Petals of Blood

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  ‘Careful about what?’ Karega asked and his manner of asking, affecting not to know what I was talking about, irritated me.

  ‘About our teaching. What we teach them. Politics for instance. Propaganda. I agree of course that it has more bite and juice in it and needs little preparation.’

  He did not answer. I became more enthusiastic and drove home my points with mounting authority and sureness.

  ‘You see. What they need to know are facts. Simple facts. Information, just so they can pass their CPE. Yes, information, not interpretation. Later when they go to High School, and I am sure these gentlemen will bear me out in this, they can start learning the more complicated stuff. By that time they will have learnt how to think and can start interpreting. I say let’s teach them facts, facts, and not propaganda about blackness, African peoples, all that, because that is politics, and they know the tribe they belong to. That’s a fact – not propaganda.’

  I sat back and swallowed a glass of beer, rather satisfied with myself. Some of the things I had of course read from a circular sent to all schools by an English inspector of language and history at the Ministry, who had described himself as a scientist in language, literature and history, but what did it matter?

  ‘I do not agree with that approach,’ Karega started and I could see that he was having difficulties. ‘I cannot accept that there is a stage in our growth as human beings when all we need are so-called facts and information. Man is a thinking being from the time he is born to the time he dies. He looks, he hears, he touches, he smells, he tastes and he sifts all these impressions in his mind to arrive at a certain outlook in his direct experience of life. Are there pure facts? When I am looking at you, how much I see of you is conditioned by where I stand or sit; by the amount of light in this room; by the power of my eyes; by whether my mind is occupied with other thoughts and what thoughts. Surely the story we teach about the seven blind men who had never seen an elephant is instructive. Looking and touching, then, do involve interpretation. Even assuming that there were pure facts, what about their selection? Does this not involve interpretation? What is the propaganda we are accused of teaching? When you talked just now, it was so funny, I was thinking of Chui. But that’s another story. Now let’s look at this propaganda which is Not Facts. The oppression of black people is a fact. The scattering of Africans into the four corners of the earth is a fact. That there are Africans in USA, Canada, Latin America, the West Indies, Europe, India, everywhere – this is a fact. That Africa is one of the richest continents with infinite possibilities for renewal and growth is a fact. What mineral, from copper, gold, diamonds, cobalt to uranium, is not found in Africa? What crop? That our people fought against the Arab slave raiders is a fact: that the Akamba people built formidable defences against them even while trading with them in ivory is a fact. That our people resisted European intrusion is a fact: we fought inch by inch, ridge by ridge, and it was only through the superiority of their arms and the traitorous actions of some of us that we were defeated. That Kenya people have had a history of fighting and resistance is therefore a fact. Our children must look at the things that deformed us yesterday, that are deforming us today. They must also look at the things which formed us yesterday, that will creatively form us into a new breed of men and women who will not be afraid to link hands with children from other lands on the basis of an unashamed immersion in the struggle against those things that dwarf us.

  ‘Liberation: no child is ever too young to think about this: it is the only way he can truly experience himself as he collects, breaks, collects, rejects, assimilates and tries to discover himself. We must teach our children to hate all those things which prevent them from loving and to love all those things that make it possible for them to love freely.’

  I had never clearly thought about these things. I could see that the others were captivated by the novelty and the purity of conviction behind the utterances. I felt uncomfortable. I braced myself to hit back, only I did not know how. At that moment Wanja hodi-ed and stood at the door.

  Her eyes sought out his. My tension-filled body felt rather than saw their eyebeams entwine a second, two seconds, before she greeted the rest of us.

  I could not bear the pain.

  I could not resist the evil thought.

  I cycled to the headquarters.

  Chapter Ten

  1 ~ It was the end of yet another year. School had closed and Munira was in the office writing the annual report and drawing up estimates for the following year. He was astonished that he had now been here for five years. Next year the school would have six classes learning all day. Joseph had made the most impressive progress. His mind was clearly above the average. Even if Ilmorog did not send any child to a secondary school on the first attempt at CPE, he was sure that on the school’s second attempt, Joseph would make it to higher realms and thus finally put Ilmorog Full Primary School on the national map.

  He closed the office and stood outside. Ilmorog countryside was clear, for it was after yet another harvest. The drought and the journey to the city seemed like events in a legend. None of the promises had yet materialized. Ilmorog was still a kind of neglected outpost of the republic. Even the churchmen and the chief and the policemen only came once every so many months. But Mzigo did visit the school once or twice, he would quickly wet his throat at Abdulla’s place and then would curse the road and disappear. But some of the improvements, especially in equipment and buildings, were a direct result of those visits. He had brought him one other teacher so that they were five altogether.

  ‘Come to Tea’ also seemed like something which had happened in another country, long ago, and Munira thought he might visit his home: but how would he look at his father, he wondered, now that he knew how Mukami had met her death? Idle speculation, he thought, since his relations to his father and to his past and the discomfiture he felt had never had anything to do with Mukami’s death. He took his bicycle: he wanted to run to Abdulla’s place for a quick one.

  He was whistling gaily when he saw her in the middle of the narrow path, almost the same spot where five years back she had accosted him and asked funny but hostile questions. ‘Oh, it is you, mother of men,’ he called out cheerfully, braking to a stop. He was feeling good, because but for Wanja’s movement away from him he had almost regained his position as a hero, the bringer of new teachers for the children. He had for a time lost the position to Karega, soon after the return from the city, but now . . . he only needed Wanja to complete his happiness. Nyakinyua looked to the ground but her voice reached him clearly.

  ‘The three new teachers: they have now been here for many months. Is it not so?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he answered, puzzled.

  ‘They have been doing well.’

  ‘Yes. But why? Have the children been complaining?’

  ‘No. They say that the new teachers are also good. Just like the two before them. Who has given them to us?’

  ‘Serikali. How else can we pay them?’

  ‘Mwalimu. Why, why have they given us with the right hand only to take away with the left? Is that fair for the children?’

  ‘I do – I do not understand,’ he said.

  ‘You do: you know more than you dare to tell us.’

  ‘I really – I do not understand the meaning behind your words.’

  As he said this, he coughed and turned his head away. Ilmorog was quiet, very quiet. He sighted two children playing ‘football’ with two yellow mitura apples, competing to see who could kick furthest backwards. When again he looked to the road, the woman had vanished. ‘Just like that other time,’ he mused, going over her words in his mind. He suddenly lost the heart and the stomach for Abdulla’s place. He didn’t want more talk and gossip. He leaned the bicycle against the walls of the house. He stood at the door and once again looked at where the woman had been. He was a little scared of her because she was highly respected in the community and her hostility could mean somebody’s ignominy and downfall.


  He started. The repetition of past patterns had always frightened him. It was the tyranny of the past that he had always tried to escape. First it was Nyakinyua: now it was Wanja. Then he understood, and the first flush of fear was replaced by an elation at his new-found power.

  ‘You have never learnt manners,’ she said, also echoing the past. She looked at him evenly and he could not tell her attitude toward him. ‘Won’t you invite me into your house?’

  ‘Come in, come in,’ he said with awkward joviality. But inwardly he sunned himself against a nice warm glow.

  She took a folding chair from against the wall and sat on it. She was barefoot with a simple flower-patterned frock. She had no jewellery. She seemed more mature in body: her eyes were firm, clear, and no longer dancing with devilish invitation. But they were alive and her direct look, though not hostile, made him slightly uncomfortable.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘I don’t want any tea,’ she said, ‘but I could drink water.’

  ‘Water is now plentiful,’ he tried to joke as he fetched her a mug of water. He now had an aluminium water tank into which he collected the rainwater from the roof. His house had also improved over the years: there were now more chairs – including a sofa set – and more utensils and more books on the shelves. She drank a bit and then carefully, almost too carefully, put the mug on the floor.

  ‘Do you remember the night of Theng’eta drinking?’ she suddenly asked.

  ‘Yes. I do. Why? It’s a long time. A year ago.’

  ‘I remember you asking me: why did I really come to Ilmorog?’

  ‘Well, one gets curious . . . but we all have our reasons for doing things. Our secret lives.’

  ‘But the second time: you must have known . . . I told you . . . the fire . . . and the tea.’

  ‘Why do you want to rake up the past?’ he asked, feeling even more uncomfortable. Then he added: ‘I don’t know if I told you that I myself had just come back from the same tea-party.’

  ‘Is that so? Anyway, you did not tell me. But it does not matter. Why did you want to know why I had come here? I suppose you meant the first time.’

  ‘Listen, Wanja. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want. I must have been under the influence of Theng’eta. Strong stuff it was, and it rather loosened all our tongues.’

  ‘But I want to tell you,’ she said with an ironic smile. ‘I have come all the way to tell you, so I must. I have told you many things. I have not tried to hide from you what I am and what I have been. But there is one thing which I did not really speak to you about. I have always feared that I am barren: that I am incapable of having a child. The knowledge has been a weight, a heavy weight to carry. For children, no matter how we neglect them, are what makes many a barmaid feel human. You are a mother and nobody can take that from you. I have tried. I have even been to Barabana’s place in Thigio. He is famous with herbs, especially those to do with women’s illnesses and with child-bearing—’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Munira interrupted – ‘I thought you told me, you told us that you had a child, you were pregnant once.’

  ‘That’s so.’ She looked at the ground for a long time and bit her lower lip as if to steel herself a little.

  ‘It died,’ she said, and continued: ‘but it was really much afterward that I discovered this need in me. I must say that even as a girl in school, I always had felt a quickening of the heart, a kind of aching pleasure, at the sight of children, and I wanted to do things for them. The need became great. That’s why I came here. To see my grandmother. First to know really well where my father was born and to seek advice. She took me to Mwathi’s place—’

  ‘But they say he does not see people below a certain age.’

  ‘It’s true. I was left outside. It’s a big yard surrounded by a hedge of stinging nettles and matura. When I went in, I only heard his voice. He asked me a few questions. I don’t want to go into that now. But he advised on a certain day under a new moon in the open fields. I didn’t follow his instructions. I don’t anyway quite believe in the moon business. The rest you know. It has been my life. It has been my misfortune. I accept it.’

  ‘Why do you tell me this?’ he asked, a little pained: so she was only using him, for a witchdoctor’s experiment?

  ‘Because I want you to understand what Ilmorog has meant to me, what Karega means to me. Please don’t get hurt when I tell you that with most men I have gone to them with a purpose. I like friendships all right. But I know that at first it was to forget my earlier involvement. The scar. Later it was mostly with the hope . . . sometimes I would make friends only with married men, those with children. Believe me, it has been lonely. Even with you, I was hoping, but it did not work out. With him it has been different. I want him. I really want him. For himself. For the first time, I feel wanted . . . a human being . . . no longer humiliated . . . degraded . . . foot-trodden . . . do you understand? It is not given to many: a second chance to be a woman, to be human without this or that “except”, “except”. . . without shame. He has reawakened my smothered woman-ness, my girlhood, and I feel I am about to flower . . .’

  She paused and fixed him with a steadfast gaze. Her eyes were dancing. He felt even more uncomfortable under her naked, mad, challenging eyes. There was a kind of terrible beauty in them . . . the beauty of a lioness.

  ‘I tell you all this, Munira, because I know it is you who is behind Karega’s downfall. Behind his dismissal from his job.’

  He was about to say something, to make a weak protest, to blame it on Mzigo, but she continued, her voice raised.

  ‘I want him back in this school. I want him back, we all want him back as a teacher of our children. Whatever you do, he must not leave Ilmorog. Either that or else . . . Munira . . . I am a hard woman . . . and somebody, either now or later, will have to pay. I want you to understand that: that it will be . . . I don’t know how . . . but should he go, either you or Mzigo or both . . .’

  She stood up and hurried out of the room as if she feared the effort and the words would choke her or weaken her at the knees. But for Godfrey Munira the words lingered in the air ominously and for a long time he was never to forget the power of that voice, the beauty of her body, the purity of the commitment in her heart, the moonlit brilliance of her angry eyes, all of which at that moment finally and dangerously bound him to her for ever. ‘I am lost . . . we are all lost . . . but she is . . . She must be . . . my wild-eyed lioness.’

  He knew she had conquered him. But he knew that there was nothing he could do now about Karega’s dismissal. What was done was done . . . and it was for you, my moonlight lioness, he murmured to himself.

  2 ~ So now help me God that he does not go, Wanja murmured to herself, gazing across the plains to the distant Donyo Hills. Just above the hills, the moving clouds had formed two shapes, the likeness of scraggy-mouthed caves, belching out mist and light. The mouths became smaller and smaller until the caves finally dissolved into a floating black-bluish wool. She followed the slow wool motion, trying to locate where the fingerprints of God had been. She thus kept her mind off their present mission. But the thought persisted: if he left Ilmorog . . . if he left Ilmorog . . . she would also leave. She shuddered: she was now really scared of what she might encounter in the world beyond these rural boundaries. She had left her past behind her: let it stay there, outside these Ilmorog walls. But here in Ilmorog, without him, what was she to do? Follow him . . . and once again she shivered at the thought of the world beyond the present cloister. My scars . . . stay you without . . .

  ‘You can work in my shop,’ Abdulla again offered to Karega. ‘We shall be full partners.’ He felt the inadequacy of this outlet: could the shop really contain them all? But it was all he had.

  Wanja looked at Abdulla and she remembered his similar offer to her five years back. In the encircling silence, against the solemnity of the occasion, the words reaching her as she held herself together because of the slight breeze over
Ilmorog Hill, the suggestion was comic and she wanted to laugh. It sounded odd, frivolous even, but she knew the feelings behind it.

  Karega heard the words without taking in the meaning. For he knew and he thought they all could see that there was nothing more for him to do in Ilmorog, nothing. The bitterness and the rancour at what Munira and the schools inspectorate had done to him still dominated his responses to whatever was now around him. He could not understand it, the motive-spring behind this unceremonious ouster from what had started to give him life and meaning. In teaching the children, he had sensed a possible vocation, a daily dialogue with his deepest self, as he tried to understand the children and the world which shaped their future and their chances in life. He had already started to doubt the value of formal education as a tool of a people’s total liberation, but he was not yet ready to leave, he was not yet ready for the world outside Ilmorog school. His first venture had after all landed him in jail. But what now? Go back to the road and sell sheepskins and plums and pears to watalii? Would his life merely be one long trail of thwarted desires and dreams, broken only by accidental escapades into places like Ilmorog? Searching for, only wanting truth and beauty and understanding, how was it that he had interfered with another’s peace and comfort? How could Munira do this to him? For Karega did not accept Munira’s avowed concern for a sister’s death and a father’s missing ear. He was ignorant of Munira’s attachment to Wanja. And even if he had known, he would not have understood. He was too young. He was innocent. He did not as yet know of those doubts that needed affirmations of passion to silence them and which, unsilenced, could drive the middle-aged to murder even as an act of self-affirmation and assurance that one had not really failed. Had Lord Freeze-Kilby not followed his goodly lady with gun and powder originally meant for natives and animals? So Karega could only see motiveless paltriness in Munira’s act of vengeance. He could not anyway think straight where Munira was concerned: behind his thinking, ill or good, just or unjust, he still felt an embarrassment, an empty deflation of expectations much like what he had felt when Chui, their hero, came to Siriana and tried to outdo Fraudsham. OK . . . actors . . . heroes . . . what was the point in believing in people? He had been looking up to the wrong heroes, or he had been looking for actors and heroes where they could not possibly be found. And so in that moment of despair, he came very close to the fatal mistake of losing faith in people and in the possibilities of truth and beauty and ideals in a world where people were daily struggling for bread and water. But he heard the voices of Wanja and Abdulla calling him from a sudden irrevocable plunge into the slough. He was touched by the evident concern in Abdulla’s tone as he made the offer of partnership in trade. He turned to Abdulla: