The Present Moment

by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

  ‘He said they were expensive and a waste of time. But a man who does not believe in anything will surely come to grief, and unfortunately the end came on a day when he had taken his younger brother out with him. None of the men came back and there was no trace of the boat. For a long time my co-wife was completely broken down – sons gone, boat gone, and the families of the other men blaming her for what had happened. It was a terrible time. Her elder daughter had been sent to boarding school up to standard eight and was training as a teacher, a great thing in those days, but she got pregnant and ran away from the college and we never heard what became of her or received any dowry. The little one was now about thirteen and doing well at school, but of course she had to leave because there was no money for fees, and she was needed to help her mother with the fish business.

  ‘We managed to keep on, but not very easily. We worked – jowa, that time, in the 1950s, we worked. We were happy in a way because of the Uhuru we were hearing about. But these young people think that to have a job is just enjoyment – money at the end of the month and the rest of the time sitting around drinking tea – that is far from it, mama.’

  The schoolgirl giggled. Her fees depended on the commission her mother made getting orders for shoes and knitwear from bored girls in office after office she dropped into for a chat during a carefully planned working day. Mrs Reinhold frowned: one of her daily problems was the clamour for jobs from people who had never learned what it meant to have a job.

  ‘Florence had her little bit of money but of course she wanted shoes out of it, a handbag, skin cream – you ask Wairimu, she has worked for wages ever since she was young, she knows what girls are: but work, running here, running there, carrying the dirty pans, going to rooms where people were half-dead, cut open and stinking, or even completely dead, that is not easy, and without the praise a nurse gets for it either. Whether you had a bad head or what, always running, and mother always asking for rent out of your money: myself I was providing the food, the market payments, the charcoal, the fares to Uyoma. I think if we had been working alone we might have made a fair profit, but having always to allow a share to Min Omondi, who was in a very low state anyway because of the expense of that big funeral, it was a hard grind. Often we had only the leftover fish to eat, the ones that would not last till morning, and the smell seemed to be around us day and night.

  ‘So I was not surprised that Florence wanted to get away from it. She started to spend nights at her girlfriend’s place in railway quarters. I could not object so long as she was helping me. Girlfriends, of course, have brothers, cousins, uncles: don’t suppose I hadn’t thought of it. Soon she was wanting to be married by a Kisumu man.

  ‘Well, of course I asked, “What about the dowry? Where are your uncles to speak for you? Where is your mother from? Do you have regular work?”

  ‘He was a gardener and groundsman at one of the schools.

  ‘“It’s a bit late, mother-in-law, isn’t it, to be asking these questions?”

  ‘That’s what he said to my face. No respect at all.

  ‘“I reckon you’ve got less than four months to get them answered, Min Florence. I’m ready to give her a roof and a name for the baby,” he said to me. “And if my brother can help me to scrape together five hundred shillings, that might pay your rent for a year, I suppose. As to talk about registering the marriage, leave that till we see how we get on. If you think with all that education she’s fit for a doctor or a lawyer, then you’d better look after the bastard yourself, hadn’t you?”

  ‘And what could I do? It wasn’t like now, when a girl goes back to work a month after she’s had her baby whether she’s married or not. I couldn’t have kept the two of them, and in any case she was set on having this husband. But I felt my heart sinking, for he was not clean in the way that a man who has come home from honest work and respects his neighbours makes himself clean, and not careful, even in the way that a man living under begging eyes on low wages can be careful. It was a weary year for me. If it hadn’t been that Vitalis sent me a few shillings out of his pay now and then, I don’t know how I’d have got through it.

  ‘By this time it was the late fifties: conferences going on, elections, parties forming and reforming, Women’s Progress movement, more and more children going to school – it was exciting if you think back over it. And me getting near the end of my womanhood, almost crying at the waste of it, but getting some strength from those church women I worked with. I knew in any case that none of those layabouts who tried to get on visiting terms with me were fit to stand in the same drill yard as the husband I’d lost. Besides, I was a grandmother already, though Margaret did not write to me, and not wanting to give Florence any excuse for misbehaving either (as though she needed one). Perhaps I was a fool, as some of you think, to refuse to be married again in Uyoma, but I swear to God I never gave my husband cause to be ashamed of me when he was alive or after he was dead, and now I’m glad of it.

  ‘So it went on, fish, fish, fish till Uhuru, and the rest of you remember that too, how we all expected that the sky would light up and everyone would pay twice as much as before for whatever he bought from you. Did they now? Somehow in these twenty years we’ve got more dresses than we ever expected then, and shoes. Children of people we know are going to the university. You go on a country bus without picking up any bugs – that’s something, I suppose – there are better jobs for women and all those good houses filled with our own black people. Yes, things have got better, but slowly. Then we were looking for miracles.

  ‘All right, Uhuru! Flags, fountains, shouts and songs. And then you remember what – mutiny! Perhaps it did not sound so terrible to you compared with all the other new words we’ve got used to – hostage, hijack, mugging. But to those of us who had grown up in the military it was like a thunderbolt, the extreme evil, the breaking up of all the rules you live within. Change of flag, picture, tune had not before meant for me the splitting of the framework.

  ‘People in the market had radios. They came to tell me. Yesterday it was a far-off event in Uganda and Tanganyika. Today it was among us. Vitalis was at Lanet. The road was closed. Vehicles were not going through to Nairobi. Trains were overloaded. One of the saved sisters came and handled the money for me. She could see that I was half-blind with tears. It was like a sort of death.

  ‘In fact to other people it was not what I meant by a mutiny. There were no symbols of disgrace and death, and in a couple of days it was all over. Perhaps a new country, I thought, can teach people new rules. For the first time I began to doubt whether I could cope with changes to come. For the army, I was thankful it was no worse. But Vitalis – Vitalis was gone. A deserter.

  ‘I haven’t seen him for nineteen years. He is my only son and I don’t know whether he is alive or dead. But it isn’t just that, you know. Some people’s children go to America and stay there. Or even to Nairobi and stay there. They get a letter now and again or perhaps a photograph. Even if your son doesn’t have money and presents to send you, you still have a son. Even if he doesn’t keep in touch, you have some idea how he is making out. Even if he was buried in Burma, you have the measure of his life. Take my daughter Margaret. She was in another country and we got very little news, but the family carried on. Then in 1975 the border was closed. A little while after that we heard that she had died of cholera. There was no way to go to the funeral. I have grandchildren there that I have never seen. There is nothing they could do for me even now that there is talk of opening the border. I am settled after four years here in the Refuge and there is nowhere I would be better looked after. But Margaret has had her life. One is not ashamed.

  ‘Vitalis has broken his father’s greatest taboo. He must have had reason, I suppose. As you grow older, you find loyalty is more complicated than you used to think. Why should a woman be ashamed before all other men except those picked for her from Uyoma, if there is even that much choice? Why should you hear talk from your daughter’s man that even your own broth
er would be ashamed to use before you? Why should you not ask the DC, now that he is your fellow African, the same price you asked of the DC when he was a white man? I may perhaps still have an only son. But because of these taboos we taught him he dare not come near us and we do not know where he stays or even what name he is using. As though the taboo means more than being a son. Is it not strange?’

  ‘And Florence?’ asked Mrs Reinhold gently, aloud, but silently asking herself whether it was not better, after all, to be childless and not disappointed. ‘Is not Florence able to help you?’

  ‘Florence?’ Rahel seemed surprised to be asked. ‘Perhaps she went further away than either of the others. She stayed with that man and got a second baby. Then he took them to Nairobi, and she waited a long time but at last started a third. This was after Vitalis deserted. By now her man was drinking badly, and he beat her and beat her until she died: neighbours took her to hospital, but it was too late to save her or the baby. When that happened, the husband was so frightened that he ran away. She was already buried in a Nairobi cemetery before I heard about it from a Kisumu girl who was training in that hospital. Because the father had run away, the children were taken to an orphanage. The police could not trace relations. I suppose the Kisumu people thought if they came forward to claim the children the man would be identified and arrested. My friends advised me not to say anything, or I might be asked to pay for the children’s keep, and what could I do? They look after them well and send them to school, I hear. At least in the Children’s Home in Kisumu they used to do that. Of course they will be grown-up by now, Jimmie and Janet, but I would not know them if I saw them, and why should they bother about me, since I was not able to make a home for them?’

  She turned to her friends and spoke in Swahili. The girl still translated, with only a little hesitation, into English. She was not considered very bright at school. The teachers wished she could give a more detached attention to problems in chemistry and home hygiene.

  ‘I keep remembering the dead tree, Wairimu, the dead tree.’

  ‘The years are long,’ said Wairimu. ‘But do you not have any people at all?’

  ‘We don’t always know. It doesn’t seem possible, does it? When we were young, we could not have helped knowing, because everybody was attached to a place – though I hear your people moved about more than ours. My co-wife and her youngest daughter died in the cholera – that was after I had my accident and came to Nairobi. I believe the daughter had some children – she had left her husband – so perhaps they live on that little bit of land. But even if I did not have this bad leg, I could hardly get a living on it without the fish, and who would help me with the fish now?

  ‘The accident happened when things fell on me off the top of a bus when I was reaching up for the fish baskets – Matron must have told you about that. First I was in Kisumu Hospital for six months and the landlord took the few bits and pieces I had in the room for the rent I owed him. I suppose he thought I was going to die there. Then they sent me to Nairobi and I was in the ward for a year. They said someone must come from Kisumu to fetch me when I could walk a bit – there’s a laugh, isn’t it? Then when they found there was no one they brought me here.

  ‘My middle brothers and sisters died long ago. The youngest – the one my husband refused to take – well, laugh with me: her husband was a DC before he retired, and he has a big farm nowadays. But of course he does not have to help his wife’s relations. His responsibility is to the nation.’

  The old ladies cackled together at this, after Mrs Reinhold had signified her thanks and left, looking burdened, choked.

  ‘I don’t blame him at all,’ said Rahel, wiping her eyes. ‘I know how he treated his first wife, you see, and all the worse after he took up with my little sister, and I’ve told them both what I think. But she’s a match for him, I’ll tell you that.’

  ‘And so here you are in a home with one bad leg.’

  ‘Here I am in a home with one good leg and a number of grandchildren whom I hope I may be proud of. They have no reason to be ashamed of me. And so I still don’t see why the fighting looks so terrible to you Kikuyu ladies.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘It was not terrible just to us, but to everyone who sees the gunshot end of it,’ said Priscilla primly, the screams echoing in her ears as she bent her head to pick a thread of cotton from the front of her dress, where the blood from the child’s throat had flowed. Pangas, she thought to herself, knives, not guns, and it was not guns, either, which had caused her brother’s shame of which, to this day, no one in the family had ever spoken openly.

  Wairimu also was thinking less of guns than of banana arches and rings of hide, the silent garotte and the evening roadblock. But she said simply, ‘I was there at the Harry Thuku riots. We heard that there was a big meeting and that everyone was going, so of course I had to join in too. I learned early enough about terrible things.’

  She paused. That was more than sixty years ago, beyond the memory of many of the women in the home, beyond the experience of most, who had grown up with the certainty of being initiated, manipulated, screened, divided into categories and the hope of being ultimately provided for. How many had ever initiated, developed, understood that they were the providers? And yet when she had been near the heart of things – which was, she supposed, the sense of that calling, the flash of sunlight on the dreary path – she had run away. Just like the Lord’s disciples, in fact, but one was allowed to read into it that their womenfolk had a little more sense of occasion. As for these fellow-residents of hers, perhaps they were not all as dull as she was tempted to think them. When they muddled the years and answered out of the question, perhaps they were only hiding the memory of their own retreats or, like Bessie, closing their minds to the unthinkable.

  ‘Thuku had been arrested with some other people and we thought, somehow, that we could get him out. The police lines were not far from where Central Police Station is now, and the place where it all happened is now called Harry Thuku Road, just there beside the university. The Norfolk Hotel was already there and the Native Civil Hospital was nearby. Opposite the Norfolk, where the National Theatre is now, there used to be a sort of market for horses and other livestock brought down from the north.

  ‘People were already disturbed. On Tuesday, the day before the arrest, there had been what they call hartal at the bazaar. That means that most of the shops were shut – it was something to do with Mr Gandhi in India, and there was a big meeting of Indians in Jeevanjee Gardens. It seems they wanted fairer dealing in India as we did here, and someone explained to me that that was why they were friendly to Thuku, but none of them came to our meeting, though a few were walking about nearby.

  ‘In fact everything was out of order, though I was too new to Nairobi to feel it coming. Well, by the 1950s I had acquired more sense of trouble on the way. Men were talking about a strike in the mines in South Africa. In Kavirondo (that is what we used to call Nyanza and Western – you know it’s true, Rahel, so don’t shake your head at me), people were also restless because of the rise in tax and because they were not getting compensation for their men who died in the Great War. There was famine at the Coast and – we heard later – freak rainstorms at Naivasha. You might say it was like the signs of a storm – the sky seeming to harden, the sudden chill, birds chattering, a kind of hush in the air, people running for cover, before you actually hear the thunder or feel the first big, slow raindrop. In fact, what was happening was Nairobi drawing together, becoming, on the African side, a community. The crisis was just like the shedding of blood at circumcision, a mark of the maturity which, if you gave it a chance, would be coming about anyway. Most of us were Kikuyu, it is true, in that meeting, but everybody knew what was going on, even the Somali and the Luo kept their children home from school and their wives from market that day. And, as in the storm, the thunder did not last long – we ran away soon enough. But the rain went on. The ground was ready and the community began to grow. />
  ‘We went there on Wednesday evening. I was supposed to be at the tea room, but most of the men were going to the police lines so I went too. Mr Doorly, the magistrate, spoke in Swahili, telling the people to go home. A lot of them did go, and so did I when it was getting dark. I had stopped being afraid of meeting a rough man at night, but those shiny bayonets the police were holding were another matter. I did not like the idea of one of those sliding up on me after the street lights went out, or the prospect of someone herding us into the police cells.

  ‘But those who remained stood where our leaders told them, looking angry but not making a fuss. I suppose it must have got cold in the middle of the night, because then some started moving about and praying aloud. Then the police got restive too, and started blowing bugles to call out those who had turned in, and both sides complained about the noise disturbing the sick people in hospital. The African police must have been fed up by the end of it too – on duty day and night, with people shouting at them from the front and giving them orders from the back.

  ‘Before light in the morning men with bicycles were all over Nairobi calling on house servants and others to come and join the crowd, and when I got to the place at eight o’clock there were already three thousand people, it was said, and others still pouring in. All the same it was very calm. Most of them were men, of course (there have always been more men than women in Nairobi) but in one corner, where the Europeans used to play with bats and balls, there was a big group of women, and I wriggled my way through to join them. Some Europeans were talking to the crowd in English and Swahili – I knew the difference by then, though I could not understand either – and our leaders translated some of the speeches into Kikuyu. Six of us came forward – these were the men chosen to go and see Bowring, who was next to the Governor. There was no dispute about who should go. Other men were walking about telling us to burn our registration kipandes and refuse to pay tax, but I didn’t have a kipande or pay tax either. This was when we started feeling more restless and some people got hold of sticks. Afterwards some stones were thrown, but I didn’t see many stones about, except perhaps some pieces of tile broken off from some building work.