Green City in the Sun

by Wood, Barbara

  "Yes," Grace said sadly, feeling for the first time since the onset of hostilities the true crime of this obscene war. "There's an underground network. Messages are left for them in hollow trees."

  "Mama Wachera will know how to get my letters to David."

  "And what do you want me to do?"

  "She doesn't speak English, and I know only a little Kikuyu. Will you go with me and explain it to her?"

  Grace looked up. "To Wachera's hut?"

  Mona nodded.

  "I haven't spoken to that woman in years. Not since the irua ... when I tried to save Njeri."

  "Please," Mona said.

  THE POLO FIELD had not been used since Rose's suicide. Mona always spoke of opening it up again or of turning it into a large garden, but she never got around to it. Now it was overgrown with weeds, its fence rusting. Grace had lately been thinking it would make a nice addition to her mission, as a playing field for the three hundred African students in her school.

  A beaten path went along the grassy bank. Mona and Grace followed it after passing under the iron archway of the mission gate. Two British soldiers offered to accompany the women, but they assured the men that there was nothing to fear from Mama Wachera. Africans in both camps respected the legendary medicine woman and left her in peace.

  As she neared the cluster of humble huts, Grace was assailed with memories: of the rainy day she had arrived back in 1919 in the ox wagons, baby Mona in Rose's arms; of her first handshake with James; of the day Valentine had had the fig tree cut down, on a spot near the southern goalposts; of the night of the fire and the subsequent days recuperating in Wachera's hut. Walking now along the edge of the medicine woman's shamba, where beans and maize awaited the rains, Grace felt her modern mission with its electricity and latest medical equipment slowly slide away behind her as she stepped into another era—the Kenya of long ago.

  Mama Wachera was sitting in the sun, stripping leaves off what Grace recognized to be a healing plant. The medicine woman chanted as she made her medicine and then stored the mixture in gourds marked with magic tokens. Wachera wore the costume for which she was known: beaded necklaces; copper bracelets; massive earrings that had stretched her earlobes down to her shoulders. Her shaved head gleamed in the sun; ceremonial charms and sacred talismans jingled on her wrists.

  She looked up at the silver-haired memsaab in white coat and metal-rubber ornament around her neck. They had not spoken in many harvests.

  Mona was apprehensive in the presence of the elderly African woman. She had heard so much about Wachera; this hut had stood here for as long as Mona could recall. And there was an elusive, dreamlike memory: of a fire, and then of rain, and finally a bed of goatskins and gentle hands cooling her fever. Mona knew that Mama Wachera had once saved her life.

  Grace addressed David's mother with extreme politeness and respect, speaking in the excellent Kikuyu that she had perfected over the years. In return, Mama Wachera was exceedingly polite and modest but did not, Grace noticed, offer a calabash of beer.

  "These letters, Lady Wachera," Grace said, holding out the bundle tied in a string, "are for your son, David. We were wondering if you could get them to him for us?"

  Mama Wachera gazed up at Grace.

  They waited. Flies buzzed in the heat; an errant cloud covered the sun. But the medicine woman didn't speak.

  Mona said, "Please," in English, and then tried to explain in her own rudimentary Kikuyu how much the letters would mean to David.

  Wachera's eyes went to Mona's waist, then back up to her face. There was contempt in the look, as if the African woman knew what secret lay beneath Mona's shirt.

  "Lady Wachera," Grace said, "your son would be very happy to read these letters. We don't know where he is. We only know that he went into the forest. But when he left, he told my niece that she could contact him through you. He said that you would help."

  Mama Wachera looked up at the woman who had long ago built a strange hut comprised of nothing more than four posts and a thatch roof but who now owned many stone buildings with paved roads and automobiles. She said, "I do not know where my son is."

  Nonetheless, Grace laid the bundle on the ground next to the medicine woman, said, "Mwaiga," which means, "All is well, go in peace," and turned away.

  As they took the path back to the mission, Grace said to Mona, "Don't worry. She knows where David is. And she would want to carry out his wishes. She will get the letters to him."

  51

  S

  IMON MWACHARO, ONE OF THE CAMP WARDERS, BOTH HATED and lusted after Wanjiru Mathenge. He had her brought to his office again and again, at all hours of the day or night, interrupting a meal or rousing her from sleep, to interrogate her, to break her spirit.

  "Who is your immediate superior in Mau Mau?" he asked her a hundred times. "What are the lines of communication? How do you receive your orders? Who is Leopard? Where is his camp?"

  Mwacharo conducted these random interrogations in his office, a hastily constructed shack of corrugated tin walls and roof, with just a table, chair, and radiophone inside. He always questioned Wanjiru in the presence of a white officer and four askaris, and he kept at it for hours, keeping her standing on the stone floor, whether it was a fiercely hot day and the hut turned into an oven or cold rains filled the office with a biting cold. Wanjiru either shivered or sweated, she was weak and exhausted, but she always remained silent. Since coming to the Kamiti Maximum Security Camp, she had uttered not one word to the authorities.

  Eventually, after an hour or two of rapid-fire questions, Simon Mwacharo, having learned nothing, would release her.

  But he was a determined man. Wanjiru Mathenge had been given the rank of field marshal by Mau Mau; she had been labeled "hard-core" by the authorities and given a black card, which meant she was among the most dangerous of the detainees. To wrest information from her, Mwacharo knew, would be to earn praise for himself and possibly a promotion from his superiors.

  He had been interrogating Wanjiru for five months. He knew that she was bound to break eventually.

  "WATCH NOW, HANNAH!" Wanjiru said to her four-year-old daughter. "Pay careful attention to what I do because someday you are going to be a medicine woman like your grandmother."

  Stories about Mama Wachera, her father's mother, were what little Hannah liked best, even better than tales of Mount Kenya. She wished her mother would tell one now, instead of showing her how to remove a nasty old jigger from a toe.

  "There," Wanjiru said to the elderly Embu woman who sat on the dirt with her back against the barracks wall. "Wash it well, mama, and be careful where you step."

  She cleaned her needle, one of her most precious possessions, pinned it to her collar, and turned her attention to the next woman.

  The three thousand female detainees of the Kamiti Detention Camp occupied only a quarter of the eleven-thousand-acre prison; they were segregated from the men's section by a high chain link fence, guard towers, and rolls of barbed wire. The inhabitants of Kamiti were considered dangerous political prisoners, and therefore, it was a maximum security camp; conditions were harsh for both the men inmates and the women and children, the food was deplorable, the cells were overcrowded, and medical help was stretched too thinly to be of any help. That was why Wanjiru, because of her training as a nurse, had become almost the sole health care worker in Compound D.

  After examining the next woman's arms, which had festering wounds as a result of torture, Wanjiru said gently, "Be sure to keep them clean, mama. And let the sunlight of Mother Africa heal them."

  Wanjiru felt so helpless. With no medicines, no bandages, and no proper food it was impossible for her to do much for these suffering, outcast women. Still, she did her best. She drew upon her formal training received from British nursing sisters, who had taught her modern medicine and hygiene, and upon the traditional healing she had learned from Mama Wachera. Sometimes just having Wanjiru Mathenge look at their ailments or listen to their troubles made the inmat
es feel better. They were lucky to have her, the women all agreed.

  Having seen to the last woman, Wanjiru stood and took hold of her daughter's hand. It was time to collect the water from the communal borehole.

  She walked with Christopher strapped to her back. He was two years old and getting heavy. Wanjiru could have left her children in the care of other women in the compound, as most mothers in the camp did, but she had never, since the day each was born, let them out of her sight. She would not be separated from them now.

  The sky was gray and lowering as she trudged under the eyes of the white and African guards up in their tower, where the British Union Jack fluttered in the wind. She passed large groups of women, sitting or lying in the dirt or lined up against the barracks walls, out of the cold, many of them inadequately dressed. She wondered again what crimes these poor creatures had committed. Surely, she thought, out of the three thousand women in the camp, there were perhaps only fifty who were Mau Mau like herself. So what had the rest done to deserve such treatment?

  They have no husbands, she thought. They are unwanted. They are considered useless. And that is their great crime.

  The water was brackish and dirty; but it was better than no water at all, so Wanjiru constantly urged the women of her compound to keep themselves and their children clean. Disease was the biggest enemy in the Kamiti camp, and Wanjiru was forever lecturing on the tactics of how to fight it.

  She paused with her calabash gourd to look out through the enormous rolls of barbed wire that coiled around the camp. This was a desolate place. She could see far into the distance, where heavy rain fell upon the mountains. In the rising wind she heard again the pronouncement at her trial: Charge: terrorist activities against the Crown. Sentence: governor's pleasure, maximum security, life.

  Life...

  Were they truly going to do that to her? Keep her and her children behind wire for the rest of their lives? Wanjiru was only thirty-six years old; life was a very long time.

  She felt Christopher, warm and heavy on her back, and Hannah's tiny hand in hers, and she was suddenly gripped with panic and fury. What crimes have these little ones committed, except to have been born with the right to freedom?

  A female warder came along. She was a tall Wakamba woman leading two vicious dogs, who prodded Wanjiru to go back to her barracks. Wanjiru thought of David. Where was he? What was this war doing to him?

  "ONCE UPON A time," Wanjiru said quietly above the sound of rain, "a very wise medicine woman lived in a hut on the bank of a river. She lived with her grandmother and her son, and they were very happy there on the bank of that river, which gave them water and fed their crops of maize, millet, and beans. One day a strange man came to the river. The medicine woman had never seen anything like him before. His skin was the color of the pale green frog, and he spoke in a language unknown to the Children of Mumbi. The medicine woman called him Mzungu, because of his strangeness."

  The women in Wanjiru's cell, huddled together against the cold, paid close attention to her tale. They had never heard this story before.

  "Now Mzungu told the medicine woman that he liked this place by the river and that he would like to live there. She said that he was welcome because there was enough food and water and sunshine for all. So he went away to build his house in another place by the river.

  "The medicine woman and her grandmother and son lived in peace by the river. They were very happy and loved one another. And they didn't mind Mzungu for a neighbor. But then one day Mzungu got greedy."

  Christopher wriggled in his mother's lap. She had told this story before; he wanted to hear the one about how the wild turkey got his spots. Hannah, curled up against her mother's side, was asleep with three fingers in her mouth.

  In this cell, which had been constructed to hold ten people, twenty-six women, some with small children and babies, sat along the cold, damp walls or lay on the floor, listening to Wanjiru's story. It didn't matter that it wasn't a familiar, traditional tale—although those were the best—only that she provided them with distraction so that they could forget for the moment how tired they were from having worked all day in the fields, growing food for the inmates, or carrying murram for new roads, or burying the many dead. They all were hungry, but Wanjiru stopped them for a while from thinking of their supper of badly prepared maize porridge served without salt or sugar.

  "Mzungu told the medicine woman that he wanted more land, that what be had wasn't enough. So she said, 'Take what you need; there is plenty for all.' So Mzungu took more land and made his shamba bigger."

  The rain drove down on the corrugated tin roof and against the one window of the cell. Although it was still day, the light in the barracks was dim, and there were no lamps or light bulbs. There was nothing for the women to do except sleep and waken in the morning to another day of hardship, of wondering where their husbands were, of wondering when they were going to be released, of not knowing why they were in prison.

  It had to do with Mau Mau, they all knew that. But, most wondered, did the government really think all these women were freedom fighters? Like toothless old Mama Margaret over there, or lame Mumbi? A "rehabilitation witch doctor" had come through Compound D that afternoon, administering antioaths to the women. For many it had seemed a useless ritual because they had not taken oaths in the first place.

  "Mzungu came again to the medicine woman's hut and told her he needed still more land. And she said, 'Take what you need; there is plenty for all.' Mzungu did this day after day, until it was no longer a long walk to his shamba. It was right next to hers! Then he said, 'I need more land,' and she said, 'Take what you need; there is plenty for all.' But Mzungu now wanted the land upon which the sacred fig tree stood, and the medicine woman said politely, 'No, my friend. You cannot have that ground, for as you can see, it belongs to Ngai, the Lord of Brightness.' "

  Wanjiru's audience murmured, pleased with the medicine woman's response. But when she told how Mzungu uprooted the tree anyway, they all cried out.

  "The medicine woman put a thahu upon Mzungu and all his generations to come and said that he would be cursed until the day the sacred land is returned to the Children of Mumbi."

  The women clapped and agreed all around that it had been a satisfying story. Then they settled down for the long, hungry sleep, trying to get comfortable in the one blanket each had been provided with, some trying with dry breasts to suckle babies, others weeping in memory of the homes they had been wrenched from. For most, there had been the sudden, surprise roundup in their villages; the women had been carted away in trucks separately from their men, riding away down the road to see soldiers enter their huts and come out with their arms full.

  "Mama Wanjiru!" called an urgent voice in the doorless doorway of the cell. "Come quickly! Mama Njoki is very ill!"

  Wanjiru went with the woman into the next cell, where Njoki was sitting propped up against the wall. In the watery light that came through the window, Wanjiru saw that the woman's tongue was swollen and bright red. There were also sores on her body, and her skin was curiously loose in places. "How do you feel, mama?" Wanjiru asked gently. "Have you had vomiting?" The woman nodded. "And diarrhea?" Another nod. "Does your throat burn?" Wanjiru saw how the woman's hands opened and closed repeatedly in a grasping reflex which Njoki could not control. She also recognized that delirium was not far off and beyond that, death.

  "Are there others?" Wanjiru asked the woman who had summoned her.

  Yes, there were others, but none as sick as Mama Njoki.

  "I must see Simon Mwacharo," Wanjiru told the female warder who watched over the barracks. "It's urgent!"

  The white British officer, Dwyer, was in Mwacharo's office. They had been playing cards beneath the thunderous sound of rain on the corrugated roof. Both were surprised to see Wanjiru, rain-soaked, come in. Mwacharo experienced the brief hope that she had come to give him the information he wanted, but that hope was dashed when she said, "There is an outbreak of pellagra in Compou
nd D."

  "How do you know?"

  "I have seen the victims. Some are very sick. They will die if we don't have an improvement in our food. We need something more than maize!"

  "What are you talking about?" said Officer Dwyer. "That's all you people ever eat."

  "We need green beans! Maize alone is deficient in vitamin B."

  His eyebrows shot up. "How do you know something like that?" She gave the white officer a contemptuous look. "I was trained as a nursing sister in Nairobi. I understand the connection between nutrition and health. And I tell you the food in this camp is unhealthy!"

  Officer Dwyer was momentarily impressed. He had never come across an educated African woman before. "Why should we feed you? To build up your strength so you can go back into the forest and fight us some more?"

  "So," said Mwacharo, coming up to her, "do you want me to set out a banquet for you every night?"

  "Just let us grow beans. Or have the daktari dispense vitamin tablets. The pellagra will spread if we don't stop it now."

  Mwacharo grinned, and Wanjiru suddenly went cold.

  "What will you do in exchange?" he asked.

  "Please give us better food," she said softly.

  The warder put his hand on her breast and squeezed. Wanjiru closed her eyes.

  "When you give me the information I want," he said, "about the secret underground of Mau Mau and about Leopard, then I'll see you get your vitamins."

  MAMA NJOKI DIED the next day, as did two other women and three children. Wanjiru was taken off the rock quarry, where she engaged in an endless labor of breaking rocks, and was put on burial detail. In the evening she went through all the cells of Compound D and saw that the pellagra was getting worse.

  She began her protest among the women of her own cell, and from there it spread to the entire compound. "Mothers of Kenya!" she cried. "They are killing us with their miserable food! We must unite and resist! We cannot let them murder us in this insidious way! Do not let tribalism keep us from forming a united front! We should not be Kikuyu or Luo or Wakamba; we must remember that we all are Kenyan mothers and are fighting for our children's future!"