Echoes From a Distant Land (29 page)

Jelani warned Gikuri to take care. ‘If he ever catches you, you will be in trouble.'

‘Catch me? That fat fart. He couldn't outrun a turtle.'

Jelani liked Peter Gikuri. It was impossible to offend him, and he could always find the bright side of any situation.

When he wasn't taunting the likes of Visram, Gikuri carved wooden images and strung together coloured beads with the intention of selling them at the market.

When he'd stockpiled what he deemed to be a suitable collection, he showed Jelani and asked him his opinion.

‘Of your carvings, or your bead work?' Jelani asked.

‘Both.'

‘Hmm … Well, your carvings are interesting. I like that one of an elephant.'

‘It's a rhino.'

‘Really? Doesn't a rhino have only one horn?'

‘That's his ears.'

‘Oh, well.'

‘Maybe I need to do a little more carving to make the ears smaller.'

‘That would help.'

‘What about my beads?'

‘I think you had better concentrate on your carvings.'

‘You don't like my beads?'

‘Your carvings are bad, but your beads are worse.'

Gikuri spent the next week improving his work and took it to town the next market day.

Later that day he came back with the same items he'd carried in that morning, but as usual, he was not discouraged. He soon had his friends in the dormitory laughing as he recalled in detail the many insults he received about his carvings and beadwork.

 

Nasar Visram grabbed Jelani by the arm as he was on his way to class.

‘You,' the big man hissed. ‘Listen to me. Your little Kikuyu friend is very funny. But you tell him that if I catch him he will not be laughing for long. He will be very, very sorry.'

Jelani looked up into his eyes and had no doubt Visram meant it.

Later, he told Gikuri what had happened.

‘Laugh? Who does he think he is to tell me not to laugh? I will always laugh. I will laugh in his face if he comes near me. Does he think he can make me afraid of him? The big fart. No.'

 

Jelani's language skills won him a part-time clerical position in the administration's head office on his days off training. He sorted and filed management correspondence circulating to and from the many outposts of the railways' network.

The job also gave him access to the railway administration's reports on current events affecting railway operations. As such, it was a good source of economic and political commentary — topics of increasing interest to Jelani, who still worried about his parents' life on Cook's farm.

Kenya was undergoing many changes in both the rural areas and urban centres. In the cities and towns it was a period of industrial unrest. During the previous years, Indian and African leaders emerged to voice their discontent — and that of their fellow workers — about the harsh employment conditions forced upon them in city-based industries. Many of the African workers were struggling to earn enough to pay their way in the cities and at the same time support family members back home in the villages.

The city workers had a lot in common with young men — like Jelani — from upcountry, who had seen their families forced from their traditional homes to become landless squatters on farms largely owned by poor white soldier-settlers. These mainly British newcomers needed cheap labour to wheedle a living out of their small, inefficient plots; and many imposed unreasonable working and pay conditions upon their squatters.

Jelani started to take notice of the union men who occasionally came to the training institute at lunchtimes to drum up support for their cause, but it took an issue unrelated to wages and conditions for Jelani to become more involved in their activities.

 

Peter Gikuri had found some casual work on the wharf and left one afternoon to do two hours' cleaning at the warehouse supervisor's office. When he hadn't returned by ten o'clock, Jelani became worried and walked the short distance to the wharf under the light of the half-moon.

He easily eluded the
askaris
guarding the gate, and headed to the warehouse. The lights were still on in the cavernous building, and Jelani softly called Gikuri's name. There was no reply. Jelani imagined he had waited for the last of the warehouse employees to leave, then found a comfortable hiding place to take a nap. He called louder.

Nothing.

He searched the aisles piled high with bagged produce, boxes and crates until he found Gikuri lying on the stone floor, his broom beside him, in a pool of blood.

Jelani could barely recognise him. His face was bloodied and broken and he moaned when Jelani lifted him to his feet.

‘Who did this?' he asked.

One eye oozed blood and was swollen shut. Gikuri smiled, revealing broken and missing teeth.

‘You wouldn't believe it, but that fat fart can move like a cat.'

Gikuri tried to laugh and then winced, holding his ribs. They staggered together for a hundred yards before Gikuri could go no further. Jelani hoisted his arm over his shoulder and half walked, half carried him to the gate. The
askaris
refused to help him find a doctor.

‘But he works here,' Jelani insisted.

They turned their backs.

By the time Jelani and his three friends from the dormitory got Gikuri to the hospital, he was unconscious.

Jelani sat in the semi-darkness of the emergency ward and tried to put together what might have happened. Visram obviously arranged or found out about Gikuri's cleaning job, and ambushed him. Jelani could imagine Gikuri taunting him as the big man beat him, refusing to give him the satisfaction of victory. From the appearance of his injuries, the attack had been prolonged and vicious.

Jelani sent the others home and sat through the night, waiting for a report of his friend's condition. Nobody came to him so around seven the following morning, he found a doctor, who looked up the medical report from the previous night.

‘Your friend has internal injuries. Ruptured spleen, three broken ribs, a punctured lung. Multiple contusions.' He flicked the page and looked grim. ‘Was he involved in a car accident?'

Jelani shook his head. ‘No. Will he be all right?'

The doctor shook his head. ‘It's hard to know. He has a haematoma, bleeding in the brain. We need to see him awake to determine the extent of any brain damage. All we can do at the moment is wait.'

A week later, with Jelani at his bedside, Peter Gikuri died. He had never regained consciousness.

The small item on page five of the
Mombasa Post
caught Jelani's eye.

That night Jelani couldn't get the words
unauthorised entry
out of his head. Now he could see that Nasar Visram had planned the whole thing. He knew Gikuri would be in the warehouse and, when he'd cornered him and beat him almost to death, he reported the incident as an attempted robbery. It was the reason why the
askaris
on the gate would have nothing to do with Jelani when he asked for help.

The next day he skipped his classes and, with a friend's help and two hours in the headquarters' print room, they produced fifty posters promoting a rally and memorial service for Peter Gikuri.

Jelani spent the rest of the day distributing his posters, nailing them to posts and walls all over the wharf area and the East African Harbours and Railways compound.

Late that night he planned his speech and grew cold at the thought of standing in front of so many people. He'd always been self-conscious about his colour and never craved attention. For a brief moment he regretted his rash decision to hold a rally, then remembered Gikuri's battered face and terrible injuries: he resolved to carry it through for his friend.

 

Jelani climbed onto a table placed in the centre of the dormitory compound for him. Surrounding him was the entire student population, a group of stevedores, and a few whites, who stayed well away from the centre of the gathering.

‘You have all seen the newspaper report,' Jelani said in a loud voice, brandishing a page of the
Mombasa Post
. ‘
Death by misadventure
, it says. And,
Gikuri made an unauthorised entry to steal goods
. Did you hear that?
Unauthorised entry
. Isn't it enough that they allow Gikuri to be beaten to death, without making him into a thief?'

A torrent of angry voices arose from the crowd.

Jelani returned to the article. ‘
He had fallen while trying to elude the security personnel
. I was there that night, my friends. We all know the
askaris
stay sitting at their gate. But someone came up to Peter Gikuri, who was legitimately working that night, and murdered him.'

He'd strayed from his prepared speech, which was more of a eulogy, but his fury and resentment swept him onwards.

‘We all know Peter, and we all know he had one enemy. Before he died he told me the name of the person who beat him to the point of death. Will we stand for this?'

A roar went up.

‘Are we going to allow them to do this to our friend Peter Gikuri?'

‘
No!
'

Now he had no idea how to bring the rally to any other conclusion than to bring Visram to justice.

‘Will you march with me to the house of the murderer?'

‘
Yes!
'

Jelani waved them to follow him and, before leaping down from his platform, noticed that the white men at the back of the crowd had gone.

 

When Jelani's crowd of students and sympathetic workers arrived at Nasar Visram's house in Owen Road, they found another group of
protesters already there. According to their banners and handmade placards bearing scrawled slogans, they were members of two groups: the Labour Trade Union of East Africa and the Kenya African Union.

A short but strongly built man with a rimless beaded hat was addressing the crowd in Swahili through a loud-hailer. Jelani could sense the tension in the gathering. The line of administration police forming a cordon around the house appeared to be very nervous.

‘It is not enough that the government denies our just calls for a fair day's pay for a fair day's work,' the man in the beaded cap cried. ‘But now they deny justice to our fallen brother — a young man not long from his home and now murdered by one of his supervisors.'

He gave a surprisingly accurate summary of Gikuri's life in the village — he'd obviously prepared well for his address — and described how difficult it was for Africans in rural areas to survive under the heel of the colonial government.

‘And these people,' he went on, ‘in the reserves and villages, or in the squatters' camps now spread all over what was once their land, can barely survive on what they can grow. They must spend time working for the white owner so they can pay their taxes. And if they don't doff their cap and say “please,
bwana
, thank you,
bwana
”, he can put bad words on their
kipandes
, and chase them away.'

Here he held up the small metal box containing his own papers.

‘And that means they may never get another job, or never be able to find a place to stay.'

He paused, his fierce eyes glaring out at the crowd. ‘Should that be allowed?'

‘
No!
' came the loud reply.

‘Is it justice?'

‘
No!
'

‘Will you stand aside and let such injustice go unanswered?'

‘
No!
'

Jelani was touched by his eloquence. Here was a master at work. His own attempts to motivate his fellow students paled into
insignificance. The man, a Kikuyu by his accent, had captured the imagination of the crowd. They clung to his every word. When he evoked anger, they grew angry. When he wanted them to lift their voices in protest, they did so. If he needed silence he only had to lift one finger and the mob became as quiet as churchgoers. He was more than a orator: he was a maestro commanding the emotions within the crowd.

What had begun as a protest about the death of a worker had been transformed into a powerful political event without anyone noticing. Just as suddenly he was again railing against the murder.

‘Are we going to let these people beat us and kick us until, like our fallen friend, we are lying bleeding on the ground?' he cried.

‘
No!
'

Abruptly returning to his political message, he drew upon experiences in his early life to illustrate the callousness of white authority. He spoke of how the white missionaries had destroyed native Africans' traditions and religions, and in the process forced them to Christianity and capitalism. He told of land seized and villages stolen. The stories resonated in Jelani and within the crowd. Discontent and anger grew with the number of the white invaders' atrocities.

A chant commenced within the ranks of the mob. ‘
Jomo! Jomo! Jomo!
'

As it grew in intensity the speaker raised his voice.

Finally, he delivered the challenge: ‘Will we stand for this injustice?'

‘
No!
'

Jelani could hardly hear or recognise his own voice, added to the thunder of voices surrounding him. It wasn't a human sound, and he couldn't identify it as his own — it was more akin to the roar of a savage beast.

The mob surged past him, towards Visram's house. Jelani was at the rear of the crowd and followed, chanting
Jomo! Jomo! Jomo!
with everyone else.

The police held their lines against the push, using their riot sticks to belt the first line of men. Unseen by the police reinforcements
observing from the other side of the square, Visram appeared at his door with an ancient blunderbuss in his hands and waved it in the air before releasing a panicked volley over the men's heads.

Hearing the shot, the officer in charge fired his revolver. From their hiding places behind the house, two columns of reservists mounted a baton charge against the crowds' flanks.

The battle raged for ten minutes.

Jelani and his friends ran to safety before the police could arrest any of them. Others were not as lucky. Twenty men were hospitalised, and one man died from his head injuries.

The brutal bashings of his fellow students and others present shocked Jelani. But the abiding memory he took from the day was that of the speaker who had, in a short time, changed Jelani's view of matters he had previously accepted as part of life under British law. The speaker was right: the British had no right to take away land belonging to Africans. Strangely, as they repeatedly preached the need for law and order, they had behaved in a manner simply unjust.

The gnawing pain of this injustice kept him awake all that night.

 

A week after addressing his fellow students in the compound, Jelani was called into the school's head office. There were two other men present, but they were not introduced. Jelani was invited to take a seat.

‘Mr Karura,' the principal began. ‘These gentlemen here, from our security department, have informed me that you addressed a group of students in the compound last Saturday night. Is that so?'

The principal, Mr J V Pavitt, had been involved in education since arriving in East Africa from Gujarat thirty-five years before. He was a mild-mannered man, much respected among the students in the trade school. ‘Jelani,' he added with a smile, ‘you don't have to answer if you don't want to.'

Jelani looked from Pavitt to the two other men. They were hard-faced, clearly more accustomed to breaking heads than educating
them. He imagined they were among the white faces he'd spotted at the back of the crowd that day.

‘I was there,' he said.

‘And what was the purpose of the gathering?'

‘It was about Peter Gikuri.'

‘A commemorative meeting?' Pavitt offered.

Jelani didn't understand the term.

‘A meeting to farewell your friend, Mr Gikuri.'

Jelani nodded.

‘And what 'appened after that, eh?' It was the closest of the other two who spoke.

Jelani hesitated.

Pavitt sent Jelani an intense look, indicating he should be cautious, but Jelani didn't know how and wasn't sure why.

‘You took your gang down to Nasar Visram's house, didn't you?' the second white security man demanded.

Again Jelani kept silent.

The man leaned forwards in his chair. ‘Just because one of your friends — a cheeky black bastard — gets what was comin' to him, you get all upset about it. Ain't that so, eh?'

Jelani bristled.

‘If I had my way, I'd have a few of my lads into that dormitory of yours and teach you a lesson about obeyin' the law. As for your little mate, well … he got what he deserved, he did. The thievin' little prick!'

‘He was not a thief! He was working and Visram beat him to death.'

‘And you decided to do something about it.'

‘Yes, we marched to his house to show he can't get away with it. Nobody can.'

‘So you led the march?'

‘Of course. What else could I do? He was a friend.'

The security man nodded, smiling.

Pavitt looked ill and let his shoulders slump.

 

As Jelani packed his handful of belongings into a burlap maize sack, he tried to imagine his future. The man from the Harbours and Railways security department spitefully told him that his name would be circulated throughout Mombasa, and nobody would employ him now. There was no opportunity to return to Nairobi and his previous job in the railways, and he couldn't face going back to his shoeshine business. An ignominious return, empty-handed, to Cook's farm appeared to be his only option.

A man appeared at the door and spoke to the nearest student.

‘That's him, there,' the student said, pointing to Jelani.

The man introduced himself as Chege Muthuri, and asked Jelani if he could talk to him in private.

Jelani shrugged and followed the man into the night, making a gesture to the other members of the dorm that said
I have no idea
.

Outside, Muthuri came to the point.

‘I've heard you've been sacked,' he said in Kikuyu.

Jelani looked at him, wondering how he knew.

‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘I'm the secretary of the Transport and Allied Workers' Union. We have friends here. There's not much that happens in the railways that I don't hear about.'

Jelani shrugged. ‘I've been sacked for conspiracy to damage railway property.' It was still painful to talk about it, knowing that his hopes of becoming a qualified electrical mechanic were at an end.

‘What property?'

‘Visram's house.'

‘Were you the one who spoke to the students that night?'

He nodded.

‘Incitement. That's how they brought the conspiracy charge against you — it's instant dismissal. And that's the reason I came to see you. The union can use your help.'

‘Me?'

‘We're looking for young leaders. People who can speak to other young people.'

‘But what do I have to say?' His old worries about drawing attention to himself returned.

‘Only what you want to say. You could speak about your friend who died. You can speak about your life in the reserve or on someone else's farm. It's usually one or the other. You'll be speaking to people who are looking for freedom.'

‘Freedom from what? All we want is food and a place to farm it.'

‘Freedom gives you that. Freedom from the imperialist British.'

Jelani looked at him. Muthuri truly believed what he said.

‘How is that possible?'

‘Listen, my friend,' the union man said. ‘The black Africans are forming strong groups to take over when the whites leave. Yes, you think it is a strange thing to say, but even now we have many men, educated men, strong men, who are preparing for what will come. They are in the unions and political parties like the Kikuyu Central Association and the Kenya African Union. One day the KAU will be in government.'