Green City in the Sun (44 page)

     "I'll never leave you again, Grace."

     She smiled sadly and laid her hand on his bare chest. If she never had anything else again, she had last night. "No, James. You must go back. Your life is with Lucille and your children. We don't have the right."

     "We have the right by our love for each other."

     "And how would we live?"

     "I'll go back to Kilima Simba." But even as he said it, James heard the hollowness of his words. The pain of it made him draw her tighter to him. "I have loved you for ten years, Grace. There were times when it was torture just to be near you. I thought going to Uganda would make it easier. But I have thought about you every day since we left."

     "And I have thought about you. I will never stop loving you, James. My life and my soul belong to you."

     He raised up on one elbow and looked down at her. He memorized every detail of her face, of her hair on the pillow, the curve of her collarbone. The image would go back with him into the Uganda jungle.

     "I'm going to write that book," she said, "the medical handbook for rural workers. I shall dedicate it to you, James." She reached up and touched his cheek. The lines in his face were more deeply etched; his skin was more sunburned. She knew he would never be more handsome than he was at this moment.

     James kissed her, and they began again, for the last time.

D
AVID
M
ATHENGE STRETCHED IN THE EARLY DAWN
. H
E
looked over at his mother's hut, where she still lay sleeping, and thought of the
ugali
left over from their supper the night before.

     He was hungry. It seemed to him he was always hungry these days, starved, in fact, not just for food but for other things, for the freedom to change his way of life, for the chance to make the fiery and untouchable Wanjiru his. At nineteen David Kabiru Mathenge was a youth who was all appetite. His tall, wiry body was fired by an energy and restlessness he could barely control. With each dawn that he rose and stepped out of the bachelor hut he had built for himself, it seemed to him that the world had shrunk a little more during the night. Even now he squinted in the morning opalescence and was sure the river had gotten smaller, the bank narrower. He felt as if he were being squeezed in from all sides. David wanted to break out of this suffocating, tiny world and escape into the bigger one where he could breathe, where he could be a man.

     Wanjiru.

     He had hardly slept for thinking of her,
burning
for her. What sort of magic spell had been cast on him that he was so consumed with sexual desire? But David knew it was not witchcraft that made him hunger for Wanjiru; it was the girl herself.

     Perhaps physically Wanjiru could not be considered a beauty. Her face was round and a bit ordinary, but her body was desirable; she was tall with large, jutting breasts and firm, strong legs. However, it was Wanjiru's spirit that inflamed David, the cold fire in her eyes, the heat in her voice, her refusal to be docile and humble even in the presence of men.
Especially
in the presence of men! Wanjiru had disrupted more than one peaceful political meeting under a fig tree by speaking up, boldly and loudly, trying to incite the men into rash action instead of, as she put it, just saying words, words, words. They resented this, of course. The men didn't like Wanjiru; they avoided her because she had gone to school and could read and write and, though they wouldn't admit it, knew more about colonial policy than some of them. She was an outcast among the clan for her defiance of the British and for her intractable stand on elevating the status of African women. Wanjiru embarrassed the young men who were David's friends; she made them uncomfortable. They would laugh nervously when she passed by and make lewd remarks. But there was lust in the eyes of not a few of them, David had seen, when Wanjiru appeared.

     She was both a gladness to his heart and a curse. Thoughts of her made his spirit soar, but thoughts of her burdened him also. He found himself thinking more and more of the old custom of
ngweko
, which was still practiced in the villages but which was dying out because of pressure from the missionaries.

     
Ngweko
means "fondling" in Kikuyu, and it was a form of ritualistic intimate contact between young people before marriage. Boys and girls would congregate for dances and parties; partners would be chosen, and the couples would pair off into huts. Once alone, the young man would take off all his clothes, the girl her upper garment, retaining her leather apron and tying it back between her legs for modesty. Then the pair would lie down on the bed facing each other, intertwine their legs, and engage in affectionate fondling of breasts and torsos while carrying on a conversation of lovemaking
until they fell asleep.
Ngweko
did not culminate in sexual intercourse, for that was taboo, nor might the girl touch the boy's member, nor he draw aside her apron, and should a boy impregnate a girl, he would have to pay a fine of nine goats to her father and the girl must provide a feast for all the men in her age-group.

     Lately David had spent his nights lying in bed thinking about Wanjiru. In his fantasy she would come unexpectedly to his
thingira
, his bachelor hut, with food and sugarcane beer. They would lie down face to face as custom demanded and caress each other. In his dream they had been doing this already for a period of time so that it was now permissible for him to put his penis between her thighs and there experience relief, provided he did not fully penetrate her. But that was not necessary to his fantasy. David would be satisfied with just
orugane wa nyondo
, "the warmth of her breast," which was the Kikuyu way of love.

     If Wanjiru were like any other Kikuyu girl, he would approach her father, offer a price, and buy her. Then he would bring her back here, build her a hut next to his mother's, and visit her bed whenever he wished. But Wanjiru was not like any other girl. The first problem was with her education. She was the only educated girl David knew, although he was aware there were others in Kenya and that their numbers were growing. Wanjiru was therefore taboo, unfit to be a wife, and buying her would make David an outcast among his friends. The second problem lay with his mother; Wachera did not approve of Wanjiru because she had sat in a schoolroom with boys and wore European dresses and spoke up in the company of men. But David's biggest problem with Wanjiru was quite simply that she didn't know he existed.

     His mother came out of her hut now, greeting him and going down to the river with her waterpot. He watched her, his heart filled with pride.

     Wachera had withstood the forces of change and "Europeanization," and because she had defied the white man's law against the practice of tribal medicine and lived by herself without a husband, her mystique and revered status had grown over the years so that now she was a living legend among the Kikuyu.

     Unbidden, Njeri came to David's mind.

     How different his half sister was from the other two women in his life! She wore dresses such as Wanjiru wore, castoffs from Bwana Lordy's wife, but she had none of Wanjiru's fight and spirit. Also seventeen years old, like Wanjiru, Njeri was docile and uncomplaining in the old way, but she hated the old ways and exhibited a demeaning adoration of the
wazungu.

     Njeri desperately wanted to be white, David knew. She despised her blackness and believed the white man's lies about the inferiority of her own race. She clung to Memsaab Mkubwa as if her life required it, spending all her days in the eucalyptus glade at the memsaab's feet. Everywhere the memsaab went, Njeri followed—ever since the journey to England eight years ago. Thoughts of his sister shamed David. She pierced his heart in a way Wanjiru never could. He had come upon Njeri one day down at the river scraping her body all over with a pumice stone until she bled. She had been trying to scrape off her blackness.

     As the morning came to life with birds and monkeys filling the trees with their news, David forced his thoughts away from the three women in his life and reminded himself of the important appointment he must soon keep.

     When he had received an unexpected reply to the letter he had written to the
Times
in England, David had called for a meeting of the Young Kikuyu Alliance, the political organization he and his friends had formed two years ago. The meeting today was to serve two purposes: to circulate the petition he had drawn up demanding that the government provide a university for Africans in Kenya and to show his brothers the letter he had received from Jomo Kenyatta.

     That name was becoming famous throughout Kenya, with an aura of power about it. Jomo lived in England as a student, and he regularly wrote articles for the
Times
, which made its way into the hands of the hot-blooded Kikuyu youth in the Central Province. In his writings for the English people Jomo Kenyatta explained his tribal ways, clarified African mysteries, and strove to speak to the British public on behalf of black independence. In England he was being labeled "agitator." Among the Kenya youth he was becoming a symbol of their fight.

     Everyone knew that the man's name had once been Johnstone Kamau,
but the reason for the change and what it meant were unknown and much speculated upon. The prevailing theory was that Kenyatta had named himself for the ornamental belt he wore, the
kinyata
, but David knew the real story. He never forgot the night his mother had taken him into the forest, where a young Johnstone Kamau had addressed a secret group. She had told that young man of her prophecy, that he would one day be "Kenya's lamp,"
Kenya taa.

     Recalling that meeting now, David saw that it paled in comparison with the ones now taking place all over Kenya. Nationalism was emerging; African self-awareness was starting to spread. The sparks that Kenyatta had struck that night of eight years ago had ignited a brush fire that the British were helpless to stamp out. The length and width of the colony, among all the tribes from the Luo people on Lake Victoria to the Swahili on the coast, political consciousness was on the rise.

     David had formed the Young Kikuyu Alliance because he and his friends found the Kikuyu Loyal Patriots too moderate and the Kikuyu Central Association admitted only elders. The youth needed an outlet, and they needed a spokesman. David Kabiru was their elected leader for three reasons: He carried the Mathenge name, which spelled power to every Kikuyu; he was an excellent speaker and unafraid to voice his opinions; and above all, he was recognized as being the most intelligent and educated of his peers.

     Four years ago he had gone from Grace Treverton's primary school into the Secondary School for Boys in Nyeri, a high school established by the Local Native Council when families, determined to resist the missionary fight against female circumcision and the new rule that said no African who had undergone tribal initiation could attend a mission school, had pulled their children from those schools and had united to build their own. David had left Grace's small school the star pupil. Memsaab Daktari, having seen early the boy's brightness and quickness to learn, had taken it upon herself to give him extra tutoring and gifts of books on special occasions. David had read those books avidly and retained everything.

     When he entered the high school, he was already far ahead of the other boys, and so the headmaster had written a special curriculum for David Mathenge, which the boy had followed with stunning success, astounding
his white teachers. And when he sat for his final exams, David's results were better than many achieved at the Prince of Wales School, the Europeans' leading school. He now held the O level of the Cambridge School Certificate and had applied to the prestigious Makerere University in Uganda, from which he was now anxiously awaiting word.

     In Uganda David was going to study agriculture. His mother had promised him that the Treverton land was going to be his one day, and he wanted to be prepared.

     But it was not an easy wait. David was in a hurry to be doing something, to be climbing to higher achievements. When he had left the high school with his precious certificate and a mind that was sharp and full of ideas and thirsty for knowledge, David had found no post waiting for him. The few Africans who held positions in offices or wore the white man's badge had gotten them through "favors" and servility. David Mathenge was simply another educated "boy." Memsaab Grace had gotten him the job that he now worked at for twelve shillings a month, slaving for her brother as a clerk in a wooden shack next to the coffee processing sheds upriver. David sat at a table for twelve hours a day, making marks in a ledger. He recorded coffee production and kept African labor cards. He was allowed no breaks but brought his lunch wrapped in a banana leaf and ate it while he worked; he never handled money, and whenever a white man came into the shed, David had to stand respectfully.