Wizard of the Crow

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  “Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa’s souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind? How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go? How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one who knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa? I cried.

  “I saw this: Around the seventeenth century, Europe impregnated some in Africa with its evil. These pregnancies gave birth to the slave driver of the slave plantation, who mutated into the colonial driver of the colonial plantation, who years later mutated into the neocolonial pilots of the postcolonial plantation. Is he now mutating into a modern driver and pilot of a global plantation? But Africa impregnated its own breed, which made our people sing, Even if you kill our heroes, we women are pregnant with hope of a new lot. Therefore, don’t cry despair at those who sold the heritage; smile also with pride at the achievements of those that struggle to rescue our heritage.

  “So I said to myself: Just as today is born of the womb of yesterday, today is pregnant with tomorrow.

  “What kind of tomorrow was Aburiria pregnant with? Of unity or murderous divisions? Of cries or laughter? Our tomorrow is determined by what we do today. Our fate is in our hands.

  “This thought must have been with me when, in a message to Ma-chokali, I wrote: Take care. The country is pregnant. What it will bear, nobody knows. I left the note for Machokali because he was then the eyes of our country outside the country.

  “But I had forgotten that in Aburiria the nation and the Buler are one. And that is why I have come here with my armed friends to tell you the truth about my role in the origins of the rumor that the Buler is pregnant.”

  No sooner had the import of what he was saying dawned on the assembly than women started ululating as men whistled and cried out: “Tell us more! When will he give birth?”

  24

  The Ruler’s pain subsided and he returned to watching television just in time to catch the cheering. He had not been able to follow the confessions of the wizard, but the sight of people laughing and calling out for more did not particularly lift his spirits. He was a director helplessly watching his actors straying from the script.

  He called Big Ben Mambo and told him to tell the Wizard of the Crow to stop talking about this pregnancy nonsense and get on with the task of locating Nyawlra. The pain erupted once again, forcing him to cut off further conversation with the minister. His contractions were violent, excruciating, but whenever they allowed he would greedily take in what was being shown on television.

  Big Ben Mambo told the assembly that they should stop spreading slander about male pregnancies now that they had heard the confessions of a lying scamp, this man who claims to travel in bird form and to see, in mirrors, what is hidden from the eyes of the ordinary mortal.

  “My people, we shall give him a chance to demonstrate his skills before this august assembly of free citizens. Let him exploit his mirrors to expose the enemies of the State. Wizard of the Crow, where is Nyawlra? Over there are mirrors. Show us where Nyawlra is! Once you have done that, you must then cleanse this crowd of the daemons of queuing, and the women of the daemons of violence against men. After that, you are free to go. The price of failure? A firing squad in front of all these people.”

  It took a few seconds for the meaning of Big Ben Mambo’s words to sink in. Some in the crowd stood up defiantly. How dare you accuse us of being possessed by daemons? Did you say that we need to be cleansed! others shouted menacingly. Why don’t we chase the

  682 daemons of arrogance from the minister with a few blows to his buttocks? others suggested, surging forward to execute their threats.

  The situation would have turned ugly, but the master of ceremony intervened and asked people to stop any foolishness because Big Ben Mambo might well be provoking them to give the armed forces an excuse to break up the assembly. Let us listen to the Wizard of the Crow, because if he is truly a sorcerer, then there must be a method to his witchcraft.

  Even the Buler, who had caught bits of Big Ben Mambo’s comments, was angered by the minister’s presumptuousness. His arrogance and exaggerations were about to thwart the Buler s intended outcome. So despite his stomachaches the Buler called the minister and told him to stop straying from the script. He was to rescind his comments about the Wizard of the Crow having to earn his freedom. Had the minister forgotten that the sorcerer was supposed to have come there of his own volition? What on earth had made him threaten the wizard with a firing squad? He had better recant his threat, immediately.

  Big Ben Mambo had no problem in reversing himself.

  “I want to remind you all that the Wizard of the Crow is here of his own volition. He volunteered to use his facility with mirrors to locate Nyawlra’s whereabouts,” he said, and then added, “I want to apologize to him. I was only being mischievous when I talked about a firing squad. It was a figure of speech. Pambo la lugha kama alivyosema Shabaan Roberts. Wizard of the Crow: In the name of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Free Bepublic of Aburlria, I now call upon you to do your thing with mirrors and give us Nyawlra, public enemy number one of the Aburlrian State.”

  25

  While this was going on, Kaniürü pondered his next move. He had felt a little betrayed when he saw the Wizard of the Crow enter the field under police escort. Had the Buler not entrusted him and his youth with the task of escorting the Wizard of the Crow to the platform? But when thinking about it he realized that this did not in any way change the real responsibility he felt the Ruler had bestowed on him. The crocodiles of the Red River awaited the Wizard of the Crow.

  As he reveled, he heard Minister Big Ben Mambo call on the Wizard of the Crow to disclose Nyawlra’s hiding place. Kaniürü felt a knot in his belly whenever her name cropped up in conversation or in print. He could no longer deny it. He was jealous of the sorcerer. He had once seen this man talking to Nyawlra at the roadside near Tajirika’s offices. He also recalled Tajirika saying, in his confessions, that when words had gotten stuck in his throat, Nyawlra had led him to the wizard. There had to be an intimacy between her and this man. He crept closer to the platform. He now wanted to catch each and every word that came from the mouth of the Wizard of the Crow. If he revealed her whereabouts, Kaniürü would leave the execution of the Wizard of the Crow to his gang and get to Nyawlra himself. His vision of a reunion with Nyawlra on his own terms never varied. He still entertained the madness: he would capture her and appeal to the Ruler to pardon her sins. Grateful and chastened, she would now sing praises to her husband. Glory, glory to Kaniürü, he sang quietly to himself. He was glowing with optimism when one of his most fearless youths crouched behind him trembling.

  “That man is not a man,” he told Kaniürü in a whisper. “Listen to me. I used to be a garbage collector. We were three. I was the driver. That man was once dead. We buried him. He rose from the dead before our very eyes and he chased us across the open field. We were saved by a group of Soldiers of Christ. One of us joined the sect right away. The other one went to hide in bars. I joined the youth. That man is Satan in human form.”

  Even though Kaniürü was unnerved, the words echoed his own when he had seen the man vanish without a trace from the public toilets not far from Paradise. He realized that if this youth were to ramble on like this to the others, he would instill terror in them and all of his own well-laid plans would come to naught.

  “Have you told the others about this?” Kaniürü asked.

  “No,” the man said.

  “Don’t go back! Stay here with me,” Kaniürü told him. “And stop shaking,” he added, pointing to the pistol he carried in his pocket.

  26

  When Sikiokuu, who kept watchful eyes on the sky for any signs of a helicopter, heard Big Ben Mambo ask th
e police to bring some packages to the platform, he leaned against his car and focused his binoculars on the packages. He recognized the paper wrappings and knew at once that these were the mirrors he had ordered from abroad. His heart leapt in joy: so the Buler had really hearkened to his plea? All the energy he had put into locating the best glass manufacturers would not go to waste. He would have liked to have been the one officiating instead of Big Ben Mambo, but that was nothing compared to the benefits he would reap from the role his mirrors were about to play in Nyawlra’s capture. History had its ironies, he thought, seeing that the recovery of his life was now dependent on a successful mirror performance by a sorcerer he was planning to kidnap! Sikiokuu was so anxious about the outcome that he forgot that he was supposed to lie low, and he now climbed onto the roof of the car to get a better view of the performance.

  As the police unwrapped each parcel and showed its contents to the crowd, with Mambo announcing the country each mirror came from before the police put it at the feet of the Wizard of the Crow, the ex-minister’s joy knew no bounds.

  And then he suddenly realized that as they were shown to the crowd the mirrors were capturing the shadows of Aburlrians. Minister Mambo had totally missed the point behind the importation of mirrors from abroad and even why they were so carefully wrapped. He went back to the driver’s seat and called the State House, but nobody picked up the phone.

  Besting his head on folded arms on the steering wheel, Sikiokuu, the Ex-Minister of State in the Buler’s Office, began to weep. His heaving made the car shake, and he came back to himself only when the car started honking and he realized that he had pressed the horn in error.

  27

  The Ruler continued groaning and, remarkably, still sneaked glances at the television screen. Many things crucial to the drama outside, like the signal for the helicopters to start dropping money from on high, were dependent on him. But the contractions were clearly affecting his concentration.

  Then suddenly came a strange sound. Furyk quickly climbed up the staircase to Heaven, from where he beckoned Clarkwell and Kaboca. The cloth on which Kaniürü had painted the colors of the earth was splitting, and the belts that secured the body to the chair were breaking.

  A little scared, the three doctors descended the staircase and went into conference.

  “The body is rising again,” said Furyk, in obvious dismay. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “It beats all scientific logic,” said Clarkwell.

  “The question is, what can we do to contain the expansion before it fills up the whole room?” Furyk asked, looking at Kaboca.

  “What did the sorcerer do to contain the expansion in New York?” asked Clarkwell.

  “The Wizard of the Crow? I don’t know what he did or how he did it,” admitted Kaboca.

  “He should be called from the assembly,” Furyk suggested.

  “An order to recall the Wizard of the Crow can come only from the Ruler’s lips,” said Kaboca, and they all knew that the Ruler was not in a position to issue any order.

  28

  The Wizard of the Crow had calmly watched the drama of the unwrapping of the mirrors and their placement in a pile before him. But inside he was all turmoil. Time was running out, and he still had not worked out how to extricate himself from this mess. How would he play with the mirrors convincingly in front of this crowd? He was almost certainly performing his own death, but he was equally convinced that the Ruler would not do anything drastic against him on the spot in front of the local and foreign media. The reprieve would delay his death by a few hours only. What would Nyawlra do if she were in a similar position? But she had been! As the Limping Witch, she had daringly gone right into the belly of the Aburirian beast!

  He felt courage suffuse him. Why see the warts of the land only when reflected in Western eyes? No, he was not going to play the game of foreign mirrors. The truth he carried within and the eyes of the people were the only mirrors he would now use. “I have been asked to use mirrors imported from abroad to smoke out enemies of the State,” the Wizard of the Crow started.

  He asked a policeman to lend him a club. Then he took the first mirror, read aloud the country of its origins, and then set about breaking it. He took the second and third. Systematically he broke all the imported mirrors, and at this act of defiance people started clapping in rhythm.

  “Since true divination is about revealing the hidden,” he said, “I want to share with you the secrets of my heart. I know Nyawlra. I love her and will never betray her, even if I must go to the land of no return. Nyawlra, I know, will be there with me, for she found me in pieces and made me whole. What she did before, making pieces whole, she will do again.” He paused as if to catch his breath.

  Clever fellow, a few skeptics muttered. Trying to flush her out of her hiding place, eh? But even they were touched by his tone as he now called out softly, as if addressing someone very near:

  “Nyawlra, I embrace you with all my heart and soul, with the people as my witness that truth never dies, its glory never fades. Holiness lies in wholeness.”

  The Wizard of the Crow felt a gentle breeze wafting the scent of flowers into his nostrils, a scent he knew so well but had not smelled for a long while. He felt a new surge of power, power rooted in his sure knowledge that his words had struck a responsive chord in the hearts of those assembled and reached Nyawlra, wherever she was among the people. He felt good because the words came from the depths of his being and he was ready to die for them.

  “Nyawlra is you. Nyawlra is you and me and others,” the Wizard of the Crow continued, without fear. “If you know that you are Nyawlra, please rise so that those who have been looking for you, calling you an enemy of the State, may see you. Nyawlra, show us the way”

  A woman stood up; I am Nyawlra, she said. Hardly had the eyes of the people turned to her than a man stood up and said, I am Nyawlra; he was followed by every other woman and man until the entire assembly proclaimed itself Nyawlra.

  Big Ben Mambo, the Minister of Information, and his official escort remained seated. The police and army officers who were already standing found themselves in an awkward position: they did not know whether or not to sit so as not to be counted as Nyawlra. They remained standing anyway, and for a few minutes it looked as if the army and the police were one with the people.

  Cameramen did not know on whom to focus. And to the government agents, Nyawlra was everywhere. One woman started shouting: How many tribes are there? Others replied two, producers and parasites.

  Voices rose in song:

  Come, come, the weak and the strong

  Let’s build a beautiful land

  Bring your knowledge and your heart

  The whole assembly was dancing now, one group working its way to the platform. And before Big Ben Mambo had time to react or figure out what was going on, a protective wall around the Wizard of the Crow had been formed.

  He felt a dancing presence beside him and knew it was Nyawlra.

  Their eyes met. They held hands and for a minute or so they danced to the song, a twosome indistinguishable from all the other dancers. Even so, the Wizard of the Crow and the Limping Witch felt as if they were in a world all their own, but one guarded and protected by the unity of the Aburlrian people.

  When at the State House the Ruler, his body still grossly expanding, saw what was happening on television, he brooded: How dare they sing and dance for joy when I am in infernal pain? It is time to scatter them with money. He gathered whatever strength he still had to make one more effort at teledirecting. He had hardly finished instructing one of the pilots to start dropping money from on high when a new wave of agony swept through him. He dropped the mobile phone; it clattered on the floor, as by now his body was taking up the whole chamber, pushing his doctors and cameramen up against the walls.

  Nyawlra heard the whine of a helicopter in the sky, looked up, and saw it dropping leaves as people shouted. The pieces of paper floated gently as if suspended. Before s
he could push to the microphone to tell the people that it was counterfeit, the dictator’s trickery to corrupt their souls and scatter them through temptation, she had a premonition. She looked behind her. Her eyes saw Kaniürü. She had never seen hate and jealousy burn so intensely as she now saw in his eyes.

  He was pressing hard against the crowd, heading straight to the platform. Nyawlra quickly glanced around for an escape route. She saw two formations from two different directions pressing against the crowd, all converging toward the Wizard of the Crow.

  Kaniürü held a gun. At first she thought he was pointing it at her. But no! He was pointing it at the Wizard of the Crow, and before she could cry out a warning Kaniürü had fired a shot. She was unable to scream; she threw herself on the fallen body of the Wizard of the Crow as if to shield him from further harm. She saw Kaniürü now pointing the gun at where she lay. We are finished, she muttered to herself.

  Somebody jumped on Kaniürü and wrestled him to the ground. The gun went off in the air. People nearby screamed in horror. Kaniürü and his adversary were rolling around on the ground, the man trying to get the gun, Kaniürü fiercely resisting. She had seen the man’s face somewhere before, Nyawlra thought. But she had no time to dwell on the thought.

  Suddenly, thunder split the sky. People felt the earth tremble. Kaniürü and his adversary stopped struggling momentarily. Fearing for his life, Kaniürü dropped his gun and simply took off. He had been preceded by his famously courageous youth, some of them crying out in despair, Oh dear, we have been caught red-handed, as they bumped against others also scampering.

  Finding himself without a protector, the ex—garbage driver also fled, moaning to himself, It is Satan, not once looking back until, fortunately, he fell in with a group of Soldiers of Christ at the incinerated remains of a building and he immediately submitted himself to Christ, assuming a new name, Pilot-of-Souls.