Minutes of Glory

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  But why our village? Why not? The question and the answers were irrelevant to the fact of the sighting. Magic and miracles, as we had learned over the years, had no logic. They were there, marvels that thrilled us; marvels that moved us became even more marvellous in the retelling. In all their varieties, the stories were eerily similar. He was always dressed in black shoes, white socks, and jeans that reached to above the ankles. And a hat, a Michael Jackson hat. And apparently, he never talked: just moonwalked in and away, tipping his hat, without indicating when or where he might appear next.

  Now we really missed our priest. He would no doubt unravel the mystery of the second coming. We yearned for his return. We thought of petitioning the bishop for a new priest but decided to hold back for a while: we had nowhere to house him. Those of us who were there can remember our attempts to repossess the home we had helped to build and the car we had bought for the convenience of our priest, depriving ourselves to make our man of God happy and satisfied. We had registered the property in his name. Some argued that the properties belonged to him as a priest and not to him as man, but others argued that once a priest always a priest, unless, of course, the Pope defrocked him. There was talk of sending a delegation to the Vatican, Rome, to appeal to the Holy See directly, but it would take years of savings to afford the flight to Rome.

  Our parish was in limbo: did we or did we not have a priest? Did the house and the car belong to the priest who had worn the robes of a priest and said Mass, in which case we could bring another one to wear similar robes, or to the man behind the regalia? We kept up paying the wages of the workmen at our priest’s house; the grounds were to remain ready for the return of the priest or his replacement. Protestants were building churches on every empty space; others were creating their own personal churches; some even insulted us by offering to buy our church building and put it to the service of real Protestant holiness. Even Muslims and Judaists vied to possess it and turn it into a temple that testified to their faith.

  Our new worries replaced the stale rumors of Jackson sightings. We joined other parishes for worship, and adopted their rivalries and prejudices and tried to forget still our new anxieties. But the rival parishes would not let us forget our loss, making jokes at our expense; they told endless tales about hypocrisy or vanishing padres, but we knew they were aimed at our loss and pride.

  Those of us in a position of leadership called a meeting of all the elders and leaders of the various groups of our parish community. The agenda about what next quickly turned into a query about the past. We started quibbling over words, parsing them into syllables and even single letters to find hidden meanings that might help us settle our doubts. The judge’s wife had spoken of tokens of love. She did not say that the jewellery was a gift, just a token. A token was not an act; it was a picture of the real, not the real itself. We sent a delegation to the judge’s residence to see if she would clarify, but the judge said his wife was aboveboard. How dare we … and threatened to have a few of us locked up for malice and slander of innocents.

  The debate resumed without the help of the judge. What wrongs had our priest committed? Love? Lust? Lustre? Coveting another’s property? None of this had occurred. If we were to condemn a person for thoughts that crept into the mind, then wouldn’t everybody have sinned at one time or another and come short of the glory of God? How then did we let ourselves be orphaned? The fact that we did not actually drive him away did not lessen the intensity of our self-flagellations.

  And that’s when we recalled Mo and his antics. It all started with the brat: before Mo broke the rhythm of our lives there was peace on earth. We all agreed: we were victims of a child’s imagination, moreover one who came from a broken home and was brought up by a godless mother who insulted God by claiming He did not need houses of worship on account that he owned the universe, and worse, that God and the devil were two in one. It’s the homeless and the poor who needed houses. What apostasy! Even Jesus had said the poor would always be among us. It was God who needed our complete, undivided attention, not the poor. We had driven our own away on the basis of lies that a misguided judge accepted as testimony. A judge should not let himself be blinded by jealousy: did he ever catch the priest atop his wife? Our remorse was unbearable, making us dismiss as irrelevant the few voices that reminded us that none of us had actually driven the priest away. Not even the judge.

  One question persisted till it became a chorus: since when did adults let little children lead them, we asked again and again, forgetting all about that line about how a little child shall lead them. Children? Mo was not a normal child. Satan dwelt inside the soul of that child. They recalled his demands that he be covered head to foot under a blanket: who, or what, was he communing with under the cover of darkness?

  And that was how Mo became the target of our communal wrath and frustration. If we had had the good sense to tear the veil, we might have caught the evil one intact. We still could do it. It was the only way by which we could assuage our remorse. Force Mo to tell the devil to give us back our priest.

  Mo and his mother had all but forgotten about the priest and the church. Not that churches and mosques and temples were her thing. She was glad that Mo had given up the church thing, coming to her view that every space was God’s space and every time God’s time and hence one could talk to It from anywhere at any time. As for Mo, the images of the priest crawling on his piss, or talking dirty with ladies late at night, had not come back to disturb his sleep.

  So when we descended on his house, he just told us a completely unacceptable truth: that he did not know the priest’s fate or his whereabouts.

  Ask your devil friend, we demanded.

  I don’t have devil for friend or enemy, he said.

  We seized and covered him under a blanket. We ignored the woman’s pleas and curses, threatening to burn her alive, even, mother of witches who had driven a husband, whoever he was, to oblivion. Or maybe she had fucked the devil. Mo was a devil’s child?

  Choke him to death, some shouted. The devil loves pain; he is the author of pain, a young man said, adding, in English, torture will thrill him.

  A thriller in Manira, another said.

  Thriller! Thriller! shouted the crowd, feverishly.

  The word thriller triggered an image in Mo.

  Don’t choke me, he pleaded from inside the blanket. Get me Michael Jackson and I will get you your priest.

  The request was so unexpected that we fell back momentarily. But hadn’t Michael Jackson joined our ancestors?

  So had Jesus, who after three days rose from the dead and showed himself to a select few, Mo replied; even those who first heard that Christ had risen doubted at first. But he rose.…

  We broke into hymn:

  He rose, He rose, He rose from the dead;?

  He rose, He rose, He rose from the dead;?

  He rose, He rose, He rose from the dead;?

  And the Lord shall bear my spirit home.

  Are you saying that Michael Jackson is back from the dead?

  You have heard the news. Ask the girls to whom he has appeared. Your girl, for instance.

  Some of the girls were present, and under the pressure of the moment confessed to having seen him, dressed in the color of the break of dawn or masked by evening twilight, and in the pathways of our village town, of all places.

  We turned to Mo. No threats this time, but could he please lead us to any one of Jackson’s appearances? He did not promise but demanded to have a band of youth near him at dawn and twilight. He had no control of the time or the space of his visions, he said, and this had a strange effect on those present. One person cited some verses from Mark:

  Therefore keep watch because you do not know when the owner of the house will come back – whether in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or at dawn. If he comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping.

  We chose to stay with him all the time. Mo did not disappoint, and one evening he guided us with w
ords to an open-air place, the way he had guided the police at the court.

  Bush telegraph must have spread the word, for by the time we reached the place, we found an assembly of screaming youth, girls and boys, but too late for them to execute their mission. Jackson had vanished but left a note about the place and day of his next appearance. But not the hour.

  VIII

  The fourth time it happened was in the same church. Except for the Judge and Joycelin, his wife, all the old members were there. Hundreds more had come. The media were there. Rumour had spread the news of a resurrection.

  We who kept vigil inside the church watched everything with blurred expectations. The choir rendered a version of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’ chorus. The scent of the myrrh and frankincense and flowers at the altar spread to the pews and outside. And then, finally, he appeared, not moonwalking as the rumors would later have it, but certainly gliding backward, airborne, a foot from the ground, his robes looking more like wings of glory. More like how Jesus walked on water, a few said.

  And then we saw his face. It was the priest. Our priest. But something had changed. His face. It was white or brown or something, anything but the black face we had come to know. Ambi skin lightening cream? Born again? So many questions. His voice, when finally he spoke, had the same sonorous quality.

  He had been possessed by the spirit of Michael Jackson and had moonwalked wide and far, over the earth. He had spent forty days in the wilderness, feeding on nothing but honey and berries. But he was glad to be back to lead the faithful to new heights of glory.…

  IX

  Mo, who had not attended the church but saw the whole thing under a blanket with which his mother had covered him at his request, was describing the whole scene as it unfolded. He could not understand how the congregation could so easily accept the return of the priest. No questions asked. Nothing about the forty days. Nothing about his flight from the court. Nothing about the Jackson appearances to a select few. It was as if nothing had happened, as if the past did not matter at all. Only the illusion …

  They worship their priest, their building, their vanity, his mother told him. Buildings under different names, Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, Evangelical, Judaic, compete. Their priests call themselves shepherds and train their followers to sheep-walk. God is not Catholic, Muslim, Judaic, Protestant, Hindu, Sikh; God is not a building. He lives here, there, and everywhere. My son, God sees all, because the universe is hers, and she never sleeps.… She is the universe.… Let’s go and tell the whole world.…

  You have to go, Mo suddenly told his mother. We have seen too much, heard too much for them to leave us alone. They would rather uproot the eyes that see and the tongue that tells. I will join you later.…

  X

  There’s work to do, the priest in a white face was saying at the church. He had come back to fight prying devils, sons of Ham who had seen their father naked and had not clothed him but went about bragging about having seen his nakedness. The devil is alive and well: he knew because he had wrestled with him in the wilderness. Now he resides in a child by the name of Mo. He and his devil mother must be burned alive.

  If I had not been there and seen with my eyes, I would never have believed what happened next. We did not wait for darkness but surrounded Mo’s place with oil and torches. Mo’s mom was nowhere to be seen. Mo was still under the blanket. We lifted the veil only to find his inert body. The devil.

  The devil is dead, we started singing, in a tone between triumph and disappointment. We were about to go back to the church, bringing back the good tidings, when someone suggested we burn the body.

  That’s when it happened. We all saw Mo’s body rise as if its soul had come back for a reunion with its body. We ran, everybody their way, back to the church, crying for help from our priest, for none of us had ever seen a body rise from the dead.

  We locked ourselves inside the church. The police found us there when they came to arrest the priest and later arraigned him at the judge’s court, charged with stealing gold from God and then trying to implicate the judge’s wife in the crime.

  Another miracle; a sight to see. Forty girls in Manira were carrying big tummies. When questioned, they all claimed that the tummies began to swell some months after the visitation of the holy spirit to their beds, mostly after every moonwalk, forty moonwalks in all.…

  FOR THIONG’O K,

  seasons gift, 25 December 2011 and 2012

  About the Author

  One of the leading writers and scholars at work today, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. He is the author of A Grain of Wheat; Weep Not, Child; and Petals of Blood, as well as Birth of a Dream Weaver and Wrestling with the Devil (all from The New Press). Currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, Ngũgĩ is the recipient of twelve honorary doctorates, among other awards.