Wizard of the Crow

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong

  “A never-ending dream,” Kamltl concluded.

  “More like a never-ending nightmare,” Nyawlra said, looking at her watch and suddenly standing up. “It is very late. Tomorrow we shall need all the strength we can muster to face the queuing daemons.”

  When we wake up,” Kamltl said, “we shall find them gone.”

  6

  But the queues did not go away. For a while all the news of the Global Bank mission, the battles of Mariko and Maritha with Satan, and the saga of flying souls and pamphleteering djinns was supplanted by the drama of the invasion of Eldares by queuing daemons.

  Nyawlra and Vinjinia arrived at the office at about the same time every day. They talked of how curious it was that the queue of hunters for future contracts had dwindled to zero, Nyawlra neglecting to tell Vinjinia that it had simply changed location. Pressed by Vinjinia to do something about the remaining queue, the Santamaria police said there was not much they could do without the report from the police motorcycle rider who had still not returned. So the two women waited patiently for the return of the rider to signal the end of the queue.

  Their monotony was broken only when Vinjinia brought her two children, Gacirü and Gaclgua, to the office during midterm break. The children said that they did not want to stay home with their father because he kept on barking a single phrase over and over, and they were a little afraid that he might be turning into a dog.

  Gacirü and Gaclgua were so excited by the sight of the queue that they quickly forgot about their father’s illness. They stood by the window, looking out and asking endless questions. Were they students? For only in school had they seen people queue. They soon grew bored with the whole thing, as there was little out there by way of shoving, hide-and-seek, or frantic chases eliciting admonition.

  Gaclgua was the first to ask their mother to tell them a story, and Vinjinia pointed at their new auntie.

  Nyawlra sang them work songs and recited poems about weaver-birds and elephants. But the children wanted stories. Nyawlra told them that stories were for evenings only, at home by the fireside and not daytime in the office by the phoneside. Hakuna matata. Gacirü and Gaclgua would pretend that it was evening and the office was home and all the people in the queue were listeners. Eventually Nyawlra yielded and said she would tell them a story about a blacksmith, an ogre, and a pregnant woman.

  What are ogres? they now wanted to know, and Nyawlra explained that the maritnü were humanlike creatures who sometimes fed on humans, including little children. The creatures had two mouths, one in front and the other at the back of their heads, and they ate flies through the mouth at the back. Otherwise the mouth at the back was well concealed by the creature’s long hair, which fell over its shoulders.

  “Like my mother’s hair?” Gacirü asked.

  “Gacirü, are you saying that your mother is an ogre?” interjected Vinjinia, laughing.

  “My mother is not an ogre,” said Gaclgua. “She does not eat other humans.”

  “Tell us the story” they said in unison.

  A certain blacksmith went to an iron smithery far away. In his absence, his pregnant woman gave birth to two children.

  “Like us two,” Gacirü said in a tone between a question and a statement.

  “Yes, like you two, a boy and a girl, but in their case they were twins.”

  “What were their names?” Gaclgua asked.

  Nyawlra was caught off-guard, for in the version she had received the children had no names.

  “At the time of the events of the story, the woman had not given them names,” she said.

  “Why?” Gacirü asked.

  “Because it was an ogre who helped her deliver and who now nursed her, and she did not want the ogre to know their names,” Nyawlra improvised again.

  “Why did the ogre do all that?” Gacirü asked.

  “Silly Because the husband was not there,” Gaclgua chimed in.

  “Mummy! Mummy, Gaclgua is calling me silly!”

  “Stop it, you two,” Vinjinia shouted from where she was, “or I shall ask Nyawlra not to tell you stories anymore.”

  The ogre was really a very bad nurse. After cooking food, he would dish it out and put the plate in front of the woman, but as soon as she stretched her hand to pick it up the ogre would quickly take the dish away and say: “I see you don’t want to eat my food, but it is all right, I will eat it for you.” The ogre did the same with water: “You don’t want it? I shall drink it for you.”

  ‘Gaclgua teases me in the same way,” Gacirü complained.

  “You do the same to me,” Gaclgua shot back.

  They argued back and forth, each accusing the other of the same mean crime, and they would have gone on except for Nyawlra’s warning them that if they did not stop the story would disappear.

  “Tell us what happened next,” they pleaded.

  All four grew big tummies: of kwashiorkor for mother and children and of fat for the ogre.

  One day the woman saw a weaverbird in the yard.

  “Is that the same weaverbird that you sang about?” Gacirü asked.

  “Which one?” Nyawlra asked, for she had forgotten about the earlier song.

  “How can she tell the story if you two keep on interrupting her with endless questions?” Vinjinia interjected.

  “We shall not ask anymore,” Gacirü and Gaclgua said together, “until the end.”

  In exchange for castor oil seeds, the bird agreed to take a message to the blacksmith far away. Nyawlra described how the bird flew and flew and flew until it finally reached the smelting yard and landed on the branches of a tree. It was very tired, but it sang.

  Blacksmith smelting iron

  Make haste, make haste

  Your wife has given birth

  With the ogre as the midwife

  With the ogre as the nurse

  Make haste, make haste

  Before it is too late

  Nyawlra asked Gaclgua and Gacirü to join in the singing so that they would help in defeating the ogre. The weaverbird jumped from tree to tree, trying to attract the smith’s attention. Now, the blacksmith was with others, and at first they simply chased it away as a nuisance, but seeing the bird’s persistence they took the time to listen to it more carefully. It was then that the blacksmith remembered that he had left a pregnant wife behind and realized that the bird was telling him of the danger facing his wife and children. He gathered his spear and shield and ran as fast as his legs could carry him, soon reaching home, where he joined his wife and children, and with their combined strength they were able to defeat the evil creature.

  “Did you say their combined strength?” Gacirü asked. “I thought that babies cannot fight?”

  “Or women?” added Gaclgua.

  “Who told you that women cannot fight?” asked Gacirü. “Me, I cannot let a boy, any boy, beat me without fighting back,” Gacirü said, glaring at Gaclgua.

  “I talked about their strengths, big and small, being combined,” Nyawlra told them, explaining how the babies cooperated by not crying too much and how the woman, though weak, gave the husband all the details she had learned about the ogre and even suggested the best way of defeating the big ogre, for by now she knew all about the evil creature. She would taunt him to distract him while the husband came out of his hiding place to attack. And that was exactly what happened.

  They spent the day spinning tales, songs, and riddles, and the scene was the same the next day. To Gacirü and Gaclgua, this was the perfect midterm break, and they hoped all of life would be like that: an endless festival of storytelling with Nyawlra as the sole narrator, for she could change her voice to sound like a bird, a lion, an old woman, a man, a child, anything. They liked stories of the trickster hare the best, though they were fascinated by the scary ones of the ogre.

  Indeed, a couple of days later, Gacirü revisited the issue of ogres and the second mouth concealed under a thick mass of long hair. This time Gacirü had Nyawlra all to herself and sat on her la
p. Vin-jinia and Gaclgua were looking through the window at the never-ending queue outside.

  “You know, I have been thinking about the story of the ogre, and I don’t think that it was their hair alone that hid the mouth at the back. Both the mouth and the hair were hidden under the hats the ogres wore. Don’t you think so? Hats can also hide the mouth, can’t they? Like those worn by those policemen outside? Tell me, are policemen ogres?”

  “Sssh!” Vinjinia said from where she sat by the window.

  “That’s clever,” Nyawlra said. “I mean about the hats. How did you work it out?”

  “It is simple. My mother has long hair but she does not wear a hat. Therefore, Mummy” she now called out, “you are not an ogre.”

  “Thank you,” Vinjinia said. “Is that what has been waking you up at night, making you turn my hair over?”

  “You see, Mummy, ogres are bad and cunning and they can make themselves look like somebody else. In school the teacher read to us the story of Red Riding Hood and how she went to see her sick grandmother, and you know what, Mummy? The girl found a big bad wolf hiding in the bed, pretending to be the grandmother. And you know what? The wolf had already eaten the grandmother…”

  Gaclgua, who had seemed not to be following the conversation, now shouted a question.

  “Do ogres ride motorcycles?”

  “Why?” asked Nyawlra.

  “A stranger on a motorbike is riding this way…”

  7

  The rider returned after seven days and, to some, he sounded like a madman. There was continuity to his narrative, all right, but he kept rolling his eyes as if to show that even he found it difficult to believe the story he was telling his debriefers.

  Those privy to his report tell of his amazing claim that for seven days, he, the rider, one hand holding a bullhorn, the other steering the motorcycle, had done nothing but follow the queue; he did not even get off his vehicle but actually slept on it while still in motion, for, aware of his duty as a loyal police officer, he wanted to reach the end of the queue as soon as possible so as to give a report both prompt and thorough. But whenever he thought that he was nearing the end, he found that more job seekers had already gotten in line.

  During the first two days he had raced along the queue, only to discover on the third day that others were feeding it. He was uncertain as to which direction to go, not wanting to be like the hyena who once tried to travel more than one path at the same time, with tragic results. So he decided to stick to the main branch, or what he assumed was the main queue.

  At the beginning of his mission he had proudly announced the message to the people standing in line: Chairman Titus Tajirika is not in the office today. Please go home and come back tomorrow. But he soon found it cumbersome, speaking as he was on his motorcycle, a bullhorn in one hand. He would start proclaiming it to some, only to pass them by without completing his remarks. As a result, people were getting bits of information. So the rider figured that it would make more sense to shorten the sentence. First he cut out all unnecessary words like Chairman Titus Tajirika. Next, all the explanations about the boss not being in the office. Then he stopped telling people that they’d better go home and abbreviated it to Come back tomorrow, which he subsequently shortened to one word: Tomorrow. But even so, some people heard only syllables, some catching to, others mor, and yet others row.

  He became the subject of heated discussions among the queuers, who concluded that he must be possessed of the daemons that usually force politicians to spew out words for the sake of hearing themselves talk, whether or not they made any sense. They nicknamed him Motorized Madman, soon the name of choice for all traffic police officers.

  After roaming for seven days through towns near and around Eldares in pursuit of the end of the queue, he eventually found himself back in Santamaria. The tail of the queue had somehow joined the head to make a huge circle, and that, in the view of analysts, was the real problem that faced the rider. He had been moving in circles, and only when he spotted the Mars Cafe did he realize that he had traveled back to the beginning. How many times he had circled the city without his knowing will forever remain a mystery, even to him. All the rider could now say was that had it not been for the Mars Cafe, he might have spent the rest of his life searching for the end of the queue.

  Actually, this rider could talk only about the one queue that he had attended to; countless others appeared in every corner of Eldares. For a time it was as if everybody in Eldares was possessed. If a person happened to be window shopping, he would suddenly find that a queue had formed behind him. People did not even bother to ask what the queue was about; they simply assumed that there was good reason for it and wanted their share of whatever was being dispersed. Rumors that Marching to Heaven was already underway and that the financial missionaries from the Global Bank were doling out cash served only to intensify the fever. Sometimes a person would start a queue without being aware that he had done so, go home, and on the following day join the same queue, still ignorant that he had been its innocent first cause. Lines simply assumed lives of their own.

  At the conclusion of his oral report, the police officer fell asleep from utter exhaustion at police headquarters. For seven days and nights, he tossed and turned in his own filth, as one gripped by a nightmare. When, after seven days of sleep, he awoke screaming for his Yamaha to continue with the unfinished task of following all the queues to their origins, he was committed to a psychiatric ward for observation and later given indefinite leave without pay to recuperate.

  When his report reached the ears of the Ruler, he immediately summoned his ministers to an emergency cabinet meeting to figure out ways of preventing the daemonic queues from spreading to the other cities.

  8

  It became obvious, at the emergency session at the State House, that what most concerned the Ruler was the crazed rider’s observation that the queues seemed to have no beginning and no end. That sounds dangerous, doesn’t it? he asked the cabinet, without a trace of humor.

  Sikiokuu, the first to respond, said that since it was illegal, in all Aburlria, for more than five people to gather without a police permit, the unlicensed queuing was a clear violation of the law and suggested to the whole world not only that unemployment had reached a crisis but that there were shortages of goods in shops. This was terrible for the image of the country. But why was all this happening now, during the Global Bank mission? To frighten investors? Were there some in their midst who were subtly inciting citizens to queue as the first step of a revolt of the masses? Perhaps those who had arranged the Bank’s visit had something else up their political sleeves. Ban the queues. Yes, let them go the way of the Movement for the Voice of the People, Sikiokuu added, tugging at his earlobes for emphasis.

  Machokali, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, who spoke next, started by pointing at his eyes to show that he was watchful at all times and, most important, that he was not about to let Sikiokuu get away with damaging innuendos.

  “What does Minister Sikiokuu mean by saying that queues should go the way of the Movement for the Voice of the People?” he asked. “Does he not know that the movement to which he refers dwells underground like a mole, its members frightened of the Buling light? Is the minister intimating that these queues should be forced underground, where they will be harder to detect and ferret out? I am sure that the minister will soon clarify his intentions.”

  As long as the Global Bank mission was in the country, Machokali advised, the Buler should stay the course, carefully weighing his words and actions, and not allow himself to be provoked into recklessness by people with their own agendas.

  “Your Mighty Excellency, we should not do anything that can be used against us by those in the world who infer from the fact that we have only one Party and one Buler that fear rules Aburlria. If anything, the queues should help to undermine their unfounded allegations. The sight of people lining up for whatever the reason, wherever, whenever, and however, should create a very good i
mpression of the State in the Global Bank missionaries.”

  “Is the minister implying that our country takes orders from the Global Bank?” Sikiokuu interjected, stung by Machokali’s words.

  With that one question, Sikiokuu had slipped. He did not realize this immediately, but the others had seen the Buler frown and had grown tense.

  “Mr. Sikiokuu, are you saying that I take orders from the Global Bank?”

  “No, no, Your Mighty Excellency, I was not talking about you,” Sikiokuu tried to explain. “I was talking about the Country.”

  He had slipped again.

  “There is a difference between me and the Country?” the Ruler growled. “Have we not visited this already?”

  Machokali seized the moment to further isolate his rival. He was on his feet, chanting: His Mighty Ruler is the Mighty Country and the Mighty Country is the Ruler. Led by Big Ben Mambo, the other ministers also stood up and chanted, The Ruler and the Country are one and the same, and soon it became a call-and-response ceremony led by Machokali.

  The moment that he saw Machokali jump up with unalloyed alacrity, Sikiokuu had realized that he had slipped again, very badly, and for a second or so he did not know whether or not to stand up and join the others. How could he sing a song initiated by his enemy, moreover a song meant to isolate and humiliate him? So instead of joining the chorus he fell to his knees and bowed his head so low that his ears touched the ground, as if to demonstrate that action spoke louder than words.

  The jubilant Machokali intensified his orchestration, and the calling and responding would have gone on for quite a while had the Ruler not gestured to them to sit down and let him hear what the man on his knees had to say for himself.

  “There is nobody in the whole world,” Sikiokuu pleaded tremulously, “who does not know that the Ruler is this Country and this Country is His Mighty Country. It is also well known that many other leaders are jealous of that irrevocable identity. All I was saying is that unlicensed queuing should be banned so as not to be exploited by your enemies within and without to question that identity. Otherwise, I am a firm believer that You are the Country and the Country is You, and I propose that this fact be stated in the constitution. I swear before Your Mighty Presence that I shall myself make a motion in Parliament to amend the constitution accordingly.”