Petals of Blood

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  He looks so different away from the office, Karega was thinking. The weariness seemed to have gone. Karega wanted to ask him questions but somehow could not find an opening.

  After the meal, the lawyer took Karega and Munira into his library where they were soon joined by Wanja and Abdulla. There were many books – heaps on heaps – and he was fingering each with obvious care and love. Munira was ashamed of his almost empty shelves. They sat down on the floor and the lawyer suddenly started questioning them very closely about Ilmorog, its history, their MP, the conditions, and what they had hoped to achieve by this visit. Karega tried to explain and in the process became acutely aware of the vagueness behind the whole venture. He noticed too that the weariness had come back to the man’s face and a sadness crept into his voice as he now said:

  ‘I suppose he will receive you. Why, he might even organize a Harambee meeting to buy peace for an uneasy conscience. A little charity . . .’

  ‘We do not mind a little charity,’ explained Munira, ‘except that we have hardly met any in this city.’ He told of his experiences at the priest’s house and at Chui’s place. ‘What I could not understand was their obvious competition to say the most shocking words. In the old days, I am told, the songs and the words and everything were in their place – singers talked to one another, abused one another, even, but there was dignity in the whole thing. When I was young I used to hide from home to attend circumcision festivals.’

  He stopped and wondered: maybe one or all his other brothers were there, while his father sat at home singing their praises. Karega and Wanja were each thinking of the ordeal in the house. But they didn’t say much about it. The lawyer started talking. It was as if he was holding a dialogue with an inner self and they were only spectators at this naked wrestling with his own doubts and fears. ‘It is sad, it hurts, at times I am angry, looking at the black zombies, black animated cartoons dancing the master’s dance to the master’s voice. That they will do to perfection. But when they are tired of that, or shall I say, when we are tired of that we turn to our people’s culture and abuse it . . . just for fun, after a bottle of champagne. But I ask myself: what other fruit do I expect that what we sowed would produce? All the same I look back on the wasted chances, on the missed opportunities: on the hour, the day, the period, when, at the crossroads, we took the wrong turning. Aaah, that was a time to remember, when the whole world, motivated by different reasons and expectations, waited, saying: they who showed Africa and the world the path of manliness and of black redemption, what are they going to do with the beast? They who washed the warriors’ spears in the blood of the white profiteers, of all those who had enslaved them to the ministry of the molten beast of silver and gold, what dance are they now going to dance in the arena? We could have done anything, then, because our people were behind us. But we, the leaders, chose to flirt with the molten god, a blind, deaf monster who has plagued us for hundreds of years. We reasoned: what’s wrong is the skin-colour of the people who ministered to this god: under our own care and tutelage we shall tame the monster-god and make it do our will. We forgot that it has always been deaf and blind to human woes. So we go on building the monster and it grows and waits for more, and now we are all slaves to it. At its shrine we kneel and pray and hope. Now see the outcome . . . dwellers in Blue Hills, those who have taken on themselves the priesthood of the ministry to the blind god . . . a thousand acres of land . . . a million acres in the two hands of a priest, while the congregation moans for an acre! and they are told: it is only a collection from your sweat . . . let us be honest slaves to the monster-god, let us give him our souls . . . and the ten per cent that goes with it . . . for his priests must eat too . . . and we shall take it to his vassal, the bank . . . meanwhile let’s all pray and the god may notice our honesty and fervour, and we shall get a few crumbs. Meanwhile, the god grows big and fat and shines even brighter and whets the appetites of his priests, for the monster has, through the priesthood, decreed only one ethical code: Greed and accumulation. I ask myself: is it fair, is it fair for our children?

  ‘I am a lawyer . . . what does this mean? I also earn my living by ministering to the monster. I am an expert in those laws meant to protect the sanctity of the monster-god and his angels and the whole hierarchy of the priesthood. Only I have chosen to defend those who have broken the laws and who might be excommunicated. For remember, only a few, the chosen few, can find favourable positions in the hierarchy. And mark you, and this is where it pains, it’s their sweat and that feeds the catechists, the wardens, the deacons, the ministers, the bishops, the angels . . . the whole hierarchy. Still they are condemned . . . damned.

  ‘I am a priest, a father-confessor, and looking through the tiny window, I am really looking at the soul of a nation . . . the scars, the wounds, the clotting blood . . . it is all on their faces and in their eyes, so bewildered. Tell us, tell us before we confess our sins: who makes these laws? For whom? To help whom? I cannot answer the questions . . . but as I said, they open a window for me to see the world.

  ‘I ask myself: what happened? What happened? I take all these books . . . I read, trying to find wisdom and the key to the many questions. Our people had said: Let’s not be slaves to the monster: let us only pray and wrestle with the true god within us. We want to control all this land, all these industries, to serve the one god within us. They fought . . . shed blood, not that a few might live in Blue Hills and minister to the molten god, the god outside us, but that many might live fully wherever they live. The white ministers, seeing defeat, now turned to sneering and jeering at the new priests. Look at these destroyers: we are going, yes, but these people will surely destroy all the canon laws . . . and we, who were educated in their schools, beat our breasts: we destroyers? We break the canon law? We are as civilized as you, we shall not be the ones to dismantle the monster god, and we shall prove it to you. You’ll be ashamed that you once had all these doubts about us.

  ‘It’s an old story. You say that you were in Siriana with Chui. I was also there, but much later, years later. We used to hear of Chui . . . but he was then described as a destroyer. My ambition was to become a priest: a highly educated priest. So I hated Chui. The very name brought images of the night-prowlers of the jungle . . . Then Peter Pooles shot dead an African who had thrown a stone at his dogs. The trial raised a lot of interest in Siriana. We were all happy when he was condemned to death. But do you know? Fraudsham called a school assembly. He argued about the need to be sensitive to animals. The measure of a civilization was how far a people had learnt to care for animals. Did we want to be merciless like those Russians who, in the face of world protest, sent a dog, poor Laika, into space to die? Pooles had been a little excessive, maybe. But he had been prompted by the highest and most noble impulse; to care for and defend the defenceless. And he read us a letter he had sent to the Governor appealing for clemency, ending with a very moving quotation from Shakespeare.

  The quality of mercy is not strain’d;

  It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

  Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless’d;

  It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

  We left the assembly with guilty, downcast eyes. A few of us wept. Can you believe it? We wept with Fraudsham. But still there were doubts, and I did not understand the whole thing. How could I? The education we got had not prepared me to understand those things: it was meant to obscure racism and other forms of oppression. It was meant to make us accept our inferiority so as to accept their superiority and their rule over us. Then I went to America. I had read in a history book that it was a place where they believed in the equality and freedom of man. While I was at a black college in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I saw with my own eyes a black man hanging from a tree outside a church. His crime? He had earlier fought a white man who had manhandled his sister. There was so much tension in that town. Aa! America, land of the Free and the Brave!’

  He stopped and it seemed as if his eyes were
fixed on a distant past. Then he started humming a blues song by Josh White:

  Southern trees

  Bear strange fruits

  Blood around the leaves

  And blood at the roots

  Black body swaying

  In a Southern breeze

  Strange fruit

  Hanging from poplar trees.

  He again stopped . . . Although they did not understand all the allusions, they caught the feeling behind it. He continued:

  ‘Is this not what has been happening in Kenya since 1896? So I said to myself: a black man is not safe at home; a black man is not safe abroad. What then is the meaning of it all? Then I saw in the cities of America white people also begging . . . I saw white women selling their bodies for a few dollars. In America vice is a selling commodity. I worked alongside white and black workers in a Detroit factory. We worked overtime to make a meagre living. I saw a lot of unemployment in Chicago and other cities. I was confused. So I said: let me return to my home, now that the black man has come to power. And suddenly as in a flash of lightning I saw that we were serving the same monster-god as they were in America . . . I saw the same signs, the same symptoms, and even the sickness . . . and I was so frightened . . . I was so frightened . . . I cried to myself: how many Kimathis must die, how many motherless children must weep, how long shall our people continue to sweat so that a few, a given few, might keep a thousand dollars in the bank of the one monster-god that for four hundred years had ravished a continent? And now I saw in the clear light of day the role that the Fraudshams of the colonial world played to create all of us black zombies dancing pornography in Blue Hills while our people are dying of hunger, while our people cannot afford decent shelter and decent schools for their children. And we are happy, we are happy that we are called stable and civilized and intelligent!’

  He had spoken in a level tone except at the end when he spat out the words stability, civilization, and intelligence with obvious disgust. They were all captivated by the parable, although they did not always understand it. But each caught different aspects of it. For Abdulla it was the idea of a blood that was shed because the question had always troubled him, looking at the lands in Tigoni and other places: is it right that that which had been bought by the collective blood of a people should go to a few hands just because they had money and bank loans? Was it banks and money that had fought for it? But he had never found an answer because it was true that black hands were owning it. And he would have liked to own one of those farms himself. For Wanja it was the idea of white prostitutes in a white country: could this really be true? Munira was bored with the image of the monster, but he was directly hit by the coincidence: the lawyer had been to Siriana? And Karega had been to Siriana, and the two had now come into his house! What was the meaning? What was it? Karega felt that the man was not telling all. But the talk had aroused in him a curiosity, an excitement, as if his mind was about to reach, grasp, grapple with, an elusive idea, as if indeed a coherent structure of outlook was forming in the bewildered universe and chaos of his own experience and history.

  ‘What really happened to you in Siriana, Karega?’ Munira suddenly burst into their different thoughts and they were startled by the violence of his concern.

  ‘Were you also educated at Siriana?’ asked the lawyer, surprised, turning to Karega.

  ‘Yes,’ Karega said. It now occurred to him that he might have been unfair to Munira: the three had seen different Sirianas and different Fraudshams and maybe they were not moved by the same things: why should he have expected Munira to keep up with every happening at Siriana?

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘I left there . . . I was expelled . . . about a year and half back . . . about two years . . . almost three years. Time flies.’

  ‘Because of the strike? Were you involved?’ The lawyer was excited. Karega felt his heart quicken at the sympathetic curiosity of one who at least had heard about the strike.

  ‘I suppose you can say . . .’

  ‘It was a – how shall I – it was—’ the lawyer interrupted and fumbled for words. ‘You see, when I came back from America and saw that we were really worshipping the same monster, I was very depressed. Where did one begin, I asked myself? So I started my practice in the poor areas of the city. I would charge a small fee: but was I not also making money out of them? And was my training and my job, the fact that I practised, not in itself a justification for those very laws in the service of the monster – was I not, in a sense, making a living out of the very system that I abhorred? Then came that strike in Siriana and, reading between the lines, I thought I saw a new youth emerging, a youth freed from the direct shame and humiliation of the past and hence not so spiritually wounded as those who had gone before. So different from our time; so different shall I say, from those who had seen their strong fathers and elder brothers fold a kofia behind them in the presence of a white boy. I said to myself: here is our hope . . . in the new children, who have nothing to prove to the white man . . . who do not find it necessary to prove that they can eat with knife and fork; that they can speak English through the nose; that they can serve the monster as efficiently as the white ministers; and therefore can see the collective humiliation clearly and hence are ready to strike out for the true kingdom of the black god within us all: Mugikuyu, Mmasai, Mjaluo, Mgiriama, Msomali, Mkamba, Kalenjin, Masai, Luhya, all of us . . . the total energy, the spirit of the people, the collective we, working for us . . . sisi kwa sisi . . . Maybe I read too much into it, but it lifted me from my depression. I saw a glimmer that could be a light, and I said: Fraudsham, and all the black Fraudshams, you have had it.’

  His every mood seemed to carry them with him and Karega succumbed to that encouragement.

  ‘There were actually two strikes, but most people know about the first one because it involved a European, I suppose. The second was equally serious and we were angry that it was so little publicized. But they were two in one, because the dominating figures in both were Cambridge Fraudsham and Chui Rimui – and I am not,’ he turned to Munira, ‘referring to that early one in which you and Chui were the actors.’

  ‘Were you, Mr Munira, also expelled?’ asked the lawyer.

  ‘Yes,’ said Munira.

  ‘How strange . . . when?’

  ‘During the first strike . . . the Chui strike.’

  ‘With Chui? There was a man . . . a legend . . . we talked about him . . . told stories about him. It was because he had gone to America that we all wanted to go there. Fraudsham did not like America . . . said Americans spoke bad English . . . But because Chui had chosen America . . . it had to be good . . .’ The lawyer shook his head at his reminiscences.

  ‘He had promise,’ Munira agreed and turned to Karega.

  Karega coughed, cleared his throat and started:

  ‘Well, as you know Cambridge Fraudsham was great in his own way: he could unsettle a face, however calm and sure. Whenever he went to the city to see the men in the Ministry, the other teachers would lounge about the yard, slow measured strides, or they would perch on the table cross-legged, smoke, talk, joke and laugh with us boys. But let them spy Fraudsham or his VW from a distance: they would tense up, quickly put out their cigarettes and throw the stubs out of the window or grind them to a pulp on the floor. But these people were white; how could Fraudsham make them piss into their calves? How could he so put the fear of the Lord into them? We would talk about this, lying on our Vono-beds in the dormitories: we would puzzle it out as we scrubbed the floor in the morning. We would discuss with heated voices the inner mettle of whiteness as we cold-showered our bodies at five in the morning. “Fraudsham is tough”; we all agreed. He would have been made a governor or something bigger than a headmaster, but he had refused, or so some knowing boys claimed. This increased our awe of the man. You should have heard us unravel the mystery around his life. We spun yarns and legends involving his life and love, though how anyone knew them was itself a bigger mystery. But he was the cl
everest man of his time at Cambridge, this we knew, and even how he used to correct the other lecturers. He was among the bravest, and he had fought in Turkey and Palestine and Burma and had held up a German tank all by himself: for this he had received a medal or something from the King. In Burma a shrapnel shell caught him in the thigh and he was given leave. What was he thinking as he went back home alive and a hero? We could picture him taking out his wallet and gazing in an ecstasy of unbelief at the image of her who had given him strength through all those campaigns in the Saharan sands, through the dense Eastern jungles, through the roar of guns, shells, bombs and rockets. The train clanged along the rails: his heart throbbed: his imagination flew ahead. She was in his arms, his arms, but . . . when he finally arrived, he only sat and wept. Then he went to church and prayed. He prayed until he heard an answering voice. He would go to Africa to serve God and die there, leaving maybe a tiny trail of spiritual heroism and glory. But he could never forgive the woman who had run away with another returning soldier: no, nor any woman. His true love was for dogs. The one he had in our time was a little dog called Lizzy. She was his constant companion to classes, to the chapel, to Nairobi, anywhere. The dog often dictated his moods. If she was ill, he became difficult and irritable and looked so alone and abandoned. Lizzy, the VW and Fraudsham: we called them the school’s three musketeers, because they seemed inseparable:

  ‘Lizzy died.

  ‘Something in Fraudsham snapped. He could not teach; he could not preach. The lines on his face suddenly deepened, his eyes greyed, he would talk or not talk as if his mind was elsewhere. He was really so alone that we felt a certain pity. But we could not understand this. Dogs had died in our villages: dogs had died on the roads: we had chased dogs across fields and terraces and whenever you hit one with a stone and it yelped you laughed to tears. Good dogs were those for hunting rabbits and antelopes: brave dogs were those that guarded cattle and homes from marauding hyenas and thieves. But Lizzy was not any of these: how could she make a man lose himself so?