Petals of Blood

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  Gemini was really his star.

  So that, depending on his moods, he variously imagined himself born or conceived under every star: practically every prediction and every advice seemed to apply to him. Sometimes he would try to act on different starry guides, hoping that one at least might prove true and prophetic. But nothing seemed to happen. Wanja was still chilly and distant, oscillating between her business establishment in old Ilmorog to her stone building going up in the New Ilmorog.

  He decided to stick to one star. He chose Leo. He read:

  This week is marked by the movement of Saturn into your solar ninth house of intellectuality and emotionality. Under both influences, you’ll be inclined to lay a course which will both be challenging and promising of heaven. Keep on smiling. Romance may come your way.

  He kept on smiling. He waited. Romance and love came his way.

  Leo, Lillian, my star!

  He saw her coming toward him and his heart gave thunderous beats. Could this be true? He listened to her unlikely story. Somebody had given her a lift from Eldoret, she claimed, and he had abandoned her in Ilmorog. Munira smiled at her. He knew her: he had seen her. He hummed the tune she once played at Ruwa-ini. She smiled back. They talked. He reminded her of the day, years back, he had found her playing a religious hymn sung by Ofafa Jericho Choir at Furaha Bar in Ruwa-ini. Wanja gave her a job. She was very fond of singing or humming religious tunes, especially after a drink or two. She would sing in a husky voice, her eyes dilated, her eyes and neck raised in heavenly expectation:

  Nearer my God to Thee,

  Nearer to meeeeeeeee,

  Even though I be a sinner

  I want you still nearer to me.

  She had a way of making up words and phrases so that they fitted in without much seeming strain on her part. And yet with her obvious gift in words and voice, she would not hear of joining the band or singing what she called irreligious songs. She would only change from one hymn to another of her own making but they were beautifully seductive:

  Come, come unto me, Jesus,

  I am waiting for you.

  Come quickly unto me, Saviour,

  And fill me with thy holy spirit.

  For a time Munira was intrigued by her and almost forgot the pain of being possessed with Wanja. Lillian: she was a strange case of a girl who maintained that she was still a virgin even after he had entered her and she had screamed and scratched his back, bitten his hand and cried in ecstasy and delight: Come, come, Lord, into me.

  Munira had hoped that his involvement with Lillian would provoke. Wanja’s jealousy. But she did not seem to be moved. He gave up starry charts. Lillian, the ‘virgin’, was not a substitute for Wanja.

  He resumed his lone walks across Ilmorog ridge, now cleaved into two by the Trans-Africa Road. He watched cars go beyond the hills: he would even count them to while away the time. Often, after school, he would walk to the building sites, and for a time become lost amidst trenches with pools of dirty water, piles of quarry rock, the cry of hammers on stone, nail and wood, the ribald chatter among the masons. What was happening to sleepy Ilmorog? What happened to the land of trios of children singing, paving the way to sleep with lullabies? He stopped and rubbed his eyes clean: Wambui, Muriuki’s mother, was staggering behind the handles of a wheelbarrow piled high with stones. The demarcation and the fencing off of land had deprived a lot of tillers and herdsmen of their hitherto unquestioned rights of use and cultivation. Now they were hiring themselves out to any who needed their labour for a wage. Wambui, a labourer! Now she had joined others who had been drawn into Ilmorog’s market for sweat and labour. He quickly passed on and only stopped when he came to Wanja-Abdulla’s building. This would soon be the New Theng’eta centre. He was racking his brains for ways and means of endearing himself to her when the idea struck him. Soon the place would be opened. There might even be other licensed bar facilities. He would help her increase her sales of Theng’eta. He would pull in more customers for her!

  Munira had always liked advertisements. But now he started reading them even more avidly. He now had a mission. He studied them, the words, the phrasing, and the difference between the intended and the possible effect on the readers and hearers. He collected a few:

  Put a tiger in your tank. Healthy hair means beautiful hair. Every time is tea time. Be a platinum blonde: be a redhead: be a whole new you in 100% imported hand-made human hair. Join the new Africans: join Ambi people. Beautiful ones not yet born? You are joking. They are, everyday, with beautiful silky wigs: Man can get lost in it.

  He tried his head at making up a few. Maybe he could sell them to whoever was going to set up businesses in the New Ilmorog. Munira: seller of beautiful ads and slogans. Want to go into Parliament? Buy a slogan! Be successful! Buy a slogan. For Wanja he would try to create a special one. For free. One that would so popularize Theng’eta that she would be known as Queen Theng’eta. She would then have to notice him. Author of her new fame.

  Do you have what it takes? Drink Theng’eta. Increase your potency: Drink Theng’eta. Beautiful people, beautiful thoughts, beautiful love: Drink Theng’eta. Join the Space Age: Drink Theng’eta. On your way to the moon with Armstrong: Drink Theng’eta. Three T’s: Theng’a Theng’a with Theng’eta.

  He was now ready. He tried the last one on a few customers, suddenly standing up in their midst, during a lull in the music from the band, and shouted: Drink the drink of three letters and increase your potency: Theng’a Theng’a with Theng’eta. He shouted it again and raised a glass to his lips. They all looked up at him and thought him drunk. They laughed and continued their drinking. Wanja looked at him and shrugged her shoulders. But the slogan remained in use – as a joke!

  That night he took Lillian home, and when she pretended that she was a virgin being taken against her will he beat her. They fell out. Lillian left Ilmorog. He was alone. Theng’eta.

  He would always remember that year as the beginning of three years of shameless enslavement to naked passion. It was as if the completion and the opening of the New Ilmorog shopping centre also saw the complete unmaking of Munira, the hitherto respected teacher of their children. He could see it; he watched the decline, a spectator, an outsider, and he could not help himself. Or was he punishing himself for another kind of failure?

  It was this that he could not quite tell him, he, who, in part, was the cause of it.

  But Karega’s eyes were insistent, his whole being seemed waiting for an answer to a big question he had not yet asked. It was all very much like their first encounter. Then Munira had sworn that tarred roads would only be built when hyenas grew horns. He would like to have swallowed back the words. For the changed circumstance under which they now met was in part a product of the tarred road. Trans-Africa Road. Even the school had changed: it was now built of stones; it had full classes and full teachers, with a new modern headmaster, and Mzigo came regularly, in part to inspect the school but largely to look after his shop in the New Ilmorog. Mzigo, Nderi wa Riera, Rev. Jerrod, they all had shop buildings in Ilmorog.

  ‘What happened to Joseph?’ Karega asked.

  ‘He passed all right. 3 As. He went to Siriana!’

  ‘Siriana?’

  ‘Yes. Siriana.’

  A silent moment followed Munira’s disclosures, both he and Karega maybe remembering what Siriana had meant to them in earlier times. Munira, still weighed down by anxiety, eyed Karega who looked at the same spot, a concentration of light in his eyes, his hands still moving, but his face refusing to smile. Munira could not tell if Karega was pleased or not with Joseph’s success. But it seemed there were some problems pressing him and it was five years since he left Ilmorog.

  ‘And what happened to the old woman?’ Karega asked, as if he was completing a thought dialogue with himself.

  Munira was visibly relieved that the big question did not come. But even this was hard to answer, because everything had happened so fast, a chaos in a drunken dream. Nyakinyua. The old woman. Eve
n Munira did not wish to remember, to think of her fate. What could he now say about Nyakinyua and himself and not weep again?

  He recalled, without telling him, that he had somehow continued looking for a slogan, for a catchy ad which would bring him Wanja’s favours – even for a night. He would go through the newspaper and read, not the news, but the advertisements. He read of course about the lawyer and his thunderous speeches in Parliament and how he was calling for a ceiling on land ownership and other reforms. But that was only because there were memories attached to the name. His main interest was in ads – he had to get the slogans . . . to beat all the slogans, the slogans that would finally buy him Wanja.

  He would always remember the evening he read about Nyakinyua – with pain . . . He was drunk but the Theng’eta in his head seemed to evaporate when suddenly he saw it. His hands and the newspaper trembled. He sobered up and looked at the announcement. It was not possible. It could not be possible:

  KANUA KANENE & CO

  Valuers & Surveyors, Auctioneers

  Land, Estate & Management AGENTS

  Acting on instructions given to us

  by Wilson, Shah, Muragi & Omolo Advocates

  on behalf of their client, African Economic Bank, charged

  with powers of sale as conferred upon them. We shall

  sell by public auction . . . all that piece of land

  situated in New Ilmorog . . . property of Mrs Nyakinyua . . .

  She was not alone: a whole lot of peasants and herdsmen of Old Ilmorog who had been lured into loans and into fencing off their land and buying imported fertilizers and were unable to pay back were similarly affected. Without much labour, without machinery, without breaking with old habits and outlook, and without much advice they had not been able to make the land yield enough to meet their food needs and pay back the loans. Some had used the money to pay school fees. Now the inexorable law of the metal power was driving them from the land.

  Munira folded the newspaper and went to Wanja’s place to break the news. He felt for her and Nyakinyua. He did not expect favours. He just wanted to take her the news. And to find out more about it. She was not at her Theng’eta premises. Abdulla told him that she had gone to Nyakinyua’s hut. Munira walked there and found other people. News of the threatened sale must have reached them too. They had come to commiserate with her and others similarly affected, to weep with one another. They looked baffled: how could a bank sell their land? A bank was not a government: from whence then, its powers? Or maybe it was the government, an invisible government, some others suggested. They turned to Munira. But he could not answer their questions. He only talked about a piece of paper they had all signed and the red blotched title-deeds, another piece of paper, they had surrendered to the bank. But he could not answer, put to sleep, the bitter scepticism in their voices and looks. What kind of monster was this bank that was a power unto itself, that could uproot lives of a thousand years?

  He went back and tried to drink Theng’eta, but it did not have the taste. He remembered that recently he had seen Wambui carting stones to earn bread for the day and he wondered what would happen to the old woman. She was too old to sell her labour and sweat in a market.

  ‘The old woman? Nyakinyua?’ Munira echoed Karega’s question, slowly. ‘She died! She is dead!’ he added quickly, almost aggressively, waking up from his memories.

  Karega’s face seemed to move.

  Nyakinyua, the old woman, tried to fight back. She tramped from hut to hut calling upon the peasants of Ilmorog to get together and fight it out. They looked at her and they shook their heads: whom would they fight now? The Government? The Banks? KCO? The Party? Nderi? Yes who would they really fight? But she tried to convince them that all these were one and that she would fight them. Her land would never be settled by strangers. There was something grand, and defiant in the woman’s action – she with her failing health and flesh trying to organize the dispossessed of Ilmorog into a protest. But there was pathos in the exercise. Those whose land had not yet been taken looked nervously aloof and distant. One or two even made disparaging remarks about an old woman not quite right in the head. Others genuinely not seeing the point of a march to Ruwa-ini or to the Big City restrained her. She could not walk all the way, they told her. But she said: ‘I’ll go alone . . . my man fought the white man. He paid for it with his blood . . . I’ll struggle against these black oppressors . . . alone . . . alone . . .’

  What would happen to her, Munira wondered.

  He need not have worried about her.

  Nyakinyua died peacefully in her sleep a few days after the news of the bank threat. Rumour went that she had told Wanja about the impending journey: she had said that she could not even think of being buried in somebody else’s land: for what would her man say to her when she met him on the other side? People waited for the bank to come and sell her land. But on the day of the sale Wanja redeemed the land and became the heroine of the new and the old Ilmorog.

  Later Munira was to know.

  But at that time only Abdulla really knew the cost: Wanja had offered to sell him her rights to their jointly owned New Building. He did not have the money and it was he who suggested that they sell the whole building to a third person and divide the income between them.

  So Wanja was back to her beginnings.

  And Mzigo was the new proud owner of the business premises in Ilmorog.

  3 ~ Wanja was not quite the same after her recent loss. For a time, she continued the proud proprietor of the old Theng’eta place. Her place still remained the meat-roasting centre. Dance steps in the hall could still raise dust to the roof, especially when people were moving to their favourite tunes:

  How beautiful you are, my love!

  How soft your round eyes are, my honey!

  What a pleasant thing you are,

  Lying here

  Shaded by this cedar bush!

  But oh, darling,

  What poison you carry between your legs!

  But Wanja’s heart was not in it. She started building a huge wooden bungalow at the lower end of her shamba, some distance from the shanty town that was growing up around Abdulla’s shop, the lodgings and the meat-roasting centre, almost as a natural growth complement to the more elegant New Ilmorog. People said that she was wise to invest in a building the money remaining after redeeming her grandmother’s shamba: but what was it for? She already had a hut further up the shamba, hidden from the noise and inquisitive eyes of the New Ilmorog by a thick natural hedge. She went about her work without taking anybody into her confidence. But it was obvious that it was built in the style of a living house with several spacious rooms. Later she moved in: she planted flower gardens all around and had electric lights fixed there. It was beautiful: it was a brave effort so soon after her double loss, people said.

  One night the band struck up a song they had composed on their first arrival. As they played, the tune and the words seemed to grow fresher and fresher and the audience clapped and whistled and shouted encouragement. The band added innovations and their voices seemed possessed of a wicked carefree devil.

  This shamba girl

  Was my darling,

  Told me she loved my sight.

  I broke bank vaults for her,

  I went to jail for her,

  But when I came back

  I found her a lady,

  Kept by a wealthy roundbelly daddy,

  And she told me,

  This shamba-lady girl told me,

  No! Gosh!

  Sikujui

  Serikali imebadilishwa

  Coup d’état!

  They stopped to thunderous handclaps and feet pounding on the floor. Wanja suddenly stood up and asked them to play it again. She started dancing to it, alone, in the arena. People were surprised. They watched the gyrations of her body, speaking pleasure and pain, memories and hopes, loss and gain, unfulfilled longing and desire. The band, responding to the many beating hearts, played with sad maddening intensity
as if it were reaching out to her loneliness and solitary struggle. She danced slowly and deliberately toward Munira and he was remembering that time he had seen her dancing to a juke-box at Safari Bar in Kamiritho. As suddenly as she had started, she stopped. She walked to the stage at the bandstand. The ‘house’ was hushed. The customers knew that something big was in the air.

  ‘I am sorry, dear customers, to have to announce the end of the old Ilmorog Bar and meat-roasting centres, and the end of Ilmorog Bar’s own Sunshine Band. Chiri County Council says we have to close.’

  She could not say more. And now they watched her as she walked across the dusty floor toward where Munira was sitting. She stopped, whirled back, and screamed at the band. ‘Play! Play! Play on. Everybody dance – Daaance!’ And she sat down beside Munira.

  ‘Munira, wouldn’t you like to come and see my new place tomorrow night?’

  Munira could hardly contain himself. So at long last. So the years of waiting were over. It was just like the old days before Karega and the roads and the changes had come to disturb the steamy peaceful rhythm in Ilmorog, when he was the teacher.

  The next day he could not teach. He could not talk. He could hardly sit or stand still in one place. And when the time came, he walked to her place with tremulous hands and beating heart. He had not been inside the new house and he felt it an honour that she had chosen him out of all those faces.

  He knocked at the door. She was in. She stood in the middle of the room lit by a blue light. For a second he thought himself in the wrong place with the wrong person.

  She had on a miniskirt which revealed just about everything, and he felt his manhood rise of itself. On her lips was smudgy red lipstick: her eyebrows were pencilled and painted a luminous blue. On her head was a flaming red wig. What was the game, he wondered? He thought of one of the many advertisements he had earlier collected: Be a platinum blonde: be a whole new you in 100 per cent imported hand-made human hair. Wanja was a really new her.