Petals of Blood (23 page)

He was a herdsman who, tired of wandering and roaming all over the plains, merely adapting to nature and its changing fortunes, tired too of whistling songs of praise only to the cow with the long horns and the one rich with milk, had broken with the others. At first they pleaded with him: whoever heard of life away from the udder, dung and urine of cows on the long trail across plains and mountains, life away from the bull with bells around its neck leading the others to
the salt-lick and the waters? They also pleaded: was he not their best magician in words, making the steps of cattle and men rise and fall with the cadence of his voice? They failed. So they turned to laughing at him and mocking his talk of taming the high ground and the forest that was really the seat of evil genii; how dare the son of man wrestle with gods?

Ndemi: he fashioned a tool with which he cut some of the trees and cleared the undergrowth. The beasts of the earth with their forked tongues spat out poison at him, but he was also learned in the ways of herbs and medicines made from the roots and bark of trees. The fame of his experiments with different types of plants spread and no herdsman would pass Ilmorog without calling on him, at first to see the outcome of man’s wrestling with God, later for advice on this or that herb, or simply for a taste of domestic honey and sugarcane. They would give him a goat or two, in gratitude, and trek further to spread Ndemi’s name to the four corners of the wind. He had made the earth yield to the touch of his fingers and the wisdom of his head, and he now had more wealth in cows and goats on top of his numerous crops!

In no time, his lone courage had attracted Nyangendo of the famous gap in her upper teeth and Nyaguthii of the black gums and breasts that were the talk of herdsmen wherever they met. Your gods of the forest will now be our gods and we shall be the mothers of your children. Other women, tired of the unsettled life, pitched their shelters of poles, ferns, mud and grass so that they could suckle the young in peace and await the return of their men and cattle following the sun. Ilmorog forest became a series of cultivated fields and a breed of tamed cows and goats. They sang of Ndemi:

Ilmorog continued to prosper even after Ndemi, father of many sons and daughters and grandchildren, had departed to the secret land of the kindly spirits. It became a great centre of trade: its market days were known from Gulu to Ukambani, to the land of the Kalenjin
people and even beyond. People came from all over with their different wares and took others in exchange. Soon a settlement of skilled workers in metal, pottery and stonework grew side by side with the community of tillers. Their knowledge of metal became legendary, reaching the ears of the Arab and Portuguese marauders from the coast.

Here the first European Foreigner pitched his tent and sought supplies for his journey across the plains. See what naked creatures our market days have brought from the land of the sea, they said, and gave him maize and beans, sweet potatoes and yams in exchange for calico and shiny beads. Later another came with a collar around his neck and a Bible, and he too sought supplies and guides, for he wanted to reach the court of the great King of Uganda. They showed him the way. But they called a war council: shall we let evil walk across our lands and not do anything? May he not be a scout from Mutesa’s court disguised as Mzungu, a spirit? For whoever saw or heard of a human being without a skin? The elders cautioned them against haste. But a section of the more youthful warriors were not satisfied and whispered together, ending with a battle cry. The Foreigners were never seen again except that for years, late at night, you could see the whiteness of a ghost wailing to its kind for blood and vengeance. Other European Foreigners came and pitched their tents, and this time stayed a little longer, exchanging more cloths for maize and beans and Ilmorog metal while urgently seeking news of gold and elephant tusks and asking less loudly about a collared white man.

The day they dreaded finally came. The peaceful traders now suddenly surrounded the market. They all carried bamboo sticks that vomited fire and venom. They demanded that those responsible for the lone Mzungu’s death should give themselves up. Nobody came forward. The warriors scrambled for their spears and shields. But it was too late. They fired at the women and men and children, and afterward sang God save the King. The warriors fought back the way they knew how; but what could they do to a people, mizungu hasa, who whistled death across nothingness? But tomorrow . . . tomorrow . . . the survivors swore, sharpening their spears in readiness!

Later the Foreigner introduced a strange kind of metal possessed of an evil power: it actually walked on the ground.

It is said that the first black man in Chiri to ride a metal horse came from Ilmorog.

A prosperous farmer Munoru was then. But the walking metal bewitched him. His hands were for ever numb at the sight of hoes and pangas. He only wanted to walk on the new metal to the acclaim of crowds. For a time he lived off demonstrating his skill on the machine. Women especially would look at him with awe, they sang of him as a hero and followed his movements with expectant ecstasy. Similar metals later came to the villages, more young men were able to ride and control them, and people anyway were tired of paying for idleness and idol worship. But no longer could Munoru return to any work which might dirty his hands: he just longed for the white Foreigner’s things which might enable him to recover the lost glory.

He was again the first among the very few who actually volunteered their services in the carrier corps of guns and food supplies to the warring Europeans. Ilmorog was a recruiting centre, and most young men were driven into the war with the butt end of the gun. Across the Ilmorog plains they went, clearing roads, toward the Tanganyikan border to ferret out the Germans. Wonder of wonders: Wazungu were actually killing one another, over what the natives could not quite understand: how could they tell that they and the division of their land and labour were the object of the war? Munoru came back, a wreck, and he talked of Voi, Darasalama, Mozambika, Morogoro, Warusha, Moshi, and other places sweetly distant to the ear. But he was a corpse, living on memories of what he thought had been. Even some of the others, when they came back, were not interested now in making the land yield to their fingers as the founders had done. A metal more deadly than the one which walked on legs had bitten them. In search of it, to pay their taxes, but also to buy useless things of the Foreigners, they went to work on farms stolen from Kenyan people and on the network of roads connecting the farms to the capital and the sea.

Ilmorog, the once thriving community of a people who were not afraid to live on the sweat of their hands, started its decline and depopulation. The railway line to Mutesa’s court had in any case
bypassed Ilmorog. The second European war saw more youth flee Ilmorog to the cities of metallic promises and what was once the centre of trade and farming became just another village, a pale shadow of what it was yesterday . . .

Thus Nyakinyua talked to them, keeping up their spirits with stories of the past. They had lit a huge fire and sat in groups around it. The trek to the city had attracted many people carried on the waves of hope and promises, and had awoken a feeling that the crisis was a community crisis needing a communal response. Nyakinyua was the spirit that guided and held them together. And she talked as if she had been everywhere, as if she had actually participated in the war against the Germans, as if the rhythm of the historic rise and fall of Ilmorog flowed in her veins. She was dressed in black, there were deep lines in her face, but she was beautiful even in age. She abruptly stopped and stared at the fire before them. The journey might take many days and she feared for the children, her children.

‘Tell us, tell us what they saw!’ Karega asked, anxious to know the rest.

‘There is nothing to tell . . . nothing,’ Nyakinyua said, still looking at the fire. Her eyes were alive, intense, a concentration of light more intense than the moon-glow above them. Nyakinyua, mother of men: there was sad gaiety in her voice, she was celebrating rainbow memories of gain and loss, triumph and failure, but above all of suffering and knowledge in struggle.

‘Nothing more to tell,’ she repeated in a voice that was distant from them, that probably had gone a-walking to those other lands. And Karega, troubled inside, anxious for a glimpse and insight into the past, what indeed made history move, wanted to know what it was she was holding back, what it was that had suddenly made her retreat into silence and gloom amidst the noise of the children. Wanja, Abdulla and Karega looked to the old woman and back again and waited.

‘It has been a hard day,’ said Njuguna to the whole group. ‘We should all sleep and be ready for tomorrow. We must set out early. We are still a long way from the city.’

*

Karega could not sleep. He took a walk in the plains, thinking about the woman’s story. He lived it: for a second, he was Ndemi felling trees in the forest, building a nascent industry . . . but his mind, as if being challenged by the vastness of the space, went beyond Ndemi, beyond Ilmorog. It was to a past he could not know but which he felt he knew: was it a hundred years, three hundred years, or was it more? What he had tried to teach the children, what he had tried to work out in Siriana was only a series of logical affirmations and refutations, a set of intellectual convictions. But now the past he had tried to affirm seemed to have a living, glowing ambience in the mouth of the woman on this journey to save a village, a community. He went over it . . . images on images . . . and he was, for a time, carried away: the knowledge in metal and stone . . . the careful piecing of things together . . . and the stories, the songs and the disputations of an evening . . . and beyond the site where they tried to capture the power of metal and stone were the settlements of those who tried to do the same with the land. Then came the ship and the smoke from the mouth of a bamboo and the equation of power was altered: now it was the African who had to flee from his settled agriculture, from his wrestling match with the god of metal and stone, for security in the depths of the forest. Karega, now transported, saw the bitterness and the fear in the ones who fled, diving deeper into the forest to establish new homes in new climes . . . and lord, the fire burnt the villages, and the fire of greed for the red dust and black ivory burnt the accumulated wisdom of many seasons . . . so that those unable to flee were clamped and chained together and were made to walk to the sea and beyond to contend with new worlds. Yes, he could see it now, and he confronted his earlier doubt with what he thought an irrefutable rejoinder. The voice had said: if so and so was true, how then explain the virtual dominance of nature over man? Didn’t you hear, did you not listen to Nyakinyua’s story? If sixty years could so destroy the work of Ndemi that no trace of his industry and knowledge was left, how much more the four hundred years of slavery and carnage, the blood-sucking serpent changing only the colours of the poison?

He suddenly stopped in his track and abruptly broke off the intense, ceaseless flow of his thoughts. Beyond, at the very heart of the plains,
was a cone-shaped hill, firm but seeming vulnerable in its utter solitude. He looked back, startled by the breathing presence of another.

‘It is only me,’ Wanja said. ‘Did I scare you?’

‘No, not quite. But I have a deep-seated fear of snakes, and I have always associated the poisonous things with dry plains.’

‘Sssch! You should not call them by their names at night. Call them Nyamu cia Thi. I fear them too.’

‘Oh, I don’t believe that superstition. A leopard is called spotted one, or the shy one. Why? If their spirits can hear, they can still hear even if you call them animals of the earth or snakes or by any other name.’

‘I remember that once in my hut you declared that you did not believe in names. You said something about a flower being a flower. Ritwa ni mbukio.’

And she laughed a little. This slightly irritated him and he tried to explain.

‘It is not that I don’t believe in names. For what could be a more ridiculous caricature of self than those of our African brothers and sisters proudly calling themselves James Phillipson, Rispa, Hot-tensiah, Ron Rodgerson, Richard Glucose, Charity, Honey Moon-snow, Ezekiel, Shiprah, Winterbottomson – all the collection of names and non-names from the Western world? What more evidence of self-hate than their throwing a tea-party for family and friends to bribe them never to call them by their African names? It is rather that I believe in the reality of what’s being named more than in the name itself.’

‘Is that what you were thinking about just now? I followed you for quite a distance and you did not seem to be aware of being stalked. Or are you now worried about the journey to the city?’

‘Not that. I was thinking about Nyakinyua’s story.’

‘About Ndemi?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why. Do you believe it?’

‘It must be true. Why not? If not the details, then at least the idea.’

‘What idea?’

‘Of a past. A great past. A past when Ilmorog, or all Africa, controlled its own earth.’

‘You are a funny young man,’ she said, and laughed a little, a bit guiltily, remembering the night Karega ran away from the hut.

‘Why?’

‘Well, the things you do and say. One day you say you don’t touch drinks. You drink milk or water. Yet the very next time, you are drunk and fighting in a bar.’

He felt a little embarrassed by this. He fidgeted on his feet. He looked at the hill in the distance.

‘I don’t know how I succumbed to it. I think I just wanted to lose myself. So many things hitting at you on every side. You want to forget.’

‘Forget? Then look at this journey. You said you suffered in the city. I think I know what you meant. I felt with you. The city can be a cruel place. But what made you think it will now be different? I fear for you. The past few days my heart bled because so many men and women and children were willing to join us. I was even more touched by the songs of hope that we sang. Don’t you think they will sing with bitterness against you should the city slap them in the face the way it did you?’