Wizard of the Crow

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong

  The voice of the Wizard of the Crow now seemed to issue from inside the mirror:

  “Vomit the words, the good and the bad!”

  “If…” Tajirika said, and paused.

  “Now,” urged the Wizard of the Crow.

  “My…” Tajirika added, and then got stuck.

  “More.”

  “Skin…”

  “Keep going.”

  “Were not…”

  “Good, good…”

  “Black.”

  Tajirika paused as if to take breath before climbing another mountain. From inside the mirror came the same commanding voice.

  “Complete the thought. The good and the bad. Complete the thought!”

  “If only…”

  “Yes!”

  “My skin…”

  “Don’t stop now!”

  “Were… white… like a… white man’s… skin…” Tajirika said, enunciating each word like one learning how to read.

  “There! You have voiced the treacherous thought!” the Wizard of the Crow said in congratulation, removing the mirror from the window.

  Tajirika no longer lusted for the mirror. His face shone as it had not done for weeks. He looked at the Wizard of the Crow with awe.

  “Now I want you to voice your thoughts without the aid of the mirror,” the Wizard of the Crow told him.

  “If… my… skin… were… not… black! Oh, if only my skin were white!” Tajirika said in the triumphant tone of a child who for the first time has read a complete sentence without stumbling. A burden had been lifted from his heart, and as he finished voicing his secret desire he turned his head away from the window and, with a sigh of relief, glanced at his wife, his face beaming with an all-embracing gratitude, like that of a person who has just confessed his sins and given himself over to Jesus as his personal savior.

  “You have heard for yourselves,” the Wizard of the Crow now said to Vinjinia. “Daemons of whiteness took possession of your husband the night he brought home these three bags of money. You remember how you told me that it was after he counted the money that he rested his legs on the table and closed his eyes? That was the evil hour! As he looked into the future, he suddenly realized that at the rate the money was coming in he would end up being the richest man in Africa, and the only thing missing to distinguish him from all the other black rich was white skin. He saw his skin as standing between him and the heaven of his desire. When he scratched his face, daemons within were urging him to break ranks with blackness and enter into union with whiteness. In short, he suffers from a severe case of white-ache.”

  Tajirika kept nodding to signal agreement with every word of the diagnosis. He was happy and relieved, because even before he came into that kind of money he had always borne the burden of self-hatred but had managed to suppress it. Now, thanks to the affliction and to Vinjinia, who’d brought him here, this sorcerer had managed to make him own up to it. Before today he had not had anybody with whom to share his secret, but now he felt as if those present were witnesses to his coming pact with his white destiny.

  But soon he fell into a deep depression. People did not become white or black; they were born so. His was an unattainable desire, and to yearn for the unattainable to the point of paralysis was indeed an illness that might plague him for the rest of his life.

  “And what is the cure for white-ache?” Vinjinia asked, happy that her husband had given voice to his desires, and fearful that the malady might return.

  Tajirika awaited the answer, and, thinking the Wizard of the Crow too slow in his response, added to his wife’s plea: “What is the cure?” he asked.

  “Tajirika, you know about smallpox.”

  “A terrible disease, that one, a scourge. Almost wiped out black people at the end of the nineteenth century. In some ways it was worse than the current virus of death. Quite infectious, and there was no way of avoiding it. Except through good luck. Thank God it is no more.”

  “How was it conquered?”

  “Through mass vaccination.”

  “Exactly. Inoculating people with the germs of smallpox. The same with tuberculosis. Tajirika, have you ever fried bacon?”

  “Eggs, sausages, and bacon are my morning favorites for breaking my nightly fasts,” Tajirika said. “But of course it is my wife who cooks them.”

  “What oil does she use for frying the bacon?”

  “Mr. Wizard of the Crow, don’t make me laugh. Have you not heard the saying that a pig is fried with its own fat? But tell me, what has smallpox, tuberculosis, and pig’s meat got to do with white-ache?”

  “Use the disease against itself! Become white!”

  Tajirika could not believe his ears. Here he was, depressed by the realization that he could never become white no matter how wealthy he became, and here was this sorcerer, saying that there was actually a way to whiteness. That the impossible could be made possible!

  “How?” he asked doubtfully after recovering from the pleasant shock. “I hope you are not thinking of a skin transplant?”

  “Oh, no, it’s far simpler and less painful than that,” said the Wizard of the Crow. “Becoming white is actually quite simple, but it calls for work, hard work.”

  “Say no more-the shoe fits,” Tajirika said now, abandoning himself to his joy at this unexpected turn in the tide of his earthly fortune, for he would kill two birds with one stone: cure his white-ache and become white. “Mr. Wizard of the Crow, tell me how to become white. I am ready to do what is needed. And when the deed is done, whatever you may want from me is yours to command.”

  “First, help me solve a riddle!” said the Wizard of the Crow.

  “Go ahead!”

  “What is the first thing that tells who a person is?”

  “The color of one’s skin.”

  “No, Tajirika. Let’s go back to history. When African people were taken as slaves across the Atlantic Ocean in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, what was the very first thing that the whites took away from the New World Africans?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tajirika, wondering what slavery in centuries past had to do with what they had been talking about.

  “Okay. Let me ask you another question. When children are born, what do their fathers and mothers give them to distinguish them from others?”

  “Names?”

  “Exactly. So what did the white slavers do to their black slaves? Took away their original names to make them over into what they wanted them to be. Are you with me?”

  “Yes, Mr. Wizard of the Crow.”

  “So to become white you must first give up your name. And, unlike those Africans who were forced to do so, you must give yours up willingly. Become a willing slave.”

  “That is not such a big deal. Tajirika is out!” Tajirika wondered why the Wizard of the Crow had said that becoming white required work. And then?”

  “Slaves were forced to take on the names of their owners. But you are lucky, Tajirika, because you have the freedom to choose from among thousands of European names.”

  “That is even easier. I have already got one. Titus,” he said proudly, as if he had been on the right path all along.

  “Titus? Mmm, let’s see. Do you know where it comes from? I mean, to whom it points?”

  “No.”

  “What’s come over you, Titus, forgetting your religion?” Vinjinia interjected suddenly. “Don’t you know that Titus was a convert and helper of St. Paul? Paul even wrote him a letter, Epistle to Titus?”

  “Oh, is that where the name comes from?” Tajirika said.

  “There was also another Titus,” said the Wizard of the Crow. “Titus Flavius Vespasianus. Roman emperor. In the construction business, like you. Completed the Colosseum in Rome. Emperor and saint. Not bad, a name that carries both.”

  “But this emperor and this saint, were they white?” Tajirika asked in a tone tinged with doubt.

  “Yes,” said the Wizard of the Crow.

  “So Titus is white
!” said Tajirika, now happy again.

  “But it has been tarnished by its years of contact with your African Tajirika,” said Vinjinia.

  “Yes. Go for a name that you think best points to the whiteness of your dreams. Freedom of choice. Choose what you want to be. Do you follow me?”

  “Yes, Mr. Wizard of the Crow.”

  “Now, Titus,” the Wizard of the Crow suddenly called out in a commanding tone, “what is your name? What is your new name in full?”

  “Clement Clarence Whitehead,” said Tajirika, as proud as a peacock. “What next?” he asked, rubbing his hands together.

  “A slave first loses his name, then his language. So, Mr. Clement Clarence Whitehead, you now know what to do next. Your language. Give it up.”

  Gone!

  “Then start speaking English like a white man.”

  “That I have already started doing,” Tajirika assured the Wizard of the Crow, and he started drawling out a couple of sentences: Hi! Give mefi! I am Clement Clarence Whitehead…

  “No, no, not American, Mr. Whitehead. The so-called American English has been completely contaminated by Black English, or what they now call Ebonics.”

  “Blame it on the cheap American TV we watch. They are ruining our tongue. I don’t want Ebonics-I want the real thing. I swear that from now on I will keep on trying to perfect my English tongue. It is not easy and it will need much practice.”

  “You have spoken well,” said the Wizard of the Crow. “Nothing comes from nothing.”

  “I have what it takes. Next?” Tajirika asked a trifle impatiently, ready to leap over the remaining steps to whiteness.

  “I want you to know, Mr. Whitehead, that we are now coming to the most difficult part of the matter, so I want you to listen very carefully. What does the Holy Bible say about matrimony, holy matrimony?”

  “That women should obey their husbands.”

  “But that is after they are married. What about the marriage itself? What does the Bible say?”

  “Mr. Wizard of the Crow, aren’t you digressing a bit?” Tajirika said, treading lightly so as not to offend his benefactor.

  “You see, when two people are joined in holy matrimony, they become one flesh, or something like that.”

  “What has that got to do with becoming white?”

  “Logic, Mr. Clement Clarence Whitehead, simple white logic. A certain African sage says that whites are driven by logic and blacks by emotion. Think with white logic, not with black emotion. If it is true that when a man and woman are joined in holy matrimony they become one flesh, then the quickest and surest way to change the color of one’s skin is to marry into the color one wants to become. That means, Mr. Whitehead, that you must marry white so as to take on the whiteness of your spouse.”

  “I hear you, and what I have heard so far is good,” Tajirika said.

  “But how do I know that my wife will not take on my blackness, leaving me in the same black hole? Or does she become black and I white?”

  “Why should you care? This is all about your becoming white. Look for a white woman who wants to be black, one of those forever frying herself under the sun, and you simply exchange colors. A kind of barter trading in color, don’t you think?”

  Up to that point Vinjinia had not seen anything wrong with the steps the Wizard of the Crow proposed to cure Tajirika’s white-ache. But when now the talk turned to possibilities of Tajirika’s marrying white, she became wary: visions of a broken marriage, a broken home, seized her, and she could no longer hold her tongue.

  “What are you saying, Mr. Wizard of the Crow? You are telling my husband to divorce me and marry a white woman? And you, Titus, how dare you even think of it? You would divorce me just like that after all the years we have been together? And with God blessing us with children?” She said all of this hastily, for she did not know to whom to direct her pain.

  “Keep out of this and let the Wizard of the Crow finish what he was saying,” Tajirika shouted at Vinjinia with piercing, angry eyes. I have always said that black women have no manners, he said to himself as he turned back to the Wizard of the Crow, ignoring his wife completely. “After I marry white, what next?”

  Nyawlra could hardly believe what she was hearing or what she saw unfolding before her. She felt like laughing but the laughter stuck in her throat as she witnessed another crisis erupt.

  Vinjinia had started trembling and shaking like one possessed. At first Nyawlra thought it was from anger. Then she saw her fall off the chair onto the floor, where she started rolling. Tajirika rushed to Vinjinia and tried to lift her up but failed. Nyawlra was about to help him but then thought better of it. Let them settle their differences on their own. But Tajirika did not seem to be in a mood to settle anything, resentful as he was that the wizard’s rituals of magic transplant were now at the mercy of female daemons. After struggling to get his wife back on her feet, Tajirika managed to make Vinjinia sit up on the floor. Her eyes were wild and it seemed as if she was not even aware who Tajirika was. In a world to herself, she now took out a mirror from her bag and looked at her face. And then, to Nyawlra’s utter amazement, Vinjinia started coughing and muttering, “If! If only!”

  To Tajirika, this seemed like the proverbial nail in the coffin of his dreams.

  “Oh, Vinjinia, why have you done this to me?” he groaned, as he now turned helplessly to the Wizard of the Crow.

  “She has caught your illness,” the Wizard of the Crow told Tajirika. “The disease is contagious, you know.”

  He asked that Vinjinia and Tajirika trade places so that Vinjinia now faced the window directly, Tajirika silently observing.

  The Wizard of the Crow took her through the same paces as Tajirika earlier on.

  “Even wisdom locked in the heart never won a lawsuit,” the Wizard of the Crow now said, trying to massage her soul. “So vomit every word and let your thoughts come out without fear.”

  Vinjinia did not need much coaxing.

  “If my skin were not black would my husband have thought of leaving me? If only I could become white!” she said.

  As soon as she uttered the last word, Vinjinia felt a big load off her mind; she, too, experienced the joy and relief of one who had just confessed her sins. She went through the steps already taken by her husband, even changing her name to Virgin Beatrice Whitehead, finally turning to her husband as if to say: I am a black sinner like you, and together let us seek salvation in whiteness.

  “What shall we do to become white?” husband and wife asked in unison.

  “Whites come in various tribes: Germans, French, Russian, Italians, Portuguese, Spanish, and even Japanese…”

  “We want to be English,” they said, interrupting him.

  “The English? Hakuna matata,” the Wizard of the Crow assured them. “But one small hurdle and we shall be on our way. The English, just like other whites, are of different varieties. And today there are also those black Britons who come from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Hong Kong, the Caribbean, and even from Africa…”

  “We want a pure English skin,” they said promptly.

  As Nyawlra sat in constant amazement at the drama unfolding before her eyes, the Wizard of the Crow told husband and wife to close their eyes and picture the kind of English person each wanted to become. He would capture these images in his mirror, the better to realize their dreams. Both shut their eyes.

  He began with Tajirika, who quickly said that he could see an image in his head. Not very clearly, though, he added.

  “Hold it there and don’t let it go,” the Wizard of the Crow told Tajirika. “There, I see him… yes, the man is as white as can be, in rags for trousers, and a leather jacket with brass buttons. His hair is blue and green and yellow, and is porcupine-style… a punk, no doubt about it, a punk…”

  Tajirika interrupted him in horror: “No, not that kind of Englishman for me. I told you, I want to be a real Englishman.”

  The Wizard of the Crow told him to open his eyes to let the
image of the punk vanish.

  Now it was Vinjinia’s turn. At first she was excited when the Wizard of the Crow spoke of a woman dressed in fur walking about in the streets of London. Oxford Street. Dean Street. A side street. But the woman was a Soho Square prostitute. Vinjinia screamed in protest, being the Christian that she was. The Wizard of the Crow then told her to open her eyes to allow the undesirable image to go.

  A heated quarrel erupted between husband and wife, each berating the other for their respective choice of image: punk and whore.

  The quarrel would have gotten worse, but the Wizard of the Crow intervened, warning them that if they continued fighting like that they would end up a cantankerous English couple. And it would certainly interfere with the emergence of other images that might present far more desirable choices.

  The Wizard of the Crow ordered them to close their eyes again. They should try their best to imagine a more harmonious joint image of a ripe old age together.

  “The colonial type, like the ones who used to lord over us here in Aburlria,” Tajirika clarified.

  “They looked pure white, with their special clubs and attack dogs,” added Vinjinia.

  “Lords. Aristocrats. Blue blood,” they agreed.

  They shut their eyes and soon were joyful when they heard the wizard say that he had managed to capture their joint image in the mirror.

  “It is a video, a moving picture,” the Wizard of the Crow said excitedly. “I see a silver-haired couple, Sir Clement Clarence Whitehead and Lady Virgin Beatrice Whitehead, holding hands, crossing a road near palace gardens in London, talking about their life in the old colonial days. A pair of authentic colonial aristocracy. They talk of how he was nearly made the governor of Aburfria…”

  “Governor, did you say?” Tajirika and Vinjinia asked in unison.

  “Sshh! Now you have made the image vanish,” the Wizard of the Crow admonished them.

  “Not another word from us,” Vinjinia said.

  “Please search it out. Get that image back, especially the bit about being the governor of Aburlria,” Tajirika pleaded.