Wizard of the Crow

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong

  “We are just trying to learn our history,” Kamltl heard a voice say, and he quickly turned around to face six men and four women. One of them was speaking to him as the others listened. “We try to locate our origins and know all the places to which black people have been scattered, from India, where dwell the Siddis, to Fiji in the Pacific, where the people claim Tanganyika as the site of their origins.”

  “And what about this flickering arrow?”

  “Which arrow?” the man asked, wondering what Kamltl was talking about.

  Kamltl looked back at the map and was surprised to find that the neon arrow was not there.

  “Oh, I was thinking about these red arrows,” Kamltl said, as if the matter was not of consequence.

  “Those arrows are pointing at the centers of ancient black civilization,” the man said. “They are the sources of black power.”

  They sat down in a semicircle. Again, Kamltl could not believe his eyes. Were these not the ones who used to work at the shrine? However, he now kept his thoughts to himself in case his mind was deceiving him again. The man said that they were still waiting for the chairperson, but even before the man had finished-was Kamrö dreaming or not?-Nyawlra entered.

  “The chairperson of the Central Committee of the Movement for the Voice of the People and commander in chief of Aburlrian People’s Resistance…”

  13

  The comrades took him on a tour, a journey imbued with magic more potent than that in Maritha’s story of suspended motion and suffused with wonders more amazing than those in the healing laughter of Maritha and Mariko. Here, in the new venture, the extraordinary, the magical, the wonderful, and even the strange came out of the ordinary and the familiar. His guides were those he had always known as workers in the shrine. But they now looked different. Nyawlra looked different. He was seeing the Eldares Mountains anew through other people’s eyes.

  They took him to their farms where they grew foods, millet, sorghum, yams, and arrowroots, as well as varieties of Aburlrian berries. Elsewhere Aburlrian soil was dying from being doused with pollutants, imported fertilizer. Here they were working with nature, not against it. The forest was a school to which they often came to hear what it had to tell them: You take, you give, for if you only take without giving back, you will leave the giver exhausted unto death. The gardens were nurseries for healing plants with seeds that could be planted on farms elsewhere; the healing of the land had to start somewhere.

  They took him to a cave on the other side of the falls, perhaps even one he had once shown Nyawlra. It had been turned into a living space. Three men and two women, guns slung on their shoulders, received them. We do a few drills here, Nyawlra explained, as if reading Kamltl’s mind. One of the men there took up the narrative.

  The so-called national army is a colonial institution. It was trained to hate its own people. The soldiers hate even themselves, shorn as they are of national pride. Those trained-to-kill nationalists fighting for freedom, how can they feel for the nation whose emergence they fought? They pass these attitudes to new recruits, the young. In time, these traditions of self-hate rooted in colonial times become the everyday. Our motto, a girl said, is simple: a New Army for a New Aburlria, not with the gun guiding politics but a politics of unity guiding the gun, to protect laws for social justice. These weapons are to protect our right to political struggle and not a substitute for political struggle.

  Another man took up the thread: You see, despite our insurgency so far, we have not been able to hold the agents of the regime accountable for murdering our people. Nyawlra added: There will surely come a day when we shall make it impossible for these armed ogres to go about their work of terror without suffering consequences. We shall then fight on our terrain, which is the people who must know and believe that we aim only to defend them and protect their right to a better life.

  They took him through underground passages to yet another cave, a large room full of books. The Ruler and now the Emperor hated books and ideas that came from within, they explained.

  “We believe that all knowledge is our inheritance, but we also have a duty to add to the common store. The right to receive, the duty to give.”

  Yes, words that he and Nyawlra had used, but now confronting him with all the power of their estrangement. Maybe knowledge was nothing more than the art of looking at what we already know with different eyes, and asking different questions. Knowledge is the discovery of the magic of the ordinary. Like words put into song. He was so absorbed in these thoughts about what was being said that he did not realize that he had been led to another spacious complex: a hospital, a replica of the shrine.

  “We transported everything to this place,” Nyawlra said, reading his mind again. “This is where we first brought you on the night they shot you. This is where you were operated on and the bullet extracted. We want you to take charge of the facilities and develop it as a nursery of health and clean living in accordance with the Seven Herbs of Grace. We are trying to imagine a different future for Aburlria after people united take power from these ogres… Dr. Patel who did the surgery is not here today but…”

  “What? Some Aburo-Asians?”

  “Yes, for it does not mean that all the Asians in Aburfria support the current program of ogres. Like black Aburlrians, some work with the forces of repression, while others toil on the side of the people. This was also true in our anticolonial struggles, but the regime tries to suppress this knowledge. Anything pointing to people being able to unite across race and ethnic lines is suppressed so that people may not realize the sources of their strength and power.”

  They took him to another room. He felt tears press against his eyelids. All his carvings of African deities were here.

  “We brought them here long before you came back from America. For us they stand for a dream. We were hoping that you can complete them and even add the gods of all the other black and related peoples.”

  A global conversation of the deities, he said to himself, remembering his thoughts as a bird in the sky.

  14

  They walked the streets of Eldares one afternoon as crowds pushed past them in all directions.

  “Every day, the same story,” commented Nyawlra. “People continue to pour into the capital for jobs they know are hard to come by.”

  “It reminds me of those days when I walked these streets expecting that my academic degrees would land me a job,” said Kamltl. “Then conditions looked really bad, and I could not see how much worse they could become. But they are so now, and I find myself with the same thought: can conditions become worse than this?”

  “What is to prevent them from worsening? When the farmer and the manufacturer grow and make things within, the neoimperial class imports en masse the cheapest from abroad and undermines the efforts within. We live in a corporate globe under imperial corporoni-alism, as proudly claimed by the new ogres.”

  The streets they passed told the same old story. The potholes had multiplied; there was garbage everywhere for want of collection.

  “The bright side of people in the streets is that we are hiding among them,” Kamltl observed.

  “Why don’t we go for coffee somewhere and enjoy this bright side while seated?” Nyawlra suggested. She was trying to find a place where she could address a tension that seemed to have grown between her and Kamltl. “Let’s try the Mars Cafe?”

  “Gautama, the owner, might he not recognize us?”

  “No, not Gautama, his mind is always on Mars or some other planet,” Nyawlra said trying a light touch. “Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto? Which of those do you think he would like to make a home?”

  “Actually it is not only Gautama,” said Kamltl, not picking up the lighthearted tone. “There is also Kaniürü.”

  “Don’t you remember the statement from his wife, Jane Kanyori, that he has disappeared? SID?”

  “And the new Emperor? He still has his business. Modern construction. Your old workplace?”

&
nbsp; It became a walk down memory lane, back to the bad and the good that had happened to them in Santamaria. Nyawlra winced as she recalled the day she narrowly escaped arrest with the inadvertent help from A.G., thanks to his belief that she was the other manifestation of the Wizard of the Crow. They sat down almost at the same roadside spot where they sat on the day they first met.

  “Whatever drew me to you on that day was blessed.”

  “And who would have thought that the place where you took the test would later become the starting point of the queuing mania? Or Tajirika’s imperial journey?”

  “Well, let’s say that even then he was an emperor of wood and construction. I wonder if they restored the original board with NO VACANCY…” Kamltl started.

  “For Jobs Come Tomorrow,” they said in unison, and they laughed together.

  Their laughter and this reunion with their beginnings considerably reduced the tensions that lingered between them.

  “Okay let’s go and get our coffee before it gets cold,” Kamltl said.

  “Did you make an order through an invisible phone?”

  They rejoined the human traffic, but after a few blocks they realized that they had gone past the place and so they turned and went back the way they came. Again they missed the place a second time and they went back, looking at each and every building carefully.

  “No, it is not that we are going past it,” said Nyawlra. “Look.”

  The building that used to house the Mars Cafe had been demolished. The site was fenced off with a wall of corrugated iron sheets. By the side was a big billboard: UNDER CONSTRUCTION: GLOBE INSURANCE CORPORATION: THE TALLEST BUILDING IN AFRICA; A REAL MARCHING TO HEAVEN.

  “What happened to Gautama, I wonder,” Kamltl said. “Did he go to one of the planets you just recited?”

  “Most likely he moved his business elsewhere in the city” said Nyawlra. “Let’s leave Gautama and his Mars Cafe alone and look for another place.”

  “What about Chou’s Chinese Gourmet?” Kamltl suggested.

  “It is a restaurant, not a coffeehouse,” Nyawlra said.

  At the Santamaria market they bought the day’s issue of the Eldares Times and went inside another coffeehouse and found a corner to themselves. They took separate sections of the newspaper and bent down to read as they waited for their order.

  Nyawlra’s eyes caught another reference to joint military exercises, and she commented, “I don’t know why they would want to mount these Euro-American-Aburlrian exercises when the cold war ended long ago.”

  “And what are you going to do about your caves?” asked Kamltl.

  “It does not mean that these exercises will involve looking for our hideouts in the mountains. But even if they were, remember that in Aburlria there are many hills and mountains, and where would they begin and end their search unless they decided to put permanent military camps in all the hills and mountains?”

  “I don’t mean they would mount such exercises merely to look for possible hideouts for possible rebels, but they could stumble upon them,” argued Kamltl.

  “Even if they did, remember, the people provide the best hideouts. To their joint military exercises we respond with joint political exercises with our people.”

  “All the same, your people should be careful,” said Kamltl.

  “Why do you talk as if you are outside it all?”

  Kamltl did not answer immediately.

  “What is the matter, Kamltl?” she asked. “These last few days, you have not been the Kamltl I know.”

  “I’ve been thinking about why the love of my life hid so much from me.”

  “But you were not then a member of the movement; how could I have entrusted you with its secrets? Would you respect me for that? What if everybody were to do likewise, be indiscreet with their spouses or lovers?”

  “Well, I thought you were all too close to one another…”

  “Yes, we are close-so?” Nyawlra asked, a little defiantly.

  “I felt as if you had put me aside,” Kamltl said.

  Nyawlra laughed. “Are you jealous?”

  “A little, yes.”

  “Only a little? I’m disappointed.”

  “More than a little!”

  “Take your mind away from those thoughts. It is true that we are very close. We have gone through a lot together. That is a bond of politics and it is as it should be. Yours and mine is a bond of love. And it is also as it should be. But today our relationship is much stronger because to the bond of love we have now added that of politics. Mind you, I would be lying if I said I was not happy to see you wriggle with a little jealousy. Thank you. But jealousy beyond acceptable limits is bad for love, for it means that whenever you see me talking or laughing with a guy or coming home late you will be stricken with grief and pointless suspicions. A little jealousy warms love. But too much of it harms love.”

  “Well, let mine then remain the right amount to warm our love. You know I have always been behind you and I never sought to know more than was necessary. Imagine how I would have felt if, when I was in their hands, I knew that I was also carrying all these secrets of the movement? Fortunately I knew nothing, so even if they had threatened to kill me I would have given nothing. For there was nothing to give away.”

  “But you carried one big secret,” Nyawlra said. You knew about me and you never betrayed me.”

  “Well, that is true, but I also didn’t know everything about you. Up until the moment you entered the room and were introduced as the leader, I had no idea about your position in the movement. You always talked about the movement or the leadership out there. Even on that day, I could not have suspected because you never let on, by hint or gesture, that you would be coming to the meeting.”

  “That is because, as I told you the other time, we did not want you to make a political decision based solely on your feelings for me.”

  “The deception, if I might call it so, was complete.”

  “You admit that you were taken in?”

  “Yes, and for a moment as you sat there and chaired the meeting, I thought that maybe I was looking at another person.”

  “Then I win,” said Nyawlra triumphantly.

  “Win what?”

  “The bet. You remember our little bet? You swore that you would not be taken in a third time?”

  “Oh, that,” Kamltl said. “This time it is different because you were not in disguise, like the Limping Witch at the State House. But I am more than glad to lose the bet. When the time comes I will buy the wedding ring.”

  “I love you,” she said softly.

  “I love you, very much,” he said.

  They wandered through the market before deciding to avoid the throng and walk along the former Ruler’s Highway, now the Imperial Highway. Soon they came to the former site of Marching to Heaven, now the site of the Imperial Coliseum.

  “See the person sitting under the tree?” Nyawlra said. “What is he doing there all alone with legs crossed Buddha fashion?”

  “Gautama,” said Kamltl at once.

  Yes, it was indeed Gautama seated at the base of the tree, legs crossed Buddha-style, his back upright against the trunk. Hanging from the tree were newspaper and magazine cuttings, in the middle of which stood out a piece on which was scribbled MARS.

  “Probably the only material he was able to rescue from Mars Cafe,” Kamltl murmured, recalling the last time he and Gautama talked about Mahabharata, Ramayana, Gita, stars, and space.

  Kamltl told Nyawlra that they should just continue with their walk, but then came a breeze that seemed to push him toward the lone person. He changed his mind. They should at least express some kind of solidarity.

  “Namaste! Gurudeva!” Kamltl called out.

  Gautama thought that he had gotten some followers, and without responding to the greeting directly or changing his posture he started telling them the good news:

  I am not alone, see? This tree and the stray animals who come to visit me are all my frien
ds. Even the sun, the wind, and the rain are my friends. Do you recall Hanuman’s parting words to Rama in Ramayana? Beautiful words that speak to the oneness of creation, he said, and, picking up a book beside him, read aloud: Dear Rama, we are indeed your old friends from long ago, and your companions of ancient days come to help you. We are your forefathers. We are your ancestors, the animals, and you are our child man. As for our friendship, we have known you a long time, Rama, and the number of those days is lost in silence.

  Ah, the silence of being, said Gautama as now he took his eyes off the book, sighing. Human dreams have no end. Oh, if we would stop hate and wars we would inherit not just the earth but the universe. Listening to what the universe is telling us is the only way for the nations of this our earth to come together and find union with life. Light comes from the sun. Let there be universal light. Space is our refuge. Let’s oppose all intents to take death to space…

  They went away wondering if what they just saw and heard was not coming from a man who had lost his head over the loss of the Mars Cafe. Clouds were darkening; rain seemed imminent. They decided to go back to Santalucia, which involved walking back through the city center to catch a bus. They passed near Paradise, then crossed the Imperial Avenue, the Imperial Road, the Imperial Street, and past the Imperial Conference Center before arriving at the Imperial City Square. Construction workers were indeed busy changing landmark names to the Ruling Emperor’s this or that.

  The Imperial City Square was a wide-open space, one of the few remaining, and it was here that the unemployed mostly came to rest and pass the time between hunting for work. Some even spent nights there when the police were not around. It was, as usual, crowded this afternoon, and entertainment was provided by impromptu street acts, including prophets of doom preaching fire and brimstone to the unrepentant.