Mission

by Philip Spires

  Next came the location’s Chief. His tack was different. He identified himself as an unabashed moderniser. He saw the expansion of the school and the possibility of its assured permanence as evidence of Migwani’s continued development. He praised the farsightedness of everyone who had contributed to the scheme in the past and almost demanded that everyone gathered there should make as large a contribution as possible to the collection. He told the crowd that by doing so they were actively investing in their community, not only in the future of the school, but also in the potential of their own children and through them even their own future. There was great applause for his speech and much nodding of heads in agreement.

  Then came John Mwangangi. As Mwingi District Officer he was effectively an overseer for all such projects in the area. As he mounted the low platform to speak, everyone applauded. It was common knowledge that only after his permission had been granted could the collections for the new building programme be made. Perhaps more important than this, however, was the fact that John was himself a Migwani man. Surely his speech, above all others, would address the mood of self-congratulation, which everyone simply exuded and strove to express. His words, though, hushed the crowd into a partly reflective and part angered silence. While recognising the Location’s achievement, he tried to temper peoples’ enthusiasm. No matter how much money they would collect that day, everyone would soon have to accept that only a small number of children would receive an education in this school. And only a tiny fraction of those who did would benefit materially from the experience. This, after all, was a Harambee school. It catered only for those children who, at the end of their primary education, had effectively failed their certificate examinations. Thus, if you believed that four years later those same children would do well in the far harder secondary level exams, then you would all be deceiving yourselves. Most of the parents who will pay fees for their children will be paying for nothing! Except, of course, to make the traders who supply the school with food and books more wealthy. There were some odd shouts of disapproval at this, though many self-consciously murmured their agreement. Turn back to your land, John said. Don’t just sit idly and wait for the rain. Work hard and improve your land. Invest in it before you invest in education. Terrace it. Fight against erosion. Lay earth dams across the gullies on your land to trap rainwater. Then, even if the rains are too little, you can carry water to your fields and maybe, just maybe, it might be enough to prevent your crops from shrivelling. You can do all these things and succeed. You can then be well fed all through the year. And then you can have your Harambee days, which would also then be far more likely to realise the level of support everyone desired.

  When Mwangangi stepped down from the speaker’s rostrum to a merely polite ripple of apparently begrudged applause, James Mulonzya began to make his way forward. During John’s speech, no one had noticed a well dressed and extremely fat man called Nzuli nervously passing behind the speaker’s platform to seek an audience with James Mulonzya MP. In his hand the fat man carried a thin school exercise book and after a few introductory words had been shared, he presented this to Mulonzya. The MP stared coldly at the book’s cover with his face set in an apparently rigid grimace. Though there were no more than a dozen words written on that cover, he read them through, carefully and slowly several times. Having opened the book and begun to read, the expression on his face, if anything, grew steadily harder. From quite some distance it was possible to see the veins in his forehead begin to swell through the skin as rage raised his pulse and made his blood race. It was a clear case of public moral indignation.

  After he had read through four or five pages of the book he had seen enough. Leading Nzuli to one side of the group of VIPs who sat behind the speaker, facing the crowd, Mulonzya was seen to question the man. Though no one could hear what was said, the content was obvious, at least to anyone who recognised the source of the small green exercise book.

  Several times Mulonzya held it up to Nzuli and pointed to a page whilst mouthing a question. Almost invariably, Nzuli’s only reply was a nod of the head in confirmation of something already stated and agreed. After only a few minutes, Mulonzya, obviously convinced of something, thanked the fat man and shook his hand. Grim-faced, he returned to his dignitary’s chair, sat down and then for a while simply stared into space, with eyes blank and his face set hard, involuntarily rolling and unrolling the soft-covered book in his hands, Mulonzya awaited the end of Mwangangi’s speech. His political mind was almost audibly constructing its tactic.

  When a mere ripple of almost polite but definitely not enthusiastic applause greeted John Mwangangi’s departure from the rostrum, the school’s headmaster stood up and laconically introduced the next speaker and the afternoon’s star turn, James Mulonzya. Now every speech Mulonzya made in public was a campaigning speech, designed to show off how his influence in high places had made things possible. From the day he had received the invitation to attend this particular function, he had assumed that Mwangangi would also be present and had prepared accordingly a fighting speech designed to dissuade the new District Officer from furthering his obvious ambitions in politics.

  Having now read through the exercise book presented by Nzuli, a long and trusted ally, he decided instantly that many of his intentionally oblique references to Mwangangi should become more explicit. As he strode proudly if clumsily to the rostrum, he was greeted with loud applause and trilling ululations. He raised his hands as far above his head as his over-fleshed shoulders would allow and milked the adulation. Then, as if switched on by an invisible hand, he began to dance. For just a few moments, his hands clapped, his head shook, and his foot stamped out a hollow rhythm on the rostrum boards. His body strained to vibrate the bulk of his hips and exercise the flabby shoulders in this, the traditional imitation of a cock, the ultimate in potency and his own trademark by which the illiterate could recognise his name on a ballot paper. Women’s ululations cackled out above the intensifying cheers and applause. This was Mulonzya, his style unmistakable, his power indisputable. When he raised his hands again with open palms forward, it was the well-known sign that his self-introduction was finished and the crowd immediately fell silent. Everyone knew however that the ritual was still far from over and that greetings would follow. This was his style, and his audience was utterly at home with it.

  “You are well?” shouted Mulonzya.

  “We are well,” replied almost everyone in the crowd with calculated restraint.

  The figure on the platform then looked aside with a scowl of dissatisfaction. “You are well?” His question is louder.

  “We are well.” The unison reply is adjudged to be sufficiently loud and enthusiastic this time, it seems, for Mulonzya nods his head and smiles. More spontaneous applause then follows because now the speech is about to begin. Mulonzya’s Kikamba is like an old man’s language, slow and musical, not like the jagged staccato rattle of the young. Like a grandfather he entertains his audience with stories, but stories pregnant with meaning, simple parables of experience. He clearly anticipates how his words will be received and every time his head thrusts forward as if to propel a final word from his mouth, he knows applause will follow and so he raises his hands whenever he wishes it to be stifled.

  “When I was a boy in Mwingi, not Migwani - before you attack me let me say that I have a legal passport in my pocket -.” He pauses here for laughter as he pats his bulging jacket pocket. “When I was a boy, there were no schools in Kitui District. There was no education whatsoever except that which our aging grandfathers gave us by the fireside. Now we all remember our grandfathers and their stories. We remember how wise they were. We remember how they could tell us of places and things we had never seen, or of great men from long ago. I would ask everyone to think for a moment of your own childhood. Think of your own grandfather resting by the fire at suppertime. Sometimes, he was funny. How many of you can remember being told ‘Don’t speak while you are eating mi
llet’ and being sprayed with wet flour from his mouth at the same time?” He pauses here to allow a ripple of laughter to cross the crowd. “But did you not also respect your grandparents?” The crowd affirms. “Did you not love them, sometimes more than you loved your own parents? A father must be strict and powerful and a mother should be full of warnings. But grandparents could delegate these chores and tell you what you wanted to hear.” Everyone seems to agree. The long flat tone “Ii,” “Yes” is almost choral.

  “Now everybody - every single person - try to recall your own grandparents. Try to remember them working in the fields before the rains. Try to think of the way you used to help your grandfather break up the clods of soil with sticks and branches.” There is a long pause here. Mulonzya, half turned away from his audience, looks sidelong at the bemused and fast saddening faces before him. “Oh, I must explain that I am speaking now only to those people who can remember such things; only those people who are as old as myself or perhaps just a little younger.” At this point he looks down at a small boy in front of the rostrum. The child is startled as the practised penetrating gaze settles on his face. Mulonzya tries to look shocked, as if the boy has offended or insulted him. But the act is still deeply friendly and therefore comic. It raises a little titter here and there. He then looks up and, with a flat hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun’s fierce glare, he peers over the heads of his audience and then theatrically begins to count all those who might qualify as older than himself.

  “One...Two...Three...That’s all.” This raises a crescendo of laugher and some applause. Among this crowd, age itself is still worthy of respect. Mulonzya raises his arms to request silence and then continues. “Let us be serious, people of Migwani. As I have asked you to do, think back. Think back to your grandfather beating the soil with a stick because he had neither plough nor hoe. And can you remember eating millet?” He seeks and receives another chorale of confirmation. “And did you like it?” Many people burst out into spontaneous laughter. They shake their heads and screw up their faces as memories of millet porridge are raised from the past. “But why did you eat it if it tasted so bad that on some days even dogs would refuse it? You ate it, my friends, because there was nothing else. Now I want the youngsters - and that is nearly all of you - to listen very carefully indeed. There is a lot of talk about famine in the area, but don’t you think that it is anything special. There has always been famine here. Not always right across the District, of course, but if you talk to your fathers and your grandfathers, they will tell you just how many times in a year when they went to bed hungry in their youth. They will tell you how many times they took their food to their houses from the family cooking pot and held their noses while they ate it - because it was millet. There was no maize in this area in those days, and very few beans also. All we had was millet porridge, millet stew, millet bread, millet shit and millet everything. We were not fooled, were we?” He pauses here to allow anticipation of what is to follow to grow a little. The expected does not follow.

  “We knew why our grandfathers always seemed to be saying ‘Don’t talk with your mouth full of millet’. We know why. It was because they too had their mouths full of foul millet and when they told us not to speak they could spit it all out because it was so horrible...” He waits for the prolonged laughter to subside. “And what did you do when there was no millet? Did you catch the bus to Nairobi and beg for pennies at the feet of some white men with cameras? You did not. Did you write a letter to your brother who was earning a salary in a government post in Nakuru? Did you say, ‘Dear brother, we are suffering so much here in the countryside. Please send us one hundred shillings to help us buy food.’ Did you say that? You did not. Did you walk to the Chief’s camp with your bowls to be given free maize and beans by the government in the form of famine relief? You most certainly did not do that. The very last thing that concerned our former masters was the fate of a few starving blacks.” There are many nods of agreement here.

  “So what did you do? Nairobi was too far to go in those days because there was no road. Most people had never been near Mombasa. There were no buses, no taxis or bicycles. And there were certainly no brothers or uncles earning salaries because there had never been any education to allow them to become qualified. So what did you do?” He invites suggestions from the crowd. Several people reply by shouting, “Go to the mountain!”

  “Exactly! Boys and girls, do you know what that means? Go to the mountain? Well it means that you walk from here to Meru or sometimes Embu, over there on the slopes of Mount Kenya...” He points vaguely behind his podium to the west, “…where there were some large farms, some great, great estates run by white people where, at harvest time, you could get casual jobs picking coffee or tea, or cutting sugar cane. And you could earn just about enough to stay alive and no more. Of course, by the time you had walked the eighty or so miles all the way home, the rest of your family might all have died - but that was life, and death, in your grandfather’s time.”

  He pauses again here for some moments and looks slowly around, directly into the eyes of selected individuals in the crowd before him. “Yes, I can see in your faces that you are somewhat confused. How could they have walked to Embu? How could they have crossed Tana River? There was certainly no great concrete bridge at Kindaruma in those days. No, they did not swim across. Though people might have been hungrier in those days, so, alas, were the crocodiles.”

  “Let me tell you youngsters something you might not know. There used to be a ferry across Tana River, a long canoe rowed by Luos. They would carry you across the river at a price and, in times of famine, when many more people arrived on the banks to make the crossing to Kikuyuni, they would charge you twice as much for the service. You would sit in their boat and these Luos would start to row, their bodies grunting and heaving as they paddled into the cascading water.” Mulonzya mimics the paddling of a canoe with great swings of his arms and jerks of his torso. “And you would hang on to the side of the boat as it shook and swamped, and would fear that you would surely drown. But was it hard work for them? Do we not know that if Luos are not actually born in the lake, then water runs through their veins? No. It was easy for them but they could charge as much as they liked because they knew that we here had no choice but to go to that mountain for work. Children, those were the facts of life in your grandfather’s day.”

  “But why are things different now? We had to cross the river or starve. Don’t try to tell me that you cannot see the reasons! That which you could not do in the past you can do now. Nearly every family in this location has a son, a father or an uncle working in a paid job. Now often many bad things are said of these people - that they go away to the cities and forget about their families at home on the farm. I will accept that this does happen sometimes. But how many of you...” He points defiantly and assertively at various imaginary sections of the crowd, “…would be starving now if it were not for the help of a relative who earns a salary? How many of you would have sold all your land, all your cows and your goats, and thus would have nothing left at all, and still have neither rain nor food? What could you do then, except die or go to Nairobi to stand for a few cents on the tourists’ photographs?”

  “You could, of course, like your grandfathers, pay through your noses to cross the Tana River...” He mimics the paddling of the canoe again and raises a laugh. “…Or maybe you could not.” He hushes the crowd. “Those Luos who used to do so well from their ferry have long since gone. They went back to Nyanza and helped to build roads and schools there and now look how prosperous they all are! Especially when compared to people here in this area where there have been neither roads nor schools for so long.”

  “I ask you again, are your sons and daughters going to be employed in the future if they have no education?” Loud shouts of “No!” answer him. “Will they ever have an education without schools? No! Do you want your children to follow certain advice we have heard to stay at home and ha
ve no schooling? No! Of course not! Because then who will move in to harvest the rich crop of jobs and salaries we all know is promised in the future of our country? Correct. Kikuyus and Luos would never be so stupid. You must never be satisfied with only second best for our area. We need more schools and more roads and more hospitals and we need them now. While there is drought we can never hope to grow rich enough to pay for these things if we rely solely on our farms. Why, we cannot even produce enough to feed ourselves, never mind enough to create the surplus we would need to sell if we were to raise enough cash to pay for our development. By the way, I have one piece of news related to this which will interest you.”

  He pauses to emphasise his seriousness. “I expect in the near future to be able to announce to the people of Kitui District that the main road from Nairobi will be tarred.” This raises great cheers from the men and wild ululations from the women. Mulonzya milks the applause, acknowledges peoples’ thanks and then raises his hands to hush the din. When he continues, he speaks very quietly, as if revealing a personal secret to the masses.

  “But let me tell you something. There will be some people who would say that tarring a road or building a school is not right. They will say that you should turn your back on such progress and reject it. They will say that you should look back to your land and seek to improve it - a deceptively subtle ploy to take away from you the chance ever to do anything different... Now when they say these things, what are they actually asking you to do? Think back, even in your grandfather’s time the rain here was never dependable, never enough to grow a surplus of food - and without a surplus you can sell nothing for the cash you need these days for your own development. And anyway, did we not as a people come this way as the rain-seekers? And are we not still seeking it? Perhaps we have to learn to find our life-giving rain in a different form from that which falls God-given from the sky.”