“So I think the best thing we can do at the moment is make a case for you to have a few months leave. We’ll say it’s on medical grounds. We’ll cable to the seminary back home and tell them to expect you. It’ll be a marvellous opportunity for you to study for a while, to refresh your ideas and restate your commitment to the Church.”
“John is there any need?” Michael pleads with some impatience. This was not what he wanted to happen. “I’ve told you I know I was wrong. What more do you want? And I can handle Mulonzya...”
O’Hara rocks slowly from side to side as Michael speaks. He is obviously no longer listening. His mind is made up and he can no longer hide his anger as he says, “Let me put it this way, Michael. If you stay here you are jeopardising not only your own position, but also that of all your colleagues. You will be a liability. Don’t you see that? As a Christian...” He lays great stress on the word, “… would you like to see yourself as responsible for the outcome?”
Michael cannot answer. The discussion is over, the judgment cast. O’Hara walks silently out of the room and into the hallway. Michael hears him wind up the telephone and then speak. As the Bishop’s echoing voice drifts into the room, Michael takes hold again of the long-ignored bottle of whiskey and fills his glass.
“Long distance please. Nairobi. Person to person. Father Patrick Mahoney. St. Patrick’s Mission.”
Mulonzya
James Mulonzya was born to privilege, guaranteed at least local honour, relative riches and unquestioning respect. He was thus one of the few Kenyans in a position to assert his advantage when unusual opportunities arose after the hasty departure of the country’s colonial masters. He secured more than his fair share of power and wealth, far greater than had even been envisaged by any of his kinsmen. Others like James Mulonzya throughout the newly independent country were able to do just the same. At independence these men sharpened their eyes. Some simply moved in to occupy a niche ready prepared by their privileged predecessors. White farmers, not the settlers of long standing, for they felt they had nowhere else to go, but those who had recently emigrated from Europe to ‘pioneer’ new land in the promise that it would thenceforth be theirs alone to exploit - many of these people, who had come to grow wealthy and had placed their entire hopes on the success of this new life, left the colony in an angry stampede, pursued by their own fears. Thus vast tracts of prime land, having in the first place been expropriated from the common ownership of everyone and no one, first by settlers and then by the legal system they brought with them, were vacated, left to the mercy of the first person to stake a claim. Although the dreaded word ‘compensation’ was voiced frequently for some years, it was clear from the beginning that finders would be keepers.
Of course many private deals were done and thus much of the plunder was secured long before it officially became vacant. And there were not only farms to grab. A large slice of the economic life of a nation was to be re-apportioned overnight and like the hopeful dash to stake a claim in a gold rush, the prospective businessmen and farmers grabbed as much and as quickly as they could. What had always been the most lucrative, of course, did not change hands. Much of that which became free was of only marginal importance, but it more than suited the desires of local heroes like the Mulonzya family.
Thus some Kenyans of James Mulonzya’s age became rich overnight. Many had originated from the same kind of background as himself. Few, however, had been better placed than he, either financially or in terms of the influence they could muster in the right places. The fact, then, that Mulonzya largely missed his chance and, when life settled down after independence, was found to be ‘comfortable’ without being wealthy tells much of his personal qualities, or rather his lack of them.
Unlike nearly all his fellows, the date of his birth can be placed exactly. On a registration certificate issued by a Nairobi office, which later Mulonzya had framed for his wall, his first day of life is recorded to have been on the twenty-fifth of September nineteen twenty-three. His father’s name, also entered on the certificate - and in the eyes of most people over the subsequent years the detail which endowed the paper with most of its worth - was one Chief Abel Mulonzya Mwendwa of Mwingi location, Administrative District of Kitui. A champion of many causes - and especially his own, Chief Abel Mwendwa rose to a position in life from which he could command the total respect of his contemporaries, who often quoted the local wisecrack, “The father is Abel, the sons not!”
His qualities were many and varied, his achievements beyond number. His greatest talent, however, and the single quality which led to the permanent benefit of his entire family, was his ability to appear to be all things to all men, or, more aptly, anything to any man. He became a champion performer, apparently living one life through the eyes of his own masters whilst furthering quite different interests in the perspective of those he mastered. Forever trusted, for all parties believed him to be on their side, he was able to play an intricate game whereby he pitted one against another, maintaining his own innocence and safety, so that when conflict arose to shatter both opponents and allies alike, he could re-assemble the pieces in his own image, reconstructed according to his needs.
Mulonzya Mwendwa had been converted to Christianity at an early age, long before most Europeans have even considered the prospect. Though he received no formal education in his youth, for his home district was entirely without schools, he was taught to read and write by a Presbyterian minister. A member of the first generation of Akamba born under white rule, Mulonzya Mwendwa - or Abel as he would soon prefer to be called - encountered only one European, his minister-tutor, in his early life.
There were no farmers, no settlers and for the most part no administrators in his area. The British were not interested in that place for it had nothing material to offer them. There were people there, though, the Akamba of Kitui, who interested the missionaries, whose zealous desire to expand and convert seemed insatiable. They were well received in Mwingi, accepted without necessarily being welcomed. By the time Abel reached maturity, however, much had changed.
The area’s people, if not its possible resources, had begun to interest the administration in Nairobi. In order to reap the windfall benefits of the colonies they had found, the rulers needed labour to build railways, roads and the like to serve those areas deemed to be economically exploitable. From the very beginning of the colonial period, the Kamba people had served the Europeans well and, so that this relationship and others like it might continue, it became necessary to establish a chain of government.
Obviously this would cost money and divert precious funds that would be better spent elsewhere and so it was decided that these new administrators in the field should also become tax gatherers. At the very lowest level of each individual, township or location, it was envisaged that a local man, an appointed chief, would execute the dictates of government and, though it was accepted that these officers would have to command great respect from the locals if their position were to remain credible, it was also a necessity that they should be able to communicate with their overseers. In other words they would have to be able to read and write English.
The dearth of people in the bush areas who could fulfil these qualifications led to some younger people having greatness prematurely thrust upon them. By the time Abel was appointed chief, however, the entire process had settled into a semblance of established routine, whilst at the same time retaining its common perception as an essentially external imposition and, as such, resented.
As chief, Abel executed his tasks both efficiently and conscientiously, always striving to achieve the goals that were set by his superiors. Dependability is what he aimed for and without question achieved. He was always a conscientious organiser of tax collection in the area, even when the levy in question was as despised and unworkable as the dreaded hut tax, which forced unwilling peasants into the cash economy, often to the detriment of their essential subsistence.
&n
bsp; Even in the north of Mwingi location, where semi-nomadic pastoralists habitually herded their animals, Abel proved to be such a good administrator from the executive’s point of view that he, perhaps alone among Kenyan local government officers, managed to enforce the new laws on stock ownership almost without exception. It was widely recognised as an enormous achievement on his part. To have done no more than to introduce such pastoralists to the very idea that they should limit their herds to a level below that which their migration could support, would have been a feat in itself. Abel, however, managed to go much further than this and actually succeeded in reducing these peoples’ herds year after year. The fact that, in order to do this, he had to employ the services of a detachment of the King’s African Rifles to direct and carry out the required strong-arm tactics, he saw as mere expediency. By attacking the annual migration of several groups into the north of Mwingi location with salvoes of gunfire, Abel achieved his own and his superiors’ end. The askaris did all he asked of them, though on occasions they might have been a little over zealous.
Abel’s great chance to display his true qualities came later. After central government had deigned that large areas of the country should be set aside as forestry reserves and had designated much of Mwingi location as such, it was necessary to move the people who had settled those areas onto other land which they would then be able to farm. The size of individual holdings, however, would have to be reduced and it became necessary to impose limits on the number of cows and goats a person could keep. Obviously the plan encountered much resistance. Effectively it disenfranchised people. Despite the fact that the majority of land was used by no one in particular, it was seen as the common property of the people of the location, each part to be used until it was exhausted, when again it would be left fallow to replenish itself. Thus the enactment of the plan required not only organisation provided by Abel in his capacity as Chief, but also, because it challenged long-standing tradition and assumption, enforcement by police and later the army. Though the policy was never fully realised, since it depended on the determination of the local chief to achieve its aims, its enactment was continued until the final days of British rule. After independence, people were allowed to re-settle these areas, but in Mwingi they returned to find their former plots not only untilled, but fenced off, Abel Mulonzya having claimed most of them for himself. Since it remained the Chief’s duty to arbitrate upon disputes over land, Abel effectively blocked all protest against his actions. Furthermore, the odd complaint against him that was levelled over his head direct to the District Officer was simply bought off with a bribe of money that, of course, ordinary people had never possessed and therefore could not match. Thus, by virtue of position and opportunism, Abel became the largest landowner of northern Kitui. The caveat that history would add to Abel’s achievement, however, was that northern Kitui was far from the most advantageous part of the country to own.
There was, however, just one mishap that marred the progress of Abel’s brilliantly self-engineered career. Throughout he had maintained the respect of his own people and the colonials by sitting firmly on the fence between them and refusing to climb down. Having successfully maintained this position for some time and convincing everyone that he stood on their side and their side alone, some people began to realise that Abel was working for the benefit of no one except himself. It was too late by then, of course, to make any difference because the chief had already constructed the greater part of his empire, but the mood of the people was such that anyone who had collaborated with the colonialists - and especially someone who had benefited from the arrangement at the expense of the locals, should be seen to suffer for his wrongs.
It was during the Emergency that this mishap occurred. Abel’s children had all left home, so he and his wife had the near mansion of the chief’s house in Mwingi to them selves. Though as an administrator he was certainly a target for reprisals by the Kenya Land Army, he had never seen the Akamba people of his own district as a possible threat and so the soldiers employed to guard his compound were effectively paid to sleep. Whenever the Chief’s eldest son, James, paid them a visit, he would always remark upon the imminence of the possible dangers and urge his father to be more careful, but these warnings fell on consistently deaf ears and were held up to the young man by his father as an example of how little he understood his own people. The aging man’s beliefs were sincere, but privately he enjoyed taking this standpoint to remind his eldest son of his inexperience in worldly matters. An education, even an undistinguished one, as his son had received, was a privilege that he, himself, had never been afforded and he rued the fact. It was necessary, therefore, that he should retain at least this claim to his son’s respect, no matter how irresponsible the tactic might appear when viewed in cold light of day.
Abel had sacrificed much to provide an education for his sons and, though he desired to see them benefit from the experience in the long run, he was equally determined that the resulting changes in their attitudes would never undermine their respect for either his age or obviously superior wisdom. Thus he actively enjoyed flouting his son James’s sincere concern for his safety. As things eventually turned out, the son was proved correct.
With the enforced depopulation of the designated areas of Mwingi well under way, disenchantment with the scheme reached its peak. There were still plenty of people waiting to be moved and thus plenty of people with much to gain and little to lose if they could possibly find a way of thwarting the enactment of the plan by any means, however drastic. Under the cover of darkness, six men visited Abel’s house while the family slept and in ten frantic minutes accomplished what was designed to end the career of Chief Abel Mulonzya Mwendwa and also permanently display to others the inevitable consequences of collaboration with the desires of the colonialists. These men, masked and forever silent to deny any recognition, broke down the door of Abel’s house and took him and his wife screaming from their beds. While two men first restrained and then gagged the woman, three held the Chief face down and with arms outstretched on the floor.
With Abel’s terrified wife forced to watch, her screams muted by a tight gag, the sixth man proceeded to hack through the chief’s wrists with an axe until both hands were severed from the arms. There was no ceremony about the act, no attempt by the men to force the Chief to hear their reasons for their act of retribution, everything being accomplished in silence with an air of apparently practised efficiency. Subsequently it would be rumoured that they had been Kikuyus involved in the forefront of the resistance against the British, that they had travelled from Meru to accomplish the specific end of eliminating Abel Mulonzya Mwendwa and him alone as retribution for his long-standing collaboration with the colonisers, but Abel himself would never subscribe to this view, always maintaining that they had been local men motivated by local issues.
Their task accomplished, the attackers unceremoniously disappeared into the night, leaving Abel for dead, with the severed arteries of his arms gushing blood onto the floor of the bedroom. The commotion, however, had been sufficient to arouse the soldiers from sleep in their nearby dormitory and it was through their efforts that he survived. Had they not acted immediately he might have bled to death. But the application of their rudimentary training in first aid was enough to stem the bleeding for long enough for him to be bundled off in a Land Rover down the road to the Mission Hospital for treatment and recovery.
The fact that Abel’s performance as the chief of one of the largest locations in Eastern Kenya had won him many friends in higher levels of government was immediately apparent when news of the attack reached the capital via Kitui’s District Commissioner. Almost by return of post a detachment, generous in number, of the King’s African Rifles travelled to Mwingi and embarked upon a series of reprisals to atone for the crime. Suspects were forcibly moved out of the area and often detained without charge or trial in a small camp for Mau Mau prisoners at nearby Ndolo’s Corner. The soldiers worked with
such speed and vigour that by the time Abel was fit enough to leave hospital, only a few weeks after the attack, he returned to his desk to find that the process of resettlement was almost complete, having been speeded up by the very act which had been designed to frustrate it. Nothing now stood between Abel and his private plan to claim much of the vacated land for himself.
It was during this period that the chief first made the acquaintance of Major Edward Munyasya. Munyasya’s home area was the neighbouring location to the south, Migwani, a smaller and generally poorer administrative area than Mwingi. Munyasya had been a member of the original detail sent to Mwingi after the attack on the chief and, under the strict orders of his superiors, he was requested to stay on to ensure there would be no further acts of terrorism and also that the resettlement programme was effected as speedily as possible. Thus the Major was required to work closely with the chief toward this common end. Gradually their continued professional relationship changed to one of long-standing friendship.
When, in what would prove to be the final days of colonial rule, it was decided to reward those people who had offered friendship and hard work to their foreign masters, Major Munyasya received a promotion and Chief Abel Mulonzya Mwendwa, in recognition of his work and personal sacrifice, received a medal from the Queen of England. Obviously the good lady could not be expected to shake his stump of an arm instead of a hand in congratulation, so, before he was despatched on his trip of a lifetime to London, Abel was equipped with two neat elongated wooden cups to hide his scars. Abel was immediately enthusiastic about his wooden hands and wore them constantly. They became nothing less than his hallmark in his later years and caused his handshake to become regarded almost as a feared weapon. It had always been his habit to greet others by clasping their offered hands firmly between his own. His wooden clubs of forearms meant that the unsuspecting would find greeting him a somewhat painful experience, especially in the later years when, with a new self-confidence inspired by his ever-increasing wealth and power, he would shake hands more vociferously than ever and deliver ever more painful raps to the knuckles with his left club as he instinctively tried to clasp his own hands together.
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