Green City in the Sun (83 page)

     "O
NCE UPON A
time," Wanjiru said quietly above the sound of rain, "a very wise medicine woman lived in a hut on the bank of a river. She lived with her grandmother and her son, and they were very happy there on the bank of that river, which gave them water and fed their crops of maize, millet, and beans. One day a strange man came to the river. The medicine woman had never seen anything like him before. His skin was the color of the pale green frog, and he spoke in a language unknown to the Children of Mumbi. The medicine woman called him Mzungu, because of his strangeness."

     The women in Wanjiru's cell, huddled together against the cold, paid close attention to her tale. They had never heard this story before.

     "Now Mzungu told the medicine woman that he liked this place by the river and that he would like to live there. She said that he was welcome because there was enough food and water and sunshine for all. So he went away to build his house in another place by the river.

     "The medicine woman and her grandmother and son lived in peace
by the river. They were very happy and loved one another. And they didn't mind Mzungu for a neighbor. But then one day Mzungu got greedy."

     Christopher wriggled in his mother's lap. She had told this story before; he wanted to hear the one about how the wild turkey got his spots. Hannah, curled up against her mother's side, was asleep with three fingers in her mouth.

     In this cell, which had been constructed to hold ten people, twenty-six women, some with small children and babies, sat along the cold, damp walls or lay on the floor, listening to Wanjiru's story. It didn't matter that it wasn't a familiar, traditional tale—although those were the best—only that she provided them with distraction so that they could forget for the moment how tired they were from having worked all day in the fields, growing food for the inmates, or carrying murram for new roads, or burying the many dead. They all were hungry, but Wanjiru stopped them for a while from thinking of their supper of badly prepared maize porridge served without salt or sugar.

     "Mzungu told the medicine woman that he wanted more land, that what be had wasn't enough. So she said, 'Take what you need; there is plenty for all.' So Mzungu took more land and made his shamba bigger."

     The rain drove down on the corrugated tin roof and against the one window of the cell. Although it was still day, the light in the barracks was dim, and there were no lamps or light bulbs. There was nothing for the women to do except sleep and waken in the morning to another day of hardship, of wondering where their husbands were, of wondering when they were going to be released, of not knowing why they were in prison.

     It had to do with Mau Mau, they all knew that. But, most wondered, did the government really think
all
these women were freedom fighters? Like toothless old Mama Margaret over there, or lame Mumbi? A "rehabilitation witch doctor" had come through Compound D that afternoon, administering antioaths to the women. For many it had seemed a useless ritual because they had not taken oaths in the first place.

     "Mzungu came again to the medicine woman's hut and told her he needed still more land. And she said, 'Take what you need; there is plenty for all.' Mzungu did this day after day, until it was no longer a long walk
to his shamba. It was right next to hers! Then he said, 'I need more land,' and she said, 'Take what you need; there is plenty for all.' But Mzungu now wanted the land upon which the sacred fig tree stood, and the medicine woman said politely, 'No, my friend. You cannot have that ground, for as you can see, it belongs to Ngai, the Lord of Brightness.' "

     Wanjiru's audience murmured, pleased with the medicine woman's response. But when she told how Mzungu uprooted the tree anyway, they all cried out.

     "The medicine woman put a
thahu
upon Mzungu and all his generations to come and said that he would be cursed until the day the sacred land is returned to the Children of Mumbi."

     The women clapped and agreed all around that it had been a satisfying story. Then they settled down for the long, hungry sleep, trying to get comfortable in the one blanket each had been provided with, some trying with dry breasts to suckle babies, others weeping in memory of the homes they had been wrenched from. For most, there had been the sudden, surprise roundup in their villages; the women had been carted away in trucks separately from their men, riding away down the road to see soldiers enter their huts and come out with their arms full.

     "Mama Wanjiru!" called an urgent voice in the doorless doorway of the cell. "Come quickly! Mama Njoki is very ill!"

     Wanjiru went with the woman into the next cell, where Njoki was sitting propped up against the wall. In the watery light that came through the window, Wanjiru saw that the woman's tongue was swollen and bright red. There were also sores on her body, and her skin was curiously loose in places. "How do you feel, mama?" Wanjiru asked gently. "Have you had vomiting?" The woman nodded. "And diarrhea?" Another nod. "Does your throat burn?" Wanjiru saw how the woman's hands opened and closed repeatedly in a grasping reflex which Njoki could not control. She also recognized that delirium was not far off and beyond that, death.

     "Are there others?" Wanjiru asked the woman who had summoned her.

     Yes, there were others, but none as sick as Mama Njoki.

     "I must see Simon Mwacharo," Wanjiru told the female warder who watched over the barracks. "It's urgent!"

     The white British officer, Dwyer, was in Mwacharo's office. They had been playing cards beneath the thunderous sound of rain on the corrugated roof. Both were surprised to see Wanjiru, rain-soaked, come in. Mwacharo experienced the brief hope that she had come to give him the information he wanted, but that hope was dashed when she said, "There is an outbreak of pellagra in Compound D."

     "How do you know?"

     "I have seen the victims. Some are very sick. They will die if we don't have an improvement in our food. We need something more than maize!"

     "What are you talking about?" said Officer Dwyer. "That's all you people ever eat."

     "We need green beans! Maize alone is deficient in vitamin B."

     His eyebrows shot up. "How do
you
know something like that?" She gave the white officer a contemptuous look. "I was trained as a nursing sister in Nairobi. I understand the connection between nutrition and health. And I tell you the food in this camp is unhealthy!"

     Officer Dwyer was momentarily impressed. He had never come across an educated African woman before. "Why
should
we feed you? To build up your strength so you can go back into the forest and fight us some more?"

     "So," said Mwacharo, coming up to her, "do you want me to set out a banquet for you every night?"

     "Just let us grow beans. Or have the
daktari
dispense vitamin tablets. The pellagra will spread if we don't stop it now."

     Mwacharo grinned, and Wanjiru suddenly went cold.

     "What will you do in exchange?" he asked.

     "Please give us better food," she said softly.

     The warder put his hand on her breast and squeezed. Wanjiru closed her eyes.

     "When you give me the information I want," he said, "about the secret underground of Mau Mau and about Leopard, then I'll see you get your vitamins."

     M
AMA
N
JOKI DIED
the next day, as did two other women and three children. Wanjiru was taken off the rock quarry, where she engaged in an endless labor of breaking rocks, and was put on burial detail. In the evening she went through all the cells of Compound D and saw that the pellagra was getting worse.

     She began her protest among the women of her own cell, and from there it spread to the entire compound. "Mothers of Kenya!" she cried. "They are killing us with their miserable food! We must unite and resist! We cannot let them murder us in this insidious way! Do not let tribalism keep us from forming a united front! We should not be Kikuyu or Luo or Wakamba; we must remember that we all are Kenyan mothers and are fighting for our children's future!"

     As a punishment for her insurrectionist talk Wanjiru, along with Mama Ngina, Kenyatta's wife, was made to carry the prisoners' excrement pails.

     But she continued to preach to the inmates, stirring them up, so that finally Wanjiru was locked up in solitary confinement, without her children, for twenty-one days. But even from there Wanjiru continued to organize a food strike. Knowing that the guards were non-Kikuyu, she sang songs at night, her voice ringing out over the compound, and in her Kikuyu songs she told the mothers of Kenya to refuse the gruel that was given to them in the morning, and to lay aside their hoes, and to refuse to carry murram until the food was improved.

     When she was released, blinking in the sun, three weeks later, Wanjiru found to her joy that her plan had worked; the women had listened to her songs and had done as she instructed. The food boycott had resulted in a concession of bean plots and a weekly distribution of vitamin tablets.

     But it was too late, she learned, for little Hannah.

     "We did what we could," the women in Wanjiru's cell told her. "But the help came too late. Now she cannot eat."

     Wanjiru sat and rocked the listless child in her arms, singing a Kikuyu lullaby while Christopher watched with big, solemn eyes. In the middle of the night Hannah stirred, said, "Mama," and died.

     The next morning Wanjiru herself dug the grave, one of many from the pellagra outbreak, and returned her daughter to the earth of Mother Africa.

     T
HEY HAD BEEN
at it for hours; Wanjiru could hardly stand up any longer. Simon Mwacharo never ceased his interminable questions: "Who did you take orders from? Where was your forest camp? Who is Leopard?"

     It even proved to be too long a session for Officer Dwyer, who finally got up and left.

     "Let me sleep," Wanjiru said. "Please..."

     "After you tell me what I want to know. Give me the Mau Mau information, and you can have anything you want. I promise."

     Wanjiru felt light-headed. She hadn't eaten in more than a day, and Simon Mwacharo had kept her standing for hours.

     "Stupid woman," he said, "your stubbornness will be your death sentence, don't you know that? And if you don't care about yourself, then what about your son?"

     She thought of Christopher, back in the cell in the care of the other women.
If he must die for
uhuru,
then so be it
, Wanjiru thought.
I will not betray my cause just to save my life or my son's.

     "Tell me what I want to know," Mwacharo said, "or I shall force it from you."

     He walked to the door and locked it. When he gave a signal to the four askaris, Wanjiru suddenly came alert.

     "You've had this coming for a long time," he said as he started to unbuckle his belt. "With your vitamins and boycotts and superior ways. I'll show you what you really are. I'll show you what you deserve. And cry out all you want; if anyone hears you, he won't interfere."