by Meja Mwangi
“Come,” he said, taking Nigel by the hand. “Your food is ready.”
Nigel was too startled to argue as father dragged him out of the hut and through the village to his grandfather’s house where, no doubt, nice things waited to be eaten.
My day of fame and glory turned to mud. Why did everything that was fun turn out to be like a deliberate effort to have my father dismissed from his job?
Nigel did not come back that day.
When my chores were done, I called Jimi and we went for a walk along the river. We ended up by my duck pool and sat for hours listening to the water rush over the rocks. Jimi eventually got bored and went back home, leaving me to brood alone.
I could smell buffalo stealing through the forest. But I saw nothing and heard nothing.
The duck family did not come out to play that day and I was worried about them. Had they been killed and eaten by some wild animals? Or had they moved to another part of the river where it was safer?
I waited for them until sunset.
That night at about midnight, Father came back from Bwana Ruin’s kitchen and woke me up roughly. He found me in the middle of a nightmare and, when I opened my eyes and saw him looming over me, I thought he had finally made up his mind to take me out in the forest and skin me alive.
“Mother,” I cried in panic.
“Quiet,” he said.
“Hari,” I called out.
“Shut up,” Father ordered.
“Mother,” I cried. “He is killing me!”
He gave me a hard slap that nearly knocked my head off my shoulders. It shocked me into silence long enough to hear what he had to say.
“Get up,” he ordered.
The fire was burning bright, throwing grotesque shadows on the wall. We were alone in the room, just the two of us. Hari slept in his own hut next to the grain store. Mother and Father slept in the next room.
We were in the kitchen. That was where I slept, on a platform of sticks and boards. It was a hard and rough bed. But I was always so tired when I went to bed that I did not feel a thing.
“Get dressed,” Father said.
There was no doubt left in my mind any more. He intended to finally carry out his threat of skinning me alive. But why was Mother so quiet? Didn’t she care about me at all? I knew she loved me. Why didn’t she come to my rescue?
Then it hit me. He had killed her too and left her in the forest for the hyenas.
I was trembling all over when I got out of bed. I stood before him and awaited my fate.
“Sit down,” he said.
I sat down on a stool across the fire from him. He had taken off his white uniform and changed into his brown shirt and patched cord trousers. Except for the tortured look in his eye, he seemed just like my father.
He took a piece of cake he had brought back from the kitchen and gave it to me.
“Eat,” he ordered.
He found a foul-smelling piece of cigarette and lit it. From the riverside came the terrible scream of the tree hyrax. The sound had frightened Nigel half to death the first time he heard it as we came back from hunting. Then he had told me that the hyrax was a true cousin of the elephant. He had read it in a book.
“I want to talk to you,” my father said.
I ate my cake and listened. He was as bad with emotions as he was with words. I could never tell what he felt for me. I could not tell if he felt anything at all. All I knew was that I could never please him, no matter how hard I tried.
Finally he sorted out his words.
“Keep away from the little white man,” he said.
“Why?”
“Why?” His right hand rose, ready to bounce me off the wall of the hut. Then he remembered he wanted to talk, not fight.
“Do you want to have me dismissed from my job?” he asked.
“No.” It was the last thing in the world I wanted.
“Then keep away from the boy.”
And that was that. Our little talk seemed over. He pulled on his cigarette. I polished off the last of my cake and got ready to go back to bed. Then he stirred suddenly and cleared his throat.
“Kariuki,” he said with great difficulty. “White people are not like us. They do not want us to step on their clean floors. I must take off my shoes when I step in their kitchen to do my work. They do not want us to touch their things. They say we make them dirty. They do not like us. They do not want our children to play with their children. They are not like us at all. They do not want their children to eat our food.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why?” he repeated. “Because… they hate us.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He had to think a long while. Even then, the answer he gave was no more illuminating than anything else he ever told me.
“They could die,” he said finally.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why?” he repeated. “Because… they are not like us.”
He pulled on his cigarette. I had never had this much conversation with him before. I was thrilled. His long, thoughtful pauses were very impressive, very profound.
Somewhere in my heart, deep down under the layers and layers of fear and awe and absolute terror, I had a certain pride in and respect for my father.
“They are not used to our food,” he said finally.
“Nigel eats ugali,” I said reasonably.
“He must not eat ugali.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why?” His hand rose instinctively.
Any discussion we had ever had before had involved some sort of violent physical contact. His knuckles on my bare head.
He now lowered his hand and said, “Because…”
He had great difficulty getting at whatever he wanted to tell me. His eyes, his will, his whole being pleaded with me to help by understanding at once.
“Do you know what they do with ugali?” he asked me.
I had no idea.
“They give it to their dogs,” he told me.
So what? We gave ugali to our dogs too.
He nodded in agreement and said that was not the point. That was completely different. It was not the same as giving it to the little white boy at all.
“Do you know what would happen to me if he should fall ill and die?” he said fearfully.
I had no idea.
“I would be fired,” he said. “I would lose my job.”
And that was not all. They would take him out and hang him. Then they would come for my mother and take her out and hang her too.
“And then,” as if that was not enough to scare me already, “then they would come for you. And Hari.”
My father did not make up the stories to frighten me. He believed every word. I had to believe too. The fear in his eyes was all too real.
He made me promise never to give ugali to the white boy again.
I promised. But he wanted more than that. He wanted me to also promise not to play with or to have anything at all to do with the little white man.
I promised. I did not believe he expected me to keep such a promise.
“Go to bed,” he ordered.
I gladly climbed back on my platform. I was thoroughly exhausted by our discussion and fell asleep right away.
There was one very bad outcome of the whole ugali affair. The village boys now knew that the little white man was human too. From that day on, every village bully wanted to test his strength and enhance his reputation by wrestling Nigel to the ground and thrashing the daylights out of him. I had a hard time protecting him, and on occasion got thoroughly beaten myself.
Seven
THEY COULD NOT keep Nigel away from my compound. I was his only friend, but I never gave him ugali again.
> He came by every chance he got and pleaded with me to take him hunting. He could not understand how I wasn’t even supposed to be with him.
We sat in the yard and played marbles as I thought of a dozen things to keep our minds occupied and away from his first and only love, hunting. Whenever he brought up the subject I had to invent good excuses like the jimis were sick or Jimi had gone off to Nanyuki with Hari. Sometimes his grandfather took him on a different kind of hunt. They went far out into the plains in the roofless Land Rover to where the game was plentiful. There was no running, not even walking. They drove up, stopped the vehicle and, while the animals watched and wondered, Bwana Ruin stood on the seat and shot them dead. Then he loaded them on the vehicle and brought them back for his dogs.
“You don’t eat the meat?” I asked Nigel.
“Grandma can’t stand the smell of game,” he told me.
My mother couldn’t stand the smell of fish.
“Crocodile?” he asked.
I told him we didn’t bother with any animals we could not eat.
“Zebra?”
I had never heard of anyone who ate zebras. But Nigel had read about it in a book. Some people even ate snakes.
“Tastes like rabbit,” he said.
“I have eaten rabbit.”
“Buffalo?”
“Tastes like beef,” I said.
“I have never eaten buffalo,” he said.
Bwana Ruin killed buffalo all the time, I informed him. We ate buffalo often.
“Have you ever eaten warthog?” I asked.
“How does it taste?”
All I could remember was the smell.
We were sitting by the chicken run next to Hari’s hut, on buckets with holes in them and brown with rust. I wanted to go swimming, but Nigel wanted to hunt.
“Bwana Ruin does not want you to go with me,” I told him. “My father told me that.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “He didn’t say not to go hunting. He told me not to come to the village.”
“Bwana Ruin will be angry,” I said.
“I have no one at the house,” he told me. “Only my grandma, and she doesn’t let me touch anything. She thinks I’ll hurt myself. It’s so boring.”
“Does she beat you?”
“Never.”
“My father beats me sometimes,” I informed him. “I have to be very careful what I do or say around him.”
“Dad would never touch me,” he told me.
“What about your mother?”
“Never, ever.”
My mother never touched me either. But her bark was much worse than her bite.
“Grandma’s like that,” Nigel said.
“Do you like her?”
He thought hard about it, shrugged and said, “I don’t know. She’s nice and all but…”
“What about your father?” I asked.
“He’s the greatest.”
It was quite a revelation. I never expected to find a boy, even a mzungu one, who liked his father. I had been led to believe boys weren’t supposed to understand, let alone like their fathers. Just to fear them and keep out of their way.
“I like my brother Hari,” I told him. He beat me too, sometimes, but he was still my best friend. “He taught me to fish and hunt.”
Nigel remembered about hunting.
“Couldn’t we go just once more? I’ll be going back to school soon,” he told me.
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t want my father to lose his job. He’d kill me for that.
Nigel didn’t want me to be killed either so we forgot about hunting. We could smell the ugali my mother was preparing for lunch.
Could he have some ugali?
I had no wish to see my parents hang.
“Let’s go hunting,” I said.
I called Jimi from under the grain store. He didn’t want to come with us. He was still angry with me for letting him get into an argument with a wild buffalo. I apologized for this, although even a blind dog would have known the difference between hare and buffalo, and assured him it would not happen again. Today we would go after Old Moses.
He summoned his friends and any other village dog that would come, and we set off for the adventure of our lives. With fifteen dogs in tow, we sneaked behind the village to avoid meeting my father or Nigel’s grandfather.
Children came to call out “little white man.” Nigel ignored them. The bigger boys objected to our taking their dogs hunting and wanted to fight us, but we had no time for fights. We had a long way to go. Other jimis saw us and tagged along. By the time we crossed the first river we had a mob of thirty dogs or more.
We swept through the forest like a storm, searched under every log and bush, sniffed in every nook and cranny, and made enough noise to scare all the animals away. We didn’t find any animals in the forest. They could hear us coming from miles away.
Scents criss-crossed like a finely woven net in the undergrowth. The jimis got very confused and excited. But we stayed together like a wind-driven storm until we came out on the open grassy plateau between the rivers.
Here was our first big challenge.
Hares popped up everywhere. Scared like rabbits they raced round and round, popping in and out of holes like magic. In spite of our pleas the dogs went after them with enthusiasm. Soon we had dogs burrowing into rabbit holes all over the plain, and turning up all sorts of surprises. They found two poisonous snakes, a fox, a wild cat and a tired old hyena who didn’t have the guts to fight and took off for the forest as fast as he could run.
There was only one possible solution to this anarchy. I grabbed Hari’s dog and slipped my belt around his neck. Then I led him forcefully across the plain and down to the Liki forest. Most of the other dogs came with us. They would follow Hari’s jimi anywhere. I had no doubt the rest would eventually follow us too as soon as they realized the futility of digging into the maze of rabbit holes that ran under the plain. A rabbit could go for miles under the ground without surfacing even once. I had learned this since our last hunt from my brother Hari, an old hand at hunting.
We swept through the Liki forest to emerge, hours later, on the Loldaiga plain, a seemingly endless grass plateau. It was flat and even all the way to the Loldaiga hills. The grass was taller and more profuse. Wild game flourished and thrived here, away from the farmlands and the farmers’ cattle.
Zebras, gazelles and giraffes moved freely in numerous herds spreading in their thousands far to the horizon. There were lions and wild dogs too, but we didn’t see any of them.
We had a hard time convincing the dogs they couldn’t possibly catch any of them. The plains game had the whole world to run away to. I gave Jimi to Nigel to hang on to, for he too was of the opinion we should go after the gazelles. Then I climbed a gnarled old acacia tree so I could see over the grass.
I searched all around for Old Moses, but he was nowhere to be seen. The plain around his territory seemed bare. I was afraid he may have died or moved to another part of the world. I already knew that warthogs were territorial. Once they found an area they liked and established a house, they lived near the burrow until they died. They never strayed farther than they could run straight back into their hole.
Then I saw him, lying in the grass in a mound like an anthill. He was about a quarter of a mile away, not far from where I knew his hole was. I climbed down.
“Have you seen him?” Nigel asked eagerly.
“He is sleeping.”
“Why? It’s still light.”
“Maybe he is tired. Animals sleep whenever they feel like.”
Jimi pricked his ears to catch our words. I took the belt from Nigel and led Jimi in the direction of the sleeping warthog. If we surprised him in his sleep, then maybe we had a chance.
I led the way, tiptoeing through the grass, stopping now and then to listen. All I could hear were the dogs roving through the bush and making enough noise to wake the entire plain.
We pressed on a little faster now to get to our quarry before the other jimis did. Many of them had strayed so far off course there was little chance they would find us again today.
“Why is he called Old Moses?” Nigel wanted to know.
“He is the oldest warthog in the world,” I said. He was also the meanest. “You will see.”
I should have known there would be no surprising Old Moses that day. Not with so many dogs blundering through the plain. When we came to where I had seen him sleeping, Old Moses was up on his short, sturdy legs, facing our way and waiting to see who came out of the tall grass.
“Wow!” Nigel was totally amazed. “What is that?”
“Old Moses.”
He was big, almost as big as a buffalo, and he had thick black-brown skin that was bald with age. He had short powerful legs, a massive head with warts as big as pumpkins and a long tapered face with tufts of black hair on the crown. His mean little eyes were almost closed in concentration.
But the most impressive feature of the old warthog were his teeth. His huge, strangely curved saber tusks were amber brown, and they swept out of the sides of his mouth and curved forwards, outwards and upwards for almost a foot on either side of his head.
“Wow!” Nigel said. “He is big!”
“Watch out,” I told him. “He is also dangerous.”
We stood there and eyed each other. I could feel Jimi trembling by my side. It wasn’t from fear. I had taught Jimi to be fearless, but he too was impressed by the size of the creature in front of us.
I released him, taking the leash from his neck. He remained by my side, one leg raised, undecided whether to commit himself. He studied the situation. Meanwhile, the other jimis had no idea where we were.
Old Moses snorted and shook his massive head at us in warning. We stood our ground. After a moment of this threatening behavior, he approached, slowly, with measured steps.
“Jimi?” I said quietly. “Go get him, boy!”
Jimi was still thinking about it. He was no ordinary dog.