A Fool's Knot

by Philip Spires

  In contrast to John’s vitality was the land about which he enthused. Bill had never seen a more barren, desolate, dusty place. It reminded him of a disused and worked-out quarry, exhausted not only of its resources, but of its life as well. Bill’s cultured Englishness was not yet able to appreciate the beauties of nakedness and he could see none of the glory which John enthusiastically tried to reveal.

  “When God created the earth he worked without food, drink or sleep. First he made the land and, while that baked hard in the sun, he made water and cut rivers for it to flow. But there was still much to be done. The land had to be finished, just like a carpenter must plane, polish and paint a table. His work was still not done when he was suddenly gripped by a new idea. He made insects, animals and birds. And then he made man. He became so excited with these new things that he forgot about the land which still lay unfinished, and so it remains today.” John lifted his arms and pointed at the rugged mountains and deep valleys that were his home. “This is the land that God forgot.”

  The antithesis of the Jews. This had long been John’s favourite description of his own people in his college days. Bill had once read a paper by him, written for the college Africa Society, in which he had paralleled the two races. Jews, God’s chosen people, are persecuted by their fellow men. Akamba, God’s forsaken people, are persecuted by God. They were never meant to inhabit the land that remained God’s failure, and so they must accept His vengeance in the form of famine, drought and disease. Bill’s comment at the end of the paper had been to ask why they simply didn’t move away. “It is not our custom,” had been his student’s reply, a reply that had not satisfied the teacher. At that stage, Bill had no idea how strong an answer that was. So, with their four-hour walk complete, they approached John Mwangangi’s ancestral home, hanging on the side of the great valley.

  On that morning, he began to see that custom unfold. John’s words to his father seemed uncomfortably formal, like a string of set answers to set questions. Then it was his turn. John had taught him just two words of Kikamba. When prompted by Musyoka, he said them, and to his astonishment the old man reeled with laughter. He laughed so hard he had to steady himself with his umbrella and hold his side. Feeling quite embarrassed and growing more ill at ease with the passing of every second, Bill was doubly shocked when, still laughing, John’s father drew himself up to his full height, threw his head back and shouted to the sky. Now terrified of what he might do next, Bill started to retreat, as if to put distance between himself and this unpredictable being that confronted him.

  In fact, Musyoka was simply announcing Bill and John’s arrival to the rest of the family. One by one they came running from the nearby fields. Two women were first to appear, followed quickly by a girl, much younger than John. All converged upon the group of huts, some stumbling over the uneven ground. There were no formalities this time. All three ran straight to John and immersed him in their embrace. The old man smiled and came forward again. Taking Bill’s hand, which he did not let go, he led him to the entrance of one of the huts. Holding aside its sackcloth door, he went inside, still pulling his companion by the hand.

  After coming straight out of the sun, the hut’s darkness was blinding. Inside, the air felt cool and fresh. As shapes began to appear out of the blackness, Bill saw an old iron bed in the centre of the space. On the uncovered foam mattress lay a crumpled piece of printed cotton cloth. Musyoka bent down and picked up a large calabash from the uneven floor and then stormed straight back outside with Bill still in tow. Obviously one of the women had anticipated his intention and she returned sporting two handfuls of dappled enamel mugs. With these distributed, she took the gourd from the old man and, approaching Bill first, turned it upside down over his mug. It gurgled once or twice and he felt something heavy drop into the mug. Bill raised a hand to try to say “Enough,” but her only reply was to brush aside his gesture and continue shaking the gourd until his mug was filled to the brim. Bill decided to adopt a passive role and set about examining the contents of the cup. The contents were white, or thereabouts, and seemed to have the consistency of cottage cheese. Thus an increasingly uncomfortable-looking Bill stood motionless, apparently trying to stare through the bottom of his cup. The girl hid her giggling behind a cupped hand. Looking up, he found that the entire family group, John included, had gathered in a semi-circle to watch the spectacle. Bill’s eyes scanned his audience with an air of faintly amused acceptance of his appointed position as jester. The women laughed and slapped their thighs. The young girl giggled some more and again hid her face. John smiled and made drinking motions with his right hand. The old man scratched his head through the hole in his hat.

  “You are to be our guest,” said John. “You must be the first to drink.”

  Bill had begun to laugh in sympathy with the others until John spoke. Then, as his smile faded to concern, he again bowed his head to peer into the cup. There were flecks of black showing through the white. “What is it?” he asked, somewhat plaintively, and the uproar started again. John said something to the woman holding the gourd and she came forward to fill his mug. He drank the contents in one and urged Bill to do the same.

  “It’s milk,” he said. “Just milk.”

  Bill looked unconvinced. Then he drank, or perhaps ate, a mouthful. The taste was rather like sweet yoghurt, but it was aromatic, almost as if it had been flavoured with rum. He liked it, despite being rather put off by the dark flecks, which floated like detached enamel amongst the dregs.

  In the hour or so that followed, they all sat together in the shade of an acacia tree, some on small low stools, others on tree roots, the rest on the ground. Words flowed in torrents, but Bill understood not a single one. Never before had he been in a position whereby he held not a single handle of what was being said. Occasionally, John would nod in his direction, say his name and then revert to words he could not even distinguish, let alone decipher. This feeling of helplessness, of total dependency on another to be his mouth and ears was something Bill had never experienced before.

  As time passed, Bill’s attention moved from the people to the surroundings. The homestead was a cluster of a half a dozen almost identical huts. Each had red earth walls and a thatched roof, neatly trimmed in steps. A gap in the wall was its entrance, lightly covered by a sackcloth door. Set apart from the rest were two other huts, but these were made from thin wooden laths and stood on legs a foot from the ground. There was not a blade of grass to be seen. The whole area had been cleared of all vegetation apart from the tree under which they sat and a group of thin straight pawpaws near the huts. Small breast-shaped fruits clustered around the tops of some of the trees, whose brilliant green, fingered leaves contrasted strongly with the general dull brown of the landscape.

  On all sides the land had been tilled and cultivated. There were a few dry brown maize stalks in a nearby field. A donkey, tethered to a large stone, gnawed at one of the crinkled leaves and then stripped it off the plant. Chewing its prize, the animal seemed to return Bill’s gaze with interest for a few moments until it again turned aside, apparently uninterested in this mere white man, to renew its search for food. Each field was bounded by a hedge of cut twigs, which carried slender but sharp white thorns, each at least two inches long. Poking through the hedges at apparently regular intervals were sisal plants, whose petrified stems rose twelve feet to sprout pathetic little twigs at the top. Standing in lines, they might have been natural telegraph poles, so regular did they seem. The whole farm nestled neatly halfway up the valley side and felt as if it might slide down the slope at any moment. But above all a feeling of stillness pervaded everything. If one listened through the conversation, sounds were few. A bulbul knocked out its call and left. The donkey crunched on a maize plant in the field. Far away a cow sounded angry and close by a pair of tethered hens scratched for food in the dust.

  The silence was vast. He heard a conversation, listened for a minute or more through the wo
rds of his nearby companions. Then he realised that it was coming from another homestead on the far side of the valley, at least half a mile away.

  Eventually one of the women got up and went into one of the huts. As she pulled back the sacking to enter, to Bill’s surprise, smoke came billowing out through the gap. On closer inspection, Bill noticed that there was a constant hint of smoke percolating through the thatch. Then John got up and walked over to his former tutor, leaving his smiling father to sit and watch. “Shall I show you round?” he asked. At that moment, Musyoka’s first wife appeared. She was walking up the valley side with her head bowed and her back bent by the weight of her load. Supported by a thick leather that passed across her forehead, the bundle of firewood nestled neatly in the small of her back. As she bent forward to take the strain, it seemed that her buttocks became the highest point of her body. With her head bent low and swinging her arms to ease the effort of each tortuous step, she climbed the hillside quickly and efficiently. Her bare feet found solid ground at every step and her tread seemed convincingly light, despite the obvious weight of her load. Quite unused to such a sight, Bill instinctively went forward to intercept her, with the intention of helping her off with her load. He pointed at the bundle of wood, took hold of the strap and started to lift. The load, of course, did not move. She shouted something, bent her legs and then flicked the wood from her back with a jerk of her hips. In one movement she had unloaded her burden and stepped aside to let it fall. Unfortunately, Bill’s hands were still clinging onto the leather strap and he was dragged somewhat involuntarily by the weight and was still holding the strap after the load hit the ground. For his own peace of mind, he gave a tug to see if he could lift the load, but he could not even drag it to the side. He found he had again become the centre of attention and everyone seemed to find the sight very funny. His hands were now perfectly trapped between the tightened cord and the wood it bound, and the smile he still displayed looked ever more forced, as he fruitlessly tried to free himself. After a moment of merrymaking, when the entire family stood back and wallowed in the improbability of his predicament, the woman stepped forward and, after reducing its tension with a plunge of her foot onto the wood, loosened the cord.

  His fingers were grazed. He tried to hide the obvious discomfort and shrug off the whole incident. Musyoka would have none of it, however, taking his hand and pulling him towards another of the huts. From a box under the bed the old man retrieved a roll of sticking plaster and tore off a length with his teeth. Over the graze he placed a single cool leaf and then bound it with the plaster. “Finish,” he said in English, much to Bill’s surprise.

  John and Bill then walked down to the sandy river bed at the bottom of the valley. Rocks of all sizes jutted through the fine grains and on one of the larger boulders Bill sat and smoked a cigarette.

  “Your father speaks some English?” he asked.

  “No,” said John curtly. “He served in the British Army for a while – as a cook, would you believe? He learned a few things there: a few words of English and the practice of shaking hands with his left hand clasping his right forearm.” He had finished the phrase as if in mid-sentence, glancing to see if there was any reaction from his friend. “That was to ensure that he was not holding a knife behind his back.”

  “You’re not serious!” scoffed Bill.

  “Totally,” John replied. “There were times of tension between the races, and there were times of calm. My own people, for instance, generally welcomed the white man and collaborated with the new rulers right from the start. But in some areas, especially where the settlers took land for themselves, there was always conflict. I personally don’t believe that the white settlers actually distrusted their own servants to the extent that the existence of this custom suggests, but the example was set and the tradition survived.”

  He obviously wanted to continue, but did not. For the first time, Bill began to feel self-consciously white in John’s company. It was John who eventually broke the silence.

  “I am in a privileged position. I have lived, as a child and as a young man, in a land ruled by immigrant whites. I have lived for eleven years or so as a black immigrant in a white country. As a student I arrived in England convinced that the white man was a kind of ‘superman’, capable of anything, and unwilling to allow any obstacle to come between him and his vision. Filled with stories of our ‘motherland’ by my teachers – of its beauty, its perfection and wealth – I went to England to learn what I still saw as the white man’s knowledge, so that I might return to educate my own people. I really did believe that! My father told me to beware of thieves and to remember him and his ancestors every day. My mother feared that my skin would be turned white by the cold weather. I knew stories of the white man’s cruelty and exploitation of defenceless people, but I chose not to believe them and hoped – sincerely hoped – that I could help to make Kenya into another Britain.” From his own memory, Bill knew that John was being unfair to himself, but he did not interrupt.

  “It took me some time to appreciate my mistakes. I saw, for instance, that the riches of England were not for all to share. But it took me longer to understand that the whole way of life, the religion, the institutions, were merely different answers to the same questions posed by life anywhere. The fact that those answers are different is no more significant than the fact that your skin is white and mine black.

  “Then, as you know, I became convinced that colonialism was just another word for conspiracy, a master plan to enable the white races to exploit all parts of the world for their own ends. We were to be pushed to poorer and poorer land to make way for progress, perhaps just another word for someone else’s interest. In our new settlements, our communities would wither and die, thus leaving all for the colonial masters. The ways of my own people, which I had learned to despise and insult both in school and in church, were suddenly no longer mere primitive, pagan rites. They became part of a romance infinitely more attractive than London in midwinter.

  “Then I changed my mind again! The colonialists, and the government which backed them, were neither supermen nor crooks. They were merely stupid. They did not think that the solution they applied with such verve and without exception might be only one of a number of equally viable possibilities. Their guns allowed them to believe that that they were always right. They settled here, took what they wished and were defeated, all because they were ignorant. I hoped that our struggle for independence and freedom would make them realise this, but, alas, it did not, just as it will not change the image of the white man in the eyes of these people. He is still the master, because he can build tractors and make music come from a box.

  “So when people talk to you and ask you questions, you will tell them that you own a car and your house is built of bricks. You work with paper in an office high up in the air in a building where there are hundreds of others like you. Each year you travel thousands of miles just to see different places – a practice quite unknown and utterly incomprehensible to people here. And people will laugh at you in wide-eyed disbelief. They will call you a rich old man and give you great respect, but it will be the kind of respect reserved for a freak. They will not understand why you took only one wife. A man with such obvious riches should have at least four, but your divorce will raise no problems of explanation. The woman bore no children, so you sent her away – a common practice and quite understandable.”

  “And what about you, John?” asked Bill. “How white are you?”

  John laughed and paused before answering. He looked Bill in the eye and said, “This is my home. I was brought up here. The customs and beliefs are my own. I have lived away and now I have returned. No matter how long you chew, you must eventually swallow.” There was another long silence before he spoke again. “Frankly, I don’t know.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  August 1976

  August is the month when little boys piss. Day begins not with the fanf
are of sunrise but with a melting of grey through mist. The air is wet, but the earth stays baked concrete hard after three months of scorching sun. There is always this damp, but never, never rain. Clouds envelop the mountains, rolling soft in grey waves over the peaks and then sinking low, as if leaden, into the valleys between. Standing in the river bed, where the sand now sticks to shoe leather, look around and the air is clear and clean. But look up and you are trapped beneath a wall of mist, compressed between the dewy acacias on the valley sides. The only way is to follow the sand between the crumbled and scarred earth banks of the winding dry river. Some twenty miles or so along this apparent tunnel, there is a miracle awaiting. Surely the head of the valley is here. The sides grow steep and the dry river suddenly narrows to no more than ten feet across, squashed between rocks rising through cloud a thousand feet on either side. Turn the corner expecting to see a wall across the path and find emptiness, utter emptiness. The earth becomes a placid sea, without rise or fall, wave or tide. Distance is an even line between earth and sky, an unblemished boundary between apparent infinities. Clouds are higher here and softer than the heavy swirl of the mountain mist, still so close at hand. And the dampness has gone, and with it the sense of cold. With only thorns and cactus straining from the hard red soil, this land is now only a memory of the scorching days between the rains, when dust flies high on the wind and the fields lie bare.