A Fool's Knot (23 page)

Privately, he had longed to go to Nairobi, where he could find work and then forget that he had ever lived in Migwani, but none of his relatives lived in the capital and the cost of establishing himself there was too great for his meagre resources. The risk, therefore, was too great. He knew that if he were forced into the shanties, the chances were that he would never get out. No, he was not that stupid! In Kitui, on the other hand, he had a cousin who was a primary school teacher and who was willing to feed him for a while until he found a job.

Eventually, after some months of asking and some weeks of offering bribes to be paid from future earnings, he had lowered his sights and legitimately persuaded the Asian owner of the timber yard to employ him as a labourer. His pay, a mere forty shillings a week, seemed like a fortune at first, but later, as his taste for spending grew, it had to be supplemented by any casual job he could find. The options available were not always legal, but he had been lucky up to now. Janet had met him at a dance in the Umoja Bar, Kitui town's fabled nightspot where, on Friday evenings the Kitui Town County Council Band played on a regular basis. Janet had gone to the last dance there to convince herself that Father Michael's imminent departure and absence would not change the way she lived. She had a wonderful time and danced the bump with all and sundry, the men at one stage forming a queue to have the privilege of the next hip and bum touch.

Late in the evening and by then rather drunk, she was asked to dance by a tall slim young man with fair brown skin, a characteristic that had led to his being called ‘that brown boy' by most of his acquaintances. He danced as flamboyantly as he dressed. He was, in fact, the model of the new Kenyan, an attempted copy of the characters that adorned the adverts for beer or cars in Drum magazine, with his imported platform shoes, red flares, yellow shirt and coloured baseball cap, set off by the reflecting dark glasses. These were just a little too big to create the image, since they had a tendency to slide down his nose, the correcting push up with the middle finger of the right hand having now become such an automated action that he did it even when the glasses were in his pocket. Apart from his ragged working clothes, these were his only possessions and he clearly prized them greatly, feeling inches taller when he wore them, more inches, that is, than those added by the clumping platforms of his soles. Dressed in the tattered khaki of the lumberyard, he was reticent and respectful, only ever doing precisely and exactly what he was told and never, never speaking out of turn. In his dance clothes, however, he stood tall, proud and upright and spoke with the volume of one slightly arrogant in his self-confidence, sure that others would take notice.

He saw Janet as soon as he entered the courtyard at the back of the bar where the dances were always held. He did not arrive until late, waiting at home until the time when the entrance fee was reduced from ten shillings to five, so that he might have enough money left for a couple of beers. Holding the dumpy Tusker Export bottle at an angle while lodging the thumb of the hand holding it over the broad plastic belt of his trousers was just another element of his calculated image. Once inside the Umoja and charged with his bottle, he paused on the steps that led down to the courtyard to survey the scene or, perhaps, to invite those already in attendance to note his presence. As ever, he was far too self-obsessed to notice that no one ever looked his way. The first thing he saw, however, was Janet's white skin. It was his greatest ambition to have a white girlfriend and even better if, like Janet, she also had straight hair and was good-looking. Having found himself at the front of the informal queue for the next dance with her, he set about the bump with what he thought was an enthusiasm and energy that would impress both her and the other competing males, and then, by complete coincidence, the music stopped. She told him she was rationing her partners to one song each. He protested, saying that he had only a part of a song with her and insisted he dance the next one as well. She shrugged her shoulders and agreed.

When the band struck up again, however, it was not a tinkling Zairois melody, but a slow American soul ballad, a song by a black man called White. Solomon needed no encouragement and grasped his opportunity, otherwise known as Janet, with both hands. Normally, of course, she would have resisted the pull of a stranger's arms, but tonight she felt she had cast her fears to the wind and, after a momentary self-conscious pause, she warmed to his embrace and held him closer. By the time Solomon suggested they sit down, they had danced almost motionless like this for more than ten minutes. Janet's queue had dispersed out of lack of opportunity and so the two of them chatted over a couple of beers that she bought. Soon they kissed, but Janet's head began to spin and suddenly her natural reserve reasserted itself. Before Solomon had time to react, she got up to go, telling him that he could visit her in Migwani if he ever went there. She did not need to tell him where she lived. Everyone knew that this woman taught at the town's secondary school. Tonight, with John Mwangangi and Bill, his newly arrived visitor from England in the other room, Solomon had shown up to accept the invitation.

“What on earth are you doing here?” she asked.

“I have come to visit, like you said,” he replied. Janet's impatient expulsion of breath told him he was not welcome. He looked confused.

“I have friends here,” she said. Solomon could hear men's voices from inside. He looked at Janet, offering an expression of pathetic disappointment. He had misjudged her, perhaps. “Come inside for a moment.”

The embarrassed, but curious young man followed her through the kitchen and into the living room. On entering he was suddenly transformed. Though dressed in his confidence-endowing colourful clothes, he suddenly dwindled into a subservient boy. John Mwangangi recognised him immediately, though at first he did not remember his name. In recent weeks it had not been uncommon for John to attend the Umoja dances, at least for a while. He tended now to spend most of his weekends in Kitui to supervise the development work on his farm. Kitui town was on the way, since he was travelling from Nairobi, so it was a good place to pause before setting off into the bush and the Umoja had the best food in town. He had met Janet there and talked with her several times, though he had missed the previous week's event, having stayed in Nairobi to prepare for his friend's arrival, so he had not witnessed Janet's extended smooch with Solomon.

After a moment of petrified silence, when Solomon tried to take in the presence of a man as important as John Mwangangi and also a white man as well, he turned abruptly and left, without offering a word. Janet did not even have time to offer him a drink. He just fled.

Janet tried to follow, saying, “Solomon, I have Father Michael's motorbike. Can I take you somewhere?” But he had already gone, was already walking briskly and determinedly away from the house. These were surely men to be feared. He could not stay.

Janet re-entered the living room and offered a confused shrug of the shoulders.

“That's the fellow from Kitui,” said John, “the boy who goes to the dances. I didn't know you were such good friends.”

“We aren't,” said Janet. “Last weekend we danced and I said he could visit me. I never thought that…”

“You must be careful, Janet,” said John, interrupting forcefully. “You are alone here and now Father Michael has gone on leave. You should be careful not to encourage boys like him.”

It was Bill who mused that John was now assuming that only white people qualified as possible companions for Janet.

After closing the kitchen door and, unlike most other nights, locking it, Janet returned to her drink and her visitors. “Are you going to the Umoja next weekend?” asked John. Janet nodded. “Well, I'll be going as well. I'll call in on my way to the farm. If he causes you any trouble, remember that I'll be there by about eight thirty or so. So don't worry.”

None of them, neither Janet herself, nor John, nor Bill had the slightest inkling that, on their next meeting in Kitui's Umoja bar, it would not be Solomon Musee that would make a pass at the young English teacher, but John Mwangangi, who would go well beyond a mere pass.

 

 

 

April 1976

 

Opinion had it that he had always been a rebel. Some say it was the revolt of a Christ, while to others it was that of a bigot. In reality he might have been both, but the truth – that which is true of no one – lies somewhere between.

John was thirty-five, or thereabouts. His birth date is unknown, but most people are sure of the year. It had been during the torrential rain, the year when rivers still flowed after the maize had ripened. Even the oldest men agreed that this had happened only once in their lifetimes. Had John not been the first-born son of his father, his name would certainly have been Wambua, born of the rain. Many men of John's age bore that name but, according to tradition for a first son, John took the name of his father's father, Mwangangi, the one who has gone away. It was also in the year of the rain that a white man came and paid people to build a house next to the holiest land in Migwani. The man had lived unmarried in the house for many years and it was he who gave the name ‘John' to Mwangangi son of Musyoka. Since that year, many said that the rain and the harvest had steadily grown worse. The cattle had weakened with each new generation and goats had learned to browse upon thorn bush. Once green hillsides had scorched brown and even old men's farms had grown sandy and dry.

John's father, Musyoka, was still the most revered man Kamandiu had ever known. His career had been long and distinguished, outshining even the memory of his own forebears. In his language, there are two words for respect. One embodies fear. This is the respect a son has for a father, or a man has for a snake, or the community has for the family of Musyoka son of Mwangangi. The tradition was long established and grew stronger as each generation had given another, more skilful doctor to the community.

Musyoka took three wives and they gave him just six children. John Mwangangi son of Musyoka was first-born and was the only boy to survive the hardening drought. Four other children had died, three of them before they had lived a year, but the boy who could learn his father's craft grew as healthy and strong as his father grew proud of him. This was the sum total of Bill's knowledge of John's background and how little it was, Bill thought, after such a long acquaintance.

That morning was to be Bill's introduction to Musyoka. John had tried to tell him much of his father. John's manner, throughout their friendship, had grown consistently more laconic, even reticent. But slowly, over the years Bill had known him, he had divulged enough for the friend to piece together the fragments he thought he had understood and thus he believed he knew what to expect. In his mind was a tall, dignified man dressed, probably, in a goatskin. His hair would be ochred, his feet bare and in his hand he would carry a walking stick made from no more than a trimmed branch of thorn. Thus, as they took the last strides of their walk down the valley from Migwani to Kamandiu, and the clustered huts of John's ancestral home came into view, Bill felt quite nervous and apprehensive of the picture in his mind. In fact, he was showing the greatest respect: he was afraid.

A few minutes later, the picture was redrawn. The man who shook his hand with such force was thin and small. He was dressed in a scruffy black suit and wore no shirt. His bare chest seemed lost inside the cavernous jacket and the legs of the trousers finished high above his ankles. A frayed straw hat with no top, sandals made from old car tyres and a plain black umbrella – clearly a cherished possession endowing status – completed the picture. In appearance, Musyoka was nothing like the man Bill had envisaged, but it was the old man's character that gave him the greater surprise. Having anticipated a severe, serious, perhaps imposing man, laconic like his son, he met a warm, friendly, almost excited old man, who was clearly overjoyed that Bill had accepted his invitation.

To collect the prize you must be first in line. The first man ever to leave Kamandiu to take up a foreign life had returned. He had returned, though, not to claim his prodigal's prize, whatever that might have been, but to display openly to his family, as well as himself, that he had come to reclaim those aspects of his life that he had once rejected. He had not come to discover his past, merely to reclaim it. But he remained aware of the dangers. He had no niche in this place he could no longer call home. He returned as a stranger, an outsider, whose presence might ask questions, rather than answer them. If you pull a branch, the tree bends.

Bill began to feel like an innocent accessory at his accomplice's trial. John had always admitted that the prime guilt had been his own. Bill's role, he said, had been secondary but nevertheless important. In rejecting Africa in favour of Europe and the age-old laws of his people for the Church, he now believed he had committed the most mortal of sins. Thus three years ago he had returned, determined to offer any penance demanded by those whom he had abused.

This was how Bill regarded John's decision to leave England, as if the decision had been totally conscious and rational. In fact, though he would never know, Bill himself had planted the seed of discontent in John's mind. John had returned to college to visit his tutor after attending a case. In his idealism he had assumed that he would be able, as a graduate, to enter the legal profession in Britain, but he had encountered a wall of discrimination barring every path. It had been Bill who had said candidly, “I don't think you will ever be accepted as an equal. It's not because you're black or because you're not qualified, but simply because you're different. In Britain we don't like it when people rock the boat.” John had worked for several years and had even become successful within his firm, securing his own client base and earning considerable fees, but he never forgot his tutor's words. He would always be an outsider.

They set out from Janet's house before dawn. Night's chorus of insects had gone, save for the odd cricket clicking beneath a cactus. The air was curiously still and clear. Sounds seemed muffled and faint and borne of the very air itself. A cow lowed somewhere deep in the darkness of the valley. A moment later, a child played gentle trills on a bamboo flute. John stood and listened intently to the near silence. These notes grew clearer as they listened, intensifying like the light in the eastern sky. Was it a herd of cows beginning their daily trek to water, shepherded by a child, or was it a trick of sound played by the echoing valley? Gradually, the sky grew grey overhead and then an orange glow warmed the wispy clouds above the horizon. Dawn had come and, as the misty darkness of the valley dissolved, the sounds died to silence.

Then, close by, a donkey began to scream its greeting to the morning. Within seconds others had answered, cocks began their crowing and birds took their songs to the air. From a homestead by the road came a woman carrying a baby wrapped in a cloth on her back. John greeted her and she replied, so loud and enthusiastic in her innocent welcome that John began to smile. A little further along the path, he stopped and turned to face Bill. He was laughing out loud. “That woman used to look after me when I was a boy. She is just five years older than me. She sometimes fed me. Now she greets me as ‘old man'.”

As they walked briskly along the dusty ridge, John began to speak of childhood memories of the mountains and valleys. He spoke coldly at first, with a matter-of-fact disinterest, rather like a prisoner recalling his detention. He told Bill about the largest of the valleys, the one on their left, beyond the next ridge. Its name was Ikoo and its depth more than a thousand feet. Bill asked him if the name had a meaning. John nodded. “It means ‘valley',” he said. Slowly, however, the words brightened and the stories began to glow with laughter. He spoke with an almost self-conscious candour, as if the fear of his origins, which the Church had instilled in him at school, had been aroused and was trying to seal his lips. But then, through his words, Migwani and his memories came alive. Since his first meeting with John, Bill had thought of this place as a dot on a map, somewhere foreign, different, and perhaps, according to the modernising assumptions of his time, a place to label ‘primitive'. Now he was here, he surprised himself in finding the experience as prosaic as walking a London street.

Nzauni, the place of bulls, was a long low hill to the west of the main road. At one end, separated from the rest by a deep depression, a large grey rock thrust skyward. During the day this gap is a missing mouthful of rock bitten out long ago by a wandering giant driven mad by thirst and hunger. At night, the hill
becomes the giant. He lies on his back where he fell after dying of thirst in this land that God neglected. The great bare rock becomes his petrified chin and the trees at its base the remains of his hair.

Kea, the prick, is a sharp, twin-peaked hill behind them. Boys and girls would pass between the twin peaks before their initiation to adulthood. John told Bill of the boy's race on the day of the ceremony and how he had finished hours after his peers. He had felt duty-bound that day to visit the priest in the mission, a detour no other boy took.

Bill had never known him like this. In these surroundings, it seemed that John was the stranger he had been on their first meeting. Urged on by an almost childlike excitement, he began to speak more quickly and was soon engaged in an almost unbroken monologue. He was talking non-stop, bursting into laughter at his own stories, most of which Bill either did not understand or did not find amusing. Bill did learn some useful survival tips, though, as John rushed from one bush to another, both to instruct his companion in their properties and, so it seemed, to renew an acquaintance with them, a familiarity rekindled by a visitor's interest. The root of this one, for instance, when powdered and swallowed, will cure stomach ache and diarrhoea. The leaves of that one have antiseptic properties. Rub the sap into a wound to prevent infection. Above all, this one is the finest. Its bark is pounded and mixed with water to form a paste. There followed a description of an infant being cured of a serious malady after this balsam had been smeared on its head and incantations spoken over a pile of feathers from a newly slaughtered cock.

In contrast to John's vitality was the land about which he enthused. Bill had never seen a more barren, desolate, dusty place. It reminded him of a disused and worked-out quarry, exhausted not only of its resources, but of its life as well. Bill's cultured Englishness was not yet able to appreciate the beauties of nakedness and he could see none of the glory which John enthusiastically tried to reveal.

“When God created the earth he worked without food, drink or sleep. First he made the land and, while that baked hard in the sun, he made water and cut rivers for it to flow. But there was still much to be done. The land had to be finished, just like a carpenter must plane, polish and paint a table. His work was still not done when he was suddenly gripped by a new idea. He made insects, animals and birds. And then he made man. He became so excited with these new things that he forgot about the land which still lay unfinished, and so it remains today.” John lifted his arms and pointed at the rugged mountains and deep valleys that were his home. “This is the land that God forgot.”

The antithesis of the Jews. This had long been John's favourite description of his own people in his college days. Bill had once read a paper by him, written for the college Africa Society, in which he had paralleled the two races. Jews, God's chosen people, are persecuted by their fellow men. Akamba, God's forsaken people, are persecuted by God. They were never meant to inhabit the land that remained God's failure, and so they must accept His vengeance in the form of famine, drought and disease. Bill's comment at the end of the paper had been to ask why they simply didn't move away. “It is not our custom,” had been his student's reply, a reply that had not satisfied the teacher. At that stage, Bill had no idea how strong an answer that was. So, with their four-hour walk complete, they approached John Mwangangi's ancestral home, hanging on the side of the great valley.

On that morning, he began to see that custom unfold. John's words to his father seemed uncomfortably formal, like a string of set answers to set questions. Then it was his turn. John had taught him just two words of Kikamba. When prompted by Musyoka, he said them, and to his astonishment the old man reeled with laughter. He laughed so hard he had to steady himself with his umbrella and hold his side. Feeling quite embarrassed and growing more ill at ease with the passing of every second, Bill was doubly shocked when, still laughing, John's father drew himself up to his full height, threw his head back and shouted to the sky. Now terrified of what he might do next, Bill started to retreat, as if to put distance between himself and this unpredictable being that confronted him.

In fact, Musyoka was simply announcing Bill and John's arrival to the rest of the family. One by one they came running from the nearby fields. Two women were first to appear, followed quickly by a girl, much younger than John. All converged upon the group of huts, some stumbling over the uneven ground. There were no formalities this time. All three ran straight to John and immersed him in their embrace. The old man smiled and came forward again. Taking Bill's hand, which he did not let go, he led him to the entrance of one of the huts. Holding aside its sackcloth door, he went inside, still pulling his companion by the hand.

After coming straight out of the sun, the hut's darkness was blinding. Inside, the air felt cool and fresh. As shapes began to appear out of the blackness, Bill saw an old iron bed in the centre of the space. On the uncovered foam mattress lay a crumpled piece of printed cotton cloth. Musyoka bent down and picked up a large calabash from the uneven floor and then stormed straight back outside with Bill still in tow. Obviously one of the women had anticipated his intention and she returned sporting two handfuls of dappled enamel mugs. With these distributed, she took the gourd from the old man and, approaching Bill first, turned it upside down over his mug. It gurgled once or twice and he felt something heavy drop into the mug. Bill raised a hand to try to say “Enough,” but her only reply was to brush aside his gesture and continue shaking the gourd until his mug was filled to the brim. Bill decided to adopt a passive role and set about examining the contents of the cup. The contents were white, or thereabouts, and seemed to have the consistency of cottage cheese. Thus an increasingly uncomfortable-looking Bill stood motionless, apparently trying to stare through the bottom of his cup. The girl hid her giggling behind a cupped hand. Looking up, he found that the entire family group, John included, had gathered in a semi-circle to watch the spectacle. Bill's eyes scanned his audience with an air of faintly amused acceptance of his appointed position as jester. The women laughed and slapped their thighs. The young girl giggled some more and again hid her face. John smiled and made drinking motions with his right hand. The old man scratched his head through the hole in his hat.