Wizard of the Crow

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  He leapt with joy. It was the file with the pictures of Nyawlra that Kaniürü had given him. He looked at each carefully to ascertain which was best suited for a poster. The only hitch was that Kaniürü himself was in many of them. He and Nyawlra had, after all, been husband and wife, and the pictures had been taken during their season of wooing and marriage.

  Then Sikiokuu chuckled. He selected a photograph showing

  Nyawlra and Kaniürü embracing in a studio. Sikiokuu ordered the picture enlarged and reproduced a thousand copies.

  Even as he searched for Nyawlra, he had found a way to compromise the traitorous Kaniürü.

  16

  Machokali, who had been officially entrusted with the capture of the wizard, was keen to achieve this before his rivals had completed their assigned tasks. Since the disastrous visit to America he had felt his power on the wane, and he thought he would recover his standing only through the release of monies for Marching to Heaven. But there were no signs that the Global Bank would release the funds anytime soon. To regain some measure of influence in the heart of power, the capture of the wizard was paramount. But he could not figure out where or how to embark on the search for the Wizard of the Crow. It was not even clear that the sorcerer had returned to Aburlria. He, too, considered a Wanted poster, but A.G. talked him out of it.

  “True! Haki ya Mungu,” A.G. was later to claim, “I told him that no human hands could draw the likeness of the Wizard of the Crow. Ask yourselves: Who was the Wizard of the Crow? Was he a man or a woman? Personally I knew that he possessed the ability to change himself into a man or a woman or into anything else. He is a whirlwind. He is lightning. He is a thunderstorm. He is the sun and the rain. He is the moon and the stars. How can you draw the likeness of air, breath, soul? The Wizard of the Crow is the being that animated everything, and how can you draw a picture of that? I told him: Give me the time, give me a free hand, and I will track him down.”

  Machokali agreed and entrusted A.G. with the search for the Wizard of the Crow. He released him from his ordinary duties. But wherever he went, A.G. was to report regularly.

  Just before they parted, the minister gave him a mobile phone and a red motorbike.

  17

  A.G. rejected the way of force and opted for that of words. He would use his tongue to find his way around and unloosen the tongues of his listeners. He went on foot, mostly, but he also rode in mkokoteni, donkey carts, bicycles, matatus, mbondambondas, buses, or trains to get to wherever people gathered. He stopped at market centers, bars, churches, mosques, and in all these places he would tell them: I am looking for the being that animates all things, including speech.

  His cryptic words would ignite a debate among his listeners. Yes, what is the being?

  And gradually the debates and heated arguments would give way to stories, anecdotes, and remembrances of what the being was. A.G. would come into his own, and soon people would forget the heat of the previous arguments as they listened to this traveling bard telling the amazing story of the Wizard of the Crow. In his tongue the real and the marvelous flowed out of each other. He would even talk about the Ruler. He would hint about plants that bore money. They listened to his stories and later improvised on them in the retelling. Soon the stream of stories became common lore. The ceaseless transformation of the stories soon resulted in rumors throughout Aburiria that the Ruler was pregnant and had a secret garden with dollar-producing plants. Was that why he had remained out of sight since returning from America? Was that why the Ruler always donated money to self-help schemes, claiming the amount came from him and his friends?

  While traveling on foot, one day A.G. saw pasted on an electric post a poster bearing what seemed to be a picture of the Wizard of the Crow. It was the name more than the picture that took him aback. It was not a photograph. It was more like a police sketch. He recalled his talks with Machokali and his warning to the minister that no human hand could draw the likeness of the Wizard of the Crow because he was many things: a man, a woman, a child, a cap on somebody’s head, a bird, lightning, a whirlwind! This sketch looked like a cross between Jesus and Sikiokuu, and it offered a prize to the Wizard of the Crow.

  Was this the work of Machokali? A.G. asked himself angrily. Ma-chokali, who had entrusted him with the task of finding the Wizard of the Crow? Is he of so little faith that no sooner do I turn my back than he has these drawings of the Wizard of the Crow posted all over the country?

  He called Machokali. The minister denied that he had authorized any such thing and wondered who could have done it.

  “Find out who is doing this,” Machokali said, “but in so doing, don’t stray from the main business, capturing the Wizard of the Crow. One more thing. Stories abound that the Ruler is pregnant. Get to the source of those slanderous rumors.”

  A.C. did not know that he himself had somehow been the source. I will look into the matter, he assured Machokali, and he resumed his travels, having taken note of the telephone number on the poster. A.C. had many friends throughout the police and intelligence network. There were some who owed him a debt of gratitude for letting them know about the Wizard of the Crow early on, long before he and his magic had achieved fame. So it did not take long for him to get to the bottom of the source of the poster. But he was not overly concerned. All this is mere foolishness, he said to himself. The Wizard of the Crow would not be bribed or tricked into submission.

  He decided not to be drawn into the power struggle between Sikiokuu and Machokali. He would leave Sikiokuu to his own schemes. He simply would continue in his search for the being that animates all things.

  “True! Haki ya Mungu, I was armed with faith and hope that if I persisted, I would hear somehow, somewhere, a voice saying: The man is here.”

  18

  Kaniürü had always wanted to see his picture in a newspaper. He felt frustrated and angry with the press, because even after he had been promoted to a senior youthwinger and then to the deputy chair of Marching to Heaven, not a single newspaper had evinced an interest in him, and none had carried his picture. So when he saw two reporters packing cameras at his first seminar, he was very pleased.

  The one-day seminar on The Kaniürü Memorandum on New Educational Initiatives for Youth and Women to Make Their Minds Conform to National Ideals and the Ruler’s Philosophy was going to be the first of several in different parts of the country, so a lot was riding on its success. It was being held at the Ruler’s Hall, Eldares, and it was supposed to start at ten in the morning. Attendance was abysmal. Even the members of his youthwing had not bothered to turn up, because they assumed that the seminar was intended for those who had not yet accepted parrotry as a norm. By eleven o’clock, the main speakers—a professor of the history of parrotology a professor of the philosophy and psychology of parrotology, a professor of the politics of parrotology, a professor of literary parrotology, a professor of the science of parrotology, and finally the chairman of the seminar, Kaniürü—were the only people present. They sat at the podium, waiting for the people to turn up, but the two reporters were the only ones in the audience. “We seem to be on African Time,” Kaniürü tried to joke with the reporters.

  But when the expected students had not arrived by two o’clock, the reporters became restive and asked Kaniürü, When is the Ruler going to arrive? Oh, is that why they came so early? Kaniürü thought. He had hinted to the newspapers that the Ruler might open the seminar, but Kaniürü, knowing the present state of the Ruler, had not even bothered to broach the subject with him. Kaniürü told them that he would not come but had sent a message. They asked if he could please give them a copy of the message so that they could leave. This made Kaniürü decide to begin the seminar even without an audience, for, as he put it, quoting a proverb, the sun never waits for anybody, not even a king, and he was not yet a king. He advised the restive reporters to focus their cameras on the podium and not the empty seats. And he offered himself for an interview, but after the meeting.

  Kaniürü
opened the seminar by saying that toward its close he would convey the message of goodwill from the Head of State to the seminar. Meantime, he had a few words to say. The queuing mania in the country had been started and fueled largely by university students, and their bad example was unfortunately followed by many people till—

  But before he had said another word, he saw a long line of young people approaching the hall. Elated, he hastened to amend his remarks.

  “It does not of course mean that all queues are wrong and immoral in all places at all times,” Kaniürü said, gesturing the newspaper people to train their cameras on the arrivals. “When you get orderly queues made by intelligent people who know why they are falling in line and where their queues are headed, like these good youth who are about to enter the hall … let me welcome them at the door.”

  Kaniürü, eager for a photo op, was so excited that he almost tripped over himself as he left the podium and headed for the door to welcome the youth.

  Suddenly, Kaniürü found himself surrounded by the youth, who were brandishing Wanted posters showing him arm in arm with Nyawlra, shouting: He is here! He is here! The professors were confused by the turmoil, but when they saw the posters they jumped through the windows, yelling that they had been misled into attending a seminar organized by a terrorist. The reporters were busy clicking away, recording this extraordinary scene of students tying Kaniürü’s hands together and dragging him along, others pushing him from behind, still others prancing about on the sides, waving their posters in the air. They took him to the nearest police station.

  When Kaniürü told the police who he was, they did not believe him. Stop lying, they said, pointing at his picture on the Wanted poster, adding in Kiswahili: Is this not you holding hands with that woman terrorist Nyawlra? Kaniürü agreed that the picture was indeed of him, but he was angry when they refused to hear any qualification, interrupting him with laughter, especially when he told them to call the State House to find out the truth of his identity. What made the police even more suspicious was that when they finally offered to call the Minister of State, Sikiokuu, the prisoner looked terror stricken, beseeching them to contact the Ruler instead.

  When the police called the Minister of State to ask what they should do with the criminal, they failed to reach Sikiokuu or any other person in charge who could dispose of the matter. So Kaniürü was held at the police station overnight.

  Kaniürü’s picture, his hands roped together, appeared on the front page of the two main newspapers, next to an image of the Wanted poster; the caption in both instances was STUDENTS APPREHEND NYAWIRA’S ASSOCIATE.

  Ironically, the picture and the story saved him from having to spend more time in prison, for when ASS Kahiga saw the newspaper, he called the State House to ask why his boss had been arrested and what he should do about it. The Ruler ordered Kaniürü’s immediate release.

  When Sikiokuu was asked about the poster, he claimed he did not mean to harm Kaniürü, his only interest was to capture Nyawlra, but unfortunately the only picture of her that he had showed her holding hands with Kaniürü. Now the Ruler was hearing of Kaniürü’s connection to Nyawlra for the first time. As he put it, There is more to this than meets the eye, and I will get to the bottom of it! Still, he decreed that Kaniürü’s image be removed from the poster.

  Kaniürü, who used to claim that he was brought up by a blind grandmother, his parents having died when he was only a baby, the truth being that it was his grandmother who had died then, was dealt further denigrations when a few days later the newspapers carried pictures of his aged parents from a rural village looking for him in the streets of Eldares after they had seen images of him being dragged along the road.

  So despite his release, Kaniürü remained bitter that his first-ever picture in a newspaper had been a humiliating fiasco.

  19

  After the ordeal, Kaniürü viewed Sikiokuu, the students, and newspapers as a grand alliance against him, and this intensified his determination to seek vengeance. First he unleashed his thugs to beat students wherever they were to be found. This caused a scandal throughout the country, but it did not deter him. Against Sikiokuu he decided to try to capture Nyawlra himself, thwarting Sikiokuu’s chances of winning the race. He would effect this through his own capture of the Wizard of the Crow, convinced as he had always been that there was a link between the two. Kaniürü would also get from him information on the women of the people’s court.

  Kaniürü designed his Wanted poster featuring a hazy illustration based on his recollection of his various encounters with the wizard. At the bottom he asked the sorcerer to make himself known through a telephone number to answer a few questions about the husband bashing that was now epidemic.

  He ordered Kahiga to keep a close watch on Sikiokuu and Ma-chokali to steal their respective plans for the capture of Nyawlra and the wizard. He also charged Kahiga with overseeing the demolition of all Sikiokuu’s posters, replacing them with Kaniürü’s, and gave him a black motorcycle to make him flexible in the choice of highways and country paths. For his part, Kahiga decided to simplify the tasks heaped upon him by following A.G. secretly to put to his own use whatever A.G. discovered.

  Sikiokuu retaliated by having Kaniürü’s posters pulled down and replaced with his, which is what turned their struggle into a poster war. He gave Njoya a golden-colored motorcycle to supervise the poster war, and Njoya decided that the most effective way of carrying out his new duties was to follow Kahiga secretly.

  20

  Having had a feast of students’ bones broken, and confident that he would win the poster war and the race, Kaniürü now turned his attention to the media. But he had yet to find a way to punish the journalists.

  The opportunity he sought suddenly knocked at his door when matatus and buses went on strike to protest a new decree that banned any queuing of passengers before entering public transport. Passengers, it seemed, had been ignoring the ban on the queues of more than five people and making long lines. The new decree required that people get on buses and matatus by pushing and shoving. The strike almost paralyzed the country, particularly the major towns, until the owners of factories and business enterprises complained that they were being ruined. This forced the government to modify the decree, allowing for both queuing and rushing. Here passengers formed queues; there they climbed all over one another as they rushed to enter matatus, buses, or trains. But, above all, the government wanted chaos, so it restricted the licensing of new passenger vehicles. Plans to add to the railway system built by the colonial regime were scuttled. Disorder reigned supreme, for any attempt on the part of the people to organize themselves was deemed by the Buler’s government as a challenge to its authority.

  At the height of the strike, when people who could afford it took taxis for transport, word reached Kaniürü that at ground transportation in the airport there was a long queue of journalists with cameras and the like and of course their pens and notebooks. Kaniürü did not even bother to find out who they were or what they were doing at the airport. He dispatched his thugs, his patriotic citizens, to set upon the journalists, who, caught unaware by the thugs’ relentless fury, fled in every direction.

  Kaniürü felt joy erupt as he savored every aspect of his victory over the journalists and the media.

  21

  The media had come from many parts of the world to cover the widely circulating rumors that the Ruler was pregnant. They now filed stories that claimed that organized thugs were attacking people who had come to verify the rumors. But, far from keeping curiosity at bay, the stories and TV images of bone fide journalists on the run at the Ruler’s Airport served only to attract yet more media: The rumors must be true, it was thought. The Ruler, after all, had disappeared from public view. Big Ben Mambo, Minister of Information, condemned the allegations, leading to even greater circulation of the rumors. Journalists continued to pour into the country, and when all hotels were full they started pitching tents in the prairie among mounds
of earth. These mounds were so many and so big that some discerning observers began to wonder what kind of ants had built them, and proceeded to report on the strange landscape of Aburiria. The stories attracted tourists. So now, in addition to sex beaches and fauna and flora, monstrous anthills and an unnatural pregnancy had become tourist attractions. Despite his contribution to the dramatic rise in tourism, the Ruler was furious: in America they had managed to keep a lid on his condition, but in Aburiria, where his word was law, his condition was the talk of the whole world. It was a terrible blow to his manhood, and of course he blamed his travails on the note written by the wizard to Machokali.

  Amid his fury, he got a call from the American ambassador, Gabriel Gemstone, asking him to receive a special envoy of the American president. Things were looking up. Maybe the special envoy was coming on behalf of the superpower to apologize for how the Ruler had been treated in America. He considered refusing to see the envoy to register his unhappiness with how things had gone in the States but thought the better of it. This was nothing to sneeze at. The apology would be too sweet.

  22

  The special envoy was accompanied by Ambassador Gabriel Gem-stone. His Mighty received them at the State House, Eldares, together with his ministers, including Machokali; Sikiokuu; the new governor of the Central Bank, Titus Tajirika; and the official biographer, Luminous Karamu-Mbu. There were two photographers selected from the Ruler’s special unit, and they were instructed to take pictures of the visitors as they entered and left the State House. All the other pictures, of the Ruler receiving the visitors for instance, were to be taken with cameras without film.

  The visitors did not show any surprise at the bodily expansion of the Ruler. The envoy, in fact, went straight to the point. He had been sent by Washington and by the capitals of the leading industrial democracies to convey their concern about what was happening in the State of Aburlria, especially the unprovoked attacks on members of the international press. They were also concerned about the on and off queuing in the country, especially the skirmishes between opponents and supporters of queuing. They were alarmed at the possibility of a complete breakdown of the rule of law, and there was nothing worse for a people than their country falling into the hands of thugs, evildoers, and warlords and becoming a terrorist haven.