Their initial concern immediately turned to smiling joy and both came forward to greet their son. They shook his hand, embraced him and offered hearty if premature congratulations for doing well in his examinations. Though the boy was careful to remind them that no one would know the results for some months, the obvious solidity of his confidence made his warnings sound more like acceptance of their praise. Soon his mother had returned to the rear of the shop to brew a pot of tea and the boy set about the task of repacking his scattered belongings back into the broken box.
“When will you get your results, my son?” asked the boy’s father. It was clear that he had only just registered what Boniface had said some moments before about the inevitable delay.
“In about two or three months,” answered Boniface, kneeling whilst he carefully folded a clean and pressed pair of shorts.
“And what are your plans until then?” The father felt the strangeness of this question deeply within a psyche that denied that such a position was possible. Until that moment, he had always looked upon Boniface as a child. He had never before sought an open opinion from him, having always merely imposed his own.
“There are many things I could do, but there are two in particular. I could certainly help here in the shop...” The boy’s voice tailed off into silence, thus transforming the statement into a question.
The other shook his head gravely. “You can see for yourself what business is like. No one in this place has any money these days. What little people have buys them food, maize and beans, not these things.” With an almost cynically dismissive gesture, the man waved an arm in the vague direction of his shop’s sparsely filled shelves.
Boniface complied with the unintended direction and looked about the room. The four walls of the box were all shelved now. The town’s carpenter had done a wonderful job. They were fine deep shelves, made from new wood, unpainted. True, the hardboard did bow a little here and there under the weight of the goods displayed on top, but that could always be repaired. And there were now goods on display on all the shelves. Not one of the shelves could actually be described as ‘stocked’, but they were not empty. There was at least something on every surface. A small pile of tinned fish here. A pyramid of match boxes there. A fine display of eight tins of Kimbo cooking fat at the back. Bags of sugar and wheat flour. Everything, however, was coated in a fine layer of red dust, thrown up from the road outside by the six buses that passed through Thitani each day, a dust borne on the incessant wind to every corner of the town. Only the open packet of Sportsman on the shelf behind the single glass display cabinet looked as if it had been touched recently. People would always want to buy a cigarette or two.
“We haven’t needed to re-stock the shelves for ages. And we’re not even taking enough money to cover our costs at the moment. I want to sell some new lines, but we’ve no capital.”
There was a pause here. Both Boniface and his father wanted to speak, but it seemed that both knew that whatever they said would be misinterpreted by the other. For Boniface there were only possibilities, whereas his father could see only difficulties.
“Could you get a job as an untrained teacher for a while? Then you would be earning a salary...”
Boniface again set about the repacking of his box as he began his reply. “That was my second option.” An expression of profound relief spread across his father’s face as he realised that there might after all be some agreement, some release from a predicament which threatened to be insoluble. “Father Michael came to see me in Mwingi last Sunday. He said that the new primary school is finished and will open next term. He asked me if I would like to teach there until my results come through.”
“Boniface, that is wonderful news.” Julius Mutisya, the boy’s youthful-looking father, was clearly overjoyed. Privately he had hoped and prayed that things would turn out like this. But there was still that little area of nagging doubt. He thought for a moment before saying more. “So it is to be for just two months until your results are published? Why can’t it be for longer?”
Boniface looked up and smiled. Only his deep respect for his father stopped him from breaking into laughter. “Because he is sure that I will pass all my exams. Of course if I don’t then I’ll have to think again, but both Father Michael and Father Patrick are convinced that I will have no trouble in getting the grades I need to enter the seminary.”
“You are still sure that you want to be a priest, Boniface? You don’t think that it would be better if you trained as a teacher and went on to earn a good salary?”
Boniface made no attempt to answer this. Never before had his father so directly questioned his oft-stated ambition and the boy simply did not know how to react. Initially his father, a man of the Church all his life and a devout Roman Catholic, had praised his son’s professed intentions, but had also always responded with a slight smile and that gentle, if metaphorical, pat on the head with which a parent publicly excuses a child’s naiveté. Having been convinced that his son would somehow grow out of his ambition to join holy orders, as time passed he had been forced to give the often expressed proposition more serious consideration. Father Michael had even begun to take him aside after Sunday mass to discuss the boy’s future. But even when Boniface took up his place in Mwingi’s junior seminary, any thought that he might actually still want to become a priest four years later was inevitably dismissed as utterly implausible. After all, most boys at the seminary regarded it merely as another secondary school, and a very good one at that, in an area where there were too few such institutions to satisfy demand for academic education. There was always great competition for places in Saint Patrick’s Junior Seminary and whatever his son’s eventual ambition might be, he had surely been right to grasp the opportunity which presented itself when he was offered the chance to study there.
The fees had been no problem then. Business, whilst never particularly good, had been adequate, and had provided enough of a return to satisfy all the family’s modest needs as well as a small surplus to invest in more stock. Before long, however, the dry spell which had affected the whole area for some time was renamed a drought and showed no signs of relenting. Life grew tougher for everyone. People needed food rather than new cooking pots or clothes and Mutisya’s small but once dependable trade deserted him. He had no licence to trade grain, none to market animal skins or meat. He could not even deal in the sisal fibre that all his customers were trying to sell to raise those few shillings needed to supplement a poor harvest. Those commodities were not the province of the small shopkeepers. Instead they were traded exclusively by the managed shops, which were part of larger businesses whose interests stretched across the length and breadth of the District. Only these larger concerns had sufficient capital to effect the bulk buying as well as selling of staple produce, which made dealing in such commodities worthwhile. Mutisya’s shop could no longer offer what people wanted. After all, he could never have been described as a trader. Julius Mutisya was merely a shopkeeper and, under these new conditions, he could keep his business alive, but its revenues could no longer sustain his family, for he was effectively excluded from the major economic life of the area.
The foodstuffs he could sell, the pre-packed or tinned products of the food industry, were all too expensive even to be considered by his clientele and, because he was forced to rely on other peoples’ transport for his deliveries, he could no longer compete with the larger shops in Thitani market. Their proprietors also owned the lorries and the profit they made from running his orders paid for their own transport. Effectively he paid their costs and this inflated his own prices relative to theirs. The fact that Julius also had a young family to support compounded the problem and gradually over the last two years he had been forced to sell off much of his existing stock at a loss in order to raise cash to pay school fees. Father Michael had helped by putting two hundred shillings of his own money towards each year’s seminary fees for Boniface, but the
bulk of the burden remained on Julius’s shoulders. If anything, this burden had increased, as local conditions had further worsened.
For some time Julius had looked forward to the day when Boniface would complete his schooling, for only then, when this greatest of his financial burdens was lightened, could another of his fast-maturing children have his chance of an education. Even then, the spectre of hunger would never be far away. Things would always be difficult, at least until the area began to prosper again, even in some small way, but so deep was his conviction that a worthwhile future for his children would be secured only through their education, that he remained willing to make almost any sacrifice short of death to accomplish this end. And thus the day had arrived when the first stage was complete. In his eyes, Boniface, his first-born son, had been granted his rightful turn and the privilege would now pass on to another. But, and here was the worry, from what Father Michael had told him over the previous weeks, he had begun to see that things were destined not to be quite that simple.
His son was determined to enter the priesthood. There could no longer be any doubt about that. Boniface was now mature enough to know his own mind, a fact that Father Michael had been keen to point out repeatedly, and at length, perhaps after every Sunday mass Julius had attended for a year and a half or more. Julius, though equally keen to praise his son’s motives and proud to think that one day he could be a minister of the Church, had been forced to divulge to the priest the financial difficulties he faced. If Boniface were to embark upon what could be several years of extra study, his younger brothers would suffer permanently. The fees for the senior seminary were high and would not be paid entirely by the Church until Boniface had completed two years there. Michael, of course, tried to dispel the father’s fears, saying that, in his son’s case, the Diocese would be able to provide a special grant to cover all expenses. He could make no firm promise at that point, though, for the eventual decision was not his to make. The priest, however, was about as sure as he could be that he could secure such a grant for Boniface.
For Julius Mutisya, however, that was never going to be good enough for it solved only part of the problem. In his opinion, it was Boniface’s unquestionable duty to share responsibility for the family’s welfare. Julius had looked forward to the time when Boniface would earn a school leaver’s salary, help to pay school fees for one of the other children and even invest in the family business, possibly by becoming a partner alongside himself and thus help it prosper again. And that was not all. Boniface was his first-born son. When he married, his own first-born son would take his grandfather’s name and thereby give that name new life. That grandfather would be Julius Mutisya Maluki, himself, and the continuation of his name and through it a family line could only be guaranteed by him.
Again and again Father Michael had tried to dispel the fears. He pointed out that Boniface knew all of his father’s concerns and was determined to treat them with the respect they undoubtedly deserved. He tried in vain to reassure the father that the boy had not taken the decision to enter the priesthood lightly, that all possible consequences had been explained to him, that all possible pitfalls had been clearly described. But deeper down within himself the priest knew he was but skirting the major issue, that he was never confronting Mutisya’s real fears directly, for the man would not admit them even to himself and thus, never openly expressed, they lay beneath a sheen of public identity which itself would not admit to the existence of deeper fears.
The boy’s duty to the rest of the family was only part of the story. What really lay behind Mutisya’s reluctance was a fear for the boy himself. Without marriage and therefore without a legitimate child who would bear his name, he would himself always remain a mere boy according to the rules of a culture which had been absorbed rather than suppressed by a veneer of Christianity, whatever that might itself be. As a devout Christian, Mutisya could never openly admit this point - even to himself - but yet it underpinned his deepest fears for his son. Perhaps it was also responsible for a number of his own fears, but he was never going to admit to any of those fears while he could continue to project all of his own unwanted emotions onto those of his son.
What Boniface proposed would result in a form of eternal damnation. Like a Christian child who died without a name, his own son was destined for a kind of non-existence. And in true Christian spirit he saw this cruel limbo as the worst possible state, worst of all when the non-soul in question apparently tolerated the process. Better damned than ignored.
Julius could not see why his son refused to train as a teacher. It was a profession that carried great respect in the community, as well as a regular income. Someone as academically accomplished and now highly qualified as his son could surely expect to become a headmaster within five years of joining the profession, and that would lead not only to greater earnings but also even greater respect from the community. And, as the son often admitted to his father, the teacher is a great moral leader, occupying a position of potentially unrivalled importance in the personal development of his pupils. In many ways, it was a role not far removed from that of a priest. Indeed in some schools, the teacher was a preacher, whether or not he had been officially trained as a priest, so central to the life of those schools was the study of religion. Boniface had resolved to enter the priesthood, but why could he not find a similar fulfilment in a teaching vocation?
And this is where Julius always became utterly confused. He had tried on many occasions to discuss this with his son, never directly linking it to his own son’s vocation, of course, but at least attempting to address the intellectual dilemma it presented. Julius had been a Church member for long enough himself to have understood that today’s priests, such as Father Michael, were now more interested in their work directly with people, in schools, in health centres and agriculture than they were in the more usual duties of a cleric. He knew that if his son entered the priesthood, he would be trained in this mould, not in the older style of Father O’Hara, who had preceded Michael as parish priest in Migwani. Now Father Michael was always expressing his preference for pastoral work, and said that he saw that as his prime mission. Church work, he had once heard Father Michael say, bored him. He only did it because he had to.
Then why, Julius would ask Boniface, is it not possible for the same pastoral vocation to be pursued with equal effect outside the Church? Why go inside something, just to project yourself out of it all the time? Why become a priest so that you can do God’s work through teaching when you can teach anyway and therefore be doing God’s work? Now if it was the case that his son saw the Church, itself, as the central pillar of his desire to become a priest, he could accept it - accept it, that is, in theory rather than practice. But in his son’s own words, this was not the case.
And then, of course, there was the crucial point of a person’s Christian duty to the family. Training as a teacher outside the priesthood would enable Boniface to earn a salary of his own. He would not only be doing God’s work for his pupils, he would be able to help the other members of his family to have a chance to develop themselves as he had done, and surely this was also God’s work.
At first Boniface could not take his father’s dilemma seriously. Perhaps in the past his father had simply not understood what he had so frequently tried to explain, that he could receive any training he needed for a future profession during the years in the seminary and he always intended to be a teaching priest. But also he thought he had successfully explained to his father many times that above all else he wanted to teach the word of God through the Gospels, as he himself had been taught by Father O’Hara and the priests in Mwingi. Surely his father had registered the fact that his salary would always be paid to the Church? And therefore that the Church, itself, was central to everything he wanted to achieve? The more people worked within its structure, the more work it could do and the wider its teaching would spread.
So it was that, during the short pause, which father an
d son shared, both recalled and re-examined the issue of Boniface’s future. Both of them believed they knew every detail of the other’s position. Somehow it seemed futile to go through it all again, and yet both father and son knew that here and now they would have to revisit the argument, if only to restate their entrenched positions. Eventually Boniface dared to speak through the growing tension of the silence. “But Father, I can train as a teacher at the seminary. I’ve told you that before.”
Mutisya knew the time had come. Raising his voice to shout, he rapped his hand on the shop’s counter to emphasise his conviction. Once broached, his views, which he himself still considered vague, seemed to state, even over-state themselves. “Boniface, you cannot go to the seminary. It is simply out of the question. Why is it that you never listen to what I say? I can’t pay the fees.”
“Then Father Patrick can get the fees. He has always said that he would help us to pay them if we found it difficult to raise the money. He has said on many occasions that the Church needs people like me and so the Church might even look upon my training as an investment for the future rather than a cost for today. I am sure there will be no problem.” Boniface still spoke with great calm. The apparently practical solution he offered, however, did not even begin to address the deeper contradictions that provoked the anger in his father’s outburst.
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