Petals of Blood

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  ‘Why, really, did you come to Ilmorog?’ he asked him.

  Abdulla winced at the question: and yet it was not so unexpected: had he not asked himself that question several times? He watched the sun going behind the distant Donyo hills. He struck at a fly buzzing around his ears.

  ‘After I was arrested, I was taken to Manyani detention camp. I was among the very last batch to be released. It was on the eve of independence and so you can imagine that for me it was full of emotion and memories and hope. I said to myself: If only Nding’uri and Ole Masai and all the others were here to see this! The flowering of faith . . . the crowning glory to a collective struggle and endurance. This would now change. No longer would I see the face of the white man laughing at our efforts. And the Indian trader with his obscenities . . . Kumanyoko mwivi . . . he too would go. Factories, tea and coffee estates would belong to us. Kenyan people. I remembered all those who had daily thwarted our struggle. I remembered the traitors: those who worked with Henderson. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: but I did not care: I would not have minded helping him a bit in the vengeance: at least weed out the parasites . . . collaborators. I could not help singing, this time, in triumphant expectation.

  You black traitors, spear-bearers,

  Where will you run to

  When the braves of the land return

  Trumpeting the glory and the victory of our struggle?

  We did not fear rain

  We did not fear death

  We did not fear the dread lion

  We did not fear naked colds and wind

  We did not fear imperialists

  For we knew

  Kenya is a black man’s country.

  ‘For weeks and months after I kept on singing the song in anticipation.

  ‘I waited for land reforms and redistribution.

  ‘I waited for a job.

  ‘I waited for a statue to Kimathi as a memorial to the fallen.

  ‘I waited.

  ‘I said to myself: let me sell half an acre of my one acre. I did: I bought myself a donkey and a cart. I became a transporter of people’s goods in the market. A donkey does not drink petrol or kerosene.

  ‘Still I waited.

  ‘I heard that they were giving loans for people to buy out European farms. I did not see why I should buy lands already bought by the blood of the people. Still I went there. They told me: this is New Kenya. No free things. Without money you cannot buy land: and without land and property you cannot get a bank loan to start business or buy land. It did not make sense. For when we were fighting, did we ask that only those with property should fight?

  ‘I said, maybe, maybe . . . a master plan . . .

  ‘I waited.

  ‘I thought OK, I will become dumb. I will become deaf. I watched things unfold. Happenings. I saw the mounting tensions between black people. This and that community. Between regions. Ridges even. Between homes. And I remembered our struggle, our fight, our songs: for didn’t I carry the memory on my leg? I said: why this and that and this between our peoples? The white man: won’t he now laugh and laugh until his nose splits into two like the louse in the story?

  ‘I said: why this silence about the dead? Why this silence about the movement?

  ‘I said: let me go from office to office. I will go back to the factory where I used to work. All I wanted was a job.

  ‘I went to the office.

  ‘Well, I said: I only wanted a job.

  ‘They said: a cripple?

  ‘I said: a cripple: must he not eat?

  ‘They looked at one another.

  ‘They said: he who has ears should hear: he who has eyes should see.

  ‘This is New Kenya.

  ‘No Free Things.

  ‘Mkono mtupu haulambwi!

  ‘If you want free things, go to Tanzania or China.

  ‘I laughed bitterly. For even to go to Tanzania or to China one would need money for a bus fare.

  ‘I stood outside the office perplexed. I was drinking my full measure of bitter gall when a man in a black suit came out of a Mercedes Benz and entered the office. All the clerks promptly stood up and put on their best smiles . . .’

  Abdulla paused reflectively. He tried to hit at the fly again buzzing around his left ear. Then he seemed to forget it as he continued gazing across the plains, into nothingness.

  ‘My friends . . . Today nothing shocks me. Munira was once your teacher. He himself was expelled from Siriana. Just like you. Now he can have you kicked out for a private grief and you are puzzled to near despair. Do you think that surprises me? Tomorrow, my friends, tomorrow you too will turn against me. I shall not cry. Even Joseph will abuse me, maybe, and I’ll not cry. But on that day? What shall I say to you? That I was not moved? What indeed can I tell you except . . . except that all stomach waters that breed shock were drained out of me?

  ‘The man who came to the office was the one who betrayed me and Nding’uri. He had, as I later gathered, a contract with the company to transport the company’s goods all over. The clerks were saying after he had gone inside: Uhuru has really come. Before independence no African was allowed to touch the company’s goods except as a labourer. Now Mr Kimeria handles millions!

  ‘I remained rooted to the ground. So Kimeria wa Kamianja was eating the fruits of Uhuru!

  ‘I went back to the village, sold the other half acre. I collected my few blankets and my donkey and journeyed, following the sun. I wanted to go deep deep into the country where I would have no reminder of so bitter a betrayal.

  ‘Escape you might call it.

  ‘But I had died a death of the spirit: only recently has blood started flowing in my veins. Ah, this fly again!’

  He suddenly started hitting at the fly, missed it and smacked himself on the face and muttered something inaudible. Then he turned to Karega and said:

  ‘That is why I ask you not to go away. For where will you go to? Stay a muhoi here. Get a strip of land. Grow a crop, like Wanja here. Perchance one or two will germinate and bear a fruit or two!’

  They heard Wanja sob once. They turned to look.

  ‘What is it? What is the matter?’ Abdulla asked. Then he remembered that Karega was going and maybe . . .

  ‘Did you say Kimeria?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He betrayed you—?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does he carry a small scar on his forehead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then he is the one.’

  ‘Who? What are you talking about?’ asked Karega.

  ‘He is the one who seduced me away from home,’ she said. ‘He called himself: Hawkins Kimeria.’

  They all looked at one another. Something blocked Karega’s throat.

  ‘He – he is also the one!’ he struggled to say, also remembering his own brother betrayed.

  ‘Yes. Yes. It’s only that the workers called him Mr Hawkins,’ Wanja said recalling her last ordeal with Kimeria during the journey to the city.

  Karega felt another kind of pain: so he had been sleeping with the woman of his brother’s murderer?

  Abdulla was slightly puzzled by their references. Then Wanja told him that the man who had detained her and Njuguna and Karega at Blue Hills was the same Kimeria!

  But before Wanja and Karega could answer more questions from a startled Abdulla, they suddenly heard a rumbling in the sky. They thought it was thunder. It was distant at first but it came louder and louder. It was an aeroplane. It flew low above them, going round in circles as if it was looking for something lost in the sky. It would come near them and then it would move to the far end of the plains before describing yet another curve in the sky. Then they heard the droning stop abruptly. It would come back and then as quickly it would trail off. Purrs, whines, drones and then a final cessation of all sound as it came toward them. The plane was in trouble. They stood up. The plane was momentarily held up in the sky above them, before it started nosing toward them, and now they realized that it was going to
crash on them. They were mesmerized with fear, with Wanja holding onto Karega, moaning. God, God. Abdulla shouted: Down! Lie down! Flat.

  They lay flat on the ground and heard the plane hurtling through the air, just missing them. It made a forced landing in a field half a mile away.

  ‘A close one, it would have chopped off our heads,’ Karega said as they scrambled back onto their feet and started for the plane.

  It had landed safely. A European in khaki shirt and khaki trousers and three Africans similarly dressed stood a few yards away, hands akimbo, surveying the plane and also their luck.

  ‘Why, it is a baby aeroplane,’ exclaimed Wanja, ‘just like the ones we saw at Wilson’s airport.’

  They went round the plane. A few yards away Abdulla let out a groan of pain ‘My other leg, my other leg,’ he said. Karega and Wanja went to his side. They looked at one another. But neither knew what to say.

  Within an hour news of the plane’s forced landing spread to ridges and villages near and far. People flocked there in hundreds. Even when later darkness fell, people still trekked to the plane carrying lamps and torches.

  They took the plane captive and formed a huge dense circle around it, surveying and commenting on every part, feeling as if it was somehow their own power which had brought the plane down.

  It became a day’s, two days’, a couple of weeks’ festival with curious parties of school children brought in hired lorries to see the winged horse. Two policemen recently arrived at the post came to guard the plane.

  It was Wanja who shook Abdulla from his sorrow.

  ‘I have thought about it. But actually the idea came to me last night. Let us not kneel down to sorrow and to despair. This festival, it seems, will continue for a number of days. A few weeks even. These people will need food. Let us cook food for sale. And a bit of Theng’eta to drown the food . . . and . . . our separate griefs.’

  It was simple: it was beautiful and Abdulla was struck by the novelty of the idea, the inspired suggestion. If Tusker, why not Theng’eta which would be cheaper and easier to make? If clubs all over the republic could sell Chang’aa, Kiruru, Busaa, why not Theng’eta in Ilmorog?

  It was another immediate success. Toward the end of the week people were coming there as much to taste Theng’eta as to see the plane. Theng’eta was soon rumoured to possess all qualities from giving fertility to barren women to restoring potency to ageing men.

  Dancing groups formed; drinking parties came over: Ilmorog had overnight become famous well beyond the walls of the ridge and the plains where once only shepherds and aged peasants roamed and sang to the soil and to the elephant grass, looking to the sky for sun and rain.

  Ilmorog was once more in the national news. Nderi wa Riera was appointed a member of a commission of Government officials and aviation experts to report on the cause of the crash. A news item on the composition of the commission appeared in all the dailies and also on the radio. One newspaper carried a feature article with pictures of the plane and the crowds:

  ‘A four-seater plane carrying a team of surveyors and photometrists which last week crashed in the tiny pastoral village of Ilmorog in Chiri District is now not only the subject of a Government commission of inquiry but also of a strange cult in the area. The plane was on a photo-surveying mission because of the new Trans-Africa Road project which is scheduled to soon pass through the area. This in turn is likely to affect the proposed wheat and ranching development schemes for the whole area.

  ‘Acceleration of development along these lines was the main feature of a secret report prepared by a team of experts sent to Ilmorog two years ago as a result of the drought and the famine which had threatened thousands. Ilmorog is also seen as a high potential area for tourism, thanks to the untiring efforts of the energetic MP for the area, the Hon. Mr Nderi wa Riera, the great advocate for African personality and Black authenticity, and one of the national leaders of KCO.

  ‘Well, I have got good news for the member.

  ‘Tourists have already started flocking to the area.

  ‘They may not have American dollars. But they carry their ten-cent pieces from the surrounding districts. And all because of the plane. The unprecedented crowd of visitors is likely to continue even after the plane has been removed.

  ‘For it is now the subject of a cult. The cult is connected with a rumoured mythological animal of the earth. The animal, it is said, will bring power and light to the area. It was the animal, they say, which really brought down the plane.

  ‘The crowds dance around it in Kanyeki-ini Garage. They sing and drink a strange mixture called Theng’eta which is reported to make barren women fertile, and not so strong men, potent. Theng’eta for Power. Some become tranced: some say they see visions of planes and other objects being driven by the strange animal of the earth, vomiting out fire and light . . .’

  But for Wanja, Abdulla, Ruoro, Njuguna, Nyakinyua, and the children in Ilmorog Full Primary School the biggest talking point was not so much the plane, or the crowds of visitors, or the sudden boost in the sales of food and drinks – but the death of Abdulla’s donkey, the sole victim of the plane crash, and the departure of Karega from Ilmorog.

  Part Four: Again . . . La Luta Continua!

  Those corpses of young men,

  Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets – those hearts pierc’d by the gray lead,

  Cold and motionless as they seem, live elsewhere with unslaughter’d vitality.

  They live in other young men, O kings!

  They live in brothers, again ready to defy you!

  Walt Whitman

  If we are brothers, it is not our fault or responsibility

  But if we are comrades, it is a political engagement.

  . . . It is better to be a brother and comrade.

  Amilcar Cabral

  Chapter Eleven

  1 ~ The Trans-Africa road linking Nairobi and Ilmorog to the many cities of our continent is justly one of the most famous highways in all the African lands, past and present. It is symbolic tribute, although an unintended one, to those who, witnessing the dread ravages of crime and treachery and greed which passed for civilization, witnessing too the resistance waged and carried out with cracked hands and broken nails and bleeding hearts, voiced visionary dreams amidst sneers and suspicions and accusations of madness or of seeking pathways to immortality and the eternal self-glory of tyrants. They had seen that the weakness of the resistance lay not in the lack of will or determination or weapons but in the African people’s toleration of being divided into regions and tongues and dialects according to the wishes of former masters, and they cried: Africa must unite.

  Live Noliwe’s Chaka. Live Toussaint L’Ouverture. Live Kwame of the eagle’s eyes. And thaai . . . thaai to Kimathi son of wa Chiuri.

  Some were scared of the searing vision, of course, and they felt more sure parroting out words from the mouth of the master: roads first, family planning, such practical needs, achievable goals, trade – the rest are dream-wishes of a Theng’eta addict. And so the road was built, not to give content and reality to the vision of a continent, but to show our readiness and faith in the practical recommendations of a realist from abroad. The master, wily architect of a myriad divisions, jealous God against the unity of a continent, now clapped his hands and nodded his head and willingly loaned out the money to pay for imported expertise and equipment. And so, abstracted from the vision of oneness, of a collective struggle of the African peoples, the road brought only the unity of earth’s surface: every corner of the continent was now within easy reach of international capitalist robbery and exploitation. That was practical unity.

  Well, well . . . we are all of the road now, part of the beauty of the partial achievement of the vision which gave rise to it and also of the hollowness and failed promises of which the road is a monument.

  People, dwellers in the New Ilmorog, often sit on banks of the road to watch cars whining and horning their way across the seven cities of Central Africa i
n an oil company-sponsored race, and they muse: how man will play with death in mechanized suicide squads for a few silver dollars! They watch too the heavy tankers squelching tar on a long trail across the plains to feed a thousand arteries of thirsty machines and motors, and they mutter: before the road, before this animal of the earth, did we live in the New Jerusalem? They shake their heads from side to side, knowing the answer but keeping it close to their hearts: unless a miracle happened, they all waited to go the way Nyakinyua went:

  Maybe it was as well

  But

  The little ones!

  Untroubled by memories and doubts, puzzlement and despair in the eyes of the elders, little boys and girls prance about the banks, trying to spell out LONRHO, SHELL, ESSO, TOTAL, AGIP beside the word DANGER on the sidebelly of the tankers. They sing, in shrill voices, of the road which will surely carry them to all the cities of Africa, their Africa, to link hands with children of other lands:

  Over the mud

  Over the tar

  Over the air

  From Luanda to Nairobi

  From Msumbiji to Cairo

  From Dar to Libya

  We all help one another

  And so they would go on, varying only the names of the cities of Africa, their Africa!