Petals of Blood (26 page)

For indeed, around him, the children were shouting catch, catch, meat, meat . . . then he too saw what they had seen. The procession had surprised a herd of antelopes which were now leap-leaping across the plains. Abdulla’s mind worked very fast.

‘Wait!’ he shouted at the children, and they obeyed the sudden authority in his voice. ‘Bring the catapult, and quick, get me some stones.’

They gave him the catapult he had helped to make earlier in the day, and also some stones. They stood aside, hushed with excited curiosity, but also sceptical about his power. He put a sharp-edged stone in the catapult and the rest in his pockets. He picked a bit of soil and threw it up in the air to see the strength and direction of the wind. He adjusted his support-walking stick and placed its seat more firmly under his right armpit. And all this time his eyes had not let go the antelopes, which had stopped and stood at a distance from them. He took out the stones in his pockets and asked Muriuki to hold them, on open palms. He held his lower lip and let out some sounds, made the animals suddenly turn and move toward them. But as soon as they saw the procession near, they again turned as if undecided on the next step, so that the sides of their bodies and necks faced the people. Abdulla set his arms, shut one eye, and pulled back the rubber
string, before letting it go. Everything was happening so fast, a magic act in a dream. They never even saw the stones nor how he managed to put one and then another and yet another into the catapult and pull and let go. They only heard the sounds of the stones whistling through the air. Then they saw two antelopes jump high in the air, one after the other, and then land still for a second, before falling writhing to the ground. They could not believe it. Munira, Karega, Njuguna and the children ran to the scene. The two animals had been maimed in the legs. The rest was easy.

Abdulla stood in the same position, now transformed in their eyes into a very extraordinary being whom they had never really known. Immobile, like a god of the plains, Abdulla still rested his eyes on the distant hills which for years had been a home to him. He still dwelt on Ole Masai and their group’s desperate and fatal attempt to capture that soldiers’ garrison in Nakuru, to regain the initiative temporarily lost after Kimathi’s capture. Even the enemy papers admitted that it was a well planned and ambitious attempt. The glitter in his eyes became more intense. He brushed them off with the back of his hand and threw the catapult to the ground.

They had a feast that night. Even long afterwards they were to remember it and talk about it as the highest point in their journey to the city. The children played around the fire and the elderly people sat in groups talking and reminiscing over old times and places. Njuguna teased Nyakinyua about antelopes, supposed to have been women’s goats which had run wild because the women could not look after them. Munira lay on his back counting stars, and felt for a time freed from that overwhelming sense of always being on the outside of things. There were still many questions in his head: about Karega for instance. He always felt ill at ease with him, but he had not yet defined his attitude to him. Maybe in the journey they would talk. He also would have liked to have a heart-to-heart talk with Wanja. He had thought that he and Wanja would take up the thread where they had left it, especially now that they had gone through almost identical baptisms by fire and terror. Wasn’t there some kind of destiny in the coincidence of their suffering? But instead he had felt her slipping away from him: where was she going? He watched her moves, but
she obviously was not developing a relationship with anyone else. She always surprised him with her moods and the changing aspects of her character. What struck him most, listening to her the other night, was the way her experiences took the form of stories, a kind of ballad of woes with a voice that demanded and compelled a hearing, and which ended by binding the listener even more to her life and fate. He now listened to Abdulla and Nyakinyua talking. How could he have not seen this side of Abdulla? Munira, like the others, had witnessed an extraordinary feat of human skill and it had united them all, as if each could see a bit of himself in Abdulla. Wanja, sitting just behind Nyakinyua and Abdulla, was particularly happy: she had always felt that Abdulla had had a history to that stump of a leg. Now it was no longer a stump, but a badge of courage indelibly imprinted on his body. She listened to Abdulla telling the story of Ole Masai and their fatal attempt to capture the Nakuru garrison. Njogu’s heart glowed with pride. He had always felt ashamed of the fact that his daughter should have borne children to an Indian. They had heard of one Ole Masai but not from one who had worked with him. Njogu felt it was the blood from the black side which had asserted itself. A truly great night of revelations, even for Abdulla, who had not known that fate would later turn him into a shopkeeper on the premises once occupied by Ole Masai’s father. He now understood Njogu’s cryptic statements when he had first inquired about the shop. Wanja tried to picture this Indian, who at least had half-acknowledged his African woman and his son by her. She thought that maybe under different times and conditions it would not matter who married whom or who slept with whom, but suddenly, remembering her ordeal in the city, she started wondering. Her attention was now taken up by the turn of the conversation. It was not her alone. Even the children stopped playing and sat down to hear their new hero answer Karega’s question about Kimathi. At long last he was going to tell the story he had once refused to tell. Silence gripped the whole group, hanging on Abdulla’s lips. He did not hesitate for long and his voice was subdued, the tone matter-of-fact, almost drained of emotion.

‘Actually, some of us had not seen Dedan although we acted in his name. Our group operated all the way from Limuru, through Kijabe,
Longonot, Nare Ngare, right to Ilmorog, these very plains. For four years our Limuru group, which had joined hands with the Ole Masai group, had, although diminishing in numbers, through hunger, forest weariness, enemy guns, fought with all the skills of survival we could muster. Our food supplies were cut when moats with death spikes planted in them were dug around many villages. You have heard of Kamiritho, Githima and other places. Now and then an old man, an old woman or even a boy might avoid the evil eyes of our brothers who through ignorance, bribery, torture, or promises of wealth and individual safety, had sold themselves as Home Guards – spear-bearers for the Foreigners – and would bring us food and news of what people were saying and doing. But such contacts were becoming rare. I confess that there were moments of quarrels, of doubt and of flagging of faith. But such acts of courage or the memory of them would make us know that our people had not forgotten us: how could they? We were their very arms, armed. This knowledge, that we were really our people, kept us going. We raided the settlers’ own homes, we burnt their houses, we cut their animals to pieces and almost wept because this, in truth, was our property. All the same, new recruits to swell our numbers were becoming difficult to find, for most of the youth had been taken to concentration camps and at one point we were reduced to twenty or so in our group.

‘It was at this time that news reached us of a great meeting of an All Kenya Parliament in Mount Kenya Forest. All the fighting groups or their representatives were expected to attend, for Dedan had new plans for the next phase of the war. He wanted us reorganized into different zones, and he wanted us to elect a military high command and a separate political and education high command to prepare us to seize and administer power. He also wanted us to make greater efforts in linking with other forces opposed to the British occupation in Ukambani, Kalenjin, Luo, Luhya and Giriama areas and all over Kenya. He also wanted us to spread our cause to the court of Haile Selassie and to Cairo, where Gamal Abdel Nasser had taken the Suez Canal and later fought the British and the French. I have told you we were without food. But we were determined to make the long journey through Olkalou, the Nyandarwa mountain ridge, across Nyeri plains
to Mount Kenya. I wanted to see this man who was but a voice, a black power, and whose military genius was recognized even by our enemy. Look at it this way. He had fought and he had defeated generals like Lt.-General Sir Erskine, General Hinde, General Ladbury and their armies brought from England: the Buffs, Lancashire Fusiliers, the Devons, the Royal Air Force, the KAR and other forces that had seen action in the Canal Zone, Palestine, Hong Kong, Malaya, wherever the British had once reigned. We spoke of him with awe and his favourite places had become important shrines in our lives. We knew him as Knight Commander of the African Empire, our Prime Minister, one who could move for fourteen days and nights without food or water, who could move for seven miles and more on his belly, and we all tried to emulate him. There was also Mathenge, Karari wa Njama, Kimbo, Kago, Waruingi, Kimemia and others whose letters and messages we had often read but whom we had never seen. What united us was our cause.

‘And what a journey, my friends! Our ammunition was scarce. We had tried to make more bullets by splitting open one and sharing the powder into smaller shells, but it did not work. For meat, we often relied on traps, but what use was this on a journey? Sometimes we ate raw maize, bamboo shoots, anything: once we found some wild millet, and we rubbed it in our hands and carried the flour in our deerskin bags. Ole Masai would enliven us with stories of old Nairobi. He tried to tell us again the story he had told us a thousand times: how he had pulled a gun on European policemen, and how they had trembled against the walls of Khoja Mosque while Muslims prayed in the house, and it did not really excite us as much as it used to do in happier days. Now our animal skin clothes were tattered, but we pressed on, through the thick undergrowth, our skins torn by wild thorns, often running away from poisonous snakes. Sometimes, too, tempers would flare amongst us: and still we moved on toward the mountain, to hear words from his own mouth. Soon we reached the mighty mountain and the meeting-ground. My friends! What do they say in the good book? That to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose in heaven . . . a time to love, and a time to hate. For us, that was a time to do both: hate and love. A great gathering I
found there: not a tree, not a bush for a mile was without a man or woman leaning against it. They sang in defiant tones and their one voice was like a roll of thunder:

‘My heart fell, my eyes were dry although I felt tears pressing. I went to the nearest bush and diarrhoea and urine came out of their own accord. Still sang the voices around me:

‘Dedan had been caught, delivered to our enemies by our own brothers, lovers of their own stomachs, Wakamatimo. May their names, like that of Judas, ever be cursed, an example to our children of what never to be! We were now awaiting the outcome of the mockery they had called a trial. Plans and attempts to rescue him had failed. The hospital where he lay was heavily guarded, with armoured vehicles, troops on horses, soldiers on foot and on motorcycles patrolling the streets and jet fighters circling in the sky. Scared indeed they were that somehow Africa’s God might intervene from above! They say that in every European settler’s home that week was held a party in celebration of the Temporary victory of Colonialism over liberation struggle. But in the mountain we sat and waited for our own spies sent to Nyeri. They were expected any day, any minute.

‘And when they finally came, early on the morning of the fourth day, we needed no words from their mouth: how shall I tell it? You know when there is an important death. It is hot and it is not hot. It is cold and it is not cold. A lone bird flies in the sky, you don’t know where it is going because it is going nowhere. We all returned to our places determined to continue fighting and the struggle but things were no longer the same! My friends . . . no longer the same.’

3 ~ They did not know it, but that night was to be the peak of their epic journey across the plains. It was true that Abdulla’s feast, as they called it, had leased them new life and determination, and the following day, despite the sun which had struck earlier and more fiercely than in the other days, as if to test their capacity for endurance to the very end, despite indeed the evidence of the acacia bush, the ashy-furred leleshwa bush, the prickly pears, all of which seemed to have given in to the bitter sun, they walked with brisk steps as if they too knew this secret desire of the sun and were resolved to come out on top. Abdulla’s story had made them aware of a new relationship to the ground on which they trod: the ground, the murram grass, the agapanthas, the cactus, everything in the plains, had been hallowed by the feet of those who had fought and died that Kenya might be free: wasn’t there something, a spirit of those people in them too? Now even they of Ilmorog had a voice in the houses of power and privilege. Soon, tonight, tomorrow, some day, at the journey’s end, they would meet him, face to face. It would be the first time that they would be demanding anything from him and they, in their different ways, felt awed at the novelty and daring of their action. During the last election campaign, some recalled doubtfully, he had promised them many things including water and better roads. It would take time, he had warned them. Maybe, they thought, taking heart, maybe he was still involved in intractable negotiations with Kenyatta’s government. Recalling, too, Abdulla’s heroism in the past and also yesterday – how good, how fortunate, that God had brought them Abdulla, Wanja, Munira and Karega – they walked with eyes fixed on a possibility of a different life in Ilmorog, if not for them, at least for their children. They even made up a song in praise of Abdulla, Munira, Wanja and Karega, but also touching on their new hopes and visions. But in the next three days, they increasingly became quiet, listless.