Petals of Blood (17 page)

He decided to cycle to Ruwa-ini to confront Mr Mzigo with the problem. It would also be good to get away from these constant talks about sun and dust. If Mzigo did not give him a teacher, Munira would have to abandon the school.

But just before he could leave for Ruwa-ini to see Mzigo about the school’s problems, two things which Munira was later to remember happened in Ilmorog. At the time, however, they only seemed out of character with the sunny somnolence of the old Ilmorog as he had known it. First came the tax officer in a government Land Rover accompanied by two gun-carrying Askaris. Before the officer could get out of the Land Rover, word of his arrival had gone round: all the men somehow managed to vanish into the plains. The officer knocked at the door of every house: in each place he found only women and children. ‘All our men have gone to your cities,’ complained the women, ‘look at the sun and the dust and tell us if you would stay here.’ In the end, the officer went to Abdulla’s place and over a drink of beer he talked incessantly about Ilmorog country. ‘It seems to be getting more and more depopulated. Every year that I have come here, I have been met by fewer and fewer males. But this trip breaks all records.’ Abdulla agreed with the officer without adding any details. ‘Anyway you have all the women to yourself,’ the officer continued, writing a tax receipt for Abdulla. He drove away. In the evening the men miraculously reappeared and they talked as if nothing had happened.

But soon after this episode came two men from ‘out there’. They claimed that they were sent by Nderi wa Riera. People of Ilmorog gathered around them at the school compound and patiently waited to hear the news: perhaps Nderi wa Riera had remembered his old promise to bring piped water to the area. One was fat with a shiny bald head which he kept on touching and they called him Fat Stomach: the other was tall and thin and kept his hands in his pockets and never once said a word. They baptized him Insect. Insect told them of a new Kīama-Kamwene Cultural Organization – which would bring unity between the rich and the poor and bring cultural harmony to all the
regions. Fat Stomach declared that the people of Ilmorog were to ready themselves to go to Gatundu to sing and have tea. He explained that all the people from Central Province were going to sing and drink tea. Just like 1952, he hinted and talked vaguely but with suggestive variation of voice, of a new cultural movement: let he who had ears hear. He explained how their hard-won property and accumulation of sweat was threatened by another tribe.

Ruoro stood up to answer back: where was Gatundu? Why would anybody want Ilmorog people to go and drink tea? How come that they from out there were threatened by other tribes? Had they piled enough property as to excite envy from other tribes? Here, people were threatened by lack of water; lack of roads; lack of hospitals. But what really was expected of them?

Fat Stomach laughed rather uneasily, but when he talked he oozed a sense of infinite patience. They would get free transport: but each man and each woman was expected to take with him twelve shillings and fifty cents.

At this, the women, led by Nyakinyua, started making a noise: did he mean that they had to pay all that in order to go and sing and drink tea?

‘Let him who has ears listen,’ Fat Stomach repeated, a mixture of warning and menace in his voice. And now Nyakinyua seemed possessed: ‘You too, if you have ears, listen: you are worse than a tax gatherer. Twelve shillings and fifty cents! From what hole are we to dig up the money? Why should we pay to sing? Go back and tell them this: here we need water, not songs. We need food. We need our sons back to help this land grow.’

Fat Stomach was sweating a little and now his voice carried anxiety. At the same time he did not want to show fear in front of these people. He tried to say the tribe’s wealth was being threatened by the lake people and others deceived by the Indian communist who was recently removed from this earth.

‘You mean some of you have already made enough wealth while we scratch the earth?’

‘Is that the wealth they want to steal from you?’

‘Good for them if they are as poor as we are.’

‘Yes, yes. What can they steal from us?’

‘One year’s harvest.’

‘Our drought and dust.’

‘If somebody can steal away this dust and this drought – that would be a blessing.’

‘Here we live with our neighbours, the herdsmen. What quarrels have you amongst yourselves out there?’

The women had taken over the whole show, and they seemed to be enjoying it. Some started making threatening loud cries. There was a slight commotion.

‘Let us pull out their penises and see if they are really men,’ one woman shouted.

Fat Stomach and his companion, Insect, backed a little, trying to keep dignity, but at the woman’s words, they started running across the school compound toward their Land Rover, the menacing voices of women behind them.

Munira briefly thought about these two incidents as later the same month he cycled to Ruwa-ini to fight for more teachers. What madness had seized the women? What was that sudden rumble of violence behind the sunny rural passivity? Maybe it was the sun and the dust he thought, dismissing the whole matter from his mind. Fat Stomach and Insect were charlatans, probably thieves who wanted to make money on the side.

He started reviewing in advance his coming confrontation with Mzigo. He was tired of his monthly cycling to Ruwa-ini. He was tired of Ruwa-ini Town with its red tiled colonial houses; its golf course; its bougainvillaeas and its jacaranda trees lining the pavements.

Ruwa-ini, the capital of Chiri District was famous only because it was originally the centre of hides and skins trade and also of trade in wattle barks.

Baumann and Coy, Forrestals, and also Primchand Raichand and Coy, in their nineteen-twenties fearsome rivalry for the control of wattle bark trade and of tanning extract, had set rival offices and factories here. It was these foreign and local giants of capital, together with the Mombasa-Kisumu-Kampala charcoal and wood-eating railway engines which had depleted forests near and far. Ruwa-ini had
had an air of prosperity and growth before the wattle extract was replaced by synthetic tanning materials and the charcoal-eating engines by those powered by diesel oil.

The tanning extract used to be railed to Limuru, in Kiambu District where a Czech-Canadian International shoe-making factory had been established just before the Second World War. Ruwa-ini was now no more than an administrative centre although its daily market and its golf course were widely known.

Mzigo’s office was still the same specklessly tidy affair. He sat in the same place, in the same position, as he had always done.

‘Aa, Mr Munira, good to see you again and again. How is the school? But do sit down. I’m sorry I have not been to your school yet but I’ll be coming shortly. Any good roads yet? I don’t need to tell you about these damned cars. Anything to wet my throat? By the way, congratulations. You were before only an Acting Headmaster. It’s now confirmed. You are the new Headmaster of Ilmorog Full Primary School. Congratulations again.’

‘I am touched by the honour,’ Munira said, actually thrilled inside.

‘It’s nothing,’ said Mzigo. ‘Your own dedication!’

‘But I could do with a few more teachers. At least one . . .’

‘Teachers? But Mr Munira, I told you almost two years ago that you could recruit any help you needed.’

‘It is a bit difficult . . . that place . . . It is slightly out of the way. A bit dry. Few people come that side.’

‘I hear that it’s been deserted by its men: is that true Mr Munira? That only women remain? Lucky you, Mr Munira. I shall be coming along to help you . . . Not a bad job eh? Meanwhile do attract one or two teachers there. Tell them about the free women. Try, Mr Munira, try. When I was at school, Mr Munira, my headmaster used to tell us: Try and Try Again. He was a fat Scotsman in charge of religion and he used to tell us a story of a Scottish king who was driven out of his kingdom and he saw a spider try and try again to climb up a wall until he succeeded. He too went back and this time regained his kingdom. So, Mr Munira, try and people your kingdom of Ilmorog with teachers . . .’

Munira was about to go out when Mzigo called him back.

‘By the way, here is a letter to the Headmaster of Ilmorog School.’

Munira took the envelope and opened it. He could not believe it. He read it over and over again. Kamwene Cultural Organization (Ilmorog Branch) invited the Headmaster of Ilmorog School and all his staff to join Nderi wa Riera in a delegation that would go to tea at Gatundu . . . He was trembling . . .

‘Thank you . . .’ he said.

‘It’s not me . . .’

Munira’s heart was glowing with pride. And so he was making something of himself after all. A headmaster. And now an invitation to tea. To tea at Gatundu! Admittedly, the note was handwritten, and came from the district office and it asked him to organize all his teachers and their wives. He had never heard of KCO (Ilmorog Branch). But it was something to remember. A headmaster. An invitation to tea. Tea at Gatundu. He thought of going back to tell Mr Mzigo the story of a Mr Ironmonger who used to talk of heaven in terms of tea, sausages and vanilla ice-cream. But now he had to hurry home to tell his wife of the news. A headmaster! Invitation to tea! Ilmorog had given him greatness. Hoyee!

Before sunset he crossed into Limuru. Even if he had not known the features and the lie of the land – the ridges that gave way to deep valleys that rose up into more ridges and valleys – he would still have known it by the cold brisk air which suddenly hit him and made his body and mind alert, ready to leap and pounce. This land; these ridges, these valleys nearly always green through the year made Limuru a scion of God’s favourite country: long rains in March, April and May; biting cold icy showers in misty June and July; windy sunshine on green peas and beans in August and September; a dazzling sun in harvest-tide in October and November and red plums and luscious pears ripening in December, January and February under a brilliantly clear blue sky. So different, he thought, from droughty Ilmorog.

But coming into the place he always felt in himself a strong tension between this vigour, this energy that was Limuru and that long night of unreality that was his past: between the call of life and involvement in living history and an escape into a family seclusion with a morality rooted in property and the Presbyterian Church; between an
inexplicable fear of the people and an equally inexplicable fear of his father; between the desire for active creation and a passive acceptance of one’s ordained fate. His father’s face now loomed large in his mind . . .

His father was an early convert to the Christian faith. We can imagine the fatal meeting between the native and the alien. The missionary had traversed the seas, the forests, armed with the desire for profit that was his faith and light and the gun that was his protection. He carried the Bible; the soldier carried the gun; the administrator and the settler carried the coin. Christianity, Commerce, Civilization: the Bible, the Coin, the Gun: Holy Trinity. The native was grazing cattle, dreaming of warriorship, of making the soil yield to the power of his hands, slowly through a mixture of magic and work bending nature’s laws to his collective will and intentions. In the evening he would dance, muthunguci, ndumo, mumburo in celebration or he would pray and sacrifice to propitiate nature. Yes: the native was still afraid of nature. But he revered man’s life as much as he revered nature. Man’s life was God’s sacred fire that had to remain lit all the way from the ancestor to the child and the generations yet unborn.

Except that Waweru and his father had been driven from their family land in Muranga by even more powerful mbari lords and wealthy houses who could buy more potent magic and other protective powers. Here in Kiambu they had to start all over again with his grandfather having to work his way up from a ndungata on yet another powerful family’s land to the time when he got a few goats to strike out on his own. Waweru had seen all that and he hoped that when he grew up he too would acquire even more potent magic and create an even more powerful house.

The native. The missionary. Driven by forces they could not always understand. The stage was set.

Waweru’s father wakes up, the hour it is said Mara threw away his dying mother to the forest. He tells Waweru: my son, take these goats and cows to the grassland near Ikenia Forest. I have a meeting with the elders to discuss this thing prophesied long ago by the travelling seer – Mugo wa Kibiro. We and our fathers used not to believe him
when he told us about red Foreigners and now indeed it has happened. And now the red stranger has started taking our lands in Tigoni and other places. You know how we have struggled to get this land and, even harder, this wealth. If he takes our land: where shall we cultivate miriyo? Where graze the cattle? So all the clans and mbaris and all the houses big and small must now close ranks and fight the stranger in our midst. Do not forget your calabash of sour milk. Also your spear and shield. We shall need them in the struggle to come. Gird your loins and always remember everything good and beautiful comes from the soil. Some clan-heads and mbari lords and some heads of the big houses are betraying the people and allying themselves with these Foreigners. But remember those who betrayed the nation to the Arab trader, Jumbe? The voice of the people haunted them to death. Waweru takes the cows and the goats and then he stands, watches the retreating figure of his father and spits on the ground.
Big houses: big families: more powerful than the work of my hand is the possession of magic: didn’t the big houses drive us from our land in Muranga and we had to start all over again? I’ll create my big house to beat all the big houses
 . . . Waweru has always passed by this new building where the daily peals of bells strike awe and curiosity into his heart. This magic and the one that comes from bamboo sticks is making the big houses and the big mbaris and clans afraid: they struggle against it or seek friendship with it. At least it is splitting houses, clans, and even ridges. Not even Kamiri’s sorcery proved more powerful than this magic. Waweru knows one or two young men who have sought shelter inside. They were given lumps of sugar and a piece of white calico. Now it is morning: and it is cold. They see him and beckon him in. He has already made up his mind. Let his father resist alone. He, Waweru, will join Kamenyi and Kahati. Better than the warmth of cow-dung and urine and biting dew was the odour of the white man sweetened by sugar, with church bells and music stranger than that from the one-stringed wandindi and the mwariki flute – and, protected by gunpowder and tinkling coins, possessing life longer and stronger than that of cows and goats and sheep. This was a new world with a new magic. His father, trembling with anger, comes to fetch home the prodigal son: he can’t speak, but helplessly points a walking stick at
Waweru. Waweru feels a bit guilty: after all, he is shin of the shin, blood of the blood of the trembling old man. But above the voice of doubt, he hears another voice calling him into a higher glory: he who forsaketh his father and mother for my sake . . . and he sees himself the fulfilment of the prophecy which is also the proof of the truth of it. At the behest of his new father and mother, Waweru, who now becomes Ezekieli – how sweet the name sounds in a new Christian’s ear – divests himself of every robe from his heathen past.