by Meja Mwangi
Only then did I stop running. My foot was on fire and my head was in turmoil.
What had I done? What should I do? What would happen now that everything was in chaos and it was all my fault?
I limped along the river path I had walked so many times with Hari when he taught me how to bait the hooks with live worms and grasshoppers. Seeing nothing and hearing nothing, I walked slowly up the path until I came to the duck pool where I had first met the people of the forest. Where they had first given me a message for Hari. Where they had warned me never to tell the soldiers about them.
Would they know that I had told? What would happen to me then?
I climbed down the bank to the water’s edge. The river had gone down a little but the water was thick with driftwood and red mud from the mountain floods. I could just make it to my special place under the cliff and sit down by the pool.
The water roared and frothed. It rushed leaves and branches down river in a mad frenzy and lapped at my toes as it passed under me.
Any minute now a flash flood would come and wash me down the river along with the driftwood and drown me. I sat on the wet rocks and waited for it to happen.
It was then that the tears came. I cried till my chest hurt and there were no more tears left to shed. Unable to stop myself, I went on weeping, sobbing hard, dry sobs. The pain in my heart was greater than any pain I had ever experienced. Worse than any beating I had ever endured from Hari or anyone else. Many times worse than anything I had ever received from Lesson One.
A family of colobus monkeys came swinging through the trees, their babies clinging to their bellies. I saw them pass but I did not care, and they went away up the river, eating their way through the mokoe trees and wondering why I did not call out to them today.
Then Nigel found me. He came crashing down from the bank and hopped from rock to rock and sat down next to me.
We were silent for a long time and let the river do the talking. We did not utter a single word until it was nearly dark and the cold rose from the river like smoke from a dying fire.
“Rookie,” Nigel said finally. “I’m sorry about your brother.”
I nodded. When I tried to smile, tears came back to my eyes. I shut my eyes tight and saw Hari lying dead on the ground with bullet holes in his chest. The sobs came again and I clenched my teeth until they had passed.
“He was my best friend,” I said to Nigel.
I had told him everything about me and Hari. Hari had taught me to fish. Hari had taught me to hunt. Hari had taught me everything I knew.
Then Nigel put his arm around my shoulder and the dam burst. I cried uncontrollably. It took me a long time to calm down.
We sat and listened to the river roar. The level was rising and my feet were now under the cold, numbing water. The pain had subsided.
Then the ducks came floating down the river, as silent as the leaves, and we turned to watch them. There were only three of them now, the mother duck and two of her ducklings. They moved around the pool, looking apprehensively over their backs as they fed on the few insects they could catch. They had never seen Nigel, and they were nervous. But Nigel did not throw stones at them. Like me, he just sat and watched.
I told him about the duck family. I told him how we had been friends for a long, long time. I had known the mother duck long before the ducklings were hatched and she had always trusted me. I wondered what had happened to the father duck and the other ducklings. The pool was not the same without them. The forest was not the same without them.
Everything had changed. The forest was now full of new and strange shadows and sounds that I could not understand.
After a few swims round the pool, the mother duck led her surviving ducklings away down the river, floating on the water and letting the current carry them.
“Rookie,” Nigel cried suddenly. “The river.”
The water had risen up to our knees without us noticing. We heard a loud rumbling up river as the floods swept down from the mountains. We scrambled from there and clambered up the bank to the fishermen’s path.
We got out of the water just in time. The flood rounded the bend, roaring like thunder and crashing down everything that stood in its path. It swept past where we stood terrified, carrying dead animals and logs and debris downstream. The forest watched and trembled. Nothing was safe any more.
“Lean on me,” Nigel said.
I put my arm around his shoulder. He lifted my side and took the weight off my injured foot.
That was how we returned to the village, shoulder to shoulder, down the fishermen’s path with the flood waters roaring furiously below us.
Publisher’s Note
The Mzungu Boy is a work of fiction that takes place in Kenya, Africa, in the early 1950s. At that time the country, a British colony, was faced with an uprising that became known as the Mau Mau Rebellion. Much of Kenya, including the best farmland, was in the hands of European settlers. At best, native Kenyans were allowed to work on the land as tenant farmers, under exploitative and demeaning conditions. The rebels wanted the white settlers to leave the country so native Africans could have their independence. As the uprising gained momentum, British rulers declared a state of emergency. Troops set out to arrest Mau Mau leaders, and rebel groups took to hiding in the forests.
By the end of 1959, most of the Mau Mau guerillas had been wiped out, and the state of emergency was lifted. Casualties were estimated to be well over 12,000, virtually all native Africans.
Kenya became an independent country on December 12, 1963. Today it has a population of 32 million people.
About the Author
MEJA MWANGI was born in Nanyuki, in central Kenya, in 1948. He has worked in film and television as a director, casting director and screenwriter, and he is the author of several novels and children’s books, including The Last Plague, Striving for the Wind, Kill Me Quick and Going Down River Road. His books have been translated into several languages, including Basque, German, French, Russian and Japanese. The Mzungu Boy won the prestigious Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis when it was first published in 1990.
About the Publisher
GROUNDWOOD BOOKS, established in 1978, is dedicated to the production of children’s books for all ages, including fiction, picture books and non-fiction. We publish in Canada, the United States and Latin America. Our books aim to be of the highest possible quality in both language and illustration. Our primary focus has been on works by Canadians, though we sometimes also buy outstanding books from other countries.
Many of our books tell the stories of people whose voices are not always heard in this age of global publishing by media conglomerates. Books by the First Peoples of this hemisphere have always been a special interest, as have those of others who through circumstance have been marginalized and whose contribution to our society is not always visible. Since 1998 we have been publishing works by people of Latin American origin living in the Americas both in English and in Spanish under our Libros Tigrillo imprint.
We believe that by reflecting intensely individual experiences, our books are of universal interest. The fact that our authors are published around the world attests to this and to their quality. Even more important, our books are read and loved by children all over the globe.