Petals of Blood (30 page)

‘I wanted, I wanted to thank you for all you have done,’ he said, confused, hoping she would not mistake the meaning.

‘I am sorry about my outburst. I feel so ashamed . . .’

He thought for a while.

‘No,’ he said . . . ‘it was not you alone . . . It was a collective humiliation . . .’ He did not know how to proceed, so he tried to make it general. ‘Whenever any of us is degraded and humiliated, even the smallest child, we are all humiliated and degraded because it has got to do with human beings.’

The lawyer came home after six bringing them welcome packets of Jogoo flour and milk and cabbages. He invited them into the sitting-room, a huge oblong space. Nyakinyua exclaimed that a hut could easily fit into it: what waste! and they all laughed. Some of the children were still playing outside and watching aeroplanes fly toward Embakasi. But a few sat with the grown-ups. The walls were decorated with the pictures of Che Guevara with his Christlike locks of hair and saintly eyes; of Dedan Kimathi, sitting calmly and arrogantly defiant; and a painting by Mugalula of a beggar in a street. At one corner was a wood sculpture of a freedom fighter by Wanjau. Abdulla stood a few seconds in front of Kimathi’s picture and then he abruptly hobbled across the room and out into the garden. The others surrounded the sculpture and commented on the fighter’s hair, the heavy lips and tongue in open laughter, and the sword around the waist. But why did he possess breasts, somebody asked: it was as if it was a man and a woman in one: how could that be?

They started arguing about it until Nyakinyua almost silenced them with her simple logic.

‘A man cannot have a child without a woman. A woman cannot bear a child without a man. And was it not a man and a woman who fought to redeem this country?’

‘But a man is more important than a woman,’ Njuguna said. ‘Is it not a man who sleeps, hmmm! hmmm! You know where?’

‘Where is the wife of the house?’ Nyakinyua asked the lawyer, to change the conversation.

‘She has gone to another country for some months to train as a midwife. But I am going to write to her and tell her that she had better hurry back now that I have suddenly got myself another wife and all these children.’ He looked with conspiratorial eyes to the kitchen where Wanja was making ugali and vegetable soup.

They all laughed and an argument ensued about polygamy.

‘It was not just anybody who could marry more than one wife. You had to pay goats, and goats were wealth in those days. Often only the big houses could do this,’ Nyakinyua explained.

He looks so different away from the office, Karega was thinking. The weariness seemed to have gone. Karega wanted to ask him questions but somehow could not find an opening.

After the meal, the lawyer took Karega and Munira into his library where they were soon joined by Wanja and Abdulla. There were many books – heaps on heaps – and he was fingering each with obvious care and love. Munira was ashamed of his almost empty shelves. They sat down on the floor and the lawyer suddenly started questioning them very closely about Ilmorog, its history, their MP, the conditions, and what they had hoped to achieve by this visit. Karega tried to explain and in the process became acutely aware of the vagueness behind the whole venture. He noticed too that the weariness had come back to the man’s face and a sadness crept into his voice as he now said:

‘I suppose he will receive you. Why, he might even organize a Harambee meeting to buy peace for an uneasy conscience. A little charity . . .’

‘We do not mind a little charity,’ explained Munira, ‘except that we have hardly met any in this city.’ He told of his experiences at the priest’s house and at Chui’s place. ‘What I could not understand was their obvious competition to say the most shocking words. In the old days, I am told, the songs and the words and everything were in their place – singers talked to one another, abused one another, even, but
there was dignity in the whole thing. When I was young I used to hide from home to attend circumcision festivals.’

He stopped and wondered: maybe one or all his other brothers were there, while his father sat at home singing their praises. Karega and Wanja were each thinking of the ordeal in the house. But they didn’t say much about it. The lawyer started talking. It was as if he was holding a dialogue with an inner self and they were only spectators at this naked wrestling with his own doubts and fears. ‘It is sad, it hurts, at times I am angry, looking at the black zombies, black animated cartoons dancing the master’s dance to the master’s voice. That they will do to perfection. But when they are tired of that, or shall I say, when we are tired of that we turn to our people’s culture and abuse it . . . just for fun, after a bottle of champagne. But I ask myself: what other fruit do I expect that what we sowed would produce? All the same I look back on the wasted chances, on the missed opportunities: on the hour, the day, the period, when, at the crossroads, we took the wrong turning. Aaah, that was a time to remember, when the whole world, motivated by different reasons and expectations, waited, saying: they who showed Africa and the world the path of manliness and of black redemption, what are they going to do with the beast? They who washed the warriors’ spears in the blood of the white profiteers, of all those who had enslaved them to the ministry of the molten beast of silver and gold, what dance are they now going to dance in the arena? We could have done anything, then, because our people were behind us. But we, the leaders, chose to flirt with the molten god, a blind, deaf monster who has plagued us for hundreds of years. We reasoned: what’s wrong is the skin-colour of the people who ministered to this god: under our own care and tutelage we shall tame the monster-god and make it do our will. We forgot that it has always been deaf and blind to human woes. So we go on building the monster and it grows and waits for more, and now we are all slaves to it. At its shrine we kneel and pray and hope. Now see the outcome . . . dwellers in Blue Hills, those who have taken on themselves the priesthood of the ministry to the blind god . . . a thousand acres of land . . . a million acres in the two hands of a priest, while the congregation moans for an acre! and they are told: it is only a collection
from your sweat . . . let us be honest slaves to the monster-god, let us give him our souls . . . and the ten per cent that goes with it . . . for his priests must eat too . . . and we shall take it to his vassal, the bank . . . meanwhile let’s all pray and the god may notice our honesty and fervour, and we shall get a few crumbs. Meanwhile, the god grows big and fat and shines even brighter and whets the appetites of his priests, for the monster has, through the priesthood, decreed only one ethical code: Greed and accumulation. I ask myself: is it fair, is it fair for our children?

‘I am a lawyer . . . what does this mean? I also earn my living by ministering to the monster. I am an expert in those laws meant to protect the sanctity of the monster-god and his angels and the whole hierarchy of the priesthood. Only I have chosen to defend those who have broken the laws and who might be excommunicated. For remember, only a few, the chosen few, can find favourable positions in the hierarchy. And mark you, and this is where it pains, it’s their sweat and that feeds the catechists, the wardens, the deacons, the ministers, the bishops, the angels . . . the whole hierarchy. Still they are condemned . . . damned.

‘I am a priest, a father-confessor, and looking through the tiny window, I am really looking at the soul of a nation . . . the scars, the wounds, the clotting blood . . . it is all on their faces and in their eyes, so bewildered. Tell us, tell us before we confess our sins: who makes these laws? For whom? To help whom? I cannot answer the questions . . . but as I said, they open a window for me to see the world.

‘I ask myself: what happened? What happened? I take all these books . . . I read, trying to find wisdom and the key to the many questions. Our people had said: Let’s not be slaves to the monster: let us only pray and wrestle with the true god within us. We want to control all this land, all these industries, to serve the one god within us. They fought . . . shed blood, not that a few might live in Blue Hills and minister to the molten god, the god outside us, but that many might live fully wherever they live. The white ministers, seeing defeat, now turned to sneering and jeering at the new priests. Look at these destroyers: we are going, yes, but these people will surely destroy all the canon laws . . . and we, who were educated in their schools, beat
our breasts: we destroyers? We break the canon law? We are as civilized as you, we shall not be the ones to dismantle the monster god, and we shall prove it to you. You’ll be ashamed that you once had all these doubts about us.

‘It’s an old story. You say that you were in Siriana with Chui. I was also there, but much later, years later. We used to hear of Chui . . . but he was then described as a destroyer. My ambition was to become a priest: a highly educated priest. So I hated Chui. The very name brought images of the night-prowlers of the jungle . . . Then Peter Pooles shot dead an African who had thrown a stone at his dogs. The trial raised a lot of interest in Siriana. We were all happy when he was condemned to death. But do you know? Fraudsham called a school assembly. He argued about the need to be sensitive to animals. The measure of a civilization was how far a people had learnt to care for animals. Did we want to be merciless like those Russians who, in the face of world protest, sent a dog, poor Laika, into space to die? Pooles had been a little excessive, maybe. But he had been prompted by the highest and most noble impulse; to care for and defend the defenceless. And he read us a letter he had sent to the Governor appealing for clemency, ending with a very moving quotation from Shakespeare.

We left the assembly with guilty, downcast eyes. A few of us wept. Can you believe it? We wept with Fraudsham. But still there were doubts, and I did not understand the whole thing. How could I? The education we got had not prepared me to understand those things: it was meant to obscure racism and other forms of oppression. It was meant to make us accept our inferiority so as to accept their superiority and their rule over us. Then I went to America. I had read in a history book that it was a place where they believed in the equality and freedom of man. While I was at a black college in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I saw with my own eyes a black man hanging from a tree outside a church. His crime? He had earlier fought a white man who
had manhandled his sister. There was so much tension in that town. Aa! America, land of the Free and the Brave!’

He stopped and it seemed as if his eyes were fixed on a distant past. Then he started humming a blues song by Josh White:

He again stopped . . . Although they did not understand all the allusions, they caught the feeling behind it. He continued:

‘Is this not what has been happening in Kenya since 1896? So I said to myself: a black man is not safe at home; a black man is not safe abroad. What then is the meaning of it all? Then I saw in the cities of America white people also begging . . . I saw white women selling their bodies for a few dollars. In America vice is a selling commodity. I worked alongside white and black workers in a Detroit factory. We worked overtime to make a meagre living. I saw a lot of unemployment in Chicago and other cities. I was confused. So I said: let me return to my home, now that the black man has come to power. And suddenly as in a flash of lightning I saw that we were serving the same monster-god as they were in America . . . I saw the same signs, the same symptoms, and even the sickness . . . and I was so frightened . . . I was so frightened . . . I cried to myself: how many Kimathis must die, how many motherless children must weep, how long shall our people continue to sweat so that a few, a given few, might keep a thousand dollars in the bank of the one monster-god that for four hundred years had ravished a continent? And now I saw in the clear light of day the role that the Fraudshams of the colonial world played to create all of us black zombies dancing pornography in Blue Hills while our people are dying of hunger, while our people cannot afford decent shelter and decent schools for their children. And we
are happy, we are happy that we are called stable and civilized and intelligent!’

He had spoken in a level tone except at the end when he spat out the words stability, civilization, and intelligence with obvious disgust. They were all captivated by the parable, although they did not always understand it. But each caught different aspects of it. For Abdulla it was the idea of a blood that was shed because the question had always troubled him, looking at the lands in Tigoni and other places: is it right that that which had been bought by the collective blood of a people should go to a few hands just because they had money and bank loans? Was it banks and money that had fought for it? But he had never found an answer because it was true that black hands were owning it. And he would have liked to own one of those farms himself. For Wanja it was the idea of white prostitutes in a white country: could this really be true? Munira was bored with the image of the monster, but he was directly hit by the coincidence: the lawyer had been to Siriana? And Karega had been to Siriana, and the two had now come into his house! What was the meaning? What was it? Karega felt that the man was not telling all. But the talk had aroused in him a curiosity, an excitement, as if his mind was about to reach, grasp, grapple with, an elusive idea, as if indeed a coherent structure of outlook was forming in the bewildered universe and chaos of his own experience and history.

‘What really happened to you in Siriana, Karega?’ Munira suddenly burst into their different thoughts and they were startled by the violence of his concern.