Petals of Blood (36 page)

Alone, in his one-bedroomed house a few yards from Munira’s, he could not readily fall asleep. In class, he did not feel that glow he had felt before the journey to the city. The same thought would buzz in his head: so it was not he, alone, as an individual: so a whole community and region could be condemned to only giving! And when their store was exhausted, through philanthropy to cities and idle classes, or through the fatigue of the soil, or poor tools, or drought, they had nothing and nowhere to turn to! A whole community of direct producers reduced to beggary and malnutrition and death in their country! He would recall Nyakinyua’s words before the journey and she too was right. Wanja too was right. Everybody had been right except himself with his enthusiasm and idealism: where now the solidarity and unity of blackness?

Amidst this chaos and whirlwind of thought, the figure of the lawyer would suddenly stand out, clean, splendid in his dedication and understanding.

He one day sat down and wrote to him. Send me books, he
appealed, for somewhere in the high seats of learning in the city somebody was bound to know. For two weeks he waited not so much for the books as a word which would restore his faith and his belief. But the lawyer did not say anything. He just sent him books and a list of other titles written by professors of learning at the University. ‘See what you can make out of these,’ the lawyer had scribbled. Karega did not know what it was that he really wanted to get, but he vaguely hoped for a vision of the future rooted in a critical awareness of the past. So he first tried the history books. It had seemed to him that history should provide the key to the present, that a study of history should help us to answer certain questions: where are we now? How did we come to be where we are? How did it come about that 75 per cent of those that produce food and wealth were poor and that a small group – part of the non-producing part of the population – were wealthy? History after all should be about those whose actions, whose labour, had changed nature over the years. But how come that parasites – lice, bedbugs and jiggers – who did no useful work lived in comfort and those that worked for twenty-four hours went hungry and without clothes? How could there be unemployment in a country that needed every ounce of labour? So how did people produce and organize their wealth before colonialism? What lessons could be learnt from that?

But instead of answering these, instead of giving him the key he so badly needed, the professors took him to pre-colonial times and made him wander purposelessly from Egypt, or Ethiopia, or Sudan, only to be checked in his pastoral wanderings by the arrival of Europeans. There, they would make him come to a sudden full stop. To the learned minds of the historians, the history of Kenya before colonialism was one of the wanderlust and pointless warfare between peoples. The learned ones never wanted to confront the meaning of colonialism and of imperialism. When they touched on it, it was only to describe acts of violent resistance as grisly murders; some even demanded the rehabilitation of those who had sold out to the enemy during the years of struggle. One even approvingly quoted Governor Mitchell on the primitivity of Kenyan peoples and went ahead to show the historical origins of this primitivity, or what he called undercivilization.
Nature had been too kind to the African, he had concluded. Karega asked himself: so the African, then, deserved the brutality of the colonizer to boot him into our civilization? There was no pride in this history: the professors delighted in abusing and denigrating the efforts of the people and their struggles in the past.

He turned away in despair: maybe it was his ignorance and his lack of university learning. What of the resistance of African peoples? What of all the heroes traversing the whole world of black peoples? Was that only in his imagination?

He tried political science. But here he plunged into an even greater maze. Here professors delighted in balancing weighty rounded phrases on a thin decaying line of thought, or else dwelt on statistics and mathematics of power equation. They talked about politics of poverty versus inequality of politics; traditional modernization versus modernizing traditions; or else merely gave a catalogue of how local governments and central bureaucracies worked, or what this or that politician said versus what another one said. And to support all this, they quoted from several books and articles all carefully footnoted. Karega looked in vain for anything about colonialism and imperialism: occasionally there were abstract phrases about inequality of opportunities or the ethnic balancing act of modern governments.

Imaginative literature was not much different: the authors described the conditions correctly: they seemed able to reflect accurately the contemporary situation of fear, oppressions and deprivation: but thereafter they led him down the paths of pessimism, obscurity and mysticism: was there no way out except cynicism? Were people helpless victims?

He put the books in packets and posted them back to the lawyer with a note: why had he sent him books which did not speak to him about the history and the political struggles of people of Kenya? And now ironically he got a rather long letter from the lawyer:

‘You had asked me for books written by Black Professors. I wanted you to judge for yourself. Educators, men of letters, intellectuals: these are only voices – not neutral, disembodied voices – but belonging to bodies of persons, of groups, of interests. You, who will seek the truth about words emitted by a voice, look first for the body behind the
voice. The voice merely rationalizes the needs, whims, caprices, of its owner, the master. Better therefore to know the master in whose service the intellect is and you’ll be able to properly evaluate the import and imagery of his utterances. You serve the people who struggle; or you serve those who rob the people. In a situation of the robber and the robbed, in a situation in which the old man of the sea is sitting on Sindbad, there can be no neutral history and politics. If you would learn look about you: choose your side.’

What did he mean look about you? Choose your side? He did not want any more masters – he just wanted to know the truth. But what truth? Weren’t they all, shouldn’t they all be on the side of blackness against whiteness?

He looked out of the window and saw the green crops, the new growth: crops will flower and later we shall harvest, he muttered to himself but his questions remained unanswered: was that the kind of African studies he and others had gone on strike about?

Munira could not understand the new motion of things, the new mood of the village after the journey. Wanja and the other women on the ridge had formed what they called Ndemi-Nyakinyua Group to cultivate and weed the land and earth the crops, working in common, on one another’s fields in turn. Munira and Karega were busy teaching, but on certain selected days the whole school joined in the collective enterprise. At first some were suspicious, but on seeing how much a Kamuingi could accomplish within only a few weeks, they joined the group.

They all felt the stirrings of a new birth, an unknown power riding wings of fear and hope. The previous certainty had deserted the village. They now knew that forces other than droughts posed new types of threats but nobody wanted to quite voice their new fears.

He looked at Wanja, at her face, and marvelled at her ready involvement in practical labour. He looked at her hands, now cracked, nails broken, and he could hardly believe any of the stories she had told about the city and about her wanderings. He wanted her now, to possess her, and it pained him that she kept him at a distance. But then she seemed equally distant to everybody and this consoled him
and made him bide his time. He himself was possessed of a new thirst to find out about things. His desire to read had gradually come back and whenever he and Karega went to Ruwa-ini to collect their salary they would pass by a bookshop to buy books. He was on the verge of being inside things and he felt good and generally grateful.

Alone in the shop, Abdulla would keep alive memories of hope and bitterness. He wondered what mood he could now trust, seeing that one so quickly and frequently, without any warning, changed into the other. But he was glad that Joseph had started school: how, he asked himself over and over again in his repentant moods, how could he have kept Joseph from school? He eagerly waited their fatigued return in the evening from school and from the fields, for only then, lost in their talk and their drinking, could he be sure that the calmness in him would not suddenly be rent asunder by his remembrance of things past. He looked at Wanja’s utter transformation, a kindred spirit, and he felt that maybe with the rains and the crop and the harvest to be, something new was happening.

The herdsmen also returned. They talked of the cattle they had lost to the sun. They talked about the journeys they had made across the plains. Now they hoped that the drought would never return. Not after so much sacrifice. Things would soon follow their normal rhythm.

But the previous flow and pattern of the seasons was obviously broken by the late rains. This irregular season, for instance, ran from December to March which under the old rhythm should have been the beginning of the major Njahi season. Their first harvest since the journey to the city was not big but it would keep bones and skins together.

They adjusted to the new pattern and once again after the harvest they cultivated the fields, readying the earth for new rains and new planting whenever this would come to be.

And so once again the peasants of Ilmorog waited for rains, their hearts alternating between fear and hope. Nothing seemed to have changed in Ilmorog. The journey to the city seemed a thing of the past.

Then suddenly two lorries came almost at the same time and brought men who started erecting a church building and a police post.
What was all this about, they wondered? Was this the promised-for development? The post would be occupied by a chief, they were told.

The builders who lived in tents would occasionally come to Abdulla’s place. Their very voices and their presence marked them as different, as outsiders, and this made the people of Ilmorog feel a solidarity and an intimacy among themselves that was a way of rejecting the strangers. It was as if the men had been sent by the forces that had earlier humiliated them in the city. Even Wanja, Abdulla, Munira and Karega took the side of Ilmorog against the new intruders.

But suddenly, soon, the church and the post were forgotten under a new flurry of activity.

June had brought rains.

It fell day and night for two weeks so that nobody could really leave their huts.

The builders packed their tents and tools and drove away.

Children sat at the doors and went on with singing:

After two weeks it changed the rhythm: it would pour only at night to be followed by a day or two of sunshine. Rain, sunshine. That was always the classical pattern heralding a big crop and a big harvest. And this balance remained so until the whole land was one luscious green growth with crowds of flowers of many colours.

So that even when toward the end of the season the builders returned and resumed their twin structures of the post and the church, the fears of Ilmorog were drowned by two big expectations.

The second harvest since their return from the city was going to be one of the biggest in the history of Ilmorog. It was a total reversal of previous years when Njahi season that started in March produced the most. This now was more or less the Mwere season at the end of the
year and it had all the signs of a major event. Munira and Karega offered the school’s help in the harvesting.

There was also going to be a circumcision ceremony after the harvest. Some of the herd-boys were going to be initiated into men. As a boy Munira used to hide from home to listen to the singing which accompanied the ceremony. And even as a young teacher, after Siriana, he once or twice stole to the ceremonies. That was before the dances were banned during the Emergency. It was during one of the ceremonies that he had met Julia. She was then Wanjiru. Her voice, her dancing, her total involvement had attracted him and he had decided that here at last was what would bring fulfilment to his life. But she had become Julia and the temporary dream of an escape into sensuality had vanished on the marriage bed.

Maybe it was the memory of the dream: but Munira was thinking of possessing Wanja again during the harvest or after it and he felt a thrill course through his blood at the prospect.

3 ~ There was something about harvesting, whether it was maize or beans or peas, which always released a youthful spirit in everyone. Children ran about the fields to the voices of women raised to various pitches of despairing admonition about the trails of waste. Sometimes the children surprised a hare or an antelope in a lair among the ripened crops: they would quickly abandon whatever they were carrying and run after the animal the whole length of Ilmorog, shouting: Kaau . . . Kaaau . . . catch . . . catch it . . . catch meat. Even old men looked like little children, in their eyes turned to the fields: only they tried to hide their trembling excitement as they carried token sheaves of beans to the threshing-ground. But as they sat and sipped beer or merely talked about this and that they were still thrilled by the sight of children competing in threshing the mass of pea- and beanstalks with thin poles: a purring rustling sound issued forth as the bare grains of beans or peas jumped from the beaten dry sheaves and coursed through the dry stalks to the ground. Women winnowing beans in the wind was itself a sight to see: sometimes the breeze would stop and women would curse and wait holding their wicker trays ready to catch the breeze when it returned. It was as if the wind was teasing the women
and was only being playful with their hopes and desires and expectation of clearing off the chaff before darkness fell and put an end to the working day. Later it was the turn of the cows: they were left loose to roam through the harvested fields of maize: they would run about, tails held up to the sky, kicking up dust with their hind legs, their tongues reaching out for the standing feed of maize. Sometimes the male would run after a young female, giving it no rest or time to eat, expecting another kind of harvest.