tin roof in Migwani at night was to listen to a chorus of cracks and pings amplified by the volume of the room. When cooled by a gust of wind, the metal contracts, squeaking and creaking on the nails that hold it to the rafters. Dust on the wind plays a rain-like line as it bounces across the corrugations. These sounds are part of the night, part of every night here. They are as natural as the clicking of crickets or the electronic buzz of the cicada; that elusive noise one never hears until it stops.

  All this went quite unnoticed by John Mwangangi, as he sat alone in a room behind the Safari Bar, leafing through the wad of papers he had accumulated during the day’s court sitting in Migwani. His magistrate’s court was held in all locations of Kitui North in rotation and today, when the case against the boys from Nzawa Sc
hool was to be heard yet again, it had been Migwani’s turn. Thus, that day every shop had been closed. Every person living in or near the town – all thirty – had come to the chief’s camp and crammed into the mud-walled, classroom-sized meeting room to hear the proceedings. Others had walked the dusty miles via hill and valley from Nzawa, Thitani, Kyome and Kamandiu. Friends, relatives and mere acquaintances of the accused had made the journey and many others, merely curious, had joined them.

  The gallery was by now both used to and tired of its role. This was the fourth time the case had come to court since the boys’ bail was granted. Each time the teachers’ attorney had requested and had been granted a postponement. Surely today, with the hearing to be held in Migwani, itself, surely today there would be judgment.

  Looking, as usual, incongruous in his surroundings, the young attorney stood to defend his clients, the two primary school teachers. He spoke in a voice calculated to express a model of efficiency, reason and professionalism. Listening to this young man, dressed perfectly in a three-piece suit with a gold watch chain for decoration, John showed no emotion, every word of his comment couched in a consciously impartial voice without expression. Beneath this, John despised the man. He was an impostor with no right to claim the status he demanded, nor the knowledge to inform the role to which he aspired. His clients had grown afraid of the action they had brought and he knew it. All reports John had received told the same story. The whole of Nzawa seemed to know exactly what happened and, indeed, why it had happened. The whole of Nzawa knew, except for Mr Muchira and Mr Kivara, the two Kikuyu teachers involved, who stolidly maintained their own independent version. When the statements were read out in court, everyone listened intently, many laughing openly, many scoffing criticism at what they heard.

  In reality, the only solid evidence to incriminate any of the accused boys was Muchira’s assertion that he had recognised the voice of one of them shouting from the road by the school soon after the attack on his house. Obviously at best no more than circumstantial, this evidence John now rejected out of hand, much to the consternation of the young attorney who laboured the point for some minutes, before the magistrate, in his matter-of-fact way, simply told him to shut up or leave the court. The young man sat down deflated and humiliated and, in sympathy, Bwanas Muchira and Kivara hung their heads, and thereby effectively admitting publicly that their claim was groundless.

  Witness after witness endorsed a thoroughly consistent story. It stated that the teachers had been attacked not by these boys, but by thirty parents of children from the Standard Four class. Pupils had been mercilessly beaten each day for a week by these two teachers in an attempt to discover the culprit responsible for writing an abusive slogan in pencil on the classroom wall. It had read simply, “Muchira fucks only his mother” and the abused had been incensed. As the week progressed and each day their children came home in tears, still bearing the scratches left by the crude thorn switches the teachers had used to beat them, the parents had talked, shared grievances and vowed revenge. A group had coalesced around an agreement to act, to teach these Kikuyus a lesson of their own. Under cover of darkness, they had gone to the school, stoned the teachers’ houses and then beat the two pleading men with sticks. These teachers, claimed the witnesses, knew the identities of all of the masked assailants who had delivered their justice and, equally, knew full well that none of the accused students were among them. In truth, they were now afraid to stay in Nzawa and, indeed, had immediately left the area to be re-posted elsewhere. So, afraid to return or to tell the truth, lest their educator’s professionalism be questioned, they had fabricated charges against those they thought might be weak enough to bully, thinking that a judgment in their favour would cover their backs. And now even their calculated ploy had backfired.

  Protesting, the teachers, now oblivious of the presence of their attorney, got to their feet and shouted that the court should not be dealing with these stories. The fact remained, they implored, that they had been attacked and that their own story was accurate. The court should be trying the defendants, they pleaded, not themselves.

  John silenced them with a word of warning and then, without further hesitation, brought matters to a close by dismissing the charges, announcing that there was no case to answer. The court was immediately filled with an uproar of cheering that John did not try to silence. Even the public prosecutor clapped his hands high over his head in joy. He had been released from his task in this particular case by the presence of the teacher’s private attorney and had voluntarily taken on the task of organising the boys’ defence, stating openly that his interest was only to see justice done. Humiliated, the trio of Kikuyu men left the room in a largely unnoticed and hasty flurry. Publicly belittled, the two teachers immediately began to argue and, feeling that it would be unwise, perhaps unsafe, to wait in town for a bus, they set off on foot along the northward road towards Mwingi. In renewed silence and order, the public prosecutor stood and formally asked John to inform the defendants of their right to take action against the teachers in view of their false accusations. John did as asked, but the youths, all exhausted in their relief at the outcome, declared themselves satisfied with acquittal and rejected the proposition. The case had already taken almost six months to resolve. It had hung over them like a weight and they were now merely glad to be rid of it.

  With the court dismissed, members of the gallery went their separate ways, their smiles and staccato comments testifying to their satisfaction with the outcome. Janet, obviously relieved, came forward to thank John and congratulate her student, Munyolo, who was overjoyed at the decision and deeply grateful to her for the support she had offered. In return, he promised that she would share the next harvest from his family’s farm. Faithfully, four months hence, he would bring her a bag of beans worth more than two hundred shillings and an ebony walking stick he had carved himself. He had needed to save just to buy the wood. Janet would donate the beans to the church’s famine relief service, but the stick she would treasure and, though clumsy and crude, she would prize it as one of the greatest mementos of her stay in Kenya, even when, years later, it would form the centrepiece of her display in St Mary’s School library.

  John, himself, had gained a lot of satisfaction from the case. Though he had tried to remain impartial, the more he learned about the events of that night in Nzawa and, indeed, those of the preceding week, the more he became angered by the attitudes and deeds of the teachers. Much as he condemned the action of the parents, he could not help but sympathise with them. It seemed that Muchira and Kivara, and others like them throughout Kenya, considered themselves, by virtue of their education and the salaries they drew, to be above reproach, above criticism, above even the law. These people despised the uneducated, illiterate poor of Nzawa, dismissing them as peasants, who knew of nothing other than the cultivation of their fields or the driving of their skinny goats and head-hanging cows. They seemed to assume that no one, save perhaps for the school’s headmaster, had any right to criticise their actions. Since, in this case, their headmaster was Mr Mwanza, whose prime consideration was not the education of the children but their adoption into the Africa Inland Church, the teachers did not even respect his right to question them. John took great satisfaction in bringing these two arrogant men down to earth and his decision had clearly been popular with the locals, but he was equally aware that he was taking something of a risk. Without doubt the two aggrieved teachers would soon be knocking on the office door of a contact, a relative or a friend in some ministry or other, to complain that this Mwingi magistrate had not shown due respect for their status and had succumbed to pressure from the mob. Entries would be made in his file and if, one day, the gossiped claims of such enemies, though empty, developed weight out of sheer numbers, then surely someone would take notice and he would thereby have a new enemy, and one to be feared. But for John, here in Migwani, it was only justice and the truth that deserved any respect.

  Now, sav
e for a moth trapped in the room, he was alone. Today the District Officer and his entourage had not immediately returned to Mwingi, as they would normally have done. Tomorrow there would be a fund-raising Harambee Day for a Migwani primary school, a day of celebration, speeches and auctions that John was required to attend in an official capacity. As usual, there were to be four speakers. The chairman of the school governors would start the proceedings and Migwani’s Chief would follow. John would be third on the rostrum, just ahead of the star attraction, James Mulonzya, the area’s member of parliament. It was expected at such gatherings for the invited speakers to extol the still unquestioned virtues of education, to praise the Government’s wise and effective policies in the sector and to list and elaborate the numerous successful projects throughout the region. Over three thousand people were expected to attend. It would be another day of celebration, a near repetition of the others he had attended during his time as Northern Region District Officer. But this was likely to be his last such occasion. Unknown to anyone in Migwani, John Mwangangi was about to leave his post. In a month or two he would move to Nairobi to reclaim his own legal career with a prestigious law firm.

  Events that had appeared random at first sight had mysteriously combined to provide the lure of an opportunity he found attractive, alongside a push he could not ignore. It had been soon after the turn of the year that one George Nzou, a Migwani man, younger than himself, had sent him a letter of invitation. John knew Nzou from his time in university. They had shared a year in Nairobi before John left for Europe. When Nzou graduated, he joined a Nairobi firm and had stayed with them ever since. He was now a partner. Nzou’s letter had suggested that he might consider joining the partnership himself, alongside, of course, a substantial input of capital. At the time, John had acknowledged the request, but declined the offer. Certainly at the time, his priority remained public service in Mwingi.