Dreams in a Time of War (4 page)

She was a great storyteller. Every evening we children gathered around the fireside in her hut, and the performance would begin. Sometimes, particularly on weekends, the older siblings would bring their friends and it would then become a storytelling session for all. One told a story. After it ended, another person from the audience would say something like, “That reminds me of …,” or such other words, a signal that
he or she was going to tell a story, even if, as it turned out in most cases, the new story had nothing to do with the one that apparently provoked it. But the comment did not always mean another story. It could also bring a narration of an episode illustrating the truth of an aspect of the story. Sometimes such opinions and illustrations generated heated debates that had no clear winner, and they often flowed into yet other stories. Or sometimes they led to stories about events in the land and the world. Like when they talked about age groups and how times change, citing the case of Harry Thuku, whose political fire of the 1920s had become cold ash following his release in 1929 after seven years of exile. The society of three letters (Kĩama kĩa Ndemwa Ithatũ), as the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), the successor to Harry Thuku’s East African Association, was called after it was also banned by the colonial state in 1941, was very angry with the new Thuku, who talked of persuasion and putting out fires in place of demands backed by threats of fire. The arguments about the merits and demerits of the two approaches were above my head and quite boring, but the historical anecdotes were all right because for me they were still part of the oral universe of storytelling. Some of them sounded stranger than fiction: like the case of a white man called Hitler refusing to shake the hand of the fastest runner in the world in 1936 because the man, Jesse Owens, was black.

I looked forward to these evenings; it seemed to me a glorious wonder that such beautiful and sometimes scary stories could issue from their mouths. Best for me were those
stories in which the audience would join in the singing of the chorus. The melody was invariably captivating; it felt like I had been transported to another world of endless harmony even in sadness. This intensified my anticipation of what would happen next. I hated it when some members would interrupt the storyteller to dispute the accuracy of a sequence. Why not wait for their turn? I was keen to hear what happened next even when I already knew the story.

Sometimes the sessions would move to the other women’s huts, but the festive air would not be as intense. Gacoki and Njeri were not good storytellers and hardly contributed. My mother was also not good at it, but when pressed she fell back on either of the two stories she always told. One was about a blacksmith who goes to a smithy far away and leaves his wife pregnant. An ogre helps her deliver, but when it comes to nursing he eats up all the food and drinks up all the porridge intended for the mother. In exchange for castor oil seeds, a pigeon agrees to deliver a message to the blacksmith, who comes back and kills the ogre and is happily reunited with his wife and family. Another was a simple, almost plot-less tale about a man with an incurable wound who does not give up but embarks on a quest for a cure. He does not know the dwelling place of the famous medicine man; he only knows him by the name of Ndiro. In asking strangers for the way, he describes the medicine man in terms of his gait, dance steps, and the rhythmic jingles around his ankles that sound his name, Ndiro. This story was popular with us children. We could visualize the medicine man and would join in the chorus, sometimes stepping on the ground and calling
out “Ndiro” in unison. One of my half sisters liked the tale so much that she adopted it as her own whenever it was her turn to tell a story.

In the daytime, we would try to retell the stories we had heard among ourselves, but they did not come out as powerfully as when told around the fireside, the entire space jammed with eager participatory listeners. Daylight, our mothers always told us, drove stories away, and it seemed true.

There was one exception that defied the rules of day and night. Wabia was the fifth child, or the second daughter, of Wangarĩ’s seven children, four of whom had physical challenges of one kind or other, the severest being those of two siblings: Gĩtogo and Wabia. Gĩtogo had lost his power of speech on the same day that his sister Wabia lost the power of sight and motion. The two were born with sight and hearing, but one day when Wabia was carrying her baby brother Gĩtogo on her back, lightning had struck. Wabia complained that somebody had put out the sun; and Gĩtogo, with gestures, that the same person had stopped all sound. Later, he learned to speak in signs accompanied by undecipherable guttural sounds. Gĩtogo, handsome and strongly built, had no other physical challenges. But Wabia had lost all power in the leg joints. She could stand up or take steps only with the aid of two walking sticks.

She always sat or lay down in the courtyard, under the roof of her mother’s hut. Sometimes she took a few steps and then lay out in the sun. But curiously her voice and memory came to be more powerful. When she sang, which she did often, her voice could be heard far away. She had
never been to church, but through listening to those who had been she remembered what she had heard sung by others; in time she became a storehouse of lyrics and melodies sung in different churches. But she also knew many other songs, particularly those in stories she had heard at her mother’s fireside. For her, the story did not flee in daytime, and we, the children, became the grateful recipients of her powers of retention. In the evening she never contributed to the storytelling, she just listened, but on the following day she could retell the same stories with an imaginative power that made them even more interesting and delightful than in their first telling. Through the modulation of her voice, she would create anew their poetry and drama. She owned the stories. Of course we had to be nice to her, love one another, and obey our parents for her to release the story in daytime. If we quarreled among ourselves or disobeyed our mothers, she claimed that the story had run away in sorrow. We had to coax and promise her that we would be on good behavior. Some of the kids would demand stories from her and when she refused would take away her walking sticks, in vengeance. But she never would give in to their demands. I was one of the most obedient, to her at least, and would bring her water or retrieve her walking sticks. She also liked it that I was one of the most persistent seekers of her performance. More than her mother or other narrators, Wabia was possessed of imaginative power that took me to worlds unknown, worlds that I was later able to glimpse only through reading fiction. Whenever I think of that phase of my childhood, it is in terms of the stories at Wangarĩ’s
hut at night and their rebirth in her daughter’s voice in daytime.

Though I did not know it at the time, it would be two of Wangarĩ’s other children who would connect me to a history unfolding in the colonial state and in the world. First was the eldest male in my father’s household, Tumbo, an odd nickname because he had no visibly big belly. He had no visible job either, but it was whispered that he was a
gĩcerũ
. There were people answering to the name Gĩcerũ, but this could refer to the fact that they were light-skinned. For them it was simply a name and not a job. How could one have a profession called “white”? It was only later, when I learned that the word, as used, was derived from the Swahili word
kacheru
, which means “informer,” that I knew that he worked in low-level undercover police intelligence.

Her third son, Joseph Kabae, was also a mystery, emerging in my mind as an image in a mist. Since I had not met him in person, the outline was formed through hints and odd bits only. As a boy, grazing our father’s herd, he had gotten into a fight with a bigger boy, a bully who always came upon him when he was milking my father’s cows. The bully would drink some of the milk by force and Kabae would get into trouble. One day in anger and self-defense, Kabae fatally stabbed the boy with a knife. He was arrested, but being under age he was taken to Wamũnyũ, a reform trade school, where he got some formal education. After this—I don’t know if it was voluntary or forced—he went to fight for King George VI, in the Second World War, as a member of the King’s African Rifles.

The KAR, as it was known, was formed in 1902, an outgrowth of two earlier units, the East African Rifles and the Central African Regiment, the brainchild of Captain Lugard. He was famous as the author of the British Indirect Rule, the strategy of using the natives of one region to fight the natives of another region, and in each community, to use the chiefs, traditional or created, to suppress their own people on behalf of the British Crown. The regiment had earlier played a big role in the pursuit of the elusive German von Lettow-Vorbeck in the First World War and against the Ashanti king, the Asantahene, in the Ashanti wars. The men of the regiment sang of themselves as king’s men marching to his orders.

Kabae was not the only one from our extended family who fought in the Second World War. Cousin Mwangi, the eldest son of Baba Mũkũrũ, had joined. Names of strange people—Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Stalin, Churchill, and
Roosevelt—and places—America, Germany, Italy, and Russia, Japan, Madagascar, and Burma—occasionally cropped up in the story sessions at Wangarĩ’s fireside. These names and places were vague in outline, and, like those surrounding Harry Thuku earlier, were really shadows in a mist. Was this Hitler, for instance, the same who had refused to shake hands with Jesse Owens? I could understand them only in terms of scary ogres versus heroes in the never-never land of orality. Hitler and Mussolini, who threatened to enslave Africans, were the bad, ugly ogres, the proof of their evil intent being next door. Even before I was born, Benito Mussolini had entered Ethiopia in 1936 and had forced the African emperor Haile Selassie into exile and added insult to injury by creating Italian East Africa out of Ethiopia and neighboring territories. Us today; you tomorrow, Haile Selassie had told the League of Nations, who had watched the invasion of Ethiopia, a member state, with silence. Folk talked about these episodes as if they were part of their everyday life. How did these young men and women, some of them just workers in the nearby Limuru Bata Shoe Company, know such stories and the goings-on in times past and places far away? The young dancers who sang of the bad Hitler marching down to Kenya to put yokes around African people’s necks reinforced the image of a dread beast let loose in the world. But pitted against this beast and its deadly intentions were brave characters, part of the British army of saviors, and among them were Cousin Mwangi and Brother Kabae. We heard of their exploits in Abyssinia in the campaign against Mussolini’s Italian East Africa, and a lot of
new names of places, such as Addis Ababa, Eritrea, Mogadishu, Italian and British Somaliland, entered the conversation. Of course the complexities of warfare eluded me. Bits and pieces of stories coalesced into whispers of Mussolini’s soldiers’ surrender. To me it was quite simple. Heroes had defeated ogres, at least those marching toward us, and our brother and our cousin had played a part in the victory. In my mind, Joseph Kabae, whom I had not met, was the most heroic and Mussolini’s soldiers had really surrendered to him. He and I were connected by blood, our father’s blood, but he was still a character in a fairyland far away.

But evidence of war was not to be found simply in stories; it was all around us. Peasant farmers could sell their food only through the government marketing board. Movement of food across regions was not permitted without a license, creating shortages and famine in some areas. Though I did not know the reasons at the time, this system of food production and distribution was actually the colony’s contribution to the British war economy. In Limuru, the prohibition produced a famous smuggler, Karugo, who drove his truck so fast that he often eluded the pursuing police. He was finally arrested and jailed, but he became a legend in the popular imagination, giving rise to the expression “Karugo’s speedometer.”
Tura na cia Karugo
meant “speed away,” or “don’t worry about any speed limit.”

There was also the visual evidence in the soldiers that passed through Limuru, who at times would get stuck in the country dirt tracks that passed for roads. To make the tracks more passable, the government turned them into wider murram
roads. In digging up the murram, the government works left a deep rectangular quarry the size of a soccer field near the Manguo marshes around Kimunya’s corner, just below the Kahahu estate. With the improvement, the soldiers would sometimes stop and park their vehicles by the roadside and have their lunches in any open space in the forest bushes around. They would give cookies and canned meat to herd boys. One of my half brothers, Njinjũ wa Njeri, then the main assistant herd boy to my father, would often bring some home, and talk about the military, but he never mentioned having seen our Joseph Kabae among them. Did he, wherever he was, also park vehicles by the roadside and eat cookies and canned meat and give some to herd boys?

One day, two of a convoy of trucks full of military men fell off the road into the cavernous murram quarry. The rest of the convoy stopped and parked by the roadside. There was mayhem of movement among the rescuers and the rescued. News spread quickly. Practically the whole village was there to see the wounded and the dead being carried away. The sounds of mourning were terrible, especially for us children. But worse for the Thiong’o family was the rumor that began to circulate that Kabae may have been part of the military convoy. There was nobody to ask. Stories of his having been far away in Abyssinia did not allay our concerns. The silence of the government exacerbated our fears. I felt deprived of a war hero, a half brother I would now never see.

But one night he came home in an army truck, two headlights splitting the darkness. There was not much of a road to our homestead. The truck simply made two tracks past
Lord Kahahu’s orchard to our compound. Unfortunately, it had been raining. The truck got stuck in the mud, and as the driver tried to rev it out, the truck hit my mother’s hut and dug deeper in the mud. The army men in green khaki fatigues and army hats spent most of their night visit trying to dig it out using flashlights to see. We crowded around them, and I could not even make out who Kabae was except when he, a shadowy figure among shadowy figures, left his men digging and said hurried greetings to the family. He was back from the East African Campaign, resting and recharging in Nairobi, before redeployment to other fronts in Madagascar or even Burma. Apparently he and his friends had taken the truck without permission, hoping to be away for only a few hours, long enough for Kabae to quench, a little, the thirst for home that he must have felt in his years away. It was also an opportunity for him and his non-Gĩkũyũ comrades-in-arms, who must have felt even farther from home, to eat a home-cooked meal as opposed to their rations of cookies and canned meat. He mentioned some of the countries of their origin—Uganda, Tanganyika, and Nyasaland. The King’s African Rifles had people from all over Africa, he said. By the time they dug out the truck, they could only eat hurriedly and were anxious to leave and return to camp in Nairobi. So we did not spend much time with him, but I hardly slept thinking of the drama that had just ended. It was as if Kabae had jumped out of a story, said a hello, a good-bye, and then jumped back into the story. Hitting my mother’s hut and digging out the truck at night was not exactly the most heroic homecoming for one who
had been all over the world fighting ogres, but then his was the first motor vehicle ever to come to our homestead. We realized how big our brother was when the landlord did not raise any complaints about the tracks the truck had made through his land or about the bent orchard trees. The visit was forever engraved in my mind and talks of the big war now brought back memories of a military truck stuck in the mud by my mother’s hut.