Dreams in a Time of War (23 page)

Good Wallace was a member of the supply wing of the nationalist guerrilla army, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. He and Uncle Gĩcini arranged to meet with a friendly source that would supply them with bullets. The source was the brother of a girl my brother used to date, but they had parted amicably. The meeting was in the open by a road that linked the old Indian shops to the African marketplace. Between my mother’s parcel of land and the road was a small hedge. At the time, my mother was tending a mixed crop of green corn and beans. Good Wallace and Uncle Gĩcini shouted greetings to her. Otherwise she was unbothered by the goings-on in the busy road. Twelve bullets and money exchanged hands and the source went away. Wallace and Gĩcini divided the bullets between them, six each. Wallace put his share in the inner pocket of his jacket, Uncle Gĩcini, in his trouser pockets.

Uncle Gĩcini and my brother had not moved a step when a police truck suddenly appeared and stopped them. Unaware that their source was an informer, they took this to be the usual police harassment that was so common at the time. They thought they would be able to talk or even bribe their
way out of trouble. The policeman assigned to frisk them started with my brother, going through every pocket except the one that contained the bullets. Then he went over to Uncle Gĩcini and found six bullets in his pocket. While the police concentrated entirely on Uncle Gĩcini, my brother dipped his hand in the inner pocket, took out the bullets, and threw them over the hedge onto the side where my mother was cultivating. The police were aware of the number of bullets that had changed hands, yet they found only six. Puzzled, the same policeman left Gĩcini in handcuffs and came back to frisk my brother again, this time not forgetting the inner pocket. Again he found nothing on him.

The two of them were going to be taken to the police station anyway for further questioning but were treated differently. The apparently more dangerous Gĩcini was placed in the front passenger seat, handcuffed, sandwiched between two armed officers. My brother was hurled in the back of the truck, without handcuffs, guarded by one officer only. By this time the fracas had attracted the attention of my mother, who looked over the hedge. My brother told her not to worry; he would be all right. She should simply
thikĩrĩra mbembe icio wega
. This phrase had two meanings. The most common was simply a call for her to cover the stems of the growing corn with mulch. But it could also mean to bury grains of corn under the soil.
Mbembe
was a secret Mau Mau code for “bullets.” So it could also mean “hide the bullets carefully.” The law in those days was clear: Anybody caught with bullets was hanged at Gĩthũngũri, the former Kenya Teachers’ College.

Good Wallace decided to escape. He jumped off the truck onto the road and then fled through the Indian shops, bullets whistling behind him, an escape that set in motion various narratives, like the version I heard on that day as I came home from Kĩnyogori.

The real narrative emerged later over time. On that night my mother offered no details of her role or presence at the time of Good Wallace’s arrest. My brother’s wife, who held their firstborn in her arms, was also mum, torn no doubt by conflicting emotions. My brother’s escape may have become instant legend, but for my mother, for his new bride and their child, for us, it was just a relief. He had escaped with his life intact. But we were also suspended between fear and hope. Would he survive the manhunt? And life in the mountains? But we did not voice our fears or hopes or anything else even to ourselves. We simply sat huddled around the fireside, shadows and light playing on our faces. My mother was the only one who spoke, taking us all in as she told us to watch our lips. The dreaded state of emergency had finally struck my mother’s house.

I was never to let anybody know that we knew where Good Wallace had gone because, indeed, in a technical sense, we did not. Do you hear me? she asked again rhetorically, looking at my younger brother and me. If anybody asks if you know where he is, just say, I don’t know.

I don’t have to be told. I know it inside me. It is strange that when I wake up in the morning, everything looks the same: the sky, the land, the neighborhood. And yet everything has changed. Tomorrow when I go to school, or read a
newspaper, or talk with Mzee Ngandi and hear of Mau Mau and their heroic deeds or deaths, the talk will not be something abstract, happening far away in the forest of Nyandarwa and Mount Kenya. I will be thinking of my brother whom I have loved: his hard work, his determination, his imagination, his love and loyalty to friends. I will be thinking of Joseph Kabae, who had earlier taught Good Wallace how to type, and now teacher and student are on opposite sides of the conflict. Yes, I will be thinking of the split in my father’s house with two of Wangarĩ’s sons, Tumbo and Kabae, working as agents of the colonial state and their half brother out in the mountains trying to bring down the colonial state. Ah, yes, brothers who love one another, now at war.

The story is told of how my brother Wallace once went to visit Mwangi wa Gacoki, the son of the second wife of my father. Wa Gacoki then worked at the Limuru Bata Shoe factory and lived in one of the company’s single-room houses. By one of those coincidences of fate, Tumbo, the informer, Wangarĩ’s eldest son and the brother to Kabae, had decided to visit Mwangi wa Gacoki at the same hour. When they encountered one another at the gate, they both took off in different directions—Good Wallace back to the mountains and my half brother Tumbo to the police station. Soon there was a large sweep of the area. But obviously Tumbo did not mention wa Gacoki because he was never called in for questioning about the incident or accused of aiding an anticolonial guerrilla fighter. Or maybe Tumbo did not know that Wallace was going to visit Mwangi wa Gacoki, since the
workers’ quarters were many and crowded. Warring motives and loyalties might have been at play.

And yet the split loyalties do not break the sense of us belonging to the same family. My mother’s co-wives don’t abandon her; they still find the time to see her at home or in the fields. But I assume that they don’t talk about Kabae or Tumbo or my brother. Or perhaps they know, deep inside, that these warring sons would always be their sons, and they hope that all of them will eventually come back home safely. The Gĩkũyũ have a saying that out of the same womb comes both a killer and a healer.

My brother’s flight to the mountains changes our external relationship to our immediate world. But I learn it the hard way. At first, neither my brother’s wife nor I can believe it. It seems impossible but Kahanya, the closest friend of my brother, the man he had taught carpentry and employed as his assistant at the workshop, has joined the Home Guards. No, it is not possible that Kahanya would join those who were hunting down my brother. It is not possible that the man who had married a girl from one of the most militantly anticolonial families, the Kĩhĩkas, would turn against what his in-laws stand for. No, Kahanya whose elder brother, Ndereba Karanja, had married Nyagaki, Gacoki’s daughter, one of my older half sisters, would not turn against us. I refuse to believe it.

One day I encounter Kahanya wearing the white armband identifying him as a Home Guard. He is in the company of another Home Guard, Gĩkonyo Marinda, also one
of my brother’s age-mates. The encounter takes place on the path that then passed by Edward Matumbĩ’s house, and on either side of which grew long green corn. I almost freeze. They both stop. Gĩkonyo glares at me as if I am contaminated with evil. But Kahanya, though not looking at me directly, greets me and then asks, Does Good Wallace ever get in touch with you? I say no, which is the truth anyway. He tells me mockingly, almost jeeringly, We understand your brother has climbed to the ranks of captain. I don’t know, I say, and continue on my way, and they continue on theirs, laughing. Both, I later understood, had taken the oath as Mau Mau adherents. They had simply changed sides. How do I make sense of these contradictions in a struggle, which, through Ngandi’s rendering, I had seen as one between the anticolonial and the colonial, good and evil? What is now emerging around me is murky.

One morning I go to my grandfather’s as I was used to doing. Even though I am now a man, I am still his scribe and bird of good omen. He does not mention my brother’s flight to the mountains, but I note that he is not as enthusiastic about the early-morning call as he used to be. On another occasion he tells me that I need not visit him anymore so early in the morning. A third visit in broad daylight: He makes it clear that I am no longer his bird of good omen at whatever time of day. I am his beloved scribe no more.

At first I am hurt. He is my mother’s father; I am named after him; once he had hidden in our place in the dark. But that was the point, really. Grandfather had already lost Kĩmũchũ, his beloved adopted son, and now he might lose
Gĩcini, his own blood. His grandson, the son of his daughter who lived on his land, is a Mau Mau guerrilla. I am sad to lose my special place as his scribe and bird of good omen, but somehow I understand. My mother’s house has become a menace to others.

But ours remains a close-knit one-parent family. In addition to the comfort my mother’s house gives me, there is school. Though the fear that I might lose my place in Kĩnyogori hovers over me always, it does not actually happen. I am grateful. I seek refuge in learning.

There were many primary school teachers who, in their own ways, contributed to my intellectual growth. But the one who most influenced my life was Mr. Samuel G. Kĩbicho. He graduated from Kagumo Teacher Training College. He became the headmaster of the newly reopened Manguo, and it was under his leadership that the school moved to Kĩnyogori. He was my English teacher during my last two years at Manguo and Kĩnyogori.

Our language texts from grade five were the
Oxford Readers for Africa
. The books featured two characters, John and Joan, who lived in Oxford but went to school in Reading. I learned that they went by train, which triggered envy in me. Of course, Oxford was in England. I don’t think that any of our teachers had ever been there, so the places mentioned in the texts must have been as strange to them as they were to us. We followed Joan and John everywhere, especially to London, where they went sightseeing at natural, historical, and architectural landmarks including the Thames, the British Houses of Parliament with Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey. The school now followed the common government
syllabus for African schools, so the teachers had to use the officially sanctioned texts. Mr. Kĩbicho had the ability to go outside the texts and cite many everyday examples from our environment. He was excellent with English grammar. He made me understand the structure of the language and how to use simple and complex sentences or how to build a sentence of ever increasing complexity from a simple one. From the simple to the complex: It was an outlook that remained imprinted in my mind. If that was all he did, he would have remained just like any other good teacher in my life.

But he had literary texts in his personal library. I don’t know how he noted my interest in reading, but he gave me the simplified Dickens’s
Great Expectations
, which I passed on to Kenneth. Then Kenneth borrowed from him
Lorna Doone
by Richard Doddridge Blackmore, and passed it on to me. One had to return the book that one had borrowed before one was allowed to take another. By exchanging what we borrowed, between Kenneth and me, we always had two books at any given time. We became avid readers and we talked about what we read. Of all the books that we read, the most gripping and memorable was Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
. Whereas the others were abridged, this one was not or only slightly so. We kept on borrowing it over and over again. Kenneth and I talked about it, the story, the characters, especially Long John Silver and his parrot. I identified with Jim Hawkins, his hopes and fears, his ingenuity, his narrow escapes. We memorized certain phrases and songs:

Sometimes, in the schoolyard, Kenneth and I would recite “Yo-ho-ho” to the surprise, bafflement, and curiosity of other students. We discussed the possibility of our going to sea to become pirates, but alas there was nothing beyond rivers and Manguo marshes in Limuru, and Mombasa was very far away.

It was Stevenson who provoked my first major literary dispute. I confided to Kenneth that I would like to write stories like Stevenson’s, but that one needed a license to write. And to qualify to write, one had to have higher education. Kenneth was adamant that one did not need to have a license to write, or any other qualification. I countered by asserting that if one wrote without such permission, one would surely be arrested. I don’t know why this idea of being imprisoned because of one’s writing came to my mind. Perhaps in my conversations with Mzee Ngandi, he had mentioned the fact that many of the nationalist writers, like Gakaara Wanjaũ, Mũgĩa, and Stanley Kagĩka, had been imprisoned by the colonial state under the laws of the state of emergency. African-language papers had been banned, and some of the editors, such as Henry Muoria of
Mũmenyereri
, were forced into exile. Whatever the origins of my position, the debate between Kenneth and me was quite heated at times.
We could have resolved it easily by posing the problem to Mr. Kĩbicho, but we did not.