Petals of Blood (43 page)

These days Karega was to be seen mostly with Wanja: what had happened between him and the teacher? It was strange, very strange, we said without understanding fully what was the matter.

But we were soon intrigued, fascinated, moved by the entwinement and flowering of youthful love and life and we whispered: see the wonder-gift of God. Crops will sprout luxuriant and green. We shall eat our fill and drink Theng’eta at harvest-time.

3 ~ Later, years later, in Ilmorog Police Station, Munira was to try and recreate the feel of this period in Ilmorog which was completely dominated by the involvement of Wanja and Karega. And he used the same phrase, almost answering the question that underlay their waiting and watching as the drama unfolded before their eyes, making even the old relive the past of their youth, making love under leleshwa bush or under the millet fingers.

‘Yes, I could have tried to save him,’ he scribbled on, trying to interpret the facts in the light of the intervening time and events.

‘I could maybe have saved him. It is this feeling that most pains me. That I might have saved him, he who only sought for peace and
truthful connection between things. Instead, I threw him even more firmly into that fatal embrace that has been the ruin of many a great man across the centuries. I should know. For was I not later caught in the same heart-perfumed embrace?

‘I tried, I struggled to extricate myself but I could not. I had, remember, watched her gradually receding from me into a neutral territory, standing, for a long time, distant to all our suits and seeking eyes, ever since Karega arrived in Ilmorog. It did not matter, I had reassured myself. It could never matter to me, for was I not really past these things? I was God’s watchman in a twilight gloom somewhere between sleeping and waking, and should I not rest there, and not trouble the twilight stillness with passionate insistence? At first I thought that I was only fascinated by her transformation. She was no longer restless, savouring people with wide assessing eyes that hid maybe bitterness behind their dilating surface softness. Within a short time of her contact with the soil and the preparations for the journey to the city, her eyes had become less exaggeratedly bright, more subdued, with a different kind of softness, no longer caressing people in the first hour of contact. She had become a less fully fleshed beauty, more of an angular beauty of a peasant woman. It had pained me that when once or twice I wanted her again as on the night of the big moon she refused or somehow put me off. But I then thought that I understood. For had I not been the recipient of her stories of her past and recent suffering in the city? She needed time to recover, I consoled myself, and thought that I would get my chance during the journey to the city. I waited . . . waited only to get the great slap on the face, the shock, during the night of Theng’eta drinking. For a day and a half, as Karega slept in his house as if drugged, I thought over the whole affair and I decided that I had really been too timid, hesitant. It was time that I took the initiative, took a step, however small, to start things in motion. I gradually worked myself into a rage and I really felt wronged over Mukami and over my father. But what was I to do about it? Could I resurrect the past and connect myself to it, graft myself on the stem of history even if it was only my family’s history outside of which I had grown? And would the stem really grow, sprouting branches with me as part of the great resurgence of life? But
I also knew that I did not want to admit to myself that I could be seriously affected by Wanja’s defection. After all, I argued, I had never wanted to have more than a carnal link with her. I knew too much about her past to feel free and uninhibited with her. Yet, yet I wanted to have it out with Karega and my action had now driven her further away from me.

I watched her after the night of Theng’eta drinking, after my quarrel with Karega, I watched her undergo yet another change. It was a new youthful, life-full, luscious growth after the rains.

It pained me that the luscious growth was beyond my reach, that I could not eat it, my share even.

The further she moved away from me, the more she drew me to her, until with months she had wrapped my soul in twists and knots around her. The security and the defences around my lifelong twilight slumber were being cut at the roots and I felt the pain of blood-sap trickling through heart’s veins and arteries awaking from years of numbness.

I could not help it. I spied on them, watching them through the corner of my eyes, and what I saw would make me regret the more that I had hastily thrown him out of my orbit.

Of an evening I saw them together running across the fields, stumbling over mikengeria creepers, over yellow merry-golden flowers, over the tall thangari stem grass, bringing back thistles on the back and the front and the sides of their clothes. Often, they would walk across Ilmorog ridge, two distant shadows against the golden glow of the setting sun, and disappear behind the hill to come back in the darkness or in the moonlight.

Their love seemed to grow with the new crops of the year.

This thing that I cannot describe, that I thought could never possess me, now grew roots and shoots and alas began to flower.

The very movement of her skirt was a razor-sharp knife in my inside. And yet the knife seemed to cut deeper and sharper when I did not see the skirt. But still coming suddenly across it, or seeing it flit by in the sunlight or against the evening cool skies, I would feel, no longer the knife, but a thousand tiny needles in my belly, in my flesh. I sought her very shadow. Her steps in the sand agitated me, her
presence occasioned thunderous palpitations of hope for the unattainable. Torturous angels.

To see her became a need. Yet seeing her was a quick act of torment. I hated it that I could not control myself. I would attempt a level voice when speaking to her or to Karega to convince myself that I could still hold myself together. Why had she come to Ilmorog? Why had Karega come to Ilmorog? Could Ilmorog contain the three of us?

I cycled to Limuru to recruit more teachers. This time I was lucky and got two with EACE passes from Kinyogori Harambee School and one who had failed his school certificate but had had his junior certificate at Ngenia High School. Three new teachers at a go!

I rushed back to my watch, now not so alone.

They were still a-wandering across Ilmorog country, always together in the fields, on the mountain-top, in the plains, their love blossoming in the wind, as if both were re-enacting broken possibilities in their pasts. A second chance. A second chance for him to get at me. First it was Mukami. Now it was Wanja.

I started finding faults in his teaching, with the level of his preparations, with the content of his lessons, with the kind of literature he introduced to the tender minds. But really, there was little to criticize.

I even started moralizing, to myself of course, about the effect of their unmarried liaison on the children.

Crops ripened: came new harvests.

One afternoon, I invited all the teachers for a drink at Abdulla’s place. It was in the middle of the third term.

I steered the conversation to the school and the teaching of certain subjects like history and civics.

‘You see, the children have very impressionable minds. They like to copy. They take the opinion of their teachers as a Bible-sanctioned truth. That is why we should be careful, don’t you think?’ I asked, turning to Karega. They were all listening and I felt the power of my own argument.

‘Careful about what?’ Karega asked and his manner of asking, affecting not to know what I was talking about, irritated me.

‘About our teaching. What we teach them. Politics for instance.
Propaganda. I agree of course that it has more bite and juice in it and needs little preparation.’

He did not answer. I became more enthusiastic and drove home my points with mounting authority and sureness.

‘You see. What they need to know are facts. Simple facts. Information, just so they can pass their CPE. Yes, information, not interpretation. Later when they go to High School, and I am sure these gentlemen will bear me out in this, they can start learning the more complicated stuff. By that time they will have learnt how to think and can start interpreting. I say let’s teach them facts, facts, and not propaganda about blackness, African peoples, all that, because that is politics, and they know the tribe they belong to. That’s a fact – not propaganda.’

I sat back and swallowed a glass of beer, rather satisfied with myself. Some of the things I had of course read from a circular sent to all schools by an English inspector of language and history at the Ministry, who had described himself as a scientist in language, literature and history, but what did it matter?

‘I do not agree with that approach,’ Karega started and I could see that he was having difficulties. ‘I cannot accept that there is a stage in our growth as human beings when all we need are so-called facts and information. Man is a thinking being from the time he is born to the time he dies. He looks, he hears, he touches, he smells, he tastes and he sifts all these impressions in his mind to arrive at a certain outlook in his direct experience of life. Are there pure facts? When I am looking at you, how much I see of you is conditioned by where I stand or sit; by the amount of light in this room; by the power of my eyes; by whether my mind is occupied with other thoughts and what thoughts. Surely the story we teach about the seven blind men who had never seen an elephant is instructive. Looking and touching, then, do involve interpretation. Even assuming that there were pure facts, what about their selection? Does this not involve interpretation? What is the propaganda we are accused of teaching? When you talked just now, it was so funny, I was thinking of Chui. But that’s another story. Now let’s look at this propaganda which is Not Facts. The oppression of black people is a fact. The scattering of Africans into the four corners
of the earth is a fact. That there are Africans in USA, Canada, Latin America, the West Indies, Europe, India, everywhere – this is a fact. That Africa is one of the richest continents with infinite possibilities for renewal and growth is a fact. What mineral, from copper, gold, diamonds, cobalt to uranium, is not found in Africa? What crop? That our people fought against the Arab slave raiders is a fact: that the Akamba people built formidable defences against them even while trading with them in ivory is a fact. That our people resisted European intrusion is a fact: we fought inch by inch, ridge by ridge, and it was only through the superiority of their arms and the traitorous actions of some of us that we were defeated. That Kenya people have had a history of fighting and resistance is therefore a fact. Our children must look at the things that deformed us yesterday, that are deforming us today. They must also look at the things which formed us yesterday, that will creatively form us into a new breed of men and women who will not be afraid to link hands with children from other lands on the basis of an unashamed immersion in the struggle against those things that dwarf us.

‘Liberation: no child is ever too young to think about this: it is the only way he can truly experience himself as he collects, breaks, collects, rejects, assimilates and tries to discover himself. We must teach our children to hate all those things which prevent them from loving and to love all those things that make it possible for them to love freely.’

I had never clearly thought about these things. I could see that the others were captivated by the novelty and the purity of conviction behind the utterances. I felt uncomfortable. I braced myself to hit back, only I did not know how. At that moment Wanja hodi-ed and stood at the door.

Her eyes sought out his. My tension-filled body felt rather than saw their eyebeams entwine a second, two seconds, before she greeted the rest of us.

I could not bear the pain.

I could not resist the evil thought.

I cycled to the headquarters.

1 ~ It was the end of yet another year. School had closed and Munira was in the office writing the annual report and drawing up estimates for the following year. He was astonished that he had now been here for five years. Next year the school would have six classes learning all day. Joseph had made the most impressive progress. His mind was clearly above the average. Even if Ilmorog did not send any child to a secondary school on the first attempt at CPE, he was sure that on the school’s second attempt, Joseph would make it to higher realms and thus finally put Ilmorog Full Primary School on the national map.

He closed the office and stood outside. Ilmorog countryside was clear, for it was after yet another harvest. The drought and the journey to the city seemed like events in a legend. None of the promises had yet materialized. Ilmorog was still a kind of neglected outpost of the republic. Even the churchmen and the chief and the policemen only came once every so many months. But Mzigo did visit the school once or twice, he would quickly wet his throat at Abdulla’s place and then would curse the road and disappear. But some of the improvements, especially in equipment and buildings, were a direct result of those visits. He had brought him one other teacher so that they were five altogether.

‘Come to Tea’ also seemed like something which had happened in another country, long ago, and Munira thought he might visit his home: but how would he look at his father, he wondered, now that he knew how Mukami had met her death? Idle speculation, he thought, since his relations to his father and to his past and the discomfiture he felt had never had anything to do with Mukami’s death. He took his bicycle: he wanted to run to Abdulla’s place for a quick one.

He was whistling gaily when he saw her in the middle of the narrow path, almost the same spot where five years back she had accosted him and asked funny but hostile questions. ‘Oh, it is you, mother of men,’ he called out cheerfully, braking to a stop. He was feeling good, because but for Wanja’s movement away from him he had almost regained his position as a hero, the bringer of new teachers for the children. He had for a time lost the position to Karega, soon after the return from the city, but now . . . he only needed Wanja to complete his happiness. Nyakinyua looked to the ground but her voice reached him clearly.