Petals of Blood (21 page)

Karega was not sure what he really expected of the place and the people. He had responded to Wanja’s call as if he were accepting his destiny. Yes, a covenant with fate, he thought, for the future seemed a yawning blank without a break or an opening, like the sky above them. But what was it that stirred, rippled dormant pools of blood at the sight of Wanja? Why this sudden pain at a presence that was really only a memory? Fate, he again decided, remembering Mukami, and he was seized with sadness and vague bitterness. But he was grateful to Munira that he had said he would hire him as a teacher. From a seller of sheepskins in Limuru to a teacher of children in Ilmorog: that anyway was a beginning.

Munira also explained to him why Ilmorog school was without teachers. During the colonial days African teachers could only teach in African schools. All the African schools were of much the same standard: poorly equipped, poor houses, and limited aids. But at least they got the best of the African teachers available.

But after internal self-government, the colour bar in schools admissions and the allocation of teachers was removed. The result was that while the former African schools remained equally poorly equipped, they now also lost the best of the African teachers. These were attracted to the former Asian and European schools which remained
as high-cost schools with better houses, equipment, teaching aids. Some schools in remote places like Ilmorog were almost completely abandoned to their own rural fate.

Karega felt good: his teaching career would have added significance. Cambridge Fraudsham used to tell them that teaching was a calling, a vocation, and hence satisfying to the soul. Karega swore to give everything he had to the children in Ilmorog.

But the Ilmorog they now came to was one of sun, dust, and sand. Wanja and Karega were especially struck by the change in the face of Ilmorog countryside.

‘So green in the past,’ she said. ‘So green and hopeful . . . and now this.’

‘A season of drought . . . so soon . . . so soon!’ echoed Karega, remembering past flowers of promise.

‘It is the way of the world,’ said Munira as they stood by the bicycle, skins glazed dry, coughing and sneezing out dust from cracked throats and noses, watching specks of dry maize-stalk whirled to the sky.

They found Nyakinyua and Abdulla and Joseph standing outside the shop.

They evinced no surprise or curiosity at seeing them and Munira felt a slight deflation of the spirits. Not even a question!

‘We were discussing Abdulla’s donkey,’ Nyakinyua explained by way of welcome.

‘What has happened to it?’ Wanja asked quickly, noticing the heaviness on Abdulla’s face. Was this the place where she was hoping to make a new mark?

‘The elders want it killed,’ she continued. ‘Some think they should beat it and then let it loose in the plains to carry this plague away.’

‘A donkey? I thought that only a goat was used in the ritual?’ Karega said.

‘Who is this one?’ Nyakinyua asked.

‘He is Karega,’ Wanja explained. ‘He comes from Abdulla’s place, Limuru, and he will help in the school.’

‘Our new teacher,’ added Munira.

‘In this drought? God bless you,’ she said.

They all sat down outside Abdulla’s shop and Munira asked for a beer to wash down the dust in his throat.

‘That donkey is my other leg,’ Abdulla moaned. ‘They want me to cut it off and throw it away. A second sacrifice.’

‘But a donkey has no influence on the weather,’ Karega commented, and he too asked for a drink.

‘Joseph, bring another beer for your new teacher,’ said Abdulla. ‘I thought you didn’t drink.’

‘Things have changed,’ Karega said thoughtfully, remembering their last encounter in Wanja’s hut six months back. ‘I should say times have changed,’ he added.

‘It is the drought . . .’ Nyakinyua was explaining. ‘Grass is scarce, only a few stems will soon be left. The question is this: to whom shall we give it, donkeys or goats?’

‘The one carried on his mother’s stomach: and the other carried on his mother’s back: how can we choose between them? Aren’t they all our children?’ Abdulla countered.

What a homecoming! A second homecoming to an argument about droughts, Munira was thinking, and no questions about the drama they left behind.

‘The drought will pass away. This is only March,’ Munira said. ‘We might drive away the rains by this talk.’

‘Yes. It will rain in March and grass will grow,’ echoed Wanja, hopefully, eagerly: it had to rain otherwise they were ruined; the whole community would be ruined. ‘Abdulla,’ she called out, ‘aren’t you glad to see your barmaid return?’

They laughed. They became a little relaxed.

‘Go wash off the dust first. Else you’ll drive away my customers. They will take you for a daughter of the drought.’

2 ~ Karega worked as a UT – an untrained teacher – in Ilmorog Primary School under its new headmaster, Godfrey Munira. Munira had taken him to the HQ and Mzigo, after his usual inquiries and promises to visit the area, had agreed to hire him ‘on the strength of Mr Munira’s recommendation and assurance about your character and good behaviour. Mr Munira has set very high standards and I
would like you to follow his example of selfless dedication to a noble profession.’

The school was now divided into four sections, Standards I to IV: two classes meeting in the morning and the other two in the afternoon. For Standard IV, which contained bigger and brighter boys who had been taught off and on by teachers who never stayed for long, Karega arranged extra classes after five to make up for lost time.

Standing in a classroom in front of those children released something in Karega. It was like continuing with the dialogue he had started with himself at Siriana and which had been interrupted by his expulsion and one year’s slavery to watalii. He was concerned that the children knew no world outside Ilmorog: they thought of Kenya as a city or a large village somewhere outside Ilmorog. How could he enlarge their consciousness so that they could see themselves, Ilmorog and Kenya as part of a larger whole, a larger territory containing the history of African people and their struggles? In his mind he scanned the whole landscape where African people once trod to leave marks and monuments that were the marvel of ages, that not even the fatal encounter of black sweat and white imperialism could rub from the memory and recorded deeds of men. Egypt, Ethiopia, Monomotapata, Zimbabwe, Timbuctoo, Haiti, Malindi, Ghana, Mali, Songhai: the names were sweet to the ear and the children listened with eager enthusiastic wonder that was the measure of their deep-seated unbelief. He made them sing: I live in Ilmorog Division which is in Chiri District; Chiri which is in the Republic of Kenya; Kenya which is part of East Africa; East Africa which is part of Africa; Africa which is the land of African peoples; Africa from where other African people were scattered to other corners of the world. They sang it, but it seemed too abstract. And it was this struggle to believe him that he found so disquieting, that made him realize that there were questions they posed by their very struggle and enthusiasm, for it had to do with the doubt that was in him too, that had haunted him even in Siriana. The African experience was not always clear to him and he saw the inadequacy of the Siriana education now that he was face to face with his own kind, little children, who wanted to know. His one year as a seller of sheepskins and fruit to watalii seemed, in retrospect, less demanding,
less frustrating than the present ordeal. For to confront Ilmorog, this poverty – and drought-stricken, depopulated wasteland; to confront the expectant eyes of those who tomorrow would run away to the cities whose cruelty he had experienced and where they would face a future which held the hope of a thousand mirages, was at once to confront himself in a way more profound and painful because the problem and the questions raised went beyond mere personal safety and salvation. It seemed to him, looking at the drought, at the tiny faces, at the lack of any development in the area – where, he wondered, were the benefits of modern science? – a collective fate to which they were all condemned.

It was hopeless: it was a gigantic deception. He and Munira were two ostriches burying their heads in the sand of a classroom, ignoring the howling winds and the sun outside. Was this not the same crime of which they had accused Chui in Siriana? How could they as teachers, albeit in a primary school, ignore the reality of the drought, the listless faces before them? What had education, history and geography and nature-study and maths, got to say to this drought?

He came out of the classroom late one day at the end of March and found a group at Abdulla’s shop.

‘Ruoro’s goat died last night,’ Nyakinyua explained. ‘And he cried. We looked at one another because a grown man’s tears can only portend ill. But we knew he could not help it, and we sat with him as at a wake.’

3 ~ By the end of April it still had not rained. Cows and goats and sheep were skeletons: most herdsmen had anyway moved across the plains in search of fairer and kindlier climes wherein to shelter. They hoped that May would bring rain. But by mid-May which was the last hope for rains which would save them, two cows died; vultures and hawks circled high in the sky and then swooped in hordes, later leaving behind them white bones scattered on stunted and dry elephant grass.

Wanja waited for Karega and Munira outside the school.

‘It has been decided. The elders went to see Mwathi wa Mugo: he said that the donkey must be taken across the plains although a
sacrifice of a goat will still be necessary. We must help Abdulla. The donkey’s death will also be his death.’

‘Did they say when?’ Munira asked.

‘They will be meeting soon to decide on the day.’

‘Did he say how they would take it across the plains?’

‘No . . . But there is talk of the whole village scourging it . . . men, women, and children taking part.’

‘But what can we do?’ asked Munira and nobody answered the question.

4 ~ Haunting memories from the past; the year of the locust; the year of the armyworms; the year of the famine of cassava: the Ngigi, Ngunga and Ngaragu ya Mwanga circumcision-groups still bore these names of woe, a witness that uncontrolled nature was always a threat to human endeavour. There was of course another lesson. In 1900, only six years after the year of locusts, the famine was so bad it put to a stop all circumcision rites for the year. No group now carried a name as memorial to the famine of England, so called, because it had weakened people’s resistance to the European marauders of the people’s land and sweat. The famine of cassava itself was a bitter funeral dirge for their sons lost in North Africa, the Middle East, Burma and India fighting against the Germans and the Japanese, thus prompting the young to sing:

Thus history and legend showed that Ilmorog had always been threatened by the twin cruelties of unprepared-for vagaries of nature and the uncontrolled actions of men.

These thoughts mocked at Karega as he was carried along by the grandeur of the people’s past, the great cultures that spread from Malindi to Tripoli. He confided: The Earliest Man, father of all men on earth, is thought to have been born in Kenya . . . Lake Turkana
. . . and he stood back and expected a gasp of disbelief or a few questions.

‘Yes, Muriuki,’ he pointed to a child whose hand seemed raised.

There was a great rustling of books, noise from the benches, children clambering from their desks. Muriuki had fallen down.

‘Move away, move away,’ Karega urged the children, pushing them aside. He felt the prostrate form of Muriuki. ‘He is just hungry,’ one boy said. ‘I know, he told me he was hungry.’ Karega got the hint: he took him to the house where he concocted something – a mixture of an egg and milk from a tin.

Just now, Karega thought, people in the city and other places were drinking and laughing and eating and making love out of excess of fullness, and here people were fainting with hunger and malnutrition.

He talked to Munira, Munira asked the same question:

‘What can I do? It is not my fault. It is not anybody’s fault. We can only close the school until better times.’

‘Accepting. Even defeat?’

‘It can’t be helped. An act of God.’

‘An act of God? Why should people accept any act of any God without resistance? God, it is said, helps those who help themselves.’

‘How?’

‘We can go to the city!’ he said, as if he had already thought about it. But in fact it had just come into his mouth.

‘The city?’

‘Yes, and seek help.’

‘No, Karega. I left those places. I don’t really want to go back,’ he said suddenly remembering the terror.

‘Why?’ Karega asked, astonished by Munira’s prompt refusal.

‘You talk as if you didn’t go to tea.’

‘Did you?’ Karega asked.

‘Yes. I was so ashamed. I was cheated into it and I cheated my wife into it, and now she can’t believe that I didn’t know,’ he answered quietly . . . ‘But even if I had not been led into it, I wonder if I would have had the mettle and the stamina to refuse, and this frightens me even more.’

Karega thought for a little while. His voice was a little hard:

‘I did not. But it is not that I would have been ashamed of it. As I sold sheepskins to watalii I asked myself, how could a whole community be taken in by a few greedy stomachs – greedy because they had eaten more than their fair share of that which was bought by the blood of the people? And they took a symbol from its original beautiful purpose . . . and they think they can make it serve narrow selfish ends! Make poverty and stolen wealth shake hands in eternal peace and Friendship! And what do we do with people who are hungry and jobless, who can’t pay school fees; shall we make them drink a tinful of oath and cry unity? How easy . . . why, there should then be no problems in Ilmorog, and in all the other forgotten areas and places in Kenya.’

‘I can see your point,’ Munira said. ‘You had better talk it over with Wanja and Abdulla. Why,’ he added suddenly, enthusiastically, ‘we can go and tell Nderi wa Riera that we are all members of KCO.’