Wizard of the Crow

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong

  1

  When official word about the thunder, smog, and carnage was not forthcoming, people started saying that maybe the Ruler was dead and the military had taken over the government, the truth of this seemingly borne out by the only visible face of the government: armored vehicles now and then patrolling the streets of the capital and major cities. A six-p.m. curfew had been put in place, but it was not strictly enforced and nobody was arrested for ignoring it.

  But why was the military not being forthright about assuming power? Some argued for a failed coup led by noncommissioned officers displeased with their wages like everybody else. Though the coup had failed, a bullet had struck the Ruler, who was now in hiding, giving his wound time to heal. Others said, No, he is merely playing mind games. Have you forgotten that other time, not so long ago, when he let out rumors that he was suffering from throat cancer, only to emerge from his seclusion to heap scorn on all who had prematurely celebrated his death? Did he not also do this and that? Every story was dissected, reinvented, reinterpreted, many times over, because people had no hard facts on which to base a true account of what had happened at the State House. Some claimed, without disclosing their sources, that after the first or second explosion, seven or eight white men were seen running from the State House, a black man giving chase, followed at some distance by black youth, and when the white men reached the American embassy, the gates were opened and the white men entered but the black man was left outside, wagging his finger at them, accusing them of having bombed the State House. The black man was shot and the youth who had been following fled the scene. The black man was never seen again, and neither, for that matter, were the seven or eight whites.

  The more the unbearable stench of the foul smog suggested environmental disaster, the more frustration, anger, and fear grew. In every village in every region all over the country, people began to demand that the government tell the truth; there was even talk of resuming demonstrations. Religious leaders called for a day of prayer, and workers for a general strike. Multiparty democracy now became the new clarion call. Soon word was out: the Ruler would not come out in the open because he was scared of Mr. Multiparty.

  The Global Bank released a statement that the current absence of leadership and the recent mysterious happenings were putting serious doubts in the minds of investors about the political stability in the country.

  It was Big Ben Mambo, Minister of Information, who broke the news: the Ruler had set a date when he would address Parliament and the nation, to be carried live on radio and television. Newspapers were told to plan for special editions, because the Ruler would be announcing a special gift from himself to the nation.

  Big Ben Mambo’s statement served only to stir the pot: what about the Ruler’s rumored illness? Since coming back from America, the Ruler had not appeared in public: why now? What had prompted this unlikely promise of generosity? And the unthinkable: was he about to abdicate?

  2

  Parliament was packed. The cabinet, members of Parliament, and even some foreign diplomats had arrived hours before the appointed time. The media, in full fever, hoped to glean anything that might make sense of the great Aburlrian mystery: the seven cracks of thunder and the unimaginable smog. American television, which had refused to grant the Ruler an interview when he was in America, now begged for an exclusive with the Ruler. Anyone with a radio or television was glued to his set, crowded by those without.

  The speaker of the house struck the table with a mallet. The eagerly awaited session was about to begin.

  “True, Haki ya Mungu, I kept wondering how he would come to the Parliament,” said A.G. “What carriage was he going to ride in? How would he enter the building, for I had not heard anything about the doors being enlarged. Would he be pushed through the entrance the way he was once squeezed into the jumbo jet? What would he talk about? Would he mention the fate of the Wizard of the Crow? And what would he say about the rumors of his pregnancy? Questions upon questions…”

  Some workers had taken the afternoon off, a few unofficially, for nobody wanted the news to pass him by. A.G. knew of a tea shop, Wvra-no-nda, with a television, and he got there early only to find that others had gotten there before him, but he positioned himself where he could see the screen clearly. All crowded around the television set the way bees swarm around a hive, buzzing. When they saw the Ruler appear, they fell silent.

  3

  The Ruler entered Parliament and walked down the aisle on a red carpet. To his right was a woman dressed magnificently, wearing a diamond tiara. Was Rachael, the Ruler’s wife, being trotted out for a public viewing?

  A.G. could hardly believe his eyes. This Excellency on television was hardly the Excellency he had last seen at the State House. This Excellency was tall and thin. He was dressed in a dark suit, with a boutonniere, a white handkerchief in the breast pocket. In his left hand he held a club and a fly whisk. The usual patches of leopard skins were there. His head was the size of a fist, but his eyes bulged, resembling the late Machokali’s.

  A.G. did not hear himself as he shouted, No, no, that is not him! over and over again, the others looking at him as at a crazy person, some of them barking impatiently, Shut up! How do you know? without allowing him to explain, to which he responded, What happened to his inflated body? And at this the people laughed, but when he tried to say, Look at his tongue, look at that tongue, they silenced him with poisonous looks. Yet some also noticed that when the Ruler was not talking he would sometimes flick his tongue in and out involuntarily, but most saw nothing strange in this, attributing it to his not having used his tongue in public for a long time. When A.G. now further insisted that the tongue was forked, people around started saying: The smog-see what it has done to this man’s head! And maybe he is not the only oner

  The Ruler started by saying that he wanted to take the opportunity to introduce the person seated next to him, because when he gave her the job she now holds he had been in seclusion and so in no position to anoint her in person before the eyes of the nation, but there was a time for everything and he was now glad to tell the nation that this was Dr. Yunique Immaculate McKenzie, Official National Hostess.

  By the time the audience recovered from the shock, for in truth since her appointment she had never been seen in public, the Ruler was already in full speaking gear. He asked people, wherever they were, in Parliament, their homes, their workplaces, or on the roads, to stand up and observe one minute of silence in memory of those who died recently on the grounds of the Parliament buildings and the law courts. He said that the deaths were the result of the activities of some bad elements in the country who had hoped to bring about confusion as a first stage in a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government. I have only one question for them: Don’t they know that we defeated communism in the twentieth century? Communism is now as dead as a dodo. The so-called Movement for the Voice of the People had urged and agitated the mob to queue not because the movement genuinely cared for the real needs and grievances of the people but because it wanted to use the populace as instruments of its own evil designs. It had even hired sorcerers to confuse the minds of the innocents with very bad magic. The movement was exploiting genuine grievances, and he would be the first to admit that the country faced a few economic problems. But the whole world faced similar problems because these had to do with global economic forces and a global economic recession due to the oil crisis brought about by the selfish policies of OPEC.

  Let me now turn to recent matters, the thunder and smog about which we are all concerned, he told an attentive Parliament and a curious nation.

  It was the same self-styled Movement for the Voice of the People, in collusion with fundamentalists from the Middle East, who dropped bombs on the State House, but luckily the Ruler, aided by his experts, had managed to detonate them before calamitous harm could be done to the nation. When the evildoers realized this, they fired tear gas in the air to frighten the population and ignite a revolution. The point of the queu
es and agitation and the timing of the bombing was clear, but he would not say more about this for security reasons, because the matter was still under investigation.

  He paused, in fact he had no choice, because members of Parliament were giving him a standing ovation with no end in sight because no MP or minister wanted to be the first to stop.

  To the bemusement and then the discomfort of the foreign diplomats who sat through it all, the Ruler let the ovation go on for one hour and seven minutes before gesturing to the MPs to sit down, for he had a lot more to share with them. As for these misguided followers of the Movement for the Voice of the People, he continued, yes, those who had killed innocent citizens whose only crime was to celebrate their Ruler’s birthday, he had only one message for them: his security forces would hunt them down and bring them to justice.

  The Ruler allowed that there were a few wrongs he wanted to set right so that the Movement for the Voice of the People would never again find grounds for deceiving the nation. He told Parliament that Marching to Heaven had been conceived by Machokali, a scheme so absurd as to boggle the mind. There was devilish cunning in it, and he, the Ruler, had gone along with the scheme only for the purpose of finding out the man’s real intentions. Well, unfortunately Machokali was not around to explain what he had in mind, so we shall never know what he was up to, and there is no point in speculation. The Ruler now lowered his voice and said that he was sad to say that the government had not yet been able to find out how or where the late Markus had met his fate, or even the nature of that fate. However, the private detectives he had hired from abroad had reported to him that this was a case of SID, self-induced disappearance. Let the scheme, like its author, go the way of SID.

  Next, the Ruler said, he would respond to rumors that he was pregnant.

  4

  The Ruler thanked all those who had come to the grounds of Parliament and the law courts to celebrate his birthday, renaming it the Day of National Self-Renewal because according to an age-old African custom, cycles of birth and rebirth are celebrated through well-known rites of passage. He was also aware that there were those who were talking about his birthday, the Day of National Self-Renewal, as the day he would give birth.

  “Well, they were not mistaken. The fact is, my people, I was pregnant. Yes, I was pregnant,” the Ruler emphasized to an astonished Parliament. “Every Aburlrian child knows that I am the Country and the Country is Me, which means that this Excellency, this Country, and this Nation are like the mystery of Three in One and One in Three creating the Perfect One.” That was why when the Ruler spoke, the nation spoke, and when he sneezed, the nation sneezed. Because the country and the head are one and the same, it follows that his birthday is the nation’s birthday and his day of giving birth is as that of the nation giving birth. “You want to see the pictures of the baby?”

  On cue, Kaniürü, using crutches, hobbled into Parliament followed by four people carrying a huge board wrapped up in a white cloth and set it up in front of the Ruler.

  And now, said the Ruler, I ask the official hostess to step forward and reveal what I have brought into the world. Dr. Yunique Immaculate McKenzie walked to the board and lifted the cloth, revealing a drawing of the Ruler holding a baby vaguely resembling Aburlria in his fatherly arms. At the foot was the inscription in large Aburlrian national colors: BABY D. Behold Baby Democracy, he called.

  The Ruler then grandly proclaimed the advent of multiparty democracy in Aburlria, to everyone’s shock. But he added that the new Aburlrian system was only making explicit what was latent in all modern democracies, in which parties were basically variations of each other. He would be the nominal head of all political parties. This meant that in the next general elections, all the parties would, of course, be choosing him as their candidate for the presidency. His victory would be a victory of all the parties, and more important for Aburlrians, a victory for wise and tested leadership.

  As a sign of the new times, he decreed that the Ruler’s Party would now simply be called the Ruling Party.

  “And in case our dear friends are worried that we might be going too far in our liberal measures,” he said, glancing in the direction of the row of Western ambassadors, he wanted to stress that whichever party from among the hundreds under his leadership came to power, Aburlria would remain a friend and trustworthy partner of the Western alliance. I worked hand in hand with you in fighting world communism, he said, and now we shall stand shoulder to shoulder in building the new global system of guided freedom and openness. That was why his new system would do away with secret ballots and introduce the queuing by which one openly stood behind the candidate of one’s choice. Direct democracy. Open democracy. Baby D is born.

  For the first time all the envoys gave him warm applause; this spurred him on.

  “If at this time there is anybody from the public gallery who would like to ask a question or make some comments, they can go ahead.”

  This had never happened in the brief history of Aburirian Parliament: the gallery being allowed to intervene. Most people took it for a rhetorical gesture, except for one wizened old man who stood up and spoke in a thin, tremulous voice but one loud enough to be heard by all.

  “Thank you, My Lord of Infinite Mercy and Kindness. I say thank you because once a long time ago I attempted to speak to you and the minister in charge of the ceremonies ordered the police to deny me the microphone and remove me from the platform. I went away screaming for you to hear me. You heard my cry. I know that is why you removed him. And that is why I thank you, Mkundu Wangu Mpya Rahisi, for hearing my cry then and now giving me a chance to redeem my name so dishonored by the late Machokali. I say with you, Down with state secrets.”

  The phrase My New Cheap Arsehole had made A.G. suddenly recall the same old man trying to speak at the ceremony where the plan for Marching to Heaven was first revealed publicly. How was the leader going to handle this? But at that point the official hostess, Dr. McKenzie, whispered in the ear of the Ruler, who now asked the security to take the old man to the State House, where both would later meet for an exchange of views in endless leisure. The Ruler was a genius of double talk, A.G. said to himself, because he knew exactly what the security had been told to do with the old man. Every opinion counts, said the Ruler. The reign of Baby D has begun.

  Now, in response to the call on him to divulge state secrets, he had a few to share with the nation. He was giving amnesty to all political inmates, including those under house arrest. He was doing this because some had already confessed and repented their sins. Sikiokuu, for instance, had confessed in writing that, wearing robes of a religion of doubt, he had contacted fanatical followers of the Frenchman by the name of Descartes with evil intentions against the government. The only ones that the Ruler would never set free were those convicted of crimes of thought, mostly followers of the Movement for the Voice of the People. They were unrepentant. He challenged Parliament to come up with a comprehensive anticorruption bill, as in his view there was no corruption worse than that of the mind.

  The MPs were about to give him another standing ovation but he waved them off, for he was about to reveal corruption in high places. The new Aburiria could not afford to sweep its own dirt under the rug. It must show itself and the world that it was ready to bring to the light of day all the bones in its closet. He would also address economic chaos and sabotage. A helicopter had crashed in the hills near Eldares after a relentless chase by “our well-trained airborne police.” The helicopter was full of counterfeit money. The pilot had not yet been found. He could not say much more about the matter, as it was still under investigation.

  The police were trying to ascertain the connection between the helicopter, counterfeit money, and a recent spate of bank robberies themselves strange because the robbers seemed less interested in paper money than in papers about money. They often broke safes where bank papers were kept or into computers, and left safes containing money and jewelry untouched. Well, two of these odd robbers were c
aught in a Mwathirika bank, putting counterfeit money into the safe. From these captives the police learned that the mastermind had intended economic chaos through the unregulated supply of money and bribes to abort the birth of Baby D. The Ruler wanted to say loud and clear that in his government, and in his country, there was no hiding place for the corrupt, be they the top officers of his security forces or the highest-ranked ministers in his government. Bring out the saboteurs, he bellowed.

  Two men, shackled, each with a sackful of freshly minted notes, were dragged into the chamber.

  A.G. felt as if his eyes would pop out. Kahiga and Njoya were being put on display.

  “These are the sinners,” the Ruler hissed, pointing at them with his club as they trembled, their chains clanking. “And, even worse, these were two of my top security men! They were recently dismissed from their jobs for letting themselves be guided by witchcraft in their work. And what do they do next? Turn to bank robbery. Economic sabotage. Let me say this to all the corrupt in the land: come forward, confess, and repent before it is too late. These two will now be put under lock and key, and, believe me, by the time I finish with them, they will have told me all I need to know about those with ill intent against the newborn Baby D.”

  5

  A.G., who had not waited for the end of the ceremony, caught up with the rest of the Ruler’s address in the newspapers the following day. New ministers to nurture Baby D were announced. Two women were appointed to Parliament and made Assistant Ministers for Women’s and Children’s Affairs. The Ruler promised to rely on his two pillars of wisdom in his furtherance of the needs of Baby D. One of them was Tajirika, erstwhile governor of the Central Bank, who was now back as a member of Parliament and Minister of Finance. The other was John Kaniürü, the ex-youth leader, now the