Petals of Blood

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  ‘It is a bit difficult . . . that place . . . It is slightly out of the way. A bit dry. Few people come that side.’

  ‘I hear that it’s been deserted by its men: is that true Mr Munira? That only women remain? Lucky you, Mr Munira. I shall be coming along to help you . . . Not a bad job eh? Meanwhile do attract one or two teachers there. Tell them about the free women. Try, Mr Munira, try. When I was at school, Mr Munira, my headmaster used to tell us: Try and Try Again. He was a fat Scotsman in charge of religion and he used to tell us a story of a Scottish king who was driven out of his kingdom and he saw a spider try and try again to climb up a wall until he succeeded. He too went back and this time regained his kingdom. So, Mr Munira, try and people your kingdom of Ilmorog with teachers . . .’

  Munira was about to go out when Mzigo called him back.

  ‘By the way, here is a letter to the Headmaster of Ilmorog School.’

  Munira took the envelope and opened it. He could not believe it. He read it over and over again. Kamwene Cultural Organization (Ilmorog Branch) invited the Headmaster of Ilmorog School and all his staff to join Nderi wa Riera in a delegation that would go to tea at Gatundu . . . He was trembling . . .

  ‘Thank you . . .’ he said.

  ‘It’s not me . . .’

  Munira’s heart was glowing with pride. And so he was making something of himself after all. A headmaster. And now an invitation to tea. To tea at Gatundu! Admittedly, the note was handwritten, and came from the district office and it asked him to organize all his teachers and their wives. He had never heard of KCO (Ilmorog Branch). But it was something to remember. A headmaster. An invitation to tea. Tea at Gatundu. He thought of going back to tell Mr Mzigo the story of a Mr Ironmonger who used to talk of heaven in terms of tea, sausages and vanilla ice-cream. But now he had to hurry home to tell his wife of the news. A headmaster! Invitation to tea! Ilmorog had given him greatness. Hoyee!

  Before sunset he crossed into Limuru. Even if he had not known the features and the lie of the land – the ridges that gave way to deep valleys that rose up into more ridges and valleys – he would still have known it by the cold brisk air which suddenly hit him and made his body and mind alert, ready to leap and pounce. This land; these ridges, these valleys nearly always green through the year made Limuru a scion of God’s favourite country: long rains in March, April and May; biting cold icy showers in misty June and July; windy sunshine on green peas and beans in August and September; a dazzling sun in harvest-tide in October and November and red plums and luscious pears ripening in December, January and February under a brilliantly clear blue sky. So different, he thought, from droughty Ilmorog.

  But coming into the place he always felt in himself a strong tension between this vigour, this energy that was Limuru and that long night of unreality that was his past: between the call of life and involvement in living history and an escape into a family seclusion with a morality rooted in property and the Presbyterian Church; between an inexplicable fear of the people and an equally inexplicable fear of his father; between the desire for active creation and a passive acceptance of one’s ordained fate. His father’s face now loomed large in his mind . . .

  His father was an early convert to the Christian faith. We can imagine the fatal meeting between the native and the alien. The missionary had traversed the seas, the forests, armed with the desire for profit that was his faith and light and the gun that was his protection. He carried the Bible; the soldier carried the gun; the administrator and the settler carried the coin. Christianity, Commerce, Civilization: the Bible, the Coin, the Gun: Holy Trinity. The native was grazing cattle, dreaming of warriorship, of making the soil yield to the power of his hands, slowly through a mixture of magic and work bending nature’s laws to his collective will and intentions. In the evening he would dance, muthunguci, ndumo, mumburo in celebration or he would pray and sacrifice to propitiate nature. Yes: the native was still afraid of nature. But he revered man’s life as much as he revered nature. Man’s life was God’s sacred fire that had to remain lit all the way from the ancestor to the child and the generations yet unborn.

  Except that Waweru and his father had been driven from their family land in Muranga by even more powerful mbari lords and wealthy houses who could buy more potent magic and other protective powers. Here in Kiambu they had to start all over again with his grandfather having to work his way up from a ndungata on yet another powerful family’s land to the time when he got a few goats to strike out on his own. Waweru had seen all that and he hoped that when he grew up he too would acquire even more potent magic and create an even more powerful house.

  The native. The missionary. Driven by forces they could not always understand. The stage was set.

  Waweru’s father wakes up, the hour it is said Mara threw away his dying mother to the forest. He tells Waweru: my son, take these goats and cows to the grassland near Ikenia Forest. I have a meeting with the elders to discuss this thing prophesied long ago by the travelling seer – Mugo wa Kibiro. We and our fathers used not to believe him when he told us about red Foreigners and now indeed it has happened. And now the red stranger has started taking our lands in Tigoni and other places. You know how we have struggled to get this land and, even harder, this wealth. If he takes our land: where shall we cultivate miriyo? Where graze the cattle? So all the clans and mbaris and all the houses big and small must now close ranks and fight the stranger in our midst. Do not forget your calabash of sour milk. Also your spear and shield. We shall need them in the struggle to come. Gird your loins and always remember everything good and beautiful comes from the soil. Some clan-heads and mbari lords and some heads of the big houses are betraying the people and allying themselves with these Foreigners. But remember those who betrayed the nation to the Arab trader, Jumbe? The voice of the people haunted them to death. Waweru takes the cows and the goats and then he stands, watches the retreating figure of his father and spits on the ground. Big houses: big families: more powerful than the work of my hand is the possession of magic: didn’t the big houses drive us from our land in Muranga and we had to start all over again? I’ll create my big house to beat all the big houses . . . Waweru has always passed by this new building where the daily peals of bells strike awe and curiosity into his heart. This magic and the one that comes from bamboo sticks is making the big houses and the big mbaris and clans afraid: they struggle against it or seek friendship with it. At least it is splitting houses, clans, and even ridges. Not even Kamiri’s sorcery proved more powerful than this magic. Waweru knows one or two young men who have sought shelter inside. They were given lumps of sugar and a piece of white calico. Now it is morning: and it is cold. They see him and beckon him in. He has already made up his mind. Let his father resist alone. He, Waweru, will join Kamenyi and Kahati. Better than the warmth of cow-dung and urine and biting dew was the odour of the white man sweetened by sugar, with church bells and music stranger than that from the one-stringed wandindi and the mwariki flute – and, protected by gunpowder and tinkling coins, possessing life longer and stronger than that of cows and goats and sheep. This was a new world with a new magic. His father, trembling with anger, comes to fetch home the prodigal son: he can’t speak, but helplessly points a walking stick at Waweru. Waweru feels a bit guilty: after all, he is shin of the shin, blood of the blood of the trembling old man. But above the voice of doubt, he hears another voice calling him into a higher glory: he who forsaketh his father and mother for my sake . . . and he sees himself the fulfilment of the prophecy which is also the proof of the truth of it. At the behest of his new father and mother, Waweru, who now becomes Ezekieli – how sweet the name sounds in a new Christian’s ear – divests himself of every robe from his heathen past.

  Wash me, Redeemer, and I shall be whiter than snow: so they sang then, as Munira was later to sing in Siriana.

  Rewards there were: a proof of God’s nodding response. With a mixture of tinkling coins and trickery of the pen and the law he was able to buy whole l
ands from some of the declining mbari lords and clans and also from individuals who needed money to pay their expected dues to the new Caesar. Such were those who did not want to turn into workers on European settlers’ lands, then the only means of securing the coins needed by Caesar. They sold their lands bit by bit to those like Waweru who could get the coins through bringing more souls to Christ. In the end they joined the very labouring clan they were trying to avoid by the sale of their land and property. For the Caesar kept on making more and more demands. There were other mbaris too, like that of Kagunda whose sons wanted only to drink and not look after their inherited wealth. So Kanjohi, elder son of Kagunda, sold all his family lands to Waweru and himself went to the Rift Valley. This and more: Waweru seized all the openings so that under the old colonial regime, he was a very powerful landowner and churchman. Waweru was amongst the first Africans allowed to grow pyrethrum as a cash crop and to sell it to the white growers. This gave him a head-start over his more pagan neighbours, some of whom had been pacified to eternal sleep or to slave-labour camps in towns or farms by Frederick Lugard, Meinertzhagen, Grogan, Francis Hall and other hirelings of Her Imperial Majesty, Defender of the Faith, Elect of God. God save the Queen, they sang after every massacre and then went to church for blessings and cleansing: it had always fallen to the priest to ordain human sacrifice to appease every dominant God in history.

  There was a photograph of his father taken between the wars which had always impressed Munira.

  Waweru is standing by a gramophone on which is drawn a picture of a dog sitting on its hind legs barking out: HIS MASTER’S VOICE. He is dressed in a jacket and riding breeches and boots and a chain passes over the front of the waistcoat. He is wearing a sun-helmet and in his hands he is holding the Bible.

  Munira had always felt a slight discomfort with this picture, but he could never tell what it was to which he was really objecting. In the same way he had married a girl from a pagan home, maybe as a prompting from the heart against what his father stood for. But the girl turned out a replica of his more obedient sisters. She could never get it out of her mind that she had married into a renowned Christian house, and she tried to be the ideal daughter-in-law. She broke his parents’ initial resistance by her readiness to be moulded anew. Julia soon became his mother’s special creation and as such his mother adored her. Munira could have forgiven her everything but those silent prayers before and after making love. But he had never lifted a finger to fight against the process.

  Life for him had always been a strain. His father thought him a loss. And he, Munira, always felt a need to break loose. But he always hesitated. It was as if he would not have known what he was running away from and what he was running toward.

  But now as Munira approached his home, a headmastership and an Invitation to Tea all in one pocket, he felt happy. His first big initiative, occasioned by the general idealism that had gripped the country just before and for a little while after independence, had produced a fruit however small. Invitation and a promotion. He could now even stand up to the profile of his father looming large in Munira’s imagination as he rode through the brisk air toward his home.

  It turned out that most teachers and their wives had been invited to tea at Gatundu. They had also been asked to take twelve shillings and fifty cents for a self-help project. Munira’s wife, despite attempts to cover it with a Christian grace, was also excited. For Munira the Saturday would remain tattooed in his mind so that he would pass it alive to his children: he, Munira, was going to tea with a living legend which had dominated the consciousness of a country for almost a century. What wouldn’t one give for the honour! Once again Munira felt a little bit above the average.

  The bus that took them came around six to the Ruwa-ini post office, and everybody was worried: someone even suggested that they should cancel the trip, but he was hushed by the others. It was better late than never: tea in such a place would mean a night’s feast. The solemn-looking government official assured them that all was well.

  The sudden reversal of fortune was the most painful Munira had experienced since the Siriana incident. They were taken past Gatundu, through some banana plantations where they found yet another crowd of people solemnly waiting for something. A funeral tea? Munira wondered, numbed to silence by the eerie sombreness of everything. He looked around: the government official had vanished. They were now ordered into lines – one for men, the other for women. A teacher asked loudly: is this the tea we came to have? He was hit with the flat of a panga by a man who emerged from nowhere and as suddenly disappeared into nowhere. How did Mzigo and the government official come into all this? It was dark: a small light came from a hut into which people disappeared in groups of ten or so. What is it all about? thudded Munira’s heart. And then it was his turn!

  On the way back, around midnight, Munira knew that Julia was silently weeping. He felt her withdrawal, the accusation of betrayal: but how could he answer her now, how could he tell her that he truly did not know? He was hungry and thirsty and all throughout the bus was this hush of a people conscious of having been taken in: of having participated in a rite that jarred with time and place and persons and people’s post-Uhuru expectations! How could they as teachers face their children and tell them that Kenya was one?

  Later Munira was to learn that a very important person in authority, with the tacit understanding and approval from other very important persons in authority like Nderi, some even from other national communities, was the brain behind this business. But the knowledge did not reconcile him to the act.

  At home Julia looked at him and said: ‘So you could not be man enough to tell your wife!’

  For the first time in his life Munira felt that he must have a man-to-man talk with his father. He now saw his father in a new and more positive light. In the 1890s he had stood up to his grandfather and joined the mission. In 1952 he had defied the movement and stuck to the Church. He had even dared preach against the movement. For these efforts he had had his cattle boma broken into and his cows taken away. His left ear was cut off as a warning. It is true that he had ceased preaching against it, but at least he had not abandoned the faith and the side that he had chosen. Yes. He would talk to him man to man, face to face, and learn the true secret of his father’s success.

  He went to his parents’ house early the following day. He found his father in prayer. Munira felt weak at the knees. He knelt on the floor, genuinely trembling before the Lord. If being saved would help him, he would be saved. If beating and tearing and baring his chest before the Lord would really help him to choose the right path once and for all, he would surely do that so as to be cleansed of terror and doubt and indecision for ever. How proud he now was of a father so serene, so sure and secure in both wealth and faith!

  Ezekiel Waweru was still one of the most powerful landlords in the area, adding to his pyrethrum estates new tea estates he bought from the departing colonials. It was an irony of history, or, for him, a manifestation of the mysterious ways of the Lord, that the new tea estate was in Tigoni, the very area Waweru’s father had cited as the one act of colonial theft which caused big and small houses of the period to join the people in armed resistance. His children except Mukami and Munira had done well.

  If he was surprised to see Munira call on him so early on a Sunday, or puzzled by the man’s contrite face and sudden involvement in prayer, he did not show it on the face. Maybe God had finally brought him home, he reasoned, suppressing the contempt he felt toward Munira.

  Munira’s fear and puzzled anger at yesterday’s experience seemed to grow and increase with reflection and distance in time. But not wanting to shock his father – and now, Munira thought, he would descend to the lowest depths in his father’s estimation of him – he trod gingerly, softly, though his bitterness at being tricked, he, of all people, a teacher, urged him to spill everything. His father listened rapt in thought and this encouraged Munira.

  ‘What I could not understand . . . what I shal
l never forget was this man . . . he was so poorly dressed . . . rags . . . no shoes even . . . and he stood there, when all of us were trembling, and he said: “I am a squatter – a working-man in a tea plantation owned by Milk Stream Tea Estates. I used to work there before 1952. During the movement I was in charge of spying and receiving guns and taking them to our fighters. I was later detained. Now I am working on the same estate owned by the same company. Only now some of our people have joined them. It is good that some of our people are eating. But I will not take another oath until the promises of the first one have been fulfilled.” They beat him in front of us. They stepped on his neck and pressed it with their boots against the floor, and only when he made animal noises did they stop. He took the oath all right. But not with his heart. I shall never forget his screaming.’

  Munira had never felt so close to his father. Even when Waweru started lecturing him about his failures, he took it as justified chastisement: and who was he to contradict a father who at least had stood by some principles?

  ‘I don’t need to tell you that you have been a disappointment to me. You are my eldest son and you know what that means. I sent you to Siriana: you got into bad company and you were sent home. If you look at some of the people you were in school with you can see where they are: you go to any ministry, go to any big company, they are there. Your first act of manhood was to impregnate a woman. We thank the Lord that Julia turned out to be a good woman. But instead of staying together with her, you ran away to a place whose name I can’t even mouth. You have always run from opportunities. You have always run away from every chance to make yourself a man. I have all this property. I am ageing. You could at least look after it. Look at your brothers . . . only the other day little children. Take a lesson from them. The banker one has bought houses all over Nairobi. He has a number of trading premises in Nairobi. He could set you up in one. He could get you a loan. And your brother in the oil company. Go to any petrol station between here and everywhere. He has some small thing there. Your sisters too . . . Now it has been reported to me that you even drink. You will come to a bad end: just like your sister . . .’