by Mike Resnick
Day by day I added to Ndemi’s limited storehouse of knowledge. I taught him how to make medicine from the bark and pods of the acacia tree, I showed him how to create the ointments that would ease the discomfort of the aged when the weather turned cold and wet, I made him memorize the hundred spells that were used to bless the scarecrows in the field. I told him a thousand parables, for the Kikuyu have a parable for every need and every occasion, and the wise mundumugu is the one who finds the right parable for each situation.
And finally, after he had served me faithfully for six long years, coming up my hill every morning, feeding my chickens and goats, lighting the fire in my boma, and filling my empty water gourds before his daily lessons began, I took him into my hut and showed him how my computer worked.
There are only four computers on all of Kirinyaga. The others belong to Koinnage, the paramount chief of our village, and to two chiefs of distant clans, but their computers can do nothing but send and receive messages. Only mine is tied into the data banks of the Eutopian Council, the ruling body that had given Kirinyaga its charter, for only the mundumugu has the strength and the vision to be exposed to European culture without becoming corrupted by it.
One of the primary purposes of my computer was to plot the orbital adjustments that would bring seasonal changes to Kirinyaga, so that the rains would come on schedule and the crops would flourish and the harvest would be successful. It was perhaps the mundumugu’s most important obligation to his people, since it assured their survival. I spent many long days teaching Ndemi all the many intricacies of the computer, until he knew its workings as well as I myself did, and could speak to it with perfect ease.
The morning that I first noticed the change in him began like any other. I awoke, wrapped my blanket around my withered shoulders, and walked painfully out of my hut to sit by my fire until the warming rays of the sun took the chill from the air. And, as always, there was no fire.
Ndemi came up the path to my hill a few minutes later.
“Jambo, Koriba,” he said, greeting me with his usual smile.
“Jambo, Ndemi,” I said. “How many times have I explained to you that I am an old man, and that I must sit by my fire until the air becomes warmer?”
“I am sorry, Koriba,” he said. “But as I was leaving my father’s shamba, I saw a hyena stalking one of our goats, and I had to drive it off.” He held his spear up, as if that were proof of his statement.
I could not help but admire his ingenuity. It was perhaps the thousandth time he had been late, and never had he given the same excuse twice. Still, the situation was becoming intolerable, and when he finished his chores and the fire had warmed my bones and eased my pain, I told him to sit down opposite me.
“What is our lesson for today?” he asked as he squatted down.
“The lesson will come later,” I said, finally letting my blanket fall from my shoulders as the first warm breeze of the day blew a fine cloud of dust past my face. “But first I will tell you a story.”
He nodded, and stared intently at me as I began speaking.
“Once there was a Kikuyu chief,” I said. “He had many admirable qualities. He was a mighty warrior, and in council his words carried great weight. But along with his many good qualities, he also had a flaw.
“One day he saw a maiden tilling the fields in her father’s shamba, and he was smitten with her. He meant to tell her of his love the very next day, but as he set out to see her, his way was blocked by an elephant, and he retreated and waited until the elephant had passed. When he finally arrived at the maiden’s boma, he discovered that a young warrior was paying her court. Nevertheless, she smiled at him when their eyes met, and, undiscouraged, he made up his mind to visit her the following day. This time a deadly snake blocked his way, and once again, when he arrived he found the maiden being courted by his rival. Once more she gave him an encouraging smile, and so he decided to come back a third time.
“On the morning of the third day, he lay on his blanket in his hut, and thought about all the many things he wanted to tell her to impress her with his ardor. By the time he had decided upon the best approach to win her favor, the sun was setting. He ran all the way from his boma to that of the maiden, only to find that his rival had just paid her father five cattle and thirty goats for her hand in marriage.
“He managed to get the maiden alone for a moment, and poured forth his litany of love.
“‘I love you too,’ she answered, ‘but although I waited for you each day, and hoped that you would come, you were always late.’
“‘I have excuses to offer,’ he said. ‘On the first day I encountered an elephant, and on the second day a killer snake was in my path.’ He did not dare tell her the real reason he was late a third time, so he said, ‘And today a leopard confronted me, and I had to kill it with my spear before I could continue on my way.’
“‘I am sorry,’ said the maiden, ‘but I am still promised to another.’
“‘Do you not believe me?’ he demanded.
“‘It makes no difference whether you are telling the truth or not,’ she replied. ‘For whether the lion and the snake and the leopard are real or whether they are lies, the result is the same: you have lost your heart’s desire because you were late.’”
I stopped and stared at Ndemi. “Do you understand the moral of my story?” I asked.
He nodded. “It does not matter to you whether a hyena was stalking my father’s goat or not. All that matters is that I was late.”
“That is correct,” I said.
This is where such things had always ended, and then we would begin his lessons. But not this day.
“It is a foolish story,” he said, looking out across the vast savannah.
“Oh?” I asked. “Why?”
“Because it begins with a lie.”
“What lie?”
“The Kikuyu had no chiefs until the British created them,” he answered.
“Who told you that?” I asked.
“I learned it from the box that glows with life,” he said, finally meeting my gaze.
“My computer?”
He nodded again. “I have had many long discussions about the Kikuyu with it, and I have learned many things.” He paused. “We did not even live in villages until the time of the Mau Mau, and then the British made us live together so that we could be more easily watched. And it was the British who created our tribal chiefs, so that they could rule us through them.”
“That is true,” I acknowledged. “But it is unimportant to my story.”
“But your story was untrue with its first line,” he said, “so why should the rest of it be true? Why did you not just say, ‘Ndemi, if you are late again, I will not care whether your reason is true or false. I will punish you.’”
“Because it is important for you to understand why you must not be late.”
“But the story is a lie. Everyone knows that it takes more than three days to court and purchase a wife. So it began with a lie and it ended with a lie.”
“You are looking at the surface of things,” I said, watching a small insect crawl over my foot and finally flicking it off. “The truth lies beneath.”
“The truth is that you do not want me to be late. What has that to do with the elephant and the leopard, which were extinct before we came to Kirinyaga?”
“Listen to me, Ndemi,” I said. “When you become the mundumugu, you will have to impart certain values, certain lessons, to your people—and you must do so in a way that they understand. This is especially true of the children, who are the clay that you will mold into the next generation of Kikuyu.”
Ndemi was silent for a long moment. “I think you are wrong, Koriba,” he said at last. “Not only will the people understand you if you speak plainly to them, but stories like the one you just told me are filled with lies which they will think are true simply because they come from the mundumugu’s lips.”
“No!” I said sharply. “We came to Kirinyaga to live
as the Kikuyu lived before the Europeans tried to change us into that characterless tribe known as Kenyans. There is a poetry to my stories, a tradition to them. They reach out to our racial memory, of the way things were, and the way we hope to make them again.” I paused to consider which path to follow, for never before had Ndemi so bluntly opposed my teachings. “You yourself used to beg me for stories, and of all the children you were the quickest to find the true meaning of them.”
“I was younger then,” he said.
“You were a Kikuyu then,” I said.
“I am still a Kikuyu.”
“You are a Kikuyu who has been exposed to European knowledge and European history,” I said. “This is unavoidable, if you are to succeed me as the mundumugu, for we hold our charter at the whim of the Europeans, and you must be able to speak to them and work their machine. But your greatest challenge, as a Kikuyu and a mundumugu, is to avoid becoming corrupted by them.”
“I do not feel corrupted,” he said. “I have learned many things from the computer.”
“So you have,” I agreed, as a fish eagle circled lazily overhead and the breeze brought the smell of a nearby herd of wildebeest. “And you have forgotten many things.”
“What have I forgotten?” he demanded, watching the fish eagle swoop down and grab a fish from the river. “You may test me and see how good my memory is.”
“You have forgotten that the true value of a story is that the listener must bring something to it,” I said. “I could simply order you not to be late, as you suggest—but the purpose of the story is to make you use your brain to understand why you should not be late.” I paused. “You are also forgetting that the reason we do not try to become like the Europeans is because we tried once before, and became only Kenyans.”
He was silent for a long time. Finally he looked up at me.
“May we skip today’s lesson?” he asked. “You have given me much to think about.”
I nodded my acquiescence. “Come back tomorrow, and we will discuss your thoughts.”
He stood up and walked down the long winding path that led from my hill to the village.
But though I waited for him until the sun was high in the sky the next day, he did not come back.
* * *
Just as it is good for fledgling birds to test their wings, it is good for young people to test their powers by questioning authority. I bore Ndemi no malice, but simply waited until the day that he returned, somewhat humbled, to resume his studies.
But the fact that I now had no assistant did not absolve me of my duties, and so each day I walked down to the village, and blessed the scarecrows, and took my place alongside Koinnage in the Council of Elders. I brought new ointment for old Siboki’s joints, which were causing him discomfort, and I sacrificed a goat so that Ngai would look with favor upon the pending marriage of Maruta with a man of another clan.
As always, when I made my rounds, I was followed everywhere by the village children, who begged me to stop what I was doing and tell them a story. For two days I was too busy, for a mundumugu has many tasks to perform, but on the morning of the third day I had some time to spare, and I gathered them around me in the shade of an acacia tree.
“What kind of story would you like to hear?” I asked.
“Tell us of the old days, when we still lived in Kenya,” said a girl.
I smiled. They always asked for stories of Kenya—not that they knew where Kenya was, or what it meant to the Kikuyu. But when we lived in Kenya the lion and the rhinoceros and the elephant were not yet extinct, and they loved stories in which animals spoke and displayed greater wisdom than men, a wisdom that they themselves assimilated as I repeated the stories.
“Very well,” I said. “I will tell you the story of the Foolish Lion.”
They all sat or squatted down in a semi-circle, facing me with rapt attention, and I continued: “Once there was a foolish lion who lived on the slopes of Kirinyaga, the holy mountain, and because he was a foolish lion, he did not believe that Ngai had given the mountain to Gikuyu, the very first man. Then one morning…”
“That is wrong, Koriba,” said one of the boys.
I focused my weak eyes on him, and saw that it was Mdutu, the son of Karenja.
“You have interrupted your mundumugu,” I noted harshly. “And, even worse, you have contradicted him. Why?”
“Ngai did not give Kirinyaga to Gikuyu,” said Mdutu, getting to his feet.
“He most certainly did,” I replied. “Kirinyaga belongs to the Kikuyu.”
“That cannot be so,” he persisted, “for Kirinyaga is not a Kikuyu name, but a Maasai name. Kiri means mountain in the language of Maa, and nyaga means light. Is it not more likely that Ngai gave the mountain to the Maasai, and that our warriors took it away from them?”
“How do you know what these words mean in the language of the Maasai?” I demanded. “That language is not known to anyone on Kirinyaga.”
“Ndemi told us,” said Mdutu.
“Well, Ndemi is wrong!” I shouted. “The truth has been passed on from Gikuyu through his nine daughters and his nine sons-in-law all the way down to me, and never has it varied. The Kikuyu are Ngai’s chosen people. Just as He gave the spear and Kilimanjaro to the Maasai, He gave the digging-stick and Kirinyaga to us. Kirinyaga has always belonged to the Kikuyu, and it always will!”
“No, Koriba, you are wrong,” said a soft, high-pitched voice, and I turned to face my new assailant. It was tiny Thimi, the daughter of Njomu, barely seven years old, who rose to contradict me.
“Ndemi told us that many years ago the Kikuyu sold Kirinyaga to a European named John Boyes for six goats, and it was the British government that made him return it to us.”
“Who do you believe?” I demanded severely. “A young boy who has lived for only fifteen long rains, or your mundumugu?”
“I do not know,” she answered with no sign of fear. “He tells us dates and places, and you speak of wise elephants and foolish lions. It is very hard to decide.”
“Then perhaps instead of the story of the Foolish Lion,” I said, “I will tell you the story of the Arrogant Boy.”
“No, no, the lion!” shouted some of the children.
“Be quiet!” I snapped. “You will hear what I want to tell you!”
Their protests subsided, and Thimi sat down again.
“Once there was a bright young boy,” I began.
“Was his name Ndemi?” asked Mdutu with a smile.
“His name was Legion,” I answered. “Do not interrupt again, or I shall leave and there will be no more stories until the next rains.”
The smile vanished from Mdutu’s face, and he lowered his head.
“As I said, this was a very bright boy, and he worked on his father’s shamba, herding the goats and cattle. And because he was a bright young boy, he was always thinking, and one day he thought of a way to make his chores easier. So he went to his father and said that he had had a dream, and in this dream they had built a wire enclosure with sharp barbs on the wire, to keep the cattle in and the hyenas out, and he was sure that if he were to build such an enclosure, he would no longer have to herd the cattle but would be free to do other things.
“‘I am glad to see that you are using your brain,’ said the boy’s father, ‘but that idea has been tried before, by the Europeans. If you wish to free yourself from your duties, you must think of some other way.’
“‘But why?’ said the boy. ‘Just because the Europeans thought of it does not make it bad. After all, it must work for them or they would not use it.’
“‘That is true,’ said his father. ‘But what works for the Europeans does not necessarily work for the Kikuyu. Now do your chores, and keep thinking, and if you think hard enough I am sure you will come up with a better idea.’
“But along with being bright, the boy was also arrogant, and he refused to listen to his father, even though his father was older and wiser and more experienced. So he spent all his spare time
attaching sharp little barbs to the wire, and when he was done he built an enclosure and put his father’s cattle into it, sure that they could not get out and the hyenas could not find a way in. And when the enclosure was completed, he went to sleep for the night.”
I paused and surveyed my audience. Most of them were staring raptly at me, trying to figure out what came next.
“He awoke to screams of anger from his father and wails of anguish from his mother and sisters, and ran out to see what had happened. He found all of his father’s cattle dead. During the night the hyenas, whose jaws can crush a bone, had bitten through the posts to which the wire was attached, and the cattle, in their panic, ran into the wire and were held motionless by the barbs while the hyenas killed and ate them.
“The arrogant boy looked upon the carnage with puzzlement. ‘How can this have happened?’ he said. ‘The Europeans have used this wire, and it never happened to them.’
“‘There are no hyenas in Europe,’ said his father. ‘I told you that we are different from the Europeans, and that what works for them will not work for us, but you refused to listen, and now we must live our lives in poverty, for in a single night your arrogance cost me the cattle that it has taken me a lifetime to accumulate.’”
I fell silent and waited for a response.
“Is that all?” asked Mdutu at last.
“That is all.”
“What did it mean?” asked another of the boys.
“You tell me,” I said.
Nobody answered for a few moments. Then Balimi, Thimi’s older sister, stood up.
“It means that only Europeans can use wire with barbs on it.”
“No,” I said. “You must not only listen, child, but think.”
“It means that what works for the Europeans will not work for the Kikuyu,” said Mdutu, “and that it is arrogant to believe that it will.”