Petals of Blood (46 page)

Untroubled by memories and doubts, puzzlement and despair in the eyes of the elders, little boys and girls prance about the banks, trying to spell out LONRHO, SHELL, ESSO, TOTAL, AGIP beside the word DANGER on the sidebelly of the tankers. They sing, in shrill voices, of the road which will surely carry them to all the cities of Africa, their Africa, to link hands with children of other lands:

And so they would go on, varying only the names of the cities of Africa, their Africa!

Well there is the dream still taken up by the voices of children. It is the dream of visionaries and believers, all the seekers who retain their faith.

Such will always be.

Ni wega. It is good so.

We of Ilmorog: the road gave us a new town and catapulted us into modern times. New Ilmorog. New Jerusalem. Does it matter? We shall all, we are all about to go the way Nyakinyua went.

But what of the children?

Oh, yes, the voices of children. Our children!

How Ilmorog rose from a deserted village into a sprawling town of stone, iron, concrete and glass and one or two neon-lights is already a legend in our times. It has already been put into song: fact and fiction mixed in fertile imaginations. You should anyway hear Abdulla sing of it, after a drink or two, or when he is selling oranges, how Ilmorog almost magically and suddenly sprang up on Kanyeki-ini Garage after the plane had been repaired and flown away:

The town! How could we have known that Wanja’s extension to Abdulla’s shop would start it all? Even when we saw that people were driving from afar just for roasted goat meat, avidly drowning it with Theng’eta spirit, we still thought it a temporary boom, part of the magic brought by the aeroplane.

Within a month we witnessed even more amazing things. Surveyors pulling clanking chains along the ground came and planted red pegs. Just like the ones who came many years back. But this time these were soon followed by caterpillars and a cheering team of workers of all nationalities and we crowded around them and listened to their nonsense work songs:

Abdulla’s place, well, Wanja’s place, became the centre for talk: the road-workers drank and ate roasted meat and ugali and told gossip. Ilmorog market, which before had been an on-and-off thing depending on need, now became a daily affair with women selling onions, potatoes, maize and eggs, listening to stories and drinking in the suggestive eyes of the strange men. We asked: what lies far far beyond Donyo hills? Would the caterpillars, the D4s and the D8s, eat the earth
with the same relentless power beyond the horizon of our eyes? Was it true what the MoW people said: that the road would reach Zaire and Nigeria, and onto the land of white people across the red sea? And the road workers would raise their voices above the roar of the earth-eating machines:

And the machines wallowed and whined and roared in the mud, clearing bush and grass and occasionally huts that stood in the way of trade and progress.

So we stood and watched as the machines roared toward Mwathi’s place. We said: it cannot be. But they still moved toward it. We said: they will be destroyed by Mwathi’s fire. Just you wait, just you wait. But the machine uprooted the hedge and then it hit the first hut and it fell and we were all hush-hush, waiting for it to be blown up. Even when the Americans landed on the moon and we thought the earth would tremble or something would happen, we were not as scared as when Mwathi’s place was razed to the ground. The two huts were pulled down. But where was Mwathi? There was no Mwathi. He must have vanished, we said, and we waited for his vengeance. Maybe he was never there, we said, and the elder who might have helped,
Muturi, had become suddenly deaf and dumb at the sacrilege. But what the machine revealed made the strangers pause, and they called people from Nairobi who came with books and cameras and measuring instruments of different kinds. Mwathi was a guardian spirit: he had been sitting on a knowledge of many seasons gone: rings, metal work, spears, smelting works – all these. A wire fence was put round it and later a big sign: ILMOROG: an archaeological site. Mwathi’s power had worked after all. The road skirted the site. But who was Mwathi? We kept on asking the question. Muturi did not long survive this and died with the secret of Ilmorog’s guardian spirit, whose place was now only a site for the curious about the past, long long before East Africa traded with China and the Indies.

Long after the road had gone beyond the plains and hills, and the workers had moved their camp, Abdulla’s place continued to grow, becoming a ‘stop’ spot for big lorries and cars that were now using the tarred road. The drivers and the turn boys would often spend the night there, drinking Theng’eta which produced the lightness of hashish and Mairungi!

Abdulla and Wanja added more extensions. There was now a shop, a butchery, a bar, a beer-hall which was also a dance place, and five rooms where those in need could spend the night: for a fee.

Shop. Butchery. Bar. Lodgings. Everything was happening as if working to some invisible pre-ordained plan.

Even then we thought of it as a temporary measure, an alien thing which would soon disappear and leave us where we were before the aeroplane crashed into our lives.

But the road: it was our road.

We prepared for the opening of the Ilmorog section with proud though vague anticipations. Why! A minister of the government would visit Ilmorog. We had never before seen a minister in our lives. We all helped in tidying up Abdulla’s place. The school with its new teachers prepared a choir.

As it turned out, no minister came: it was not an opening ceremony but rather an inspection tour by high government officials accompanied by Nderi wa Riera, and his two lieutenants:
Fat Stomach and Insect
who once came to our village long ago. Nderi spoke to us and
apologized for the inconvenience and the false expectations. But what he said more than compensated for our failure to see a live minister. He talked about KCO and what it would do for the area if people listened to him.

He started by arguing that an MP could only be judged by how far he had brought and could bring development to an area. He, Nderi, had already done that by having a road pass through Ilmorog. Now people would not, as had been known to happen in the past, have to walk for miles through dry and dangerous plains on donkey-carts: there were now matatus and buses and lorries. The road had brought trade to the area: small shopping centres were springing up on either side of the road. In order to prevent a mushrooming of mere slums and shanties, he had proposed – and indeed the plans were under way – for Chiri County Council to set up a properly planned, sewaged shopping centre at Ilmorog. A few acres of land would of course be taken from the people for the purpose, but the County Council would pay adequate compensation. Then as a result of his representations and remonstrations with the central government, it had been decided to develop the whole area into ranches and wheat fields. A tourist centre would be set up and a game park further on would be enclosed and made out of bounds for the herdsmen. People, whether herdsmen or ordinary farmers, would be given loans to develop their land and their ranches. But first people had to register their lands in order to acquire title-deeds which in turn would act as security with the banks. He had promised that he would bring development to Ilmorog. The road was only a beginning.

How times were changing! We could not believe our ears, nobody could take in fully what they had heard. But he was our MP and we had indeed seen the surveying aeroplanes come and go: we had seen men on foot with measuring chains and theodolites: and now, the new road. Why should we not believe him?

Elections were coming, he warned us, and it was a wise man and woman who knew how and where to cast his vote. They should give him the chance to complete what he had started.

Progress with Nderi! Fat Stomach shouted, and we sang back the words:

It had been a year of changes and progress!

Why had we once doubted him?

We were all happy except the old woman who felt uneasy about something and said she could not tell what it was because it was not clear. Maybe it’s the words of the road-singers that stay long in my ears, she said, but I feel a trembling in the stomach, just a tiny trembling in my belly!

Progress! Yes, development did come to Ilmorog. Plots were carved out of the various farms to make a shopping centre. Shops were planned and people were asked to send in applications for building plots to the County Council. A mobile van – African Economic Bank – came to Ilmorog and explained to the peasant farmers and the herdsmen how they could get loans. They crowded around the man fascinated as much by the up-and-down motion of his adam’s apple as by the rounded voice coming out of the loudspeaker. Demarcation. Title deeds. Loans. Fencing the land. Barbed wire. One or two grade cows. Kill or sell or cross-breed the others. A Farmers’ Marketing Co-operative. Ever for instance heard of the successful Dairy Farmers’ Co-operatives in other Districts? African Economic Bank would do similar things here. Milk. KCC. Wealth. From this one would pay back the loans at a small interest. Not in one lump sum. Oh no. Paying back would also be spread over a number of years. No steady farmer need ever feel the pinch. Only one condition: payment had to be regular. Easy. It was a year of hope. Mzigo came to the area. The school, being now more accessible, would expand. New buildings. New classes. New staff houses. More trained staff. Really, it was another year of hope in Ilmorog, except for Njuguna, who was almost ruined. His fours sons had suddenly returned and they all demanded their share of the ten-acre farm. What could he do with the two acres that remained to him? The younger son used the title-deeds as security
for a loan to start a kiosk in Nairobi. Later he returned to Ilmorog once again and set up the old man in a kiosk business and later in a shop. But in the year of demarcation, with the sons almost coming to blows with one another, Njuguna was a sad man. The road. Trade. Progress. We saw the new owners of plots bring stones and concrete. We watched the trenches being dug and we were glad that at least two of us from Ilmorog, Wanja and Abdulla, had secured a plot and so would show these outsiders that even Ilmorog had people who could put up stone buildings. Flowers for our land. Long live Nderi wa Riera. We gave him our votes: we waited for flowers to bloom.

2 ~ They talked against light and shadows from a hurricane lamp – his electricity had been cut off – Munira trying to make him traverse the five years of separation. Much had happened. So much had happened. Ilmorog and everybody was changed, utterly changed.

Who would have thought that he would return? Only the old woman who had retained faith and said that he would return. Kumagwo ni Gucokagwo, she had maintained. And it was she who now was not there to see him: or maybe she was seeing him from the limbo world of the living-dead.

He sat back on the chair and rested his hands on the table between them.

Five years, Munira was thinking, five years since he went away and left a curse behind him, as if he knew that with his going the old Ilmorog would also go. His face was gaunt, his fingers kept on moving on the table as if in a nervous energy of impatience. There was light and fire in the eyes. And yet his face was still, still but hard, skin held tight against the bones. He had travelled more, seen more, grown more but what it was that had brought him back, Munira could not tell. He had a way of asking questions without any frills at their edges and he had a way of listening as if every detail was important and he had to compare it against other details.

The way Munira told it was as if things had happened in a neat sequence of time and place. Yet Munira had experienced the events and the changes as chaos inside and outside himself, and he a comic spectator with the comic passions of an old man, unable to act. It was
only in Theng’eta that he had found personal reality and he was then able to view the burnt-out cigarette-ends of his life, his illusions, his desires. So in telling it to him who sat so still, despite his fingers that seemed to wander in search of things to do, he knew that he was falsifying history. But how could he recount his own descent into a five-year hell at Wanja’s feet?