Petals of Blood

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  ‘Later it was said she had maybe caught fire while lighting the Nyitira which spilt out oil and flames on her clothes. But it was clear that my cousin’s husband must have done it. He may have thought that the town wife who had rejected him was inside the hut.’

  ‘But it’s a horrible death . . . the pain . . . the helpless terror.’

  ‘There is no death, unless of old age, without pain. For some reason, I have not wanted to believe that it was my cousin’s husband who did it. I have not wanted to believe that any man could be so cruel. I have – it really is so childish of me – but I have liked to believe that she burnt herself like the Buddhists do, which then makes me think of the water and the fire of the beginning and the water and the fire of the second coming to cleanse and bring purity to our earth of human cruelty and loneliness. Mwalimu. I will tell you. There are times – not too many times – but a few times – when I remember a few things – that I have felt as if I could set myself on fire. And I would then run to the mountain top so that everyone can see me cleansed to my bones.’

  ‘Wanja . . . stop that . . . what are you talking about?’

  ‘My aunt was a clean woman though,’ she continued. ‘She was very good to us children. Her husband was a hard-core Mau Mau. I was even more proud of her when later I learnt that she used to carry guns and bullets to the forest hidden in baskets full of unga. She was not a Christian and used to laugh at my mother’s Jesus ways. But they somehow loved one another. My mother respected her in a certain kind of way – and her death – well – it really affected her. My father once said: “It’s probably an act of God . . . for helping the terrorists.” That was the beginning of their falling apart of which I was later to become a victim.’

  She stopped. For a few seconds she dwelt alone within that inward gaze.

  ‘No,’ she said as if she was continuing a dialogue with one of her several selves . . . ‘I don’t think I can ever burn myself. Did I frighten you? It was a way of talking. I am terrified of fires. That’s why I was upset in the hut when I saw the fire. What I would like is to get a job.’

  ‘Wanja . . . tell me: what happened to your child?’

  He felt rather than saw her body shudder. He wished he had not asked her the question. He did not know how to cope with her silent sobbing.

  ‘Wanja: what’s the matter?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘I don’t know. I just feel feverish. I thought the moon would come out tonight. What a fruitless vigil on a mountain! Please take me home.’

  They went back as they had come – in silence. They found the light was out. And Karega had gone. He struck a match and lit the Nyitira. Wanja said: ‘Please put it out.’ They both stood at the door looking out. He knew Karega could not have gone to the house because he did not have the keys. Munira felt cold sweat on his face. The fear he had earlier experienced came back. Karega had gone as mysteriously as he had appeared. He fixed his eyes to the dark outside hoping to pierce the mystery and so dispel his inner terror.

  Twelve years later Munira was to pick on this night as yet another example of Wanja’s cunning and devilry.

  ‘Looking back on that night on Ilmorog Hill,’ he wrote, ‘I can see the devil at work in the magic and wonder and perplexity I felt at that fatal meeting between Karega, Wanja, Abdulla and myself; an encounter dominated by people who were not there with us, who were now only voices in the past. But also for me, then, the night had the changing colours of a rainbow. For even before I could wish her goodbye and go home, I saw emerging from the far horizon a big orange moon half veiled by a mixture of dark and grey clouds. We watched it rise, growing bigger and bigger, dominating the horizon, and my heart was full and I searched for the slogan which would contain the experience – Moon in a Grey Rain Drop, or something like that. Wanja, who only a few minutes back was crying, was now excited like a little child at the first drops of rain and she cried out in ecstasy: The moon . . . the orange moon. Please, Mwalimu . . . stay here tonight . . . Break the moon over me.’ Her pleading voice had startled Munira out of his thoughts. He too wanted to stay the night. He would stay the night. A joyous trembling coursed through his body. Aah, my harvest. To hell with Karega and all the unpleasant memories of yesterday, he thought as he followed Wanja into the hut.

  Chapter Four

  1 ~ If Wanja had been patient and had waited for the new moon to appear on Ilmorog ridge – as indeed she had been instructed by Mwathi wa Mugo – she and Munira would have witnessed one of the most glorious and joyous sights in all the land, with the ridges and the plains draped by a level sheet of shimmering moonlit mist into a harmony of peace and silence: a human soul would have to be restless and raging beyond reach of hope and salvation for it not to be momentarily overwhelmed and stilled by the sight and the atmosphere.

  Even without the moon Ilmorog ridge, as it drops into the plains along which Ilmorog river flows, must form one of the greatest natural beauties in the world. The river is now only a stream. But there was a time when it was probably much bigger and geological speculation has it that its subterranean streams, buried long ago, feed Ondirri marshes at Kikuyu and Manguo in Limuru. Results of the researches on the recent archaeological finds in Ilmorog may well add to the theories of Ogot, Muriuki, Were and Ochieng about the origins and the movement of Kenyan peoples: they may also tell us whether the river is one of those referred to in ancient Hindu and Egyptian sacred literatures or whether the walls that form the ridges are any part of Ptolemy’s Lunae Montes or the Chandravata referred to in the Vedas.

  For there are many questions about our history which remain unanswered. Our present-day historians, following on similar theories yarned out by defenders of imperialism, insist we only arrived here yesterday. Where went all the Kenyan people who used to trade with China, India, Arabia long long before Vasco da Gama came to the scene and on the strength of gunpowder ushered in an era of blood and terror and instability – an era that climaxed in the reign of imperialism over Kenya? But even then these adventurers of Portuguese mercantilism were forced to build Fort Jesus, showing that Kenyan people had always been ready to resist foreign control and exploitation. The story of this heroic resistance: who will sing it? Their struggles to defend their land, their wealth, their lives: who’ll tell of it? What of their earlier achievements in production that had annually attracted visitors from ancient China and India?

  Just now we can only depend on legends passed from generation to generation by the poets and players of Gichandi, Litungu and Nyatiti supplemented by the most recent archaeological and linguistic researches and also by what we can glean from between the lines of the records of the colonial adventurers of the last few centuries, especially the nineteenth century.

  Ilmorog plains are themselves part of that Great Rift that formed a natural highway joining Kenya to the land of the Sphinx and to the legendary waters of the River Jordan in Palestine. For centuries, and even up to this day, the God of Africa and the Gods of other lands have wrestled for the mastery of man’s soul and for the control of the results of man’s holy sweat. It is said that the roll of thunder and the flash of lightning are their angry roar and the fire from the fearful clashing of their swords, and the Rift Valley must be one of the footprints of Africa’s God.

  From Agu and Agu, Tene wa tene, from long long before the Manjiri generation, the highway had seen more than its fair share of adventurers from the north and north-west. Solomon’s suitors for myrrh and frankincense; Zeu’s children in a royal hunt for the seat of the sun-god of the Nile; scouts and emissaries of Genghis Khan; Arab geographers and also hunters for slaves and ivory; soul and gold merchants from Gaul and from Bismarck’s Germany; land pirates and human game-hunters from Victorian and Edwardian England: they had all passed here bound for a kingdom of plenty, driven sometimes by holy zeal, sometimes by a genuine thirst for knowledge and the quest for the spot where the first man’s umbilical cord was buried, but more often by mercenary commercial greed and love of the wanton destruction of thos
e with a slightly different complexion from theirs. They each had come wearing different masks and guises and God’s children had, through struggle, survived every onslaught, every land- and soul-grabbing empire, and continued their eternal wrestling with nature and with their separate gods and mutual selves.

  Memories remained memories of a few individuals who had made some mark on the plains and on Ilmorog before making a dramatic exit to other grounds.

  First a white colonist, Lord Freeze-Kilby and his goodly wife, a lady. He was probably one of those footloose aristocrats, but a ruined one, who wanted to make something of his own in what he saw as a New Frontier. To change Ilmorog wilderness into civilized shapes and forms that would yield a million seedlings and a thousand pounds where one had planted only a few and invested only a pound, was a creative act of a god. For this he needed other’s sweat and he used the magic of a government, the chit and the power of his rifle, to conscript labour. He experimented with wheat, ignoring the many frowning faces of the herdsmen and survivors of the earlier massacres in the name of Christian pacification by the king’s men, and he again trusted to the rifle he always slung on his shoulders. Some of the herdsmen and the peasants were turned into kipande-carrying labourers on lands that used to be their own to master and to rule. They all watched the wheat finger-dancing ballet in the wind, and bided their time. Had they not heard what had happened to the Masai people of the Laikipia plains? At night, on Ilmorog ridge, their leaders met and reached a decision. They set fire to the whole field and themselves ran to the outer edges of the plains, awaiting deadly repercussions. The lord refused to move. But his lady deserted him. The warriors came back and made strange noises around his bungalow late at night. The lone adventurer must have then seen the wailing ghost of the earlier colonist, and a man of God, too, and he quickly retreated to the happier and healthier valleys of Ol Kalou. There he found his goodly wife being comforted in the arms of another lord and shot them both with his rifle. In Ilmorog, the natives burnt down the wooden bungalow and danced and sang around it. Reprisals came. The battle of Ilmorog early this century was one of the fiercest of all the wars of conquest and resistance fought in Kenya.

  Then later, in between the two European wars, came a Ramjeeh Ramlagoon Dharamashah, from nowhere it seemed, and sought permission to erect a bungalow that would be a home and a shop. He put up an iron roof and iron walls and settled into business. He sold salt, sugar, curry and cloth and also beans, potatoes and maize he had bought from the same farmers more cheaply during harvest-time. He always sat behind the counter in the same corner chewing some green leaves. Occasionally he would shut the shop to take a trip to the city, trekking along the selfsame plains and bringing back more supplies piled on the backs of the African porters and some on a wagon pulled by bulls. Once he shut the shop and stayed away for a month. When he came back, he had with him a giggling shy girl they took to be his daughter until she started bearing him children. He also got a helper in the shop and around the house, Njogu’s daughter from Ilmorog. She was very useful; especially when Dharamashah’s wife was away in India or some other place. She too became round-bellied. Dharamashah, it is said, paid her a lot of money and sent her to the city where he would often visit her in secret, half-acknowledging his only son by a black woman. But the son one day after the Second World War came to Ilmorog – a tall coffee-coloured boy – and stayed with his grandparents, only once visiting his father who thereafter quarrelled with his giggling wife about him. In time, the people of Ilmorog came to depend on Dharamashah’s shop for everything. Their economy and daily needs became inextricably bound up with the rising fortunes of the shop. They pawned their crops, their milk, their needs to the shop until they started grumbling about the invisible chains that bound them, necks and lives and all, to the shop. In 1953 the black woman, beautifully dressed but emaciated in body, suddenly came to Ilmorog and went to see Dharamashah and soon after went crying to her aged parents. In 1956, Dharamashah received a letter from one Ole Masai with a strange sender’s address: Somewhere in Nyandarura Forest. He read the letter, hands trembling, mouth frozen in the very act of chewing green leaves, and quickly shut the shop. He and a wife who had borne him more than ten children, all sent to India for their education and marriage, fled Ilmorog and never returned. The villagers broke into the shop and helped themselves to every scrap of food and cloth in the store and on the shelves and blessed those fighting in the Forest.

  May the Lord bless Ole Masai and his band of brave warriors.

  They suffered. For now they had to trek all the way to Ruwa-ini for their tiniest needs, salt even, until a few took a leaf from Ramjeeh Ramlagoon Dharamashah and started buying more than they needed and selling to others at a profit. But trading remained incidental to their daily struggle with the soil and the weather. None, not even Njuguna, was mad enough to believe that one could really grow to become a man as a mere go-between. It was left to another stranger, Abdulla, soon after independence, to rescue the building from moths, spiders and rats. Abdulla sold more or less the same assortment of things: he sat more or less in the same corner behind the counter, but he used a donkey to pull a cart and cursed Joseph where Dharamashah had used bulls to pull a wagon and chewed leaves and shouted at his wife and children.

  And then suddenly they noticed that Abdulla’s curses were over: the scowl on his face was gone: instead of terrorizing Joseph with curses he had sent him to school; he would even laugh from deep in his stomach. The store had a more cheerful look. The tea packets, bundles of salt and sugar and the curry powder tins were tidily arranged on the shelves. He had repaired the broken table in the bar and added more chairs which could even be taken out into the sun. More and more people now spent a few hours of their evening in Abdulla’s shop.

  ‘It is Wanja’s doing,’ whispered Njuguna to Muturi, Njogu and Ruoro. ‘It’s that girl’s doing. And what is this I hear that she goes to Mwathi’s place?’

  ‘It’s the way she helps Nyakinyua that moves me, and she a city woman,’ said Njogu. Muturi kept quiet, as he nearly always did when Mwathi’s place was mentioned.

  2 ~ It was not only under the floodlight of the moon that made Ilmorog a wonder! There was also something soft and subdued and beautiful about Ilmorog ridge between the hour of the sun’s death and the hour of darkness. For an inexplicable reason the low, billowy Donyo hills seemed to rise and to touch the sky. Standing anywhere on the ridge one could catch sight of the sun delicately resting on the tip of the distant hills which marked the far end of the grazing plains. Then suddenly the sun would slip behind the hills, blazing out a coppery hue with arrows of fire shot in every direction. Soon after, darkness and mystery would descend on the plains and the hills. The ridge, unless the moon was out, would now suddenly become part of that awesome shadow. Munira relished twilight as a prelude to that awesome shadow. He looked forward to the unwilled immersion into darkness. He would then be part of everything: the plants, animals, people, huts, without consciously choosing the links. To choose involved effort, decision, preference of one possibility, and this could be painful. He had chosen not to choose, a freedom he daily celebrated walking between his house, Abdulla’s place and of course Wanja’s hut.

  Yet he felt guilty about being propelled by a whirlwind he had neither willed nor could now control. This consciousness of guilt, of having done a wrong, had always shadowed him in life.

  Munira was a refugee from a home where certain things were never mentioned. His own family life was built and he supposed now broken on the altar of Presbyterian Christian propriety and good manners. He had had his affairs, this he could not deny. Son of man must live. But he always remembered that first time in a house in old Kamiritho, long long before the present Emergency village, with shame. The house was one of several built in what was called Swahili majengo style: a corner house with a huge sprawling roof of rotting tin. The houses were famous, especially because Italian prisoners of war – the Bonos, as they were called – used to fetch murram for t
he Nakuru road from near there and they would frequent the houses. Amina, her name was: he gave her two shillings, all the money that he had saved. She had really humiliated him. ‘He is only a boy,’ she said, standing in the doorway, looking him up and down with amused eyes, as if announcing her surprised discovery to another inside the house, and for a second he was full of terror in case she was a married woman and her husband came out with ten sharpened pangas. ‘You know I don’t sleep with uncircumcised men. It’s a rule of mine. But come here.’ She led him into the house and sat on the bed. Munira was trembling with fear and shame and he wanted to cry. His thing had anyway shrivelled. ‘Let’s see now . . . don’t be afraid . . . you are a man . . . I bet you have impregnated one or two.’ But she was nice and she had soothed him with the gentleness of a mother and his thing had suddenly saluted, upright and strong, and now he felt he would die if—But she had put him between her fleshy thighs, she spoke in a cooing voice, crossed her legs slightly and, God, it was all over for him and he could not tell if he had been in or not. It was this that he had tried to exorcise by fire in vain. He always recalled that scene with unpleasant feelings, especially when in later years, after expulsion from Siriana, he would pass by the house on his way to Kamandura as a young teacher. Nevertheless he had sworn never to be shocked by anybody’s openness to the flesh.

  But even with Wanja he found that he was still a prisoner of his own upbringing and Siriana missionary education. It was not that he did not enjoy the experience. On the contrary, despite that upbringing he knew there was nothing so great, nothing so joyous as those few seconds of expectation before entry into a woman’s unknown. And Wanja’s pained face under the moonlit beams issuing from the window; or her little noises of pain, as if she was really hurt; of pleasure, as if eating honeycombs and sugarcanes; and the waves of her gentle motions made the snake in paradise full with the blood-warmth of expectation before final deliverance from the pain of this knowing, this knowledge. Her scream, calling out to her mother or sisters for help, would give him an even greater sense of power and strength until he sank into a void, darkness, awesome shadow where choosing or not choosing was no longer a question. But he would wake to a terrified consciousness that somehow he had been led on, and he did not feel any victory. He had not reached her and this, ironically, made him hunger the more for her, for a thousand sins with her and more.