Dreams in a Time of War (17 page)

Every colonial governor from Eliot in 1902 to Mitchell in 1944 had committed some crime against us, lamented Ngandi, but this was the first time that a governor had declared war on the Kenyan people within a few days of his arrival. Of course, Governor Baring was taking orders from his boss in London, Churchill himself, who was, after all, the prime minister. Do you see the irony? Our own men help him fight Hitler and how does he reward us?

Ngandi had not fought in the Second World War but my half brother Kabae had. I recalled him saying that the world would never know how much African people had contributed to the war effort. I had not seen much of him since leaving my father’s house, and I wondered what he would now say about the declaration of war against us, as Ngandi
put it. And did the soldiers he came home with that night long ago also feel as Ngandi did about the situation?

Here was another violation of Ngandi’s beloved Devonshire declaration. Things would now move from bad to worse to worst before they would start to become better. Ngandi tried to explain the gravity of the situation by decrying the suspension of laws and civil liberties—not that there had been many civil liberties for Africans, but the few that had existed would now be abrogated by martial law. He even talked about other places where a state of emergency had been declared. The British had done it in Ireland in 1939 and in Malaya in 1948. Most ominously, he intoned, Adolf Hitler had done it in Germany in 1933. And what had followed? War. Concentration camps.

As if to confirm Ngandi’s suspicions, the radio was soon reporting the landing of British troops, Lancashire Fusiliers, in Nairobi, or, as Ngandi put it, a “convoy” of British military planes had landed at Eastleigh to enhance the existing colonial forces. Some people claimed that they had actually seen the new arrivals patrolling Nairobi streets, armed in very frightening gear. The war machine that had once been directed at Hitler was now turned against us, Ngandi lamented.

The arrest of Jomo Kenyatta may have been a blow to the public, but to me it was personal. It had deprived me of my raison d’être for coming to the marketplace so assiduously. Despite my dashed hopes, the events, even the landing of the British battalions, were largely abstract, happening in a
misty land far away, like a story in a distant landscape, alternating between dream and nightmare. Ngandi’s citing of emergencies elsewhere and war and concentration camps as well as his scary description of British soldiers and the sweeping arrests in the streets of our capital did not make the story any nearer or more real. Not even when he talked of men entering Nyandarwa and Mount Kenya forests driven by Waiyaki’s spirit.

And then things began to hit closer to home. Mau Mau songs and all references to Waiyaki, Kenyatta, or Mbiyũ were criminalized. This abruptly ended my life as a troubadour. More basic, the Kenya Teachers’ College at Gĩthũngũri and all KISA and Karĩng’a schools were banned, a blow to my dreams of an education.

I went through a period of uncertainty intensified by conflicting facts and rumors. For some time I stayed away from the Limuru marketplace and the radio at the Green Hotel, getting by on Ngandi’s renditions. But I was too used to my brother’s workshop and furniture store to keep away from the marketplace for long. Besides, I was now not attending school.

One day I went to the same Limuru marketplace to find men, women, and children bearing luggage, huddled in groups, looking forlorn and lost. The entire marketplace and surrounding areas were occupied by a mass of displaced people. They had been thrown off trains and trucks. This was different from the Ole Ngurueni expulsions of 1948. Those were confined to squatters. Now all Gĩkũyũ, Embu, and Meru people were being expelled from the Rift Valley.
The same scene was taking place at many other centers all over central Kenya. Like the Ole Ngurueni deportees before, most of the new wave had lost all memory of their ancestral origins, for they were descendants of those who had made the Rift Valley their home long ago. This internal displacement continued for weeks.

What I did not know at the time was that my grandmother from Elburgon was herself being displaced.

I grew up envious of children who had grandmothers whom they could visit and who sometimes came to see them with gifts of ripe bananas and sweet potatoes and, most important, the gift of touch and play. Of course I had lots of step-grandmothers or grandmothers in the Gĩkũyũ extended family system, where every woman of one’s grandmother’s age group was also one’s own. But I could not just go to them, start playing with them, or make demands on them, or expect their embrace and endearments as a natural right. When other kids spoke of their grandmothers, it only accentuated my sense of loss with respect to my paternal grandparents and my absent maternal grandmother. When I had had the chance to take a train to meet her, it had collided with my dreams of school, and I was left with only my younger brother’s tales of the glorious time he had spent with Grandmother Gathoni. So although I felt anxious about the cloud from the Rift Valley, I saw and accepted its silver lining: My grandmother had come home.

Whatever had brought about the separation of my two grandparents must still have been fresh, for she stayed in my grandfather’s place only briefly after leaving Elburgon.
Then she came to stay with us in our new place, where I got to observe and know her from close quarters.

Her face looked sullen, but when she smiled the folds would go away, and for a time it was nice to cuddle against her. But I had to be careful. Her left arm hung loose, was dead, unfeeling, down to the hand. When seated, she mostly held it in her right hand, stroking its inert fingers. What happened, Grandma?

She never tired of telling the story. She had been all right before and even after relocating to Elburgon to live with her brother Daudi Gatune and her daughter, Auntie Wanjirũ, my mother’s only sister, who had by now died, leaving a big daughter, Beatrice, and her young son, named Ngũgĩ like me. And then it happened suddenly. She could not lift her hand. She felt life on her left side leave her; she could actually feel the life draining out of her veins. They took her to the hospital, but the doctors only partially restored some functioning. They could not get to the root of the evil. If she had depended on the hospital alone she would have died. But fortunately a traditional healer was able to penetrate the source of the evil straightaway. A bad person had put several pieces of broken glass inside her body. The healer took them out. I saw them with my own eyes, she would say, almost choking at the memory. A pile of broken pieces of glass. As much as this, she would say, raising her right hand slightly to show the height of the pile. Pieces of a broken bottle, can you imagine that? But Grandmother, shards of glass in your body? Yes, hard, with sharp edges; he took them out in stages. Every time I went back he would discover some
more, hidden inside this body. Oh my children, she would tell me, he wanted to kill me, the evil one. If she detected doubts in my reaction, she would become really upset.

Today I assume she must have had a mild stroke, but back then we had no name for it, and we had no facts to contradict her amazing story. Whenever I see pieces of broken glass I always think of my grandmother and her ordeal. For she must have lived with the terror that the evil one would strike again. If she suspected the other woman, or whoever had driven a wedge between her and her husband, as the evil one, she would not say, although she hinted that Mũkami, the youngest wife, had come from Embu or Ndia, places that, from her lips, sounded weirdly far away. Nothing could induce her to take anything, food, water even, from that other woman. She alternated between joy and resentment. When in a joyful mood, she laughed, exposing her still functioning full set of white teeth, and she became the grandmother I had hoped for. But she was mostly resentful, as if everybody had been part of the evil conspiracy and they owed her attention, pity, and service. The more cantankerous she became, the more the glamour of having a grandmother wore off.

She had this incredible hold on my mother. There was nothing that my mother could do that seemed to mollify my grandmother and put her in good humor, which forced my mother to intensify her efforts to care for her, to meet her demands, spoken and often unspoken. My grandmother would be talking to us in a friendly almost relaxed manner, but the moment her own daughter approached, she would
instinctively revert to her injured self, sighing and hinting neglect or loudly blaming her own body for preventing her from doing things for herself. Tension mounted in the house.

To reduce the contention between mother and grandmother, Good Wallace put up another hut for my grandmother on a separate site, next to my mother’s, hoping that this would give her more independence and my mother some peace. But even in her new abode, my grandmother expected instant service from her daughter. The situation became worse, my grandmother now openly and continuously complaining of neglect. The only other name whose mention made her even more resentful and made her complain even more, was my grandfather’s. But they did not see much of each other, and when they did sarcastic barbs would fly from my grandmother’s mouth and her husband would walk away.

And then a shadow of death fell on my grandfather’s house.

Kĩmũchũ’s house was literally on the other side of my grandfather’s compound. He was in the process of putting the finishing touches on a new stone house next to the old one of wood slabs with its corrugated iron roof. A white man, a British officer, with a gang of African paramilitary, came for Kĩmũchũ by night. His wife assumed that he had been arrested the way Kenyatta and others had been. But when she and other relatives inquired at police stations they got no news. After a few days what had happened became clear. Kĩmũchũ, Njerandi, Elijah Karanja, Mwangi,
Nehemiah, some of the most prominent men in Limuru, all picked up the same night, had been summarily executed by the British officer at a wooded glen in Kĩneniĩ, a few yards from the road built by the Bonos. Ndũng’ũ and Njoroge, Kĩmũchũ’s children by his first wife, Wangũi, had now lost both parents.

Terror struck our region, but it hit my grandfather hardest. He was Kĩmũchũ’s surrogate father; they were very close. My grandfather was convinced he would be next, that “they” would come for him by night. He sought refuge in my mother’s hut. Every evening, under the cover of darkness, he would slip into our place. To see this very powerful man, the respected landowner and custodian of his subclan, yes, my grandfather who wrote letters to the government, in our hut, quaking with fear of colonial malfeasance, was my first real intimation of the import of the state of emergency. He had to use a chamber pot. I felt with him his painful humiliation at having to use a chamber pot in his own daughter’s hut! After a few weeks he relaxed and returned to his normal residence with Mũkami. But now and then he would still seek out our place at night.

For the duration of his struggle, my grandmother became less sullen, more sympathetic. An undeclared truce reigned between them. But after he left and the white shadow of death did not strike again, life returned to normal in my mother’s house, which also meant the return of Grandmother’s sullenness, and my mother’s terror of her own mother. My grandmother complained of her displacement from Elburgon
before the healer had completed his task. The pieces of broken glass that the healer had not taken out still hurt.

Then came the week when my grandmother turned kind and gentle. She was loving and comforting, and I wished she would always be like that. She joked a little, and laughed softly. People could talk about anything without her bringing up the pieces of glass that unknown evil had planted in her.

Kĩmũchũ’s brutal assassination was always alluded to in a variety of ways: What was going to happen to all his wealth? Would Phyllis, his widow, look after the property in the equal interests of all the children, hers and her stepchildren? This would lead to discussions about Ndũng’ũ, Kĩmũchũ’s eldest son, who was about my age, and Njoroge, his younger brother. Ndũng’ũ was going to be a man soon, my mother said, reporting what she heard as coming from Ndũng’ũ’s grandmother. Then he would look after the portion of wealth due to him.

My grandmother turned to me: “And my husband here? He cannot be left behind.” She called me her husband because I was named after my grandfather. I laughed off the talk of becoming a man. I was focused on school only. The idea of circumcision was very far from my mind. But for some reason she would not let the matter go, and a few days later she brought up the subject, reiterating that Ndũng’ũ, who was my age, could not become a man and leave me behind a boy. I tried to distract her by asking her more details about the story of the removal of the pieces of glass
from her body. Previously this would have been sure bait. I was surprised by her mild response.

“I have no ill will toward the evil one,” she said, and then continued in the same train of thought. “I have never meant anybody harm.”

It was as if, by asking questions about her condition, I had induced in her forgiveness and general beneficence. She kept on telling my mother and all of us that she harbored no bad feelings toward anybody. As if to confirm the truth of it, she slightly spit on her hands and breast in the Gĩkũyũ gesture of blessing.