A Grain of Wheat (33 page)

Suddenly a small wind blew dust and bits of rubbish into the air. Mugo covered his face with both palms to protect his eyes against the
sand. The bits of paper spiralled up higher and higher in a cyclic cone. This storm that so whirled dust and rubbish into a moving cone-shaped pillar was said to be possessed of women’s devils. Normally it only lasted for a few seconds and disappeared as suddenly and mysteriously as it had come. But now it went on and on increasing in vigour and threw things very high into the sky. At last the wind stopped. Mugo watched dust and rubbish slowly fall to the ground. Somehow this act relieved him of his shaking and depression. He took the panga and the jembe and continued his journey to the shamba. He was almost calm.

But only for a time.

After walking a few steps from where he had sat, Mugo saw a strange spectacle. He stared at the corrugated-iron wall. His hair pulled away at the roots. He felt shocked pleasure in his belly. For Kihika’s face was there, pinned-framed to the shop, becoming larger and more distorted the longer he gazed at it. The face, clear against a white surface, awakened the same excitement and terror he once experienced, as a boy, the night he wanted to strangle his aunt. There was a price on Kihika’s head – a – price – on – Kihika’s – head.

Mugo walked towards the District Officer, hazed with suppressed wonder and excitement. God called upon Abraham to offer an only son Isaac for a burnt sacrifice upon a mountain in the land of Moriah. And Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And Isaac, lying there, waited for the sword to sever his head from the body. He knew the sword would surely fall – for a second he was certain of death by a cold panga. And suddenly Isaac heard the voice of the Lord. He wept. Saved from death. Saved from death, Mugo repeated to himself. He walked in this vision. And in his dazed head was a tumult of thoughts that acquired the concrete logic of a dream. The argument was so clear, so exhilarating, it explained things he had been unable to solve in his life. I am important. I must not die. To keep myself alive, healthy, strong – to wait for my mission in life – is a duty to myself, to men and women of tomorrow. If Moses had
died in the reeds, who would ever have known that he was destined to be a great man?

These lofty sensations were mixed up with thoughts of the money reward and the various possibilities opened before him. He would buy more land. He would build a big house. He would then find a woman for a wife and get children. The novelty and the nearness of the scheme added to his present thrill. He had never before considered women in relation to his man’s body. Now pictures of various girls he had seen in the village passed through his mind. He would flash his victory before the eyes of his aunt’s ghost. His place in society would be established. He would be half-way on the road to power. And what is greatness but power? What’s power? A judge is powerful: he can send a man to death, without anyone questioning his authority, judgement, or harming his body in return. Yes – to be great you must stand in such a place that you can dispense pain and death to others without anyone asking questions. Like a headmaster, a judge, a Governor.

He arrived, almost too soon, at the offices. The offices had been built recently as a base from which the surrounding villages could be quickly reached. Two rifled policemen, in black polo-necked sweaters, guarded the entrance. In his present state, Mugo felt impatient with these unreal things that stood in his path.

‘Can I see the DO?’ he asked, attempting to walk past them dwelling on the vision within.

‘What do you want?’ One of the policemen pulled him back by the shoulder.

‘I – I want to see him alone,’ he said, surprised.

‘With a jembe and a panga? Ha! ha! ha!’

‘I say what do you want here.’

‘I cannot – not to you.’

The two policemen laughed and jeered at Mugo’s answers. They took his panga and jembe and threw them on the ground.

‘Can’t! Can’t! Do you hear that? Hey, farmer, what do you want?’

‘I must – it is – it is important.’ Fear started creeping into him. They searched him all over, roughly pushing him about.

‘He ought to remove his clothes.’

‘Such a tall man – his thing is probably as long as a donkey’s penis.’

‘How do you manage women? eh?’

‘Women? You are joking. Even a fat prostitute would run away at the sight.’

‘Maybe he does it with sheep – or cows. Some people do, you know. At night. Ha! Ha!’

‘Ha! ha! Or with old women – bribe them, or force them. Ha! ha! ha!’

‘Ha! ha! ha!’

John Thompson, the District Officer, came out and shouted at them to stop the laughter. They told him about Mugo, and he told them to let him in. Mugo was almost short of breath as he bounded into the office; grateful to the whiteman who had rescued him from shame and humiliation. And now that he was in, he did not know how to begin. It was the first time he had ever confronted a whiteman at such close quarters. He fixed his eyes on the opposite wall determined, if possible, not to look at the whiteman’s face.

‘What do you want?’ The voice startled Mugo.

‘Kihika – I came to see you about him.’

Thompson sat up in his chair at the mention of that name. Then he stood up, his hands reaching for the edge of the table, as if for support. He peered at Mugo. The two men were almost the same height. Mugo resolutely refused to meet the other man’s eyes. The whiteman sat down again.

‘Yes?’

‘I know—’ he gulped down saliva. Panic seized him. He feared the voice would fail him.

‘I know,’ he said quietly, ‘I know where Kihika can be found, tonight.’

And now the hatred he had felt towards Kihika rose fresh in him. He trembled with a victorious rage as he blurted out the story that had tormented him for a week. For a time he experienced a pure, delicious joy at his own daring, at what he suddenly saw as a great act of moral courage. Indeed, for him, at that moment, there was a kind of purity in the act; he stood beyond good and evil; he enjoyed the power and authority of his own knowledge: did he not hold the fate
of a man’s life in his head? His heart – his cup – was full to overflowing. Tears of relief stood on the edge of his eyes. For a week he had wrestled with demons, alone, in an endless nightmare. This confession was his first contact with another man. He felt deep gratitude to the whiteman, a patient listener, who had lifted his burden from Mugo’s heart, who had extricated him from the nightmare. He even dared to look at the whiteman, the new-found friend. A smile spread over Mugo’s face. The smile, however, froze into a grin that appeared like scorn, when he met the whiteman’s inscrutable face and searching eyes.

The DO again stood up. He walked round the table to where Mugo stood. He held Mugo by the chin and tilted his face backwards. Then quite unexpectedly he shot saliva into the dark face. Mugo moved back a step and lifted his left hand to rub off the saliva. But the whiteman reached Mugo’s face first and slapped him hard, once.

‘Many people have already given us false information concerning this terrorist. Hear? Because they want the reward. We shall keep you here, and if you are not telling the truth, we shall hang you there, outside. Do you hear?’

Mugo was back in his nightmare. The table, the white face, the ceiling, the walls moved round and round. Then everything stopped abruptly. He tried to steady himself. Suddenly the ground where he stood gave way. He was falling down. He thrust his arms into the air. The bottom was so far away he could see only darkness. But he knew that there were stones jutting out, sharp, at the floor. He was nothing. Tears could not help him. With a choked cry, his body smashed on to the broken stones and jutting rock, at the whiteman’s feet. The shock of discovery was so deep it numbed him. He felt no pain, and saw no blood.

‘Do you hear?’

‘Yes.’

‘Say Effendi.’

‘Yes—’

The word stuck, blocked the throat. His open mouth let out inarticulate noises. Foam had collected at the corners of his mouth. He stared at the whiteman, a watery glint in the eyes, without seeing
him. Then the table, the chair, the DO, the white-washed walls – the earth – started spinning, faster and faster again. He held on to the table to still himself. He did not want the money. He did not want to know what he had done.

Kenya regained her Uhuru from the British on 12 December 1963. A minute before midnight, lights were put out at the Nairobi stadium so that people from all over the country and the world who had gathered there for the midnight ceremony were swallowed by the darkness. In the dark, the Union Jack was quickly lowered. When next the lights came on the new Kenya flag was flying and fluttering, and waving, in the air. The Police band played the new National Anthem and the crowd cheered continuously when they saw the flag was black, and red and green. The cheering sounded like one intense cracking of many trees, falling on the thick mud in the stadium.

In our village and despite the drizzling rain, men and women and children, it seemed, had emptied themselves into the streets where they sang and danced in the mud. Because it was dark, they put oil-lamps at the doorsteps to light the streets. As usual, on such occasions, some young men walked in gangs, carrying torches, lurked and whispered in dark corners and the fringes, really looking for love-mates among the crowd. Mothers warned their daughters to take care not to be raped in the dark. The girls danced in the middle, thrusting out their buttocks provokingly, knowing that the men in corners watched them. Everybody waited for something to happen. This ‘waiting’ and the uncertainty that went with it – like a woman torn between fear and joy during birth-motions – was a taut cord beneath the screams and the shouts and the laughter. People moved from street to street singing. They praised Jomo and Kaggia and Oginga. They recalled Waiyaki, who even before 1900 had challenged the white people who had come to Dagoreti in the wake of Lugard.
They remembered heroes from our village, too. They created words to describe the deeds of Kihika in the forest, deeds matched only by those of Mugo in the trench and detention camps. They mixed Christmas hymns with songs and dances only performed during initiation rites when boys and girls are circumcised into responsibility as men and women. And underneath it all was the chord that followed us from street to street. Somewhere, a woman suggested we go and sing to Mugo, the hermit, at his hut. The cry was taken up by the crowd, who, even before the decision was taken, had already started tearing through the drizzle and the dark to Mugo’s hut. For more than an hour Mugo’s hut was taken prisoner. His name was on everybody’s lips. We wove new legends around his name and imagined deeds. We hoped that Mugo would come out and join us, but he did not open the door to our knocks. When the hour of midnight came, people broke into one long ululation. Then the women cried out the five Ngemi to welcome a son at birth or at circumcision. These they sang for Kihika and Mugo, the two heroes of deliverance, from our village. Soon after this, we all dispersed to our various huts to wait for the morning, when the Uhuru Celebrations would really begin.

Later in the night, the drizzle changed into a heavy downpour. Lightning, followed by thunder, would for a second or two red-white-light our huts, even though it only came through the cracks in the walls. The wind increased with the rain. A moaning sound, together with a continuous booming which went on all night, came from swaying and breaking trees and hedges as the wind and the rain beat the leaves and the branches. Some decaying thatched roofs freely let in rain, so that pools collected on the floor. To avoid being drenched, people kept on shifting their beds from spot to spot, only to be followed by a new leakage.

The wind and the rain were so strong that some trees were uprooted whole, while others broke by the stems, or lost their branches.

This we saw the following morning as we went into a field near Rung’ei, where the sports and dances to celebrate Uhuru were to take place. Crops on the valley slopes were badly damaged. Running water had grooved trenches that now zig-zagged all along the sloping fields.
Uprooted potato and bean crops lay everywhere on the valley floor. The leaves of the maize plants still standing were lacerated into numerous shreds.

The morning itself was so dull we feared the day would not break into life. But the rain had stopped. The air was soft and fresh, and an intimate warmth oozed from the pregnant earth to our hearts.

The field had been chosen by the Party’s Uhuru Committee because it was the most central to all the ridges around. The field sloped dangerously towards the Rung’ei shops; the white-chalked athletic tracks rose in sharp bumps and fell into holes and shallow ditches.

First came the school sports and races. Children had turned out smart in their green, blue, or brown uniforms. Each school had its own group of supporters and all was noise and cheering as the children ran and fell and rose again to continue the race. There were two youth bands who, armed with bugles and drums, entertained people in between the races, with victory and military tunes. The bands belonged to the youth-wing of the Party. The school sports and races were followed by traditional dances. Uncircumcised boys and girls delighted the crowd with vigorous Muthuo; they had painted their faces with chalk and red-ochre and tied jingles to their knees; younger men and women did Mucung’wa: older women, in Mithuru, Miengu and layers of beads, danced Ndumo. All that morning, Gikonyo ran from place to place, from group to group, seeing that things ran smoothly. This was his day, he gloried in it, and wanted to make it a resounding success.