Dreams in a Time of War (13 page)

So, in keeping with the traditions established by the educational wars of the time, Kamandũra was seen as denying us the kind of education that would propel us quickly into modern times. In contrast, Manguo was seen as having a more challenging curriculum, demanding rapid acquisition of English as we entered modern times.

Thus in moving from Kamandũra, a Kĩrore school, to Manguo, a Karĩng’a school, I was crossing a great historic divide that had begun way before I was born, and which, years later, I would still be trying to understand through my first novel,
The River Between
. But at the time I was not trying to understand history or act it out; I just wanted to realize my dreams of education in accordance with the pact that I had made with my mother.

English may have been cited as the prime reason for the exodus from Kamandũra to Manguo school, but I doubt if there was much difference in the teaching of the language. Nearly all the instructors were products of the mission and government schools and they could only draw on what they knew. In fact my own two teachers of English and history at Manguo, Fred Mbũgua and Stephen Thiro, were graduates of a Church of Scotland Mission school in Thogoto in Kikuyu, Dr. Arthur’s missionary kingdom.

The difference lay in intangibles. When I think back on Kamandũra, what pops up are images of church, silent prayer, and individual achievement; in Manguo, images of performance, public spectacle, and a sense of community. Sunday services at Kamandũra had a set pattern: a text from the New Testament that carried the theme of the sermon of the day; prayers; and hymns that were Gĩkũyũ translations and renderings of the lyrics and melodies from the Church of Scotland Mission hymnbook. Without instrumental accompaniment, the melodies were slow, mournful, almost tired. The text, the hymns, and the sermon summoned calm introspection
in older listeners, but impatience in the young. Manguo on Sunday was different.

Manguo, founded in 1928 on land given by the Kĩeya family, with Morris Kĩhang’ũ as the first head but later replaced by Fred Mbũgua and then Stephen Thiro, did not have a formal church building. On Sunday, the school hall became hallowed ground, the regular tables turned into a colorfully decorated altar and the regular benches into pews. The preacher on the first day that I attended was Morris Kĩhang’ũ, an ordinary teacher on weekdays, in the same school, not the most popular, prone as he was to using the stick to impose discipline and attentiveness in the class.

On the Sunday of my first attendance, I had never seen anything like this service. The hymns, often accompanied by drums and cymbals, had more zest and rhythm. Some were recent compositions, evoking contemporary events and experiences through biblical imagery. In fact many of the lyrics were based on biblical events.
In the times of hardship, O Lord, please don’t turn your face away. When Daniel was put in the den of lions, Lord, you sent your angel …
etcetera.
When Cain pierced his brother Abel with a knife …
etcetera.
Samson and Delilah. David and Goliath
. What the Lord did then he could do now: give strength to the lowly and scatter their enemies.

The lines and the images in the various lyrics were familiar: I had read them in my copy of selections from the Old Testament, but from the lips of this mass of worshippers they carried a suggestion of sublime power. The soloists
changed; any member of the congregation could join in, sometimes two taking over the next verse or repeating an earlier one. Some of the call-and-response was triadic: voices in unison, splitting into antiphony before coming together once more in triumphant reconciliation.

And then came the sermon; it was also based on a text from the Old Testament. The preacher started slowly, calmly, gradually raising his voice. Then would come dramatic changes in voice and gesture, as he sang, cajoled, pled, condemned, promised. He would tear off his shirt, baring his chest and beating it, acting out his humiliation, as he implored his God, the God of Isaac and Abraham, to do for the present people what he had done ages ago for the children of Israel, freeing them from oppression, leading them from slavery, across hot deserts, through roaring seas, blinding their pursuers. It was as if he had been an eyewitness to the exodus. Then he would assume the voice of God telling his followers: Tear up your hearts and not your clothes, and turn to me, for I am Jehovah your God! By this time the audience would be groaning and grunting assent, egging on their preacher. In the midst of the sermon, at an appropriate pause, or in response to an implied question, some member of the congregation would respond with a verse from a song, prompting the preacher and the congregation to join in, and then the preacher would resume his performance as if the response had been an integral part of the sermon. Seamlessly, Kĩhang’ũ is no longer the teacher I knew, his body and voice having changed. He is simultaneously conductor and member
of a vast orchestra. Yet when on Monday I see teacher Kĩhang’ũ he looks so ordinary, frail even. Where is the voice and the presence that I had seen make the ground move?

Though not always rising to the same intensity, performance permeated everything in Manguo, bespeaking a common experience and hope for collective deliverance. Success and failure were not just personal: They included others. We were competing not just among ourselves but also against some other forces, even time. It was always one for all and all for one.

Nothing showed this better than sports. Manguo did not have good grounds or great sports facilities, but it made do with what it had. One of my greatest thrills came from my first attendance at a sports festival in a part of the Manguo marshes that was often dry and firm in the hot season.

The festival started in the streets with a marching band, which was new to me. The drum major, who wore a Scottish kilt, guided the band with a baton decorated with green yarn that ended in loose bobs and fluffs at both ends. Sometimes he would throw the baton so high in the air that I gasped with fear that he would not be able to catch it, but he always did deftly without missing a step. The drums, the bugles, and the trumpets seemed to be in conversation with each other in beautiful wordless sounds.

As it wound its way through the market and shopping centers, we children, even some adults, ran or tried to march on either side of the band, to the entrance of the festival site where only those with a ticket could enter. The grounds
were enclosed by a thick wall of grass and dry cornstalks so as to prevent mischievous efforts to create openings and peer through, efforts constantly thwarted by official watchful eyes, mostly of boys in scout uniforms. But there was little the organizers could do about those who sat atop the ridge or climbed up trees a distance away from the walls.

Within the grounds were sideshows, including a display of a little person whose words and antics were the subject of intense conversation afterward, but the major attractions included synchronized push-ups, leapfroging or jumping jacks, and tableaux, some of which, though made to look easy, seemed dangerous to me. Three-legged, egg-in-the-spoon, or human wheelbarrow races provoked raucous crowd involvement, but nothing could top the excitement generated by the athletic races, particularly the ones longer than a mile. Winners were heroes and heroines in their villages. As they ran the lap of honor, some in the crowd would join them. At the end of the day, an even bigger crowd followed the heroes and heroines all the way to their homes in triumph. Sometimes the crowd would carry them shoulder-high, the heroes or their helpers holding aloft the trophies won, be they basins, hoes, machetes, or axes, for prizes were always tools, not money.

The festival was an annual event among the Karĩng’a and KISA schools, which took turns hosting it, thus ensuring that it rotated from site to site, region to region. These events forged a togetherness between KISA and Karĩng’a while also tightening the bond between the schools and the
community. The fact that the spectacles were organized without the colonial government or missionary help deepened the community’s collective pride.

The sense of communal victory or loss was also felt in the classroom, much evident when the exam results were announced at the end of the year. Parents, guardians, relatives, and neighbors came to the school to participate in the celebration of excellence. It was a formal occasion attended by the school’s founding elders, among them Mzee Kĩeya, who had donated the land, and whose son Stephen Thiro taught there. Whoever took the coveted three places, first, second, or third, was the pride of his family and community. Those who held the tail, as was the expression at the time, brought shame to their family. So every celebration of academic excellence was accompanied by laughter and tears, collective joy and grief. The pressure to do well must have produced the high degree of tolerance for corporal punishment, sometimes verging on abuse, that was so common in Manguo. The aggrieved children had no sympathy from their parents. The teacher was always right; after all, he was the daily eye of the community in the classroom.

Though things would change in years to come, I did not stand out in any subject during my first year at Manguo, not even in sports or physical education. But I had done something that caught the attention of Fred Mbũgua. I had written a class essay in Gĩkũyũ, a report on a meeting of an imaginary council of elders. He seemed to have been struck by the fact that I had captured the gravitas of elderly speech in my choice of words, imagery, and proverbs. The paper was
read to the assembly. I can’t remember if my elder brother was there. Certainly my mother was not. But by the time I reached home, my mother knew about it. That I had been made to stand up and take a bow was confirmation of my having done the best I could.

My mother must have been pleased, because later she allowed me to climb up her dear pear tree and shake down some fruit. She guarded it jealously with love and care, and the tree, as if returning the favor, often bore a lot of fruit.

I was happy that my class exercise had made her happy and had brought collective honor and pride to my new community.

I did not know that I would soon become a traveling troubadour. Music at Kamandũra accompanied religious ceremony, prayer mostly; at Manguo music was incorporated in everything, secular and religious. Even the sports festival had choirs who marked the intermissions, an alternative to the marching band. Performances, including music and dance, were part of the year-end school assemblies. Some of these were simple skits and sketches.

Two made an impression on me for a long time. One, called “a bicycle built for two,” was the story of a love triangle wherein two male friends outwit each other to win the love of a girl. They end up fighting, giving the girl an opportunity to slip away. Both lose. The other had something to do with justice or the art of righting wrongs unjustly. A mother has left two bananas for her two children to share. The two brothers start fighting over the bananas; both want the bigger one. An old man, looking every inch a caring adult, passes by, sees the problem, and offers to help by making the two bananas equal. Taking both pieces of fruit in his hands, he compares them and bites a piece off the bigger one, only to create a new inequality, which he tries to rectify in the
same way. Eventually he finishes off both bananas, leaving the brothers to ponder the equality of loss. Too late the brothers join forces against the old man, who runs off the stage as if the bananas have given him new youth. The skits were all in mime yet they were so eloquent, they generated applause, laughter, and nods of understanding.

The performance of songs, most of which had educational themes, produced a different mood and made some in the assembly tear up.