Mission

by Philip Spires

  Abel remained lively and active right up to his death. He bequeathed to his sons immense but not fully developed farms, two bars and two general stores in Mwingi market, the sole rights to buy and sell grain and animal skins in the location, two lorries and the controlling interest in Mwingi’s own bus company. Though this was a veritable empire in local terms, nationally it was nothing. Kitui District, itself, held few riches when compared to the vast resources of the highlands and coast and, despite determined efforts on his behalf by his son James in Nairobi to gain a foothold in these areas, he never succeeded to any substantial degree during his father’s lifetime.

  James, the eldest of Abel’s four sons was destined by virtue of his family’s relative wealth to live a very different life from that of his father. In the span of a single generation not only the aspirations but also the expected achievements of the members of the family had been totally transformed. At the time of James’s birth, his father would have considered his son lucky if he inherited a small herd of cows and a couple of acres of useful land. By the time the boy had completed his schooling at the age of twenty, his father could guarantee that his son’s eventual inheritance would place him among the ten richest men in the entire District. By that time, of course, both son and father had grown impatient with the status of local heroes and aspired to be amongst the richest in the land.

  To accomplish this Abel needed access to something, which he knew that he, himself, would never possess. And that was influence outside his home district of Kitui, through someone involved either in central government or law or finance. Now it had been clear to most people for a generation that there were jobs and thence fast promotion to be had in Nairobi for anyone with an education. The catch was that the school places available were both few in number and expensive and therefore effectively open only to the sons of men like Abel. He was determined not to lose his chance and so sent all his sons off to school in Nairobi. Whether through lack of application or talent, none of the boys did very well and only James obtained even the minimum standard required to pass his Cambridge Certificate. While the other sons returned to Mwingi, however, to run the family’s farms and businesses, James took a job in the city as a clerk in government service. Unfortunately, the ensuing years did not see him promoted into a position of possible influence as quickly as his father had hoped. In fact James Mwendwa Mulonzya was a careless and somewhat lazy addition to the civil service. Had he applied himself as his father wished and received quick promotion, by the time independence became a certainty James would have been in a perfect position to help his father to invest his money in the right land with the best prospects. As things turned out, the son could not yet help the father.

  At this point Abel struck upon a new idea. With independence clearly in the offing and with it elections, he, as the most powerful and widely respected man in the north of the district found himself being urged to stand for Parliament. He would have no serious rivals. There were no nationalists, no former members of the Kenya Land Army in this area to accuse him of collaboration with the colonial masters, no one to brand him a traitor. No one outside Kitui District itself had ever been interested in this semi-arid poor area, and so it had interested neither the rulers nor the leaders of the ruled. There was thus a real prospect of his being elected, and also that his rise to relative power would not be seen as a threat by anyone outside the District.

  In fact Abel knew he was too old and slow, too set in his simple rural ways ever to get the better of the highly educated elite which seemed destined to rule the newly independent country. Thus, still believing his son to be more capable than experience had proved, he persuaded the interested parties to back not himself, but James as the candidate for the constituency centred on Mwingi. Once he had accomplished that, the election itself was a mere formality. Being rich, Abel could aid his son’s chance of election by giving more gifts and buying more beer than anyone else could afford. In the long term it would be an investment, after all.

  The declaration of the result that affirmed his son’s success proved to be one of Abel’s happiest moments. By then old and already ailing, he believed he had secured the future of his name and line and, when he died, peacefully in his sleep only a few years later, he had already begun to see his idea start to pay off.

  Throughout his childhood, James Mulonzya received the benefits that his family’s relative wealth could endow. He grew up expecting to receive special treatment and the assumption not only stayed with him, but actually grew stronger into adulthood. His quick temper and the associated ability to invent a suitable tantrum whenever something or somebody stood in his way remained undiminished by age and it was whilst thus afflicted that he at one stage disowned his own father and promised to make his own way in life. The argument revolved around two things. One was his apparent lack of achievement in his chosen career. He had worked for five years since leaving school and still showed no definite signs of being entrusted with the extra responsibility that Abel so desired to be his.

  The second bone of contention was James’s expressed wish to marry. The woman concerned, in Abel’s eyes, was far beneath his son’s station. The father commanded the son to wait, for if, in the future, he should become more successful, he might find that so ‘bush’ a wife might be a handicap. The girl was uneducated and a member of a poor family, but James had known her for many years and, though they had hardly met often, James had made an irrevocable decision to marry her. And so he bluntly disobeyed his father.

  He asked for no help when it came to paying the dowry to the girl’s father, preferring to save the required sum month by month from his own salary. Once Abel had learned to live with the idea, however, he actually began to admire his son’s determination and desire for independence. The aging man thus offered reconciliation, which was immediately and gratefully accepted. In the long run Abel’s reservations about the match would be proved justified, but he would be dead before they became public.

  The girl, Mbete, was a country girl with a clearly moulded traditional view of a wife’s duties. Initially, when all the formalities of her marriage had been completed, she lived with James in the city but found life there dull, even useless. For twenty years she had been brought up to adopt a certain role in life and when she found it denied her, she blamed that which had replaced it.

  In their town house, James insisted on employing a ‘boy’ to do the garden and a ‘maid’ to do the housework. Chores, he called them. When discussing the business of the household duties with his ‘staff’, he adopted a confident authority, as if in some other life he had developed an intimate knowledge of the nature of their work. For Mbete - or Rose as he preferred to call her, though she never regarded herself as a Rose - who had grown up yearning to fetch the wood for her own fire, to cook for her own husband, to bear children and tend her own garden, this was simply too much. She thanked God that she had already been pregnant when they married.

  Within six months of the ceremony, the child was born and at first reluctantly James granted her wish that she and the baby should return to Mwingi. In her eyes the city was no place to bring up a child. It was far too restricting and far too dangerous. And anyway where in a city like Nairobi could a youngster learn to herd goats? So she moved back to the country into a plot of land with a new concrete house which James had built especially for her and, though he bought a car and promised to visit her and the baby every weekend without fail, they became steadily more estranged from that moment. But since it was considered normal for the woman to tend the farm while the man worked away from home, their growing lack of sympathy for one another remained a private affair, too commonplace to warrant public comment.

  Their first child was a boy, much to James’s delight. The birth of a man’s first son was surely his greatest moment. It demonstrated his potency, assured the future of his family line and kept his name alive. Three more children followed quickly - two more boys and a girl. Though by now cer
tainly not seeing eye-to-eye, Mulonzya and Mbete had clearly managed to agree an agenda through other channels. Children were what Mbete believed life was for and James enjoyed the convenience. For him, however, the birth of each child seemed to mean less and less.

  When his wife subsequently had two miscarriages - events which he interpreted as personal threats - he told her he had lost all interest in a larger family and from that day he and Rose were effectively, though never either officially or publicly, divorced. Though Rose had known for some time that James was keeping a concubine - a second wife, in fact - in the city, she offered not a word of complaint. James had given her everything she could want and she was content, after only eight years of ‘normal’ married life, to live out her days in the enjoyment of those continued benefits. Besides, it was common practice by then among those men who worked away from home in the city - even for professed Christians like James - to keep two wives, always with the ‘official’ wife at home on the farm to retain ownership of the land and its produce. The second, common law wife in the city could then warm the bed during the week, until such time that she was superseded by new charms in the form of a new and younger body. Rose could therefore be happy that she would always be the ‘real’ wife, because she had borne the children which would bear her husband’s name and would therefore inherit his wealth.

  That first child, the boy, ritually and proudly named Mulonzya Mwendwa after his by now illustrious grandfather, was baptised a Christian in the Africa Inland Church whilst an infant. James gave his son the name of Charles in deference to the boy child and future king of that name born to an English princess. She, of course, would later become the queen who would honour his own father, a conjunction that confirmed, in James Mulonzya’s self-importance, that his own son would one day be worthy of empire.

  As he grew, Charles promised to be everything that James, himself, had not been. After his father had lied about his age so that he could start his schooling a year early, Charles never looked back. He did his work conscientiously, passed all his exams and went on to a degree in Commerce and Business Studies from Makerere University. By the tender age of twenty-one, an age which traditionally would not even have conferred the status of manhood, he had installed himself in an office and taken on the responsibility of running his father’s interests, thus allowing James Mulonzya, himself, to concentrate his efforts on the perhaps more important if less taxing pursuit of politics. Charles’s business acumen was undeniable, as was the fact that, though he had been lucky enough not to have inherited his father’s brains, he had certainly inherited his quick temper and idiosyncratic behaviour.

  His first major initiative, initially against his father’s wishes, was a masterstroke. James Mulonzya’s brothers, who had continued to run their own parts of Abel’s empire in their own way and according to their limited talents were fast growing disenchanted with their lot. All businesses in Mwingi were performing poorly, since the local economy was in recession at the time, depressed by the effects of the prolonged drought, which had afflicted the area for several growing seasons. Charles saw his chance and bought them all out.

  The brothers were all extremely happy with the ready cash which would certainly be sufficient to allow them all to increase the productive capacity of their farms. Charles was satisfied with the deal, not because he wanted two shops and two bars, but because he needed the plots on which they stood.

  During his grandfather’s day, the majority of the town’s shops had been owned by Asians or Arabs. They had initially followed the paid work of building the railway from the coast and then had settled inland wherever the work ran out, intending to exploit the total lack of commerce in the interior at the time. Since they were mainly Muslims, wherever the settled they tended to congregate in a single area, where family, life and business could benefit from mutual support. After independence, when more local people began to set up businesses, the trading centres of these expanding market towns moved away from these small Muslim ghettos a quarter of a mile down the road to what became generally known as the ‘African markets’. His uncle’s shops, therefore, being quite long established and therefore sited in the older ‘Arab town’, had rather been left out on a limb and captured only occasional trade.

  His father’s political contacts told him that a new road was to by-pass the ‘African market’ town centre and skirt the edge of the old, and it was there that the town’s only and ineptly run petrol station stood. Thus, having bought his uncles’ shops, Charles immediately demolished them and within a year had replaced them with the town’s second garage. Subsequently, just by making sure there was always petrol in stock, which the other station could only rarely guarantee, he cornered a market which was still small, but which was surely bound to grow.

  Charles then made his next move. Instead of releasing his uncle’s maize marketing licence to one of the other traders in the market place, he not only held on to it, but also bought out one of the traders in the new town. So within two years of having turned over the management of his affairs to his newly qualified son, James Mulonzya found himself the owner of two highly successful and expanding businesses in Mwingi instead of four struggling small shops. Of course the petrol station did very little trade there since the road through Mwingi could hardly be described as busy, but, using it as a base and its cost-price fuel to increase profit margins, Charles was able to expand his father’s business into transport, including pick-up-truck taxis to ferry local people to and from market, long distance buses and lorries. It was said at the time that a man could grow rich by operating one taxi for two years. On behalf of his father, Charles operated six and all of them on cut-price fuel.

  The young man was certainly ambitious but always chose pragmatic methods to realise his goals. He could, for instance, have bought out his own father at almost any time and rendered himself the undisputed ruler of the empire. Anyone with only limited vision would have seen that as a victory. He was young, dedicated and hard working. The business would surely expand and what is more his father was fast growing tired of the predictability of commerce. Surely he would have leapt at the chance of an early retirement which would have allowed him to spend more of his time on the activity he preferred, being politics, or the Nairobi social scene, however it might be labelled. The son, in fact, would have been glad to be rid of the father in many ways. He knew that the elder man’s outmoded, over-simple understanding of business had for years held back the growth of his interests, and felt confident that if he could run his own show, he would counteract the stultifying influence of his father and, furthermore, manipulate his standing to great effect. But the father’s contacts and political influence were both invaluable and irreplaceable, so the pragmatic partnership endured.

  One typical disagreement between father and son centred upon the son’s early decision to split Mulonzya Enterprises into a series of separate, smaller companies under different names. Each part would be registered separately as an autonomous concern. Now James took great pride in seeing his name advertised so diversely in so many places. Mulonzya Enterprises shone resplendently from cars, lorries and buses, over shops, bars and a garage, and, most importantly of all, from a stainless steel plaque outside an undistinguished office on Government Road, Nairobi. His name stood at the foot of a cabinet full of contracts confirming the company as owner or part owner of shops, hotels and bars in Nakuru, Nairobi, Mombasa and Malindi and this knowledge afforded the man great pride, added inches to his stature and oceans to his public credibility. In that sphere, the name was always more important than turnover or profit margin.

  It seemed a great shame to James to have to do away with all this, to split up the empire into what appeared to be almost insignificant smallholdings under anonymous names such as Market Trading Company, Overland Transport Services or Sayala Property Company. Try as he might, he could not understand his son’s reasons for doing this. To him, it seemed like the dismantling of everything that had tak
en so long and so much effort to build.

  Charles tried to explain numerous times. He offered a myriad of paper calculations to show how it worked. For a period of many months, every time the two men met their conversation would gravitate towards the issue of ‘rationalisation of the company’ within seconds of exchanging pleasantries. Silence usually followed, as Charles would again offer only few words to illustrate what to him was self-evident in the pages of projected accounts he would show his uncomprehending father.

  Take maize, for example. You buy maize in Nairobi, use your own lorry to move it to Mwingi and sell it. People have to buy it, because their own farms are not growing enough in this drought to render them self-sufficient. You make enough profit on the bulk maize to cover your transport costs. Now create a separate organisation, went the argument, to own and manage the lorries and force this transport business to operate at a profit. Legally, your maize marketing licence allows you to pass on your transport costs, so you make no less profit on the eventual retailing of the grain. Don’t you see that we’ve made three profits on the one item, two of which can be passed on into a higher retail price? Meanwhile our transport company and our wholesaling company declare their own separate profits, rather than appear as part of an overall operation of buying and selling grain? But what’s the point? It will surely all come to the same figure in the end because the retail price is fixed. A few cents here and there make hardly any difference.