‘Mother will tell us a story.’
‘Oh, will she?’
Both loved stories. Storytelling was a common entertainment in their family. Kori, like Ngotho, was a good storyteller and could keep a whole company listening and laughing. Boro, who had been to the war, did not know many tribal stories. He drank a lot and he was always sad and withdrawn. He never talked much about his war experiences except when he was drunk or when he was in a mood of resentment against the government and settlers.
‘We fought for them, we fought to save them from the hands of their white brothers…’
Then on such occasions, he might talk just a little about the actual fighting. But he very rarely alluded to Mwangi’s death. It was common knowledge that they had loved each other very much. Before the war, it had always been said that such love between brothers was unnatural and portended no good.
Boro, Kori, and Kamau were all sons of Njeri, Ngotho’s eldest wife. Njoroge’s only true brother was Mwangi who had died in the war. But they all behaved as if they were of one mother. Kori worked in an African tea shop called Green Hotel. Green Hotel was a very dirty place, full of buzzing flies, while the stench of decay hung in the air like a heavy cloud. But it was a very popular place because there was a wireless set. Njoroge looked forward to Kori’s homecoming because he brought with him the town gossip and what was happening in the country. For instance, when Jomo came from Britain, it was Kori who brought the news home. Home was especially a nice place when all the brothers and many village girls and boys came in the evening and, sitting around the fireplace in a big circle, they would gossip, laugh, and play. Njoroge always longed for the day he would be a man, for then he would have the freedom to sit with big circumcised girls and touch them as he saw the young men do.
But sometimes his brothers did not come. Home then was dull. But the mothers could tell stories. And Ngotho too, when he was in the mood.
‘Our elder mother wanted you,’ Njoroge said when they reached home. It was already dark. While Njeri was always ‘our’ or ‘my elder mother’, Nyokabi, being the younger wife, was always just ‘Mother’. It was a habit observed and accepted by all.
‘What does she want?’
‘I don’t know.’
Kamau began to move. Njoroge stood and watched in silence. Then he raised his voice. ‘Remember to come back to our hut. You remember the story.’
‘Yes,’ Kamau replied. His voice sounded thin in the dark.
Later in the evening Kamau came to Nyokabi’s hut.
‘Tell us the story.’
‘Now, now, don’t be troublesome,’ Nyokabi said.
‘It is a bad woman this. If I had been my father, I would not have married her.’ Kamau liked teasing Nyokabi. Tonight his teasing sounded forced. It did not provoke laughter.
‘Oh! But he could not resist me.’
‘It isn’t true,’ said Ngotho, who just then entered the hut. ‘You should have seen how happy she was when I proposed to her. Nobody could have taken her. So I pitied her.’
‘I refused all the young men that wanted me. But your father would have died if I had refused him.’
‘Don’t you believe a word she says!’
Ngotho was given food. He began to eat and for a time there was an awkward silence. The children could not joke in their father’s presence. Njoroge broke the silence.
‘Tell us a story. You promised, you know.’
‘You children! You never ask your father to tell you stories. Tonight he will tell you,’ she said smilingly towards her husband. She was happy.
‘If you all come to my Thingira, I’ll tell you one or two.’
Njoroge feared his father. But it always made him feel good to listen to him.
‘…There was wind and rain. And there was also thunder and terrible lightning. The earth and the forest around Kerinyaga shook. The animals of the forest whom the Creator had recently put there were afraid. There was no sunlight. This went on for many days so that the whole land was in darkness. Because the animals could not move, they just sat and moaned with wind. The plants and trees remained dumb. It was, our elders tell us, all dead except for the thunder, a violence that seemed to strangle life. It was this dark night whose depth you could not measure, not you or I can conceive of its solid blackness, which would not let the sun pierce through it.
‘But in this darkness, at the foot of Kerinyaga, a tree rose. At first it was a small tree and grew up, finding a way even through the darkness. It wanted to reach the light, and the sun. This tree had Life. It went up, up, sending forth the rich warmth of a blossoming tree – you know a holy tree in the dark night of thunder and moaning. This was Mukuyu, God’s tree. Now, you know that at the beginning of things there was only one man (Gikuyu) and one woman (Mumbi). It was under this Mukuyu that he first put them. And immediately the sun rose, and the dark night melted away. The sun shone with a warmth that gave life and activity to all things. The wind and lightning and thunder stopped. The animals stopped wondering and moved. They no longer moaned but gave homage to the Creator and Gikuyu and Mumbi. And the Creator who is also called Murungu took Gikuyu and Mumbi from his holy mountain. He took them to the country of ridges near Siriana and there stood them on a big ridge before he finally took them to Mukuruwe wa Gathanga about which you have heard so much. But he had shown them all the land – yes, children, God showed Gikuyu and Mumbi all the land and told them,
“This land I hand over to you. O Man and woman
It’s yours to rule and till in serenity sacrificing
Only to me, your God, under my sacred tree…”’
There was something strange in Ngotho’s eyes. He looked as if he had forgotten all about those who were present: Kamau, Njoroge, Boro, Kori, and many other young men and women who had come to make the long hours of night shorter by listening to stories. It was as if he was telling a secret for the first time, but to himself. Boro sat in a corner. The expression on his face could not be seen. He did not once move but kept on looking past his father. It was as if Boro and Ngotho were the only two who were there at the beginning when these things came to be. Njoroge too could imagine the scene. He saw the sun rise and shine on a dark night. He saw fear, gloom, and terror of the living things of the creator, melting away, touched by the warmth of the holy tree. It must have been a new world. The man and woman must have been blessed to walk in the new Kingdom with Murungu. He wished he had been there to stand near Him in His holy place and survey all the land. Njoroge could not help exclaiming,
‘Where did the land go?’
Everyone looked at him.
‘…I am old now. But I too have asked that question in waking and sleeping. I’ve said, “What happened, O Murungu, to the land that you gave to us? Where, O Creator, went our promised land?” At times I’ve wanted to cry or harm my body to drive away the curse that removed us from the ancestral lands. I ask, “Have you left your children naked, O Murungu?”
‘I’ll tell you. There was a big drought sent to the land by evil ones who must have been jealous of the prosperity of the children of the Great One. But maybe also the children of Mumbi forgot to burn a sacrifice to Murungu. So he did not shed His blessed tears that make crops grow. The sun burnt freely. Plague came to the land. Cattle died and people shrank in size. Then came the white man as had long been prophesied by Mugo wa Kibiro, that Gikuyu seer of old. He came from the country of ridges, far away from here. Mugo had told the people of the coming of the white man. He had warned the tribe. So the white man came and took the land. But at first not the whole of it.
‘Then came the war. It was the first big war. I was then young, a mere boy, although circumcised. All of us were taken by force. We made roads and cleared the forest to make it possible for the warring white man to move more quickly. The war ended. We were all tired. We came home worn-out but very ready for whatever the British might give us as a reward. But, more than this, we wanted to go back to the soil and court it to yield, to create, not to destroy
. But Ng’o! The land was gone. My father and many others had been moved from our ancestral lands. He died lonely, a poor man waiting for the white man to go. Mugo had said this would come to be. The white man did not go and he died a Muhoi on this very land. It then belonged to Chahira before he sold it to Jacobo. I grew up here, but working…(here Ngotho looked all around the silent faces and then continued)…working on the land that belonged to our ancestors…’
‘You mean the land that Howlands farms?’ Boro’s voice was cracked, but clear.
‘Yes. The same land. My father showed it all to me. I have worked there too, waiting for the prophecy to be fulfilled.’
‘And do you think it will ever be fulfilled?’ It was Kori who asked this to break the silence that followed Ngotho’s reply.
‘I don’t know. Once in the country of the ridges where the hills and ridges lie together like lions, a man rose. People thought that he was the man who had been sent to drive away the white man. But he was killed by wicked people because he said people should stand together. I’ve waited for the prophecy. It may not be fulfilled in my lifetime…but O, Murungu, I wish it could.’
Someone coughed. Then silence. From a corner, a young man tried to make a joke about the coming of the white man and what people thought of his skin. Nobody heeded him. He laughed alone and then stopped. For Njoroge it was a surprising revelation, this knowledge that the land occupied by Mr Howlands originally belonged to them.
Boro thought of his father who had fought in the war only to be dispossessed. He too had gone to war, against Hitler. He had gone to Egypt, Jerusalem, and Burma. He had seen things. He had often escaped death narrowly. But the thing he could not forget was the death of his stepbrother, Mwangi. For whom or for what had he died?
When the war came to an end, Boro had come home, no longer a boy but a man with experience and ideas, only to find that for him there was to be no employment. There was no land on which he could settle, even if he had been able to do so. As he listened to this story, all these things came into his mind with a growing anger. How could these people have let the white man occupy the land without acting? And what was all this superstitious belief in a prophecy?
In a whisper that sounded like a shout, he said, ‘To hell with the prophecy.’
Yes, this was nothing more than a whisper. To his father, he said, ‘How can you continue working for a man who has taken your land? How can you go on serving him?’
He walked out, without waiting for an answer.
3
Ngotho left early for work. He did not go through the fields as was his usual custom. Ngotho loved the rainy seasons when everything was green and the crops in flower, and the morning dew hung on the leaves. But the track where he had disturbed the plants and made the water run off made him feel as if, through his own fault, he had lost something. There was one time when he had felt a desire to touch the dewdrops or open one and see what it held hidden inside. He had trembled like a child but, after he had touched the drops and they had quickly lost shape melting into wetness, he felt ashamed and moved on. At times he was thankful to Murungu for no apparent reason as he went through these cultivated fields all alone while the whole country had a stillness. Almost like the stillness of death.
This morning he walked along the road – the big tarmac road that was long and broad and had no beginning and no end except that it went into the city. Motorcars passed him. Men and women, going to work, some in the settled area and some in the shoe factory, chattered along. But Ngotho was not aware of anything that went by him. Why had he behaved like that in front of all those children? The voice of Boro had cut deep into him, cut into all the lonely years of waiting. Perhaps he and others had waited for too long and now he feared that this was being taken as an excuse for inactivity, or worse, a betrayal.
He came to the Indian shops. Years ago, he had worked here. That was long before the second war. He had worked for an Indian who had always owed him a month’s pay. This was deliberate. It was meant to be a compelling device to keep Ngotho in the Indian’s employment permanently. For if he left, he would lose a month’s pay. In the end, he had to lose it. That was the time he went to work for Mr Howlands – as a Shambaboy. But at first he did everything from working in the tea plantations to cleaning the big house and carrying firewood. He passed through the African shops, near the barber’s shop, and went on, on to the same place where he had now been for years, even before the second big war took his two sons away to kill one and change the other.
Mr Howlands was up. He never slept much. Not like Memsahib who sometimes remained in bed until ten o’clock. She had not much else to do. There was something in Howlands, almost a flicker of mystery, that Ngotho could never fathom.
‘Good morning, Ngotho.’
‘Good morning, Bwana.’
‘Had a good night?’
‘Ndio Bwana.’
Ngotho was the only man Mr Howlands greeted in this fashion – a fashion that never varied. He spoke in the usual abstract manner as if his mind was preoccupied with something big. It was at any rate something that took all his attention. His mind was always directed towards the shamba. His life and soul were in the shamba. Everything else with him counted only insofar as it was related to the shamba. Even his wife mattered only insofar as she made it possible for him to work in it more efficiently without a worry about home. For he left the management of home to her and knew nothing about what happened there. If he employed someone in the house, it was only because his wife had asked for an extra ‘boy’. And if she later beat the ‘boy’ and wanted him sacked, well, what did it matter? It was not just that the boys had black skins. The question of wanting to know more about his servants just never crossed his mind.
The only man he had resisted the efforts of his wife to have sacked was Ngotho. Not that Mr Howlands stopped to analyse his feelings towards him. He just loved to see Ngotho working in the farm; the way the old man touched the soil, almost fondling, and the way he tended the young tea plants as if they were his own…Ngotho was too much a part of the farm to be separated from it. Something else. He could manage the farm labourers as no other person could. Ngotho had come to him at a time when his money position was bad. But with the coming of Ngotho, things and his fortune improved.
Mr Howlands was tall, heavily built, with an oval-shaped face that ended in a double chin and a big stomach. In physical appearance at least, he was a typical Kenya settler. He was a product of the First World War. After years of security at home, he had been suddenly called to arms and he had gone to the war with the fire of youth that imagines war a glory. But after four years of blood and terrible destruction, like many other young men he was utterly disillusioned by the ‘peace’. He had to escape. East Africa was a good place. Here was a big trace of wild country to conquer.
For a long time England remained a country far away. He did not want to go back because of what he remembered. But he soon found that he wanted a wife. He could not go about with the natives as some had done. He went back ‘home’, a stranger, and picked the first woman he could get. Suzannah was a good girl – neither beautiful nor ugly. She too was bored with life in England. But she had never known what she wanted to do. Africa sounded quite a nice place so she had willingly followed this man who would give her a change. But she had not known that Africa meant hardship and complete break with Europe. She again became bored. Mr Howlands was oblivious of her boredom. He believed her when she had told him, out in England, that she could face the life in the bush.
But she soon had a woman’s consolation. She had her first child, a son. She turned her attention to the child and the servants at home. She could now afford to stay there all the day long playing with the child and talking to him. She found sweet pleasure in scolding and beating her servants. The boy, Peter, was followed by a girl. For a time, the three – mother, daughter, and son – made home, the father appearing only in the evening. It was lucky that their home was near Nairobi. The children could go to
school there. Her pride was in watching them grow together loving each other. They in their way loved her. But Peter soon took to his father. Mr Howlands grew to like his son and the two walked through the fields together. Not that Mr Howlands was demonstrative. But the thought that he would have someone to whom he could leave the shamba gave him a glow in his heart. Each day he became more and more of a family man and, as years went by, seemed even reconciled to that England from which he had run away. He sent both children back for studies. Then European civilisation caught up with him again. His son had to go to war.
Mr Howlands lost all faith – even the few shreds that had begun to return. He would again have destroyed himself, but again his god, land, came to the rescue. He turned all his efforts and energy into it. He seemed to worship the soil. At times he went on for days with nothing but a few cups of tea. His one pleasure was in contemplating and planning the land to which he had now given all his life. Suzannah was left alone. She beat and sacked servant after servant. But God was kind to her. She had another boy, Stephen. He was now an only son. The daughter had turned missionary after Peter’s death in the war.
They went from place to place, a white man and a black man. Now and then they would stop here and there, examine a luxuriant green tea plant, or pull out a weed. Both men admired this shamba. For Ngotho felt responsible for whatever happened to this land. He owed it to the dead, the living, and the unborn of his line, to keep guard over this shamba. Mr Howlands always felt a certain amount of victory whenever he walked through it all. He alone was responsible for taming this unoccupied wildness. They came to a raised piece of ground and stopped. The land sloped gently to rise again into the next ridge and the next. Beyond, Ngotho could see the African Reserve.
Weep Not, Child Page 4