Green City in the Sun (47 page)

     "You cannot say 'peaceful fight,' Mathenge. The two words oppose and cancel each other out."

     "Through peaceful resistance we will show superiority to the white man, as Gandhi in India is doing."

     Wanjiru spat in the dirt. "Does the lion show its superiority to the jackal through peaceful resistance?" She turned to the crowd and raised her arms. "The British do not understand peaceful negotiations because they themselves stole our land by
force.
Violence is the only language they understand!"

     The audience shifted like a tide. Half wanted to act immediately, with clubs and spears; the other half looked nervously around for informers and police. Ironically, it was the old men who constituted the former; the young men, the latter.

     Wanjiru climbed up onto the giant stump, drew up next to David, and seized his arm. Close to his ear she hissed, "I was there the night you first
heard Jomo Kenyatta in the forest! Have you forgotten his message?
I have not!"

     David's eyes flew open. He stared at her, stunned. Her fingers dug deep into his biceps, painfully. Her eyes, inches from his, shot a look through his brain that seemed to sear the back of his skull.
Now. He wanted to take her now.

     "This meeting is over" came a deep, authoritative voice. "Go home now, all of you."

     Wanjiru and David looked down and saw Chief John Muchina forcing the mob apart with his silver-tipped walking stick; askaris, soldiers, escorted him.

     "Come down from there, David Kabiru," Muchina ordered. "Go home and forget all this nonsense."

     David stared down at the formidable chief. On the edge of his vision he saw the crowd starting to disperse, was aware of his friends looking to him for guidance, felt Wanjiru's firm breast pressing against his bare back.

     He said, "I am breaking no laws, mzee."

     "I told you before, son, not to give such speeches. You are deliberately defying me. Go home now, peacefully, and I will let the matter drop."

     "We are gathered here for important business, mzee."

     The chief clucked and shook his head. "You are young and restless, David Kabiru, the same as your own father was years ago. Heed the proverb that says, 'Great hurry in digging will break the yam tuber, leaving the best part in the ground, but go slowly and you will reap the whole of it.'"

     David jumped down and faced the chief squarely. They formed an odd tableau, the handsome, sinewy youth wearing only khaki shorts and the fat gray-haired chief in his long white kanzu and leopardskin over one shoulder.

     "Proverbs," said David. "Is that all you offer us?"

     The crowd froze. Wanjiru on the stump caught her breath. Muchina's eyes narrowed. "I said to go home now, boy, before you are in real trouble."

     David thought of the girl standing behind him, her arrogant black eyes watching him. He steeled himself and said, "We are all in trouble, mzee, with chiefs like you."

     It seemed that all Africa fell silent then, that an entire continent turned
a shocked face toward the mere boy who was challenging the authority of a chief and, behind that chief, the British Empire. What none of the startled eyes saw that August morning on the edge of Nyeri town was the fear in David Mathenge. He knew the risk he was taking; he had heard of the "accidents" that happened in prison to men who opposed Muchina. But there was Wanjiru, watching, listening, doubting David's manhood and bravery. He had to save face in front of the girl; he had to stand fast against Muchina as if he were a warrior of old stalking his first lion. None of the onlookers was aware of the gripping in David's bowels, of the terror constricting his throat. They saw only the sudden and unexpected birth of a new and necessary hero.

     John Muchina boiled with rage. As the seconds ticked by, he weighed the situation. These political upstarts were becoming more and more of a nuisance, like that agitator overseas Jomo Kenyatta; they threatened his comfortable arrangement with the British. Old John Muchina hated this new educated generation. They were intelligent and bright and could make fine speeches, while he could not even read or write and had never gone to school.

     "Do you have something to say to me, boy?" he asked in a low, cautioning tone.

     A thousand ears hung upon David's reply. Wanjiru, towering over them like a black Liberty, wanted to speak, but even she knew to be silent in the presence of a chief.

     A fine sweat broke out over David's body. "This is what I have to say," he said above the pounding of his heart. "I say that the British who appointed chiefs among the Kikuyu did so arbitrarily and with no thought to a man's competence or desire to help his people. I say that the chiefs appointed by white men do not provide adequate tribal representation in the government, that they do not represent tribal tradition, that they exist in a capacity that is foreign to the Kikuyu way of life, and that the chiefs' only interest is in preserving the status quo."

     Muchina clenched his jaw. "You speak, then, of your own father, Chief Mathenge."

     "I do. It was through his stupidity and the stupidity of our fathers
that we now have no land. They had no right to sell our inheritance to the white man."

     If David had physically struck the chief, he could have not caused a greater insult, for John Muchina was older than a hundred harvests and therefore was of David's father's generation, and so he, too, had sold his land to the white man in exchange for the badge of office he wore today.

     "You are being led toward the prison by your impudent tongue, boy." Muchina lowered his voice so that only David could hear. "If I put you behind bars, you will never see daylight again."

     David suppressed a shudder. He turned to the crowd and said in a strong voice, "Look at your chief who tries to run with the impala and hunt with the lion!"

     Muchina gestured to the askaris. They started to come forward.

     Inflamed, meeting Wanjiru's fiery eyes, David shouted, "Our chiefs are like dogs! They bark when other dogs bark, but they do tricks when they want their British masters to feed them!"

     When two soldiers seized David by his arms, his voice rose. "Chief Muchina is a Judas Iscariot!"

     "Arrest him."

     David struggled against the men who held him. "Listen to me!" he cried to the crowd, which was growing nervous and agitated. A few men had picked up stones; the elders were suddenly hefting their walking staffs and realizing how much they felt like the spears of the old days. "Why do we want to become like Europeans?" David cried. "How many Europeans have you seen who wish to become like the Kikuyu?"

     
"Eyh!"
cried the mob.

     Muchina raised his silver-tipped cane to silence them, and when order prevailed, he opened his mouth to speak. Instead, the crowd heard David say, "Remember, brothers, that the man who does not love his country does not love his mother and father and the people of his country. And a man who does not love his mother or father or his own people cannot love God!"

     The silver-tipped stick came slamming down on David's head. It made a great obscene cracking noise in the morning stillness. David's head snapped back, but he recovered and turned a venomous eye on the chief. They glared
at each other for one cold instant; then Muchina gestured for David to be taken away.

     But the crowd was suddenly disrupted. From the rear a commotion began, and it rippled to the front until the chief had to call for order again. This time, when the crowd obeyed, they parted in two halves, forming a path down the center, and at its end stood the reason for the commotion.

     It was David's mother, Wachera.

     When the chief saw her, a few in the crowd caught the brief tremor in his stolid demeanor. It was no secret that John Muchina went often to the medicine woman's hut in the middle of the night to confer on grave tribal taboos. If everyone in the district was afraid of Chief Muchina, Chief Muchina was afraid of Wachera.

     David focused his blurred eyes on her, tried to see her through the blood trickling into his eyes from the wound in his scalp. She appeared to him as almost unreal, as if she were an ancestress who had been conjured up from the mists. She stood in her soft leather dress and aprons, her heavy layers of bead necklaces and bracelets and anklets, her ceremonial belts with their magic charms sewn on. Wachera's smoothly shaved skull was held high as her eyes looked across the space between her and her son. She spoke to him with that look; she said things to him no one else could read.

     And he knew in that instant that his mother was not going to rescue him from prison and certain torture.

     "White injustice will be the forge that hammers you into manhood, my son," she had said once, and her eyes said it again now. "Suffer first; then you will have the strength and courage to reclaim our land."

     When Chief Muchina realized that Wachera was not going to interfere, he barked an order at the askaris and hurried away with his prisoner, leaving behind a confused mob, a mother filled with love and pride and pain, and, on the giant stump of the fig tree, forgotten, a transformed seventeen-year-old Wanjiru, who clutched her hands to her breast and, watching David Mathenge being marched away, saw the new purpose in her life.

A
RTHUR
T
REVERTON PRAYED HE WOULDN'T HAVE A SEIZURE
. Today's parade was going to be the biggest ever held in Kenya, and he was going to be the most important person in it. The eyes of the colony, it seemed to the anxious fifteen-year-old, would be upon him as he officially launched the week of celebrations. It was going to be the first chance in his life to prove himself finally.

     A red ribbon had been strung across Nairobi's main street, and at an appointed moment Arthur, riding ahead of the parade, was to gallop down the dirt street with his saber held high, swoop upon the ribbon, and cut it before hundreds of spectators, thus marking the official renaming of Central Road to Lord Treverton Avenue.

     Arthur was nervous and excited. The grandstands that had been erected on either side of the road, between the Stanley Hotel and the Post Office, were filled with officials and visiting dignitaries. His mother, Lady Rose, was already under her special canopy, smiling serenely and queenlike. Next to her, his father, the earl, was seated beneath a portrait of the King. The boy
knew that his father would watch him with the critical, dispassionate gaze Arthur had grown up fearing and adoring.

     But even more vital to Arthur than pleasing his father was his performance today in front of Alice Hopkins, who, by virtue of owning the second-largest ranch in Kenya, had also been given a seat in the coveted grandstands.

     Alice Hopkins was twenty-two years old, remarkable neither for beauty nor for charm, but something of a legend in East Africa because of her single-handed taking over of a ninety-thousand-acre ranch upon the sudden death of her parents six years ago, when she was only sixteen. Everyone had said at the time that she could never manage the enormous holding alone, and speculation had run high upon who would be the lucky purchaser of the land. Valentine Treverton had been among the prospective buyers and one of the many who had been impressed by young Alice's fight to keep her land and work it with no more help than a few loyal Africans and her brother, Tim, younger by five years. Against immeasurable odds she had saved the sheep and the sisal, had stayed out of debt, had not played into the hands of the fortune hunters who came around, and had emerged solidly successful and independent at age twenty-two.

     And she had paid only one price: her femininity.

     It was the hard and dour Alice Hopkins, whose mouth had forgotten how to smile, sitting in her khaki trousers and homespun shirt, her sunburned face hidden beneath the wide brim of a man's bushwhacker's hat, whom Arthur Treverton hoped to impress and win over on this August afternoon, because Alice stood between him and her seventeen-year-old brother, Tim Hopkins, with whom Arthur was desperately in love.

     The staging area for the parade was the grounds of the Norfolk Hotel. Tables loaded with champagne and food stood beneath trees, and music came from a gramophone. It was mostly young people who had constructed the floats and who would ride on them, and they rushed about now making last-minute adjustments to costumes and checking the engines of the cars pulling the floats, their laughter and excitement filling the cool August morning.

     "Do I look all right, Mona?" Arthur asked his sister as he ran his hands down the immaculate jodphurs of the borrowed hunting clothes.

     "You look smashing!" Mona said, giving him a hug.

     It had been marvelous, she thought, of Hardy Acres, Jr., the banker's son, to lend Arthur his complete hunting outfit. The minute Arthur had put it on, he had seemed to grow two feet. Mona prayed that her brother would perform successfully today. Opening up this parade meant so much to him.

     Arthur had no idea that his sister was responsible for his having the honor of cutting the ribbon. When she had heard that that distinction was being awarded to the governor's nephew, and when she had seen how her brother's face had glowed with envy at the news, she had launched a secret campaign to persuade her father that the privilege of opening up Lord Treverton Avenue should, after all, fall to a Treverton. Valentine had finally conceded, not so much, Mona knew, because he agreed with his daughter or because he cared what she thought as because she could be such an annoyance when she took up a cause. Mona knew how to handle her father. She didn't use his love for her as a means of getting her way, as other daughters might, because she knew there wasn't any love there. What Mona did was persist until he gave in, to be left in peace.