Dreams in a Time of War (24 page)

Irritated by my intransigence, Kenneth said that he would write a book to prove to me that one did not need a state license to write. He did not tell me what the book would be about or whether he had started. But he could not have gone very far. Our attention was soon taken up with preparations for the Kenya African Preliminary Exams, which would decide our fate.

The Kenya African Preliminary Exams were dreaded. Only about 5 percent of the students taking the tests ever found places at high schools or teacher training colleges. Preparing for the exams was nerve-racking, made more so by our being in the midst of a war. We were continually deprived of sleep by interruptions at unexpected times, and I was always wondering about my brother in the mountains. How to prepare for the exams was a problem. Were the questions going to be based on one year’s work, on the previous two, three, or four years of work? Except for English, we did not have textbooks. We depended on the teachers’ notes that we had copied from the blackboard. There were very few students if any who would have been able to preserve in one place notes taken over a period of one year.

But I tried reading time and again whatever notes I had. Even that was a struggle. Some days we were without paraffin for the lamp. I had to read by firelight. Dry cornstalks could produce sudden bright flames but the flames also died as quickly. One had to keep on feeding the flames. It was a race to read as much as one could within the span of one set of flames. It strained my eyes but I got used to it. Daylight
was best. But reading had to compete with chores, including looking for firewood for the evening.

The exams were a very formal affair. They were often held at one center with the candidates from different schools finding their own way to the place. In 1954, for our area the center was at Loreto Convent School, Limuru, three miles from home. We felt lucky because there were some who had to travel more than ten miles to get there, and there was hardly any transportation.

The Catholic mission where Loreto School was located had been founded by Italian missionaries in 1906. The vast land the church owned was part of Tigoni, the center of the dispute that eventually led to the Lari massacre in 1953. But although there was a saying that there was no difference between a priest and a settler, the anger of the population was directed more at soldier settlements than at the mission center itself.

A week or so before the exams, I was awakened from deep sleep by my mother opening the door. A group of men entered the house. They wore long coats, and at the waist were belts from which swords in leather sheaths hung. A few had guns slung over their shoulders. One of them was smiling at me. I could not believe my eyes. It was my elder brother, Good Wallace, alive and smiling, holding a flashlight in his hand. By this time, his wife, her baby in tow, had come in from her house. I was trembling with a mix of fear and joy. He was alive and well. But what if Home Guards were following them? These men showed no fear. They were talking freely, though in low voices, and even laughing. They
ate food and drank some tea. They must have had sentries outside because there was always some movement in and out. Then my brother turned to me and said, Don’t fear. I know you will be taking exams soon. I came to wish you good luck. As our mother says, try your best. Knowledge is our light. And they left. Just like that. My mother impressed upon me that what I had seen was not to be discussed with anybody else. Not even my younger brother, who had slept through it all. In the morning I thought that I was waking up from a strange dream.

I was sorry that I could not have asked all the questions on my mind: about the day he had escaped death, the way they lived in the mountains, the battles they had fought, or about their leader Marshall Dedan Kĩmathi. But the thought that my elder brother would risk being caught so as to wish me good luck was very touching. He was the same person who used to discourage me from playing with carpenter tools but whose face beamed bright when I was absorbed in a book or a newspaper. His risky visit motivated me to work harder, but it also added to my anxiety.

My anxiety became sheer panic when, almost a week or so later, Joseph Kabae, the king’s man, turned up in our house. He smelled of alcohol but was his affable self. It was early in the evening. He had a belt from which hung a holstered gun. He was passing by and, remembering that he had never come to visit, he thought he would stop in just to ask, How are you? he explained. My mother made him a cup of tea, but there was not much flow of words between stepmother and stepson. I was sure of the thoughts in my mother’s head:
Why so soon after Good Wallace’s visit by night? The questions I always had now came back: Why was this man, who had fought white people in the Second World War, not out in the mountains fighting against the white settlers? Then suddenly he turned to me: You are about to take exams, I know. Don’t fear the exams. They are just words on paper; attack them with the pen. The pen is your weapon. Then he took out his gun from the holster and held it in front of my face. He wanted me to touch it, maybe to drive out the fear in me, but I didn’t. My mother’s eyes were cold with disapproval, and there was a discernible collective sigh of relief when he left. His visit so soon after that of Wallace left a cloud of fear and anxiety: In taking out his gun, was Kabae showing off or conveying a message? It was notable that he never mentioned the brother in the mountains. I took it in the most positive light: He was the most highly educated in our family; maybe he was genuinely coming to wish me well. The guerrilla and the king’s soldier had both come to say almost identical words to me.

The eve of the exams brought back the kind of fear and anxiety that I had felt on the eve of circumcision. It was the fear of the unknown, where the consequences of failure were clear but those of success were not. Now there would not be any direct communal involvement, just me and my notebooks. There was the three-mile walk to Loreto, and I was hoping that I would get there on time.

I had never been to Loreto Convent School, though I had seen its students in passing. The day I would have gone there, to convert to Catholicism, I was turned away by Kenneth’s
mother. And now, at long last, I was there, though for a different purpose. The contrast with Kĩnyogori was remarkable. The buildings, from the church to the classrooms, were surrounded by lots of land, with well-mowed grass and well-trimmed hedges. Farther out were paddocks with cows, their udders full, grazing peacefully. The classrooms were joined by corridors in which one could have gotten lost, but some girls had been assigned to guide us to the exam room. And wonder of wonders: They had toilets that one flushed after use, and the waste would disappear. Ours at Kĩnyogori and earlier at Manguo were pit latrines. The girls told us that they had shower rooms too. In everything, their style of life was far above ours. I could not recall a more intimidating environment.

But most dazzling were the school uniforms—red dresses, so colorful in contrast with our drab khaki. I could not keep my eyes off the girls: They all looked equally beautiful, intelligent, radiant, sinless, ready to be received into a heavenly choir of angels. One or two nuns in their habits hovered. I don’t know what was more daunting, the school environment as a whole, or the room where we sat behind desks, spaced in such a manner as to make it impossible to cast an eye on our neighbor’s answer sheets. The proctor was a white education officer from Nairobi who, after preliminary instructions, sat in front but would sometimes walk between the rows to ensure that there was no cheating. The exams took four days to complete. On the first, there was registration, orientation, and the assignment of a number in lieu of one’s name. The other three were each devoted to one
or two subjects, including math, English, Swahili, history, geography, and civics. I was nervous, almost paralyzed, as I looked at each exam in front of me and at the girls in red, who seemed at ease with themselves. But the moment I put pen to paper I felt a kind of animated serenity. Every day brought the same anxieties and the same attempts to calm my emotions, and then serenity. On the English exam I had an unexpected encounter with my recent past. Among the questions was a passage meant to test our comprehension. Read this and answer the following questions. The passage was taken from Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
. The passage did not contain the title of the book or the author’s name. But it had signature lines and phrases: “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest / Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum.” It was probably incomprehensible to many candidates, who complained about it afterward, but for Kenneth and me, who understood the context, it was a reward for our extracurricular readings.

By the fourth and last day I was exhausted in body and mind. It was a relief when it was all over.

Over, too, for me, were my years at Kĩnyogori. The struggle for school from Kamandũra School, through Manguo Karĩng’a, to Kĩnyogori Intermediate, a government school; the ups and downs in the fortune of my mother’s house; the drums of war in the country—any of these events could have derailed me from my educational track. Now it was time to say good-bye to the school and the history it carried. Sadly, it was also time to say good-bye to Mr. Kĩbicho and his library.

The weeks of waiting for exam results were among the longest of my life. We were not under the protective umbrella of a school any longer. We were subject to the same perpetual rhythm of tension bedeviling the entire population. Now and then my mother was called to the Home Guard post for questioning. Apparently somebody had revealed the other meaning of
mbembe
. But my mother was always consistent in her denial: She had been cultivating her cornfields at the time, and corn was corn; she could not see how corn could be anything else. My mother had an unflappable bearing even under the severest of conditions.

Without my being preoccupied with study and exams, my mind begins to wander. I fear that my mother’s house might fall, but mostly I fear for my brother out there in the cold of the mountains, and the fear is not made any less by the memory of his reassuring laughter the night he came home to bid me to do well. That visit was vintage Wallace—he was always doing the unexpected, at least in my eyes. There was that time when, through my child’s eyes, I had seen him as a scholar, because he studied the whole night, his feet in a basin full of cold water. But then he turned out to be a woodworker,
and whenever in the Bible I read of Joseph, the father of Jesus, a carpenter, I thought of Good Wallace. And now he had given up everything, his workshop, the secondhand car he had just bought, his wife and child, for the rough life of a freedom warrior. In reality, I had never seen Wallace as a warrior. To me he had always seemed vulnerable, and though he was considerably older than me, I had always felt protective toward him.

There was a man about my brother’s age who, because of the manner of his dress, gait, speech, and name—Mũturi, “Ironsmith,” which sounded menacing—I always felt could beat him in a physical confrontation. I was then in Kamandũra school. I wanted to warn my brother against the man’s company, especially after I learned that they were acquainted, but I did not know how to begin. I approached the subject gingerly, asking him whether they had met recently, as if I was merely interested in knowing about him. But my brother did not seem to be bothered about Mũturi one way or another, and he would ask me to concentrate on my studies and stop worrying about the whereabouts of grown-ups. His indifference to the danger I saw clearly in my mind alarmed me even more, and I never stopped being concerned until the day I heard Kahanya congratulating my brother on how he had floored Mũturi in a street fight.

Similar anxieties now revolve around Kahanya. He will surely betray my brother, and I have no way of warning Wallace about his friend’s treachery. But how could friends betray one another? Ngandi, who had seemed to know everything including what happened in the mountains; yes,
Ngandi who had told us stories of the exploits of Dedan Kĩmathi, Stanley Mathenge, and General China with details as if from an eyewitness, should surely be able to explain this. He might even know how to send a message to the mountains. But he never comes to my brother’s place anymore. Perhaps I should search for him and, I hope, by chance, run into him in the streets, but I remind myself that I am not supposed to discuss my brother’s whereabouts with anybody. Well, I never see him again. I have to sort out these contradictions alone.