Petals of Blood (52 page)

There was a quiet but firm conviction in Munira’s voice that somehow carried Inspector Godfrey. It had made him listen without the usual boredom that had characterized his investigative relationship with Munira. Behind the boredom was of course a questioning, calculating mind sifting words, storing phrases and looks and gestures, also looking for a line, a key, a thread, a connection, an image that would help tie everything together. He now sighed back into his chair and the boredom returned:

‘Interesting – very interesting. And yet, Mr Munira, I believe you were always to be seen either with Karega or Wanja or Abdulla . . . I thought that you – please excuse my curiosity – but you being no longer of this evil world would . . . eeh . . . well . . . abandon it and keep the company of the holy . . . Lillian, for instance.’

‘You don’t understand. It is enjoined upon us to bring others to see the light. I wanted each one of them to discover this new world . . .’

‘Mr Munira . . . isn’t it true . . . and again excuse me if I am a little
mixed up . . . isn’t it true that Karega also used to talk to the workers about a new world?’

‘That was it,’ Munira said excitedly. ‘You are following, you are beginning to see. I wanted to save him . . . I wanted to save him first from it—!’

Inspector Godfrey suddenly clutched at the sides of the table and interrupted almost hoarsely:

‘It . . . what . . . what do you mean?’

‘His dreams . . . his devil’s dreams and illusions . . . save him from committing the unforgivable sin . . .’

‘What sin? Please, Mr Munira, don’t talk in parables! What scheme? What sin? Please tell me . . . and be quick about it.’

The officer’s lower lip was trembling. He was like a hound on a hot scent. Munira looked at him, at his bloodshot eyes, and said:

‘Why, of pride. Of thinking that he and his workers could change the evil . . . could change this world . . .’

The officer let out his breath and suddenly looked exhausted. He had lost the scent and he felt like kicking the holy fanatic of a teacher outside the office.

‘Did he say how he intended to change the world, apart from inciting strikes, go-slow, work to rule and all that communist nonsense?’

‘It is his pride I am talking about. His pride in even contemplating that one man unaided by God through Christ could change himself, could change the world, could improve on it.’

‘I now understand your “IT”. But this I believe was only at first . . . what other evil were you going to save him from?’

‘Her!’

‘Whom?’

‘Wanja.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He had started seeing her secretly. I am sure of it.’

‘How?’

‘I saw him.’

‘When?’

‘About a week before the fire. They were meeting at her old hut. But Abdulla—’

The officer was on his feet again. His lips were trembling. He stared at Munira.

‘Are you sure, very sure?’

‘Yes. I saw them. I saw them,’ he said quietly, as a doubt darted through his mind. Suppose, he thought, and he was about to add something when the officer suddenly stood up and rushed to the door. He had picked up the scent and this time he was determined not to lose it. Munira shouted at him.

‘Stop . . . wait . . . I’ve not finished.’

The officer looked back over his shoulder and waited, on legs ready to spring on in the chase. Munira approached.

‘What have you done to him? What have you done with Karega?’

‘Stupid fool,’ hissed the officer and shouted an order. ‘. . . Take him back . . . I’ll be seeing him later.’ And he hurried on toward the other cells.

2 ~ To Karega the morning of his arrest, ten days earlier, was still doubly bitter because he had just listened to the six o’clock news bulletin only to hear that because of the tense situation in Ilmorog after the killing of Kimeria, Chui and Mzigo, the planned strike was banned. They always take the side of the employers, he reflected in anger. I knew they would seize on the excuse of the arson to ban the strike and aim yet another blow at the fledgling workers’ movement.

He was in a cell all by himself for a whole day and night. He wondered what fake charges they would bring against him. He had only been arrested once: that time that he and Munira and Abdulla had led a ‘donkey’ delegation to the city. Then they were saved from prison by the lawyer. Such a long time ago, he thought. And the lawyer had been killed. He had not quite been able to understand the lawyer: he genuinely loved people: he could see and even analyse what had happened in a way that few others could do: yet . . . he seemed at the same time fascinated by property and the social power and authority that this gave him. ‘You see,’ he had once explained to Karega, ‘they can’t fault me on education or on professional qualifications. They can’t fault me on involvement in the struggle. I had as a boy taken the batuni oath and used to be a go-between for the fighting
units. I would dress as a Boy Scout so I could go to places unmolested. They can’t fault me on property. They can’t say I am a Kaggia.’ He had laughed at the pun. ‘So I can speak fearlessly for the poor and for land and property reforms – put a ceiling on what a person can accumulate . . . one man, one kiosk, that kind of thing. One shamba, one man, that kind of thing. One job, one man, and so on.’ His brutal death had shocked Karega as it had shaken the whole land. Such a fine stock . . . with all his faults, he represented the finest and most courageous in a line of courageous and selfless individuals from among the propertied men and women of Kenya; from some of the feudal mbari lords at the turn of the century who, despite bribes of beads and calico and the lure of white-protected power, would not side with the hordes of colonial invaders but died fighting with the people, to others in the thirties and fifties who, despite education and property, refused to betray the people for a few favours from the British. Oh, a long time ago, he thought again as he recalled how the lawyer had effected their release from the Central Police Station and from the law court. Those scenes now appeared as faint outlines of distant landscapes in another country. Even in himself he could not recognize the dreamer who once could talk endlessly about Africa’s past glories, Africa’s great feudal cultures, as if it was enough to have this knowledge to cure one day’s pang of hunger, to quench an hour’s thirst or to clothe a naked child. After all, the British merchant magnates and their missionary soothsayers once colonized and humiliated China by making the Chinese buy and drink opium and clubbed them when they refused to import the poison, even while the British scholars sang of China’s great feudal cultures and stole the evidence in gold and art and parchments and took them to London. Egypt too. India too. Syria, Iraq . . . God was born in Palestine even . . . and all this knowledge never once deterred the European merchant warlords. And China was saved, not by singers and poets telling of great past cultures, but by the creative struggle of the workers for a better day today. No, it was not a people’s past glories only, but also the glory of their present strife and struggles to right the wrongs that bring tears to the many and laughter only to a few. The Ilmorog whose past achievements had moved him so after listening to Nyakinyua was not there any
more. Within only ten years – how time galloped, he thought – Ilmorog peasants had been displaced from the land: some had joined the army of workers, others were semi-workers with one foot in a plot of land and one foot in a factory, while others became petty traders in hovels and shanties they did not even own, along the Trans-Africa Road, or criminals and prostitutes who with their stolen guns and over-used cunts eked a precarious living from each and everybody – workers, peasants, factory owners, blacks, whites – indiscriminately. There were a few who tried their hands at making sufurias, karais, water tins, chicken-feeding troughs; shoemakers, carpenters; but how long would they last, seeing that they were being driven out of their trades by more organized big-scale production of the same stuff? The herdsmen had suffered a similar fate: some had died; others had been driven even further out into drier parts away from the newly enclosed game-parks for tourists, and yet others had become hired labourers on wheatfields or on farms belonging to wealthier peasants. And behind it all, as a monument to the changes, was the Trans-Africa Road and the two-storeyed building of the African Economic Bank Ltd.

He had noticed and picked out these changes within the first days of his return, because he had known the Ilmorog of Nyakinyua, of the mythical Mwathi and of Njuguna and Ruoro. But on looking back on all the places he had been to he could discern the same pattern: rapid in some places, slow in others, but emerging all the time in all of them. There was no other place to which he could turn. Further education? He had lost his chance: besides, what else was there to learn besides what he had experienced with his eyes and hands? Land? There was no land – he was born into a landless home. But even those with land: for how long could it continue to be subdivided into plots and sub-plots so that each son could own a piece? Why, anyway, should soil, any soil, which after all was what was Kenya, be owned by an individual? Kenya, the soil, was the people’s common shamba, and there was no way it could be right for a few, or a section, or a single nationality, to inherit for their sole use what was communal, any more than it would be right for a few sons and daughters to own and monopolize their father or mother. It was better for him to get
reconciled to his situation: since the only thing that he had now was his two hands, he would somehow sell its creative power to whoever would buy it and then join with all the other hands in ensuring that at least they had a fair share of what their thousand sets of fingers produced.

At least he would not, he could not accept the static vision of Wanja’s logic. It was too ruthless, and it could only lead to despair and self- or mutual annihilation. For what was the point of a world in which one could only be clean by wiping his dirt and shit and urine on others? A world in which one could only be healthy by making others carry one’s leprosy? A world in which one could only be saintly and moral and upright by prostituting others? Why, anyway, should the victims of a few people’s cleanliness and health and saintliness and wealth be expected to always accept their lot? The true lesson of history was this: that the so-called victims, the poor, the downtrodden, the masses, had always struggled with spears and arrows, with their hands and songs of courage and hope, to end their oppression and exploitation: that they would continue struggling until a human kingdom came: a world in which goodness and beauty and strength and courage would be seen not in how cunning one can be, not in how much power to oppress one possessed, but only in one’s contribution in creating a more humane world in which the inherited inventive genius of man in culture and science from all ages and climes would be not the monopoly of a few, but for the use of all, so that all flowers in all their different colours would ripen and bear fruits and seeds. And the seeds would be put into the ground and they would once again sprout and flower in rain and sunshine. If Abdulla could choose a brother, why couldn’t they all do the same? Choose brothers and sisters in sweat, in toil, in struggle, and stand by one another and strive for that kingdom?

These thoughts matured as for six months he worked in the Theng’eta Breweries as a counting clerk. He kept a check on the bottles that came off the production line. He also helped in counting the number of cases put on a customer’s lorry. They called him the silent one because he worked in silence, observing, annotating, now and then arguing with one or two workers, but no more. He also
stopped drinking because alcohol sapped his energy and reduced his power of concentration. But he frequented the bars, where he would insert a shilling or two in a juke-box and listen to his favourites as well as keeping up with the latest singers and poets. The juke-box had driven out all the live bands. In one or two places he met some of his old students, now young men. They would call him Mwalimu, but he discouraged them from calling him so. The only bars he avoided were those likely to be visited by Chui or Kimeria or Mzigo, who liked staying on after inspecting the workings of the factory. Once or twice he went to the Tourist Village. He liked the songs and dances of the older generation. But when he saw how Nderi wa Riera and his managing consortium of German and Greek proprietors had so mummified them and drained them of all emotion and meaning; when he saw how the fat tourists carrying cameras, chewing gum and adjusting their safari hats clapped and cheered at this acrobatic nothingness, he was disgusted and swore he would never return. He observed how the workers were disunited: in their talk he could see that they were proud of their linguistic enclaves and clans and regions and tended to see any emergent leadership in terms of how it would help or hinder the allocation of jobs to people of their own clan and language groups. Men too seemed to think they were better off than women workers because they got a little bit more pay and preference in certain jobs. They seemed to think that women deserved low pay and heavy work: women’s real job, they argued amidst noise and laughter, was to lie on their backs and open their legs to man’s passage to the kingdoms of pleasure.

He now knew his line of attack and approach. These divisions had to end if they were going to successfully demand recognition and a fair share of their own sweat. From nowhere, so it seemed, pamphlets started appearing: and they all carried the same theme: workers were all children of the machine and the New Road. Those who owned the machine did not care where a worker came from in the game of exploitation. But the machine and the New Road were the children of the workers, for it was their sweat that built the road, the factory, and it was they who sustained the whole complex by their energy and consumption. The machine was no less their father than they were its
father, and the struggle in future would be fought on who should own and control the machine and the products: those whose sweat made it move or those whose power was the bank, and who came to reap and harvest where they had not ploughed or planted. Every dispute was put in the context of the exploitation of labour by capital, itself stolen from other workers. Why should so few wield power of life and death over so many?