Petals of Blood

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  ‘That’s why they say: Tura na Cia Karugo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very interesting.’

  ‘Today the same thing would be called Magendo . . . But this time in ivory and rubies, maize and charcoal. Only that no policeman would chase some of the culprits.’

  ‘Ha! ha! ha! Mr Munira, you seem to know a little bit about your culture. But I believe that your parents were Christians?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And your brothers are all well off. One is now a big man in an oil company, not so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And your father is still – he is a big landlord?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was the relationship between you and your parents? Cordial?’

  ‘Strained, I should say.’

  ‘How would you describe yourself? A failure? The odd man, the black sheep of an otherwise white family?’

  ‘There is no failure for those born anew in Christ. This world is not my home.’

  ‘Quite right. But tell me . . . did you meet Chui again after your little adventure in Siriana?’

  ‘No . . . not really.’

  Munira stopped and thought for a few minutes. Then he laughed as if amused by sudden inward reflection.

  ‘No. Actually . . . you see, I saw him several times in Ilmorog. I thought of introducing myself. But I didn’t, or rather I kept on putting off the decision. Then one day I did so. It was funny. It was during the opening of Ilmorog Golf Club. We teachers were also invited. This time I went straight to him. At first he could not remember me. I told him about Chui, the football player. I called him Joe Louis – Shakespeare. He burst into laughter. He felt his huge stomach with one hand, glass of champagne in the other. “How are you, my friend? Ha! Ha! I suppose today they would have called me Muhammad Ali or Bruce Lee, or Pele. So you became a teacher? Like myself? That Fraudsham . . . did you attend his funeral?” We talked a little bit about the Ironmongers, Fraudsham, and Siriana in our time. “Schoolboys . . . these days . . . not at all like we used to be,” he said. He asked me what I was drinking. Why didn’t I Theng’a Theng’a with Theng’eta? Did I not know the modern algebra – P was equal to 3 Ts? “New maths,” he said and laughed, slapping me on the shoulder with his free hand. That day I did not want to drink and I said ginger ale. “Come, come, wine is a good familiar creature if it be used well,” he said encouragingly and slapped me hard on the shoulder. I still stuck to my ginger ale and quoted back. “O thou invisible spirit of wine, If thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil.” “So you remember Mr Billy Shakespeare,” he said, and laughed again. An argument developed. Was ginger ale really an ale (Alcohol Livens Everybody) or was it a Fanta (Foolish Teachers Never Take Alcohol)? He said that it could have an alcoholic effect, depending on who was taking it. He told a story how once at a party in his place at Blue Hills, a lady did get drunk on ginger ales. She went to the door and screamed and fainted and later claimed that she had seen a ghost . . .’

  ‘I see. Very interesting. And Kimeria? Did you know him?’

  ‘No . . . not very well . . . Except that he had ruined Wanja’s life and betrayed Karega’s brother.’

  ‘And Karega . . . did he ever talk in a way that might suggest – eeh?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bitterness. Or how he was going to bring about his new world? Could he have thought of hastening its coming?’

  ‘I’ve told you how it was that I didn’t believe in man’s—’

  He stopped. The officer was looking at him in a strange manner. Inspector Godfrey suddenly changed his tone . . . he was not any longer the bemused onlooker.

  ‘Mr Munira . . . what were you doing on Ilmorog Hill on the Sunday morning after the arson?’

  Munira looked at the officer. He read everything in his eyes.

  ‘So you know?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Yes, Mr Munira . . . The rulers of every world have their laws, their policemen, and their judges and . . . and the law’s executioners . . . not so? I am afraid, Mr Munira, that I am only a policeman of this world. And I’ll now formally charge you with burning Wanja’s house and causing the deaths of three men. I may warn you that anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. Tell me: why did you do it?’

  ‘I – I wanted to save Karega,’ Munira said.

  Munira had been so convinced that this world was wrong, was a mistake, that he wanted all his friends to see this and escape in time. That was why he had pestered Karega so much. In the end this had become an obsession. He followed Wanja; he followed Abdulla; he followed Karega. But it was Karega in whom he was most interested. It was as if he had a doubt in his mind which could only be erased by Karega’s conversion. But it was sheer coincidence that on the crucial Friday he saw the shadow of Karega. He had followed him. He saw him enter Wanja’s hut. ‘So they have been meeting in secret,’ it suddenly dawned on him. ‘So they have been seeing one another in the hut!’ He waited in the dark, thinking hard. He recalled his first arrival in Ilmorog: he remembered how Wanja had shaken his world, the world he had created around himself. He recalled and relived his involvement with her and his later sliding into sloth and drinking, and she looking so desirable like the fruit in the old garden. From nowhere, a voice spoke to him: She is Jezebel, Karega will never escape from her embrace of evil. In the dark, the message was clear: Karega had to be saved from her. He would otherwise descend the very same steps that Munira had himself descended and from which he had been saved by the return of Karega and Lillian. Save him . . . save him, the voice insisted. Munira knew that he would obey the voice. Christ, after all, had beaten the traders who had been spoiling God’s temple. What was important was not just passive obedience to the law but active obedience to the universal law of God. It was a tremendous revelation. He saw Karega move out. He wondered if he should act tonight and how he should act. He was going to follow Karega when again he saw Abdulla come and also go into the hut. ‘Even he . . .’ Munira thought and moved away.

  For a whole week he prayed that God would show him the way. He bought petrol on the Saturday evening . . . He walked to Wanja’s place. It was not he, Munira. He was doing this only in active obedience to the law. It was enjoined on him to burn down the whorehouse – which mocked God’s work on earth. He poured petrol on all the doors and lit it up. He walked away toward Ilmorog Hill. He stood on the hill and watched the whorehouse burn, the tongues of flame from the four corners forming petals of blood, making a twilight of the dark sky. He, Munira, had willed and acted, and he felt, as he knelt down to pray, that he was no longer an outsider, for he had finally affirmed his oneness with the Law.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1 ~ Inspector Godfrey sat by the window of a first-class coach and watched the fields roll away: neat man-controlled beauty of coffee and tea plantations on hillsides and valleys and ridges. His mind was not wholly on the undulating landscape between Ruwa-ini and Nairobi, but was still in New Ilmorog. He should now have been experiencing that inner satisfaction he always had felt whenever he put a crime jigsaw puzzle together: but instead he felt an inner discomfort, a slight irritability. He was a little surprised at himself because this kind of unease was hopelessly out of character with the equanimity with which he was wont to view the flow of social and political events. Not that he was interested in the likes of Karega. For such destroyers of order he had no feelings. Inspector Godfrey, a self-made man, for his formal education had not taken him beyond Form 2 and yet see where he was, the heights he had reached through study, application and through an instinctive fear of stirring the bottom of a pool, had been brought up to believe in the sanctity of private property. The system of private ownership, of means of production, exchange and distribution, was for him synonymous with the natural order of things like the sun, the moon and the stars which seemed fixed and permanent in the firmament. Anybody who interfered with that ordained fixity and permanence of things was himself unnatural and deserved no mercy: was he
not inviting chaos such as would occur if some foolish astronaut/cosmonaut should go and push the sun or the moon from its place? People like Karega with their radical trade unionism and communism threatened the very structure of capitalism: as such they were worse than murderers. Inspector Godfrey always felt a certain protective relationship to this society. It did not matter that for him, all these years, he had acquired very little. Still he felt a lordly proprietorial air to the structure: was the police not the force that guaranteed that stability which alone made possible the unhindered accumulation of wealth? Everybody, even those millionaires that had ganged together under Kamwene Cultural Organization, really owed their position to the force. The police force was truly the maker of modern Kenya, he had always felt. The Karegas and their like should really be deported to Tanzania and China!

  But it was people like Munira who really disturbed him. How could Munira have repudiated his father’s immense property? Could property, wealth, status, religion, plus education not hold a family together? What else could a man want? Inspector Godfrey decided that it was religious fanaticism! Yet from his own experience in the police force, such fanaticism was normally found among the poor. Human beings: they could never be satisfied!

  And yet there was a way in which Munira was right. This system of capitalism and capitalistic democracy needed moral purity if it was going to survive. The skeletons that he himself had come across in the New Ilmorog could not very well come under the label of moral purity. Of course he had seen similar or near similar things in Nairobi, Mombasa, Malindi, Watamu and other places but he had never before given it much thought because, at least so he supposed now, he had never before come across a Munira who was prepared to murder in the name of moral purity. And it was not Wanja’s Sunshine Lodge that Inspector Godfrey was thinking about. It was, for instance, the Utamaduni Cultural Tourist Centre at Ilmorog. Ostensibly it was there to entertain watalii from USA, Japan, West Germany, and other parts of Western Europe. But this only camouflaged other more sinister activities: smuggling of gemstones and ivory plus animal and even human skins. It was a centre for the plunder of the country’s natural and human assets. Women, young girls, were being recruited to satisfy any watalii’s physical whims. The more promising ones, those who seemed to acquire an air of sophistication with a smattering of English and German were lured to Europe as slave whores from Africa! Inspector Godfrey was in no doubt that this lucrative trade in Black Ivory was done with the knowledge of Nderi wa Riera, the MP for the area, for did he not own the centre? He was in partnership with the proprietor, the man from West Germany. Black Ivory for Export: First-rate Foreign Exchange Earner: but couldn’t we do without it, Inspector Godfrey thought, recalling the storm that had burst out when years before a similar trafficking in young flesh had been discovered at Watamu Bay? Maybe he would talk to his superiors about this: maybe he would give them the separate report that he had made. But then remembering how many VIP’s might be connected with such an Utalii Utamaduni Centre, he desisted. He would keep the report and the knowledge to himself. It might come in useful should he ever be called upon to put together another criminal jigsaw puzzle. He was a crime detective not the leader of a moral vice squad! Tourism was after all one of the biggest industries in the country and there was nothing good that did not carry with it a few negative things. His duty as a policeman was to help maintain stability, law and order, upon which depended the successful growth of all the industries and foreign investments. He chuckled to himself. He felt better. How silly of him to have let himself be drawn into moral questions of how and why! Was he growing weak with old age? He settled back in the carriage and his mind dwelt on the more comfortable formal questions of his investigation of the murder by arson of Kimeria, Chui and Mzigo. Wanja, Munira, Abdulla and even Karega passed through his mind . . . as the train took him nearer and nearer the city of which New Ilmorog was only a tiny, tiny imitation . . .

  2 ~ She thought about her father: what was it that made some take the side of the people in a struggle and others sell out to foreign interests while still others stood precariously on the fence? What was it? And recalling Abdulla, Karega, Munira, her grandfather and all the other individuals who had been in and out of her life, she decided that maybe everything was simply a matter of love and hate. Love and hate – Siamese twins – back to back in a human heart. Because you loved you also hated: and because you hated you also loved. What you loved decided what you would have to hate in relation to what you loved. What you hated decided the possibilities of what you could love in relation to that which you hated. And how did one know what one loved and hated? Again, thinking of the events in her life, she came back to the question of choice. You knew what you loved and what you hated by what you did, what actions, what side you had chosen. You could not, for instance, work with the colonists in suppressing the people and still say you loved the people. You could not stand on the fence in a struggle and still say you were on the side of those fighting the evil. Her father had wanted to make money and to accumulate property: he had chosen neutrality, and he hated any suggestion of being involved on the side of the people in case this ruined his chances of making money. The tragedy of her father, who by his neutrality had therefore chosen the side of the colonists, was that despite his selling out, despite his denial of self and of his father, he had ended up ruined anyway, the world disintegrating around him. His petty trade as a plumber was no match for the giant enterprises around him. She could see this clearly because of her own involvement in the petty transport trade and she knew what pressures were brought upon the petty trader, the matatu driver, the owner of one bus, the shopkeeper – all these and more. So what was the difference between her own position and that of her father? Had she not, like her father before her, also chosen her side in the struggle because she had latterly opted for her thing to love: money and money-making? She had chosen, then, the side of the Kimerias of post-Independence Kenya: how could she then blame her father? She now wished she had really known him: she wished she had talked with him at some length! But what could they have spoken about? Had she not, after all, added to his humiliation? It could not now be helped. But was there a time when she maybe could have helped it? She thought of her many attempts to return home and all the failures. There was the time she packed all her things and told the other girls that she was definitely quitting the life. The following day she found all her clothes stolen. She became scared of going home empty-handed. There was the time her father called her a prostitute and, in word if not in deed, had chased her out of the house! There was the time the lawyer had asked her to return home. She would have done it. She had taken the bus, determined to go back home. But on reaching her place she had suddenly changed her mind. She had been stabbed with guilt, not only because of her being empty-handed but because of the memory of her very last encounter with her father. The memory wounded . . . it still hurt. She had, before her first visit to Ilmorog, decided to make it up with her parents and seek their blessing: who knows the effect of the power of the parental curse? She had reasoned. She had gone home at midday and found him lying on the grass under the barn. She saw from his emaciated face that he was very ill; she suddenly felt kindly toward him. He was all alone. He spoke to her with difficulty. He asked her for water. She went into the house and poured some water into a cup and took it to him. His hands trembled. He looked up at her. Then he slowly shook his head. ‘You look exactly like your mother when she was young,’ he said, and his voice was soft. Maybe, she had thought, maybe he was remembering a time when it was possible to love. And indeed in that second she too remembered the time when she used to sit on her father’s knees and he would sing to her. It was a brilliant sunny spot in her childhood before he became obsessed with the idea of making money. Her heart mellowed toward him. She wanted to confess all her failings and ask for forgiveness. He looked at her again. He said: ‘Have you any money? Five shillings? Twenty shillings?’ She picked up her handbag. She saw him suddenly beam bright on
his face, his emaciated hands were trembling with eagerness. He started praising her in a most exaggerated tone, saying that he knew all the time she would later be his blessing in his old age. He complained to her how her mother treated him, cheating him out of his money. And not just his mother: it seemed as if all the neighbourhood had ganged up to deny him his share of the money in Kenya. Only Wanja was left. And suddenly her hands became frozen in the very act of pulling out a note. So only money, no matter how it was got, could redeem her in his eyes? And she had thought . . . She could not buy his love or his blessings or buy her way back to the home with money. She said: ‘I have nothing!’ and she shut the handbag. Then he started condemning everybody: he had known that all his children were useless . . . She walked away, went to the nearest bar and wept and drank all the money she had. Later she heard the news of his death and she did not cry. He had died of cancer.

  She rested on her bed in the old hut, turning over these things in her head . . . these silhouettes from the past . . . these images that refused to be burnt right out of her life and memory. She wanted a new life . . . clean . . . she felt this was the meaning of her recent escape! Already she felt the stirrings of a new person . . . she had after all been baptized by fire. And to think that it was Munira and Abdulla who were instrumental in her double narrow escapes, in her getting yet another chance to try out new paths, new possibilities? Yet would there now be any better chance for her? Whatever would happen to her she would always shiver at the horror of that moment . . . she still wondered how or from where she could have got the strength to do what she had done . . .

  Somebody knocked at the door. Who could it be? There was another knock, then the door opened and—

  ‘Mother!’ Wanja gasped.

  ‘My child . . . fire again!’ her now aged mother cried out. They wept together, maybe both weeping out their different memories.