Dreams in a Time of War (16 page)

Perhaps the real Kenyatta, whenever and wherever I might meet him, would match the Kenyatta of legends. But his home was far away in Gatũndũ and I did not have relatives married in the region. It was unlikely that I would ever
be in a position to catch him in a gray suit walking alone, pensively, on a country path through green cornfields.

Then I heard from Ngandi, who seemed to know everything, that Jomo Kenyatta would be coming to Limuru. He did not know the day, the week, or the month. But I was sure of one thing: I was not about to let the chance pass me by. I did not tell anybody. I simply started frequenting my elder brother’s furniture store at the Limuru African marketplace.

Wallace Mwangi, or Good Wallace as he was becoming known, was my mother’s first major success. He was born in 1930 and later went to Manguo school for a few years beginning in 1945. He had interesting study habits, especially before a test: He would work all night, with an open paraffin lantern, feet in a basin of cold water to keep him awake, but I suspect that the lack of sleep was not very conducive to good performance. He would try to sell his theory and practice to anybody who would listen. He did not persuade me. With my past history of bad eyes, I disliked the very thought of studying all night by an oil lamp with my feet in cold water, but he never gave up selling the idea. My mother, who paid his tuition, did not interfere with his school efforts except once when he announced that he intended to become a boy scout. In Gĩkũyũ, the word “scout” sounded like
thikauti
, or
thika hiti
, to my mother, and somebody must have confirmed her worst fears that my brother would become a “burier of dead hyenas.” She pleaded with him, she threatened, and she did not want to hear an explanation. She just could not imagine her son becoming a professional mourner and burier of dead hyenas. I doubt if any other animal would
have been more tolerable to her, but the hyena was the worst character in stories: greedy, dirty, and it fed on the remains of humans. I don’t know if it was because he caved in to her concerns or because he left school afterward, but he never became a boy scout.

This may have left, in my brother, a desire that he fulfilled vicariously through the lady with whom he fell in love and eventually married. Charity Wanjikũ was born in 1935 in Kĩmuga village, Kĩambaa, next to my sister Gathoni’s place and Charles Koinange’s. She went to Kĩambaa Church Missionary Society school, where she joined the girl guides squad. Even when not in uniform, Charity often wore a blue beret, leaving all the young men of Limuru agog with envy and admiration. Wallace got himself a girl guide, they would whisper or even say loudly. They nicknamed her Rendi ya Banana, “Lady from Banana Hills,” because the banana place, being on the highway between Nairobi and Limuru, was better known and sounded more esoteric than Kĩmuga or Kĩambaa, which sounded like villages next door. That was years later, of course, in 1954, and my mother had no objections to having a girl guide for a daughter-in-law because the name did not sound like “boy scout.”

Now, relieved and even grateful that her son had heeded her concerns, my mother funded his other dreams, time and again selling he-goats she may have been fattening, or black wattle trees she had grown on one of her parcels of land.

After leaving school he joined Kabae’s legal and secretarial services as an apprentice typist. His English would not have created great demand for his secretarial skills, but
whatever he did, he would add a little something. He tried his hand at making a wooden typewriter that he claimed would be faster and less noisy than Kabae’s Remington. He abandoned both projects and became apprenticed to a carpenter, Joseph Njoroge, about his age. Such an apprenticeship was supposed to last several years, but after only a few months my brother had started making his own things on the side. Here his creative talents and persuasive skills came together, and soon he had more customers than the master carpenter. He did something no African artisan from the area had done. He rented the backyard of an Indian shop owned by Govji, or Ngũnji in its Gĩkũyũnized form, where he made and displayed beds and chairs, competing with the more skilled and experienced Indian artisans. His business kept on expanding, and he rented a much bigger yard, halfway between the Indian and African shops. The space belonged to Karabu, who was in the transport business, and who had lost one of his legs in a road accident. By this time Good Wallace was even hiring the occasional services of Joseph Njoroge, the master carpenter. The owner of the premises resented my brother’s success and tried to force him out by raising the rent very steeply. He eventually did get him out by claiming he needed the space for his own use. My brother ended up renting a building in the Limuru marketplace, where he set up his workshop and furniture store.

Among his own apprentices was Kahanya wa Njue, one of his closest friends, whose elder brother, Karanja the driver, or simply Ndereba as he was known, had married my half
sister Nyagaki, Gacoki’s third born. Kahanya had also been to Manguo school, but dropped out after beating up the teacher Wahinya, who was much younger than him, and who had tried to discipline him. Unlike other apprentices who paid to learn, Kahanya was paid for his work. He and my brother Wallace were social friends, literally inseparable. They moved to the new premises together, and Kahanya eventually became his assistant, although he was never nearly as good as the master carpenter Njoroge.

I had frequently visited my brother’s workshop when it used to be at the Indian shops and Karabu’s place, but not with the regularity that I did now that I was looking for the opportunity to meet Kenyatta. Manguo school was not far from the marketplace, and at lunch breaks I would run there and back in time for afternoon classes. The marketplace thrived with artisans of all kinds: shoemakers; bicycle repairers and motor vehicle mechanics; makers of aluminium utensils, charcoal burners, and other household gadgets; and tailors with noisy Singer sewing machines.

Like the Bata Shoe factory workers, who often visited our home with an eye on the girls, so did the members of the artisan class. With their independent self-employed base, they were a social notch above the working class as eligible bachelors. That was how the humorous shoemaker and flamboyant dancer Gatanjeru son of Mariu captured the heart of my half sister Minneh Wanjirũ wa Gacoki; Mr. Washerman Wanjohi, that of beautiful Mũmbi, Baba Mũkũrũ’s daughter; and the religious tailor, Willie Ng’ang’a, that of another half sister, the equally religious Wambũkũ wa Njeri, edging
out a large crowd of suitors. But the workers, including those employed in the restaurants and butcher shops in the marketplace, attracted their fair share of fluttering hearts.

At one of the corners was Kĩmũchũ’s shop and restaurant. Uncle Kĩmũchũ was the oldest son of one of the women my grandfather had inherited upon the death of his relative Ndũng’ũ. Uncle Gĩcini, who had now left Kamandũra, worked there.

Now and then Good Wallace would give me a few cents. I would run down to Uncle Kĩmũchũ’s restaurant to buy
mandazi
, or
matumbuya
, as we called them, a kind of deep-fried dough, often fresh from the cooking oil. Kĩmũchũ’s was a very popular eating place. There was a pile of
Mũmenyereri
newspapers but no seller in sight. People just picked up their copy and put down the right amount or took the right amount of change. Kĩmũchũ himself, obese, light-skinned, was nearly always behind the counter at his shop next door, and I got the impression that he did not know who I was because he never nodded recognition at me.

I enjoyed those days of waiting for Kenyatta at my brother’s workshop. I came to like the smell of wood, unvarnished or varnished. I liked shuffling through the wood shavings and the sawdust on the floor. I came to appreciate the muscular and imaginative demands of woodworking. I noted how meticulous my brother was with everything: designs and finishes. He would work on something, and just when I was sure he was done I would see him go at it over and over again till it achieved the refinement he wanted. Whatever he made was unique. He tried to inculcate his
work ethic in his employees, including his friend and assistant Kahanya, but they were not so patient. He persisted, impressing upon them the importance of satisfying customers, winning their goodwill, turning them into good ambassadors of the workshop. He led by example.

I wanted to learn woodworking, particularly insofar as it involved the use of the saw, the shaving plane, mallet, hammer, and nails. But my brother would not allow me to meddle with his tools. I felt it unfair that he allowed my younger brother much more freedom with them. It was as if he was actively discouraging my interest in woodworking. If I insisted, he would give me sandpaper to work on some chairs or a table, a very boring, repetitive task. The required standard, it seemed to me, was in the eyes of the judge, and my brother was a very demanding judge. He liked it best when I was holding a book or a newspaper. Then he would draw the attention of his friends to what I was doing.

I did not mind. I had my own agenda. I was waiting for Kenyatta. It was during this period that I got a chance to ride a bike for the first time in my life. Most youth, girls and boys alike, who wanted to learn had to wait for a chance visit by bicycle-owning relatives. As the guests wined and dined, the young would quietly “borrow” the bike and take a ride, as admiring brothers and sisters followed behind, waiting for their turn. Accidents followed, which resulted in beatings when injuries and damage to the bike forced the culprits to confess. But this would not deter them.

I had always wanted to ride a bike but no one I knew had one. And then my half brother Mwangi wa Gacoki, a tailor,
rented premises near my brother’s furniture shop and opened a grocery store. He shuttled between his tailor and grocery shops, which was hard. At his request, whenever I was not in school I went to the grocery store to help, yet another reason for me to be at the marketplace. Mwangi was married to Elizabeth, sister to Patrick Mũrage Cege, my fellow student at Manguo, with whom I had struck up a friendship.

I don’t know how Mũrage got himself a boy’s bike, a rare possession, the type we had seen only among Indian youth. He decided to make money by renting it out for a set distance at a time, each ride costing a few cents. I did not have the money needed, so whenever he came to his brother-in-law’s shop I would beg him to let me ride his bike for free. But he would not let friendship interfere with commerce. One day I let him have some candy from the shop for free. I did not consider it stealing, as there was so much of it in the big glass container, and, besides, I was not paid for my work, and the shop, I convinced myself, was partly his because it belonged to his brother-in-law. In exchange for the candy, he let me use his bike.

After showing me how to hold the handles and assuring me that pedaling was as easy as drinking a calabash of water, he held the bike as I got on. Then he let it go without telling me he would. Once I started pedaling I panicked. I looked back, and within seconds the bike had veered from the lane outside Mwangi’s shop and was going down the slope toward buildings on the opposite side. I did not know how to steer. My legs slipped off the pedals. I was paralyzed with fear. I
held on to the handles, my legs spread out in the air. The bike was picking up speed. I was sure I was going to smash into a wall, and then, suddenly, thud! I hit two passersby. They fell, I fell, and the bike lay a few yards away, the wheels spinning. My victims stood up, dusted themselves off, barely avoiding giving me a beating. Fortunately, they were not injured. I did not mind my own bruises for I had escaped a worse fate. Deep inside, though, I thought the fall was punishment for the candy I had stolen.

I did not nurse my wounded pride or body for long; soon something else happened that seized my attention. At a tea shop named the Green Hotel, a few yards away on the same side as the workshop and the grocery store, there was a radio with a loudspeaker, the only one in town. Previously people had relied on readers of Muoria’s
Mũmenyereri
, like my friend Ngandi, to relay news to small crowds at a time, who would then spread it even further through word of mouth. Now people crammed inside and outside the tea shop to hear the announcer Mbũrũ Matemo read the news in a voice that would rise and fall. He would shout and whisper for dramatic effect. His listeners increased by the day, as the invisible Mbũrũ Matemo was always prompt at lunchtime when all work in the marketplace would come to a standstill.

It was from the radio that in early October 1952 we heard that Senior Chief Warũhiũ had been assassinated in what Mbũrũ Matemo described as a Chicago gang-style killing, a car trailing the chief’s, then pulling alongside, some people dressed in fake police uniforms politely asking the chief to identify himself and then pumping him with bullets before
swiftly driving away, and all this in broad daylight. Some days later we heard that Kenyatta had addressed a mammoth rally in Kĩambu, denouncing Mau Mau with the expression: Let it disappear under the roots of the Mikongoe trees
(Mau Mau irothii na miri ya mikongoe)
. Maybe Kenyatta was slowly making his way to Limuru after all. And then on October 20, 1952, came the shocker. Jomo Kenyatta, Bildad Kaggia, Fred Kubai, Paul Ngei, Achieng Oneko, Kũng’ũ Karumba, and other leaders had been arrested, under Operation Jock Scott. Kenyatta had been moved from Gatũndũ to Lokitaung in Turkana, far from Nairobi. Governor Evelyn Baring, who had recently taken over from the previous governor, Philip Mitchell, had declared a state of emergency. Things seemed to be escalating.