Mission

by Philip Spires

  Then, suddenly, Private Edward’s life was changed. Harry Thuku’s words aroused a nation and transformed discontent into revolt. Major Cunningham entered active service, commanding a force that was now solely concerned with security, not defence. At his request, Private Edward became his personal assistant, entrusted with an ever-increasing amount of Cunningham’s command, thus releasing his superior to address greater, more pressing deeds. When the immediate problem was solved and disturbances died down, the real troubles began. A nation’s conscience had been aroused, its pride fired, and for the colonial masters, control was the only possible solution, the only way of avoiding continued embarrassment. Thus the future role for Cunningham, Edward and their army was defined, as was the need for more recruits to carry it out.

  Impressed by his protégé’s work, Cunningham recommended Edward for training as an officer, which he duly received. It was perhaps not the formal structured training that the graduate of an English university might have received, but it satisfied local requirements, which demanded the promotion of ‘natives’ as both a practical and political necessity. Thus the beliefs that Cunningham had imparted over the years came into their own as Edward strove to become, in his own career, the very image of his master. Edward Munyasya had followed the example faithfully and had thus now received what he judged to be no more than his just rewards.

  It was the Second World War that irretrievably transformed Edward Munyasya’s career and his life with it, though perhaps long before career and life had intertwined to the extent that they were no longer discernible as separate entities. He began in the Sudan, on the southern front of the North African Campaign and continued into Abyssinia. Later, he saw service right across North Africa to the Middle East, but not then as a member of the King’s African Rifles, a secondment enabling him to continue his support of Major Cunningham in his campaigns, an arrangement that could not survive his master’s crossing of the Mediterranean to Europe. His efficiency and effectiveness as a soldier were recognised and noted by his superiors, wherever he served. This, added to his proficiency with the English language, which, after Major Cunningham had sown the seed, he made it almost his life’s work to achieve, attracted responsibility. His accent was an image of Cunningham’s, Guildford crossed with Oxford, nasal vowels mixed with a pretension that endowed class, thus marking him as one worthy of command. And so he was promoted again, and repeatedly.

  By the time he returned to Kenya, battle-hardened and further estranged from his roots at the end of the war, he was Major Edward Munyasya, Major Edward, as he was invariably known in formal circles. He returned to his homeland ready to assume the proud public role to which he had been assigned. In fact he was eager, if not impatient, to seek out and renew his acquaintance with Major Cunningham, but it was not to be. The man was dead, killed in action in Italy. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Munyasya felt himself alone.

  Within a year Major Edward was abroad again, this time in India, again seconded from his own regiment, but this time on his own behalf, in recognition of the fact that he had become an efficient, effective, professional soldier. It was not war which required his services, but civil unrest and for two years he delivered training to local recruits, with those he commanded convinced by accent and action that this man had been trained at Sandhurst. With his job completed, he returned to Kenya, only to be posted again, after a few uneventful years, to Malaya, to a modern conflict that taught him new skills. In the mid-1950s he returned to Kenya again, this time never to leave, not yet quite a stranger to his homeland, to find that the things he had learned could be employed at home and, during the years that preceded independence, the Kikuyu and, on occasions, his own people, became his enemy.

  The foe was to be contained, not killed and it was in part Edward Munyasya’s command which effected the policy of resettling whole communities of the Kikuyu people, to scatter them across the still artificial but now institutionalised country. When it became clear that the policy would not have its desired effect, the measures became harsher and their enactment tougher. Kikuyu men folk were to be moved from their home areas and held in camps where they could be ‘protected’ from the potential horrors of the Land Army. Major Edward, after first leading a transport section, was eventually transferred to become the commander of one such internment camp, incurring not only the undiluted wrath of its inmates, but also the unquestioning trust of his Commanding Officer and through him the respect of the administrators who directed him.

  And then, as they had left India, the British left Kenya. Though on the surface there was more decorum surrounding the hand-over of power than in India’s chaos, behind the scenes there was nothing less than panic. Major Edward, at the behest of the departing power, was granted the rank of Brigadier. It was little more than a parting gesture, a way of both rewarding friends and also a last ditch effort to demonstrate to an increasingly hostile populace that the changes they demanded, notably independence, Africanisation and equal rights with the settlers, would have been granted in any case, in time. But it was this qualification that was the real bone of contention and the politicians knew it. Expediency ruled the day and the colony became an independent state. The British establishment, after accepting as a condition of American victory in the Second World War that their Empire would have to be dismantled, had convinced itself that it could hold on to at least some large tracts of territory, which as yet made insignificant contributions to the world economy. The status of the Indian sub-continent had to change immediately, but there was just a chance that quite large areas of Africa might be retained. They were wrong.

  In the whirlwind of activity which followed KANU’s victory in elections, men like the now Brigadier Edward, those who, in government service, had collaborated with the British and enacted their policies, were ousted quickly and in most cases painlessly by prior agreement with the departing colonial power.

  So, having had greatness thrust upon him by one hand, Munyasya was immediately stripped of the same by another. And so it was that the career army officer reluctantly retired to his homeland, which by and large he had never known, accompanied by his relative wealth and the security of his guaranteed lifetime pension to dull the sting of rejection. Amongst his own people, whom he had effectively left decades before, though he had never deserted nor even shunned them during his long years of absence, he immediately but reluctantly adopted a position of great social standing. With almost radiant pride, he continued to wear the uniform of his rank and thus both demanded and received a degree of respect within the community at least commensurate with that afforded to the country’s new administrators.

  For some time he remained a public figure, but after unsuccessfully seeking appointment as a chief, he resigned himself to his old age and began to devote himself to farming the large tract of land he had bought and cleared. It became a full-time job. Being now too old himself for physical work and having no family to do it for him, he employed labourers to carry out his plans. He thus assumed the role of a manager, indeed a more fitting position for one of his standing in the community. The farm, however, soon began to run itself. As a farmer he was no more than an ignorant novice, whereas those whom he employed had many years of experience. So, gradually, Edward Munyasya’s role diminished, even became redundant. For the first time in his life, his days were empty. He had time to tell the tales of his life, of other lands and of the ways of the British, which he had come to know so well. But stories must have an audience, and Munyasya had none. Tales of the old are for the ears of the young, but Munyasya had no family. The only place which could offer him a regular and dependable audience in this, his home town, was the bar, so Munyasya, whist his labourers worked unsupervised, began to spend his days drinking in the half-dozen bars which encircled Migwani market.

  There he renewed relationships with old friends whom he had previously seen only during his brief periods of leave. Unlike him they had no great stories to tell, having spen
t the entirety of their lives in their home areas. But, as time went by, their words began to affect him more deeply, to captivate his imagination far more than his fast-fading tales had ever affected them. Over the many years during which Munyasya’s life had been totally governed by the pressures of the present, he had ignored and thus almost forgotten the truths that he had been taught as a child, the same truths that still not only affected but governed the lives of his people. It was as if the unacknowledged and ignored fears of his own childhood had been raised from some neglected backwater of his mind. Common knowledge that he had ignored for decades came flooding back to him and privately he began to find it an increasingly painful process.

  He had never married. Who would care for him when he fell ill in his old age? Who would mourn his death and, more importantly, who would continue his father’s name and line in his own memory? These were questions he had not considered for decades and, when his friends in the bar continued to press him for answers, eager to know how he could come to terms with his unenviable position, he began to see perhaps for the first time just how important these considerations had been before he left home to join the Carrier Corps.

  Of course, he answered these questions by re-affirming his Christian faith. Publicly it offered a solution to every problem he might be called to face. It rationalised death, gave meaning to life as a progression to something greater, justified all he personally had done in life and, most importantly, excused his failures. But his adopted beliefs had never before been seriously challenged from outside in this way and the self-justification he offered his peers began to ring increasingly hollow in his ears.

  He had in fact planned to marry before he left home to join the war effort. Virtually everything had been agreed, but at the time the adolescent Munyasya could not afford to pay the required dowry. He had persuaded his future father-in-law to be patient for a few months to allow himself time to earn the money needed to buy the cows which were being demanded for his future wife’s hand. Munyasya thus left for the war planning to save his earnings during the months he would be away. He would then fulfil his promise and have his wife. It would have been better that way, rather than to marry immediately and spend several years paying off the dowry piecemeal whenever surplus production on his stepfather’s farm allowed. This way would also allow him to pay everything at once, but neither he nor any of the others who had enlisted in the Carrier Corps knew in advance that their work would take them away from home for years rather than months of trekking through German colonial territory.

  By the time he returned, his fiancée had married another and borne him a child. It was no consolation to learn that it had been the girl’s father who had insisted on the union, fearing that, as the months passed into years without sign of Munyasya’s return, he might be left with a completely unmarriageable daughter unless he acted quickly. The fact that he had already received several payments towards the dowry, which after all had been his only true desire, had made no difference. Saddened, Munyasya had returned to Nairobi after that short period of leave and enlisted in the army proper, determined to make it his career. As the years passed, even though he unquestionably put the disappointment behind him, it seemed that the opportunity to marry never again presented itself. Thus an old man, who possessed many grandfather’s tales to tell, had no grandchildren to listen.

  As his dependence upon the company in the bar and with it his dependence on the beer he drank there both increased, continued reflection and thought prompted by his friends made him feel ever more cheated by his own life. The obvious differences between himself and those around him gave rise to deep private feelings of loneliness and isolation that, unrelieved, bred cynicism. Having had no family of his own and, over the years since independence, having either lost contact with or suffered estrangement from all his surviving relatives - none of whom had been close for over forty years anyway - he was left quite alone in what remained of his life. He began to shun contact with others, to avoid their increasingly painful questions and, for a short while, even toyed with the idea of leaving his farm to live in the city. But he had no friends at all there and he could not bring himself to desert the community, which for some years, had sought his advice, respected his wisdom and gratefully accepted his participation on councils and committees. People here seemed to need him and constantly encouraged him to stay. Loyalty, a quality he had always possessed in good measure, still governed all he did.

  Until his accident, he had appeared to be in fine health. When he did not recover, it was assumed that his injuries had been very serious, but most people who knew him at all well saw that the deterioration in his health was inevitable and directly attributable to his alcoholism. What was surprising, however, was how quickly the changes happened. In the space of a few days he was transformed from an old but still overtly strong man to a broken and weary destitute. He stopped eating completely for some months, preferring to live on beer and, when he no longer had the strength to walk to town to buy it, he took to sleeping under the tree in the market place so that he would never be too far away from the bar. Surely this complete and unexpected transformation could not have come about as a result of mere illness. When the old man lived on in this state for year after year, however, it became obvious that there were other forces than simple sickness or old age at play.

  His constant murmuring surely held the key to what had afflicted him, but then no one could ever quite discern what he was saying. Neither was it either desirable or possible for anyone to sit and talk with him now, nor to try to offer help for his condition. He seemed lost to the world. He could not be helped because the old man had grown so cynical that he flatly refused to enter into any communication with others and, more importantly, it was not possible to offer any assistance because the Munyasya that he had become was now sometimes a man to be feared. Most people, therefore, kept their distance.

  The accident had changed his mind. He had always been a mild-mannered, even-tempered man, but now he was irascible and unpredictable, to say the least. By some strange feat, this bedraggled bundle of bones, which he had become, could transform itself into something fired with tremendous energy and terrific rage. His limbs would grow stiff and strong and his body would grow stunned and straight. With his back erect, his entire frame could seem almost restored to youth, boasting the power of a man in his prime. His voice, no longer an indiscernible murmur, would bellow out at great volume, speaking clearly of things from the depths of some unknown past, far beyond the scope of his own memory. He would speak of his family and his children, of which, of course, there had been none. He would sometimes challenge passers by at random. On those occasions he would square up to his target, stretching his body to its full height and speak in a declamatory way very close to the other’s face, so close that his fetid breath would bring an immediate grimace from the other. He had even once or twice physically attacked people, something that the ever mild-mannered Munyasya would never have done, at least outside active service.

  And his eyes that normally were surely sightless would pick up smallest details of behaviour, even the slightest changes of expression in the faces of those he confronted. It was this man whom people feared so much. Opinion around the town was that he had been infected by some spirit and later, when he began to proclaim curses upon those he confronted, this was surely confirmed.

  He became obsessed with the paintings of snakes on the wall of his favourite bar. The word nzoka, ‘snake’, seemed to be constantly on his lips and often emerged from within the otherwise toneless and indiscernible murmur he constantly mouthed. But then it was his stepfather’s name, which he himself had once opted to bear. To name a child after an animal, contrary to the tradition of using those of close relatives in a fixed and known pecking order of familial proximity to the newborn child identified a family that had suffered infant deaths. The spirits clearly knew the family names and could call their victim with friendly persuasion, so they must be tricke
d with something they would not recognise. And so it was that many people in a community which accepted child mortality almost as the norm that there were many people named after animals - snake, hyena, lion, cheetah, elephant and rhino, places, mountains, trees or even the weather. So when Munyasya Nzoka spoke of snakes, he could just be talking about himself. But soon he had taken to tying a length of string to his thumb of his left hand. A foot or so long and usually left to dangle limp in the air, it was generally not noticed, even by those whom he confronted. But this was his own snake, the pet with which he would constantly play whenever the work ‘nzoka’ lay on his lips.

  After the women who sat all day in the market place with their piles of tomatoes and onions had packed away their wares and gone home, Munyasya would scour the earth for new pieces of string, discarded from sacks and bundles which had been considerably larger when they had arrived in the market than they were in the evening after a day of trade. If small, he would tie them to the end of what was already hanging from his thumb, an operation that might demand an hour or more of concentrated application. If, on the other hand what he found was long and still in good condition, he would reject the old concatenated knotty twine and replace all of it with this newfound treasure. On most occasions, however, he found it quite impossible to untie the existing knot. It was a fool trying to untie another fool’s knot. So for a while old and new co-existed side by side in an uneasy and unequal partnership until one or the other simply frayed and wore off his thumb.