‘After a long time the delegates came back and told us in Kikuyu that Thuku could not be released until he had talked with the Governor, but we had better go home as they had had a chance to put their points. They said it with very straight faces and some of us were not sure whether they meant it or not. That is one trouble with our people – it is not easy to read our faces. Some men who had been sitting on the ground stood up as though to leave, and then some of the women called the men cowards and urged them to fight it out. That was when we found ourselves moving forward towards the iron fence. You couldn’t stand against the crowd, you were just pushed forward, which meant that most of the women were in front, and the European officers who had been walking up and down between the armed police and the crowd were knocked forward too. There was a young Kikuyu man about my age carrying a white flag. He had been there in the evening and in the morning he was still carrying it. The shooting started after he had been knocked down in a scuffle with a white officer, but it was difficult in the confusion to tell exactly what was happening. Mr Doorly had read out some orders in Swahili and at the same time soldiers arrived behind us in the open grassy place near the Scottish church. All of a sudden there was one shot, then some more. I don’t know how I knew what it was, but of course we had been watching those armed police for hours and I never had any doubt about it. Mary, the bravest of all, was there with blood streaming from her. Mr Wright, the European padre, was standing nearby. He didn’t throw himself down like others, and some of us girls got as near to him as we could, somehow thinking that shots could not go near a white man. Poor man, it was as close as he ever came to sinful women, probably, but he did not look frightened, only distressed that we should be bewildered, divided and in pain. It could not have been more than a minute or two, though it seemed an age, before people were turning to run away, and that gave space for us who were crowded at the front also to run, and again be carried along with the rest. I was expecting more shots from behind, but although we had seen the policemen being issued with more bullets (I’ve learned a lot about bullets since then) they were so jammed together that they couldn’t possibly have reloaded until we were already on the retreat, even if they had wanted to. There were some whistles and bugles blowing, everything in confusion.
‘I tell you, I was scared. For all I thought I knew the world, I was still a kid, not yet eighteen. It was quite clear to me that I had seen people die. And remember, this was not supposed to happen, however old you were. You put people nearly dead out in the forest rather than meet the shame of seeing them die. At that time I would rather have faced the police bayonets a dozen times than worked in the Native Civil Hospital. It was obscene to be face to face with sickness, touching, smelling, hearing the death-throes. But I understood that this was real fighting. I had seen our great hero and come close to where he was shut up in prison, and not even a great crowd of us could get him out. I learned something about power that day. They took him away for years and years and his name was hardly mentioned. . . .
‘I had seen that golden haze over the city turn black and smoky, and the women who looked so smart and strong to me that first morning I had seen slinking into back alleys in dirty wrappers, smelling of drink and weakened by disease. The men whom I admired for their knowledge of other languages, their clothes, their command of town life, mostly showed no respect for either girl or woman, and little enough even for elders. The dream had turned into a nightmare.’
But Rahel could not understand nightmare. Sophia could not understand the excitement of first seeing paved streets and storeyed buildings. The younger ones, even those to whom Wairimu could have spoken her heart out in Kikuyu, could not remember the crying in the forest or even the rupee (they could not connect it with the word mbia) and had no memory of seeing their first bicycle or their first Indian or being afraid of a big, black Luo who was said to eat people. Wairimu found the pictures blocked in her mind, unable to get out.
She had run through the streets back to the tea shanty, only afterwards noticing that the cuts and alleyways had become as familiar to her feet as the twists and turns of forest paths. She had not even paused to think where she could rush ahead, where she must give way to an important pedestrian: the knowledge was buried in her. She poured out her story to Nduta – Samson, of course, had been at the meeting, though she had not seen him in the crowd. Nduta was boiling huge sufurias of maize and beans. Whatever else, people would be hungry today and some would be afraid to go home. And if you were searched, it was better to be about your normal business.
Wairimu was sobbing.
‘I did not know it would be like this. It would be better if I had never come. I do not want to get like these sour, smelly women. I like working for you here, but in the town I see no escape from changing. I want to go. . . .’
‘Home?’
‘No, not home. I am afraid to go home. I am no longer a girl in their eyes. They would taunt me, and – and –’
She did not want to say that she thought she was barren. By now she had enough experience to suspect it. Enough, anyway, to know that even with a child she could not settle back to life within the ridge. That would neither expel her fear nor satisfy even the narrowest part of her dream. She had chosen and so she was destined to go on choosing.
‘Not home. Perhaps back to the coffee.’
‘Yes, do that. Go today – go now. The town is not yet ready for you. Unless you have a man – a husband, best, or a father to speak for you, but at least a steady man – you get the worst of the bargain here. You can get money, but as yet there is no way for you to get good from the money as you would from beans or sweet potatoes or wood if you had plenty. One day it may well be different. And we do not know what kind of trouble the day will bring, but trouble it is bound to be. So let me advise you. Pack up your dresses and your new beads. You could sell them here, but perhaps away from town you will get a better price. Put on your old cloth tied over your shoulder, pick up your bundle and go. But you should not walk alone, and if you show money for the train they will ask you a lot of questions. Is there any older person who can accompany you?’
‘I think this, mother; please help me. When I came I had no thought of going back or of anything but seeing marvels. But I know it is not only from Nyeri that the coffee comes. The drivers have told me that sacks are brought together in great numbers for sale. So, since I do not want to go home yet – perhaps I may go when I am older and they have stopped trying to make a marriage for me and when I have presents for them – is there not somewhere nearer where I could get the same work?’
‘Of course, if you are willing. There are plenty of coffee farms nearby, and because of the dispute about the wages some of their workers will have gone away. Get your things ready now, and I will tell you how to get to the Kabete road, but if I can find anyone going that way it will be safer. You don’t need to wait for Samson to come: you tell me he was not where the bullets were passing: he has money and knows how to keep himself safe. I do not know quite what we should give you, but take these three florins for now – hide them, but remember you will have to change them for the new shillings when they come. We are sure to see one another again and you can bargain with Samson then.’
Wairimu had not actually been expecting money: she had got some from the men who called her to their rooms and had learned from other girls what to ask for and what to pay for things, since in town you had a choice of traders, not like the farm store where you had to pay what was asked. That was a lesson it was well to learn early, reflected Wairimu as she took up her story again.
‘In the little room at the back I changed into my old yellow cloth and just enough beads to look natural. In the kanga I had bought I wrapped my two “European” dresses and other ornaments, a tin mug that was my own, a bar of soap, a headscarf of which I was very proud, a calico waistcloth and my little bit of money. I also had a small knife, some brown sugar twisted in a piece of newspaper, and a leaflet of the East African Association that
I had bought for five cents although I didn’t know how to read it. I folded this carefully inside my clothes, put the lot in the kiondo basket I had come from Nyeri with and slung it round my forehead. I was ready.
‘But Nduta told me to wait a little. She was talking to a smart man I had seen before, and giving him tea in one of her best cups. This was a family connection of hers, she told me, who usually called when he was in town. He worked in the house of a Mzungu along the way to Kabete, and was sent in for post and shopping once a week or so. He would take me part of the way and explain to me what Europeans wanted of their staff. His name was John Wanyama and I should address him as Mr John.
‘Mr John soon let me know that he was an important person, skilled in the handling of European stoves and water-sources. However I need not offer to carry his burdens, because this was his master’s jacket back from the tailor’s and he could not trust it in the hands of such a person as myself. In the streets he expected me to keep submissively behind him, but once we were by the old railway track – where Uhuru Highway is now – he allowed some conversation. He wanted to avoid the scene of the meeting, though that might have been a short cut, and even down to Sixth Avenue soldiers were inspecting the town in pairs, hustling out any Kikuyu they found in alleys and doorways and directing them towards Pangani Village. Since there were armed askaris cruising the streets in cars, it was easy enough to see that the people followed directions, and seeing the way they were handled I was glad enough that the soldiers had had no part in the morning’s clashes. But John’s packet of letters and his employer’s chit kept him safe, and I suppose the askaris took me for a wife of his, ignorant of what standards a paragon like John would impose upon a wife.
‘We walked up past Chiromo where, he said, his master had camped in a tent by the river when he first arrived in the country long before, and past the mpaka or boundary of Nairobi town. The place still looked to me full of people, but more homely, through woody lanes, and Mr John kept telling me that the way to advance in work was to join a European household. I could take him as an example – his neat shirt and shorts and tyre-rubber sandals, his pair of keys, his baptised status, his children going to school, his self-contained house – I thought all houses were self-contained until he explained – and two servants under him. Domestic service, he explained to me, was really important work for men, but some ladies were beginning to take black nursemaids for their children or to do a bit of laundry, and this would give me better status and security than agricultural work – that was what women did at home and anyone who wanted advancement must look for something better. His own master did not have small children, but some of his friends employed Swahili, Seychelloise or mixed-race women, and it was really a great concession for them to consider local girls or widows.
‘I promised that I would think about it when I had got some experience and had learned to speak Swahili, as this was necessary for getting along in town. Was I crazy or what? Two hours ago I had been sobbing in the urgency of leaving Nairobi. But this was a balmy place where you could hardly imagine the sound of gunshots, and all the Africans in sight were skipping nimbly about some sophisticated business of their masters. John said I was very sensible. I did not tell him that I thought myself too grown-up to be looking after someone else’s babies or washing her dirty clothes, but I took note of the place he lived in case I should have any more questions to ask and followed his directions about half an hour further on to the first of the coffee farms.
‘We had left River Road, I suppose, after three in the afternoon, a couple of hours after Mary’s shouts had flowered into blood. So the sun was well down by the time I reached the first farm and in Nyeri, I knew, the plantation office would already be closed. I wondered what I could do if left alone in a place that did not seem to have any familiar homesteads. Perhaps here too a line had been drawn between the coffee and the places where people lived. I should not have liked to be forced to appeal to Mr John with his fancy airs, but perhaps it was safe to walk among European houses even after dark. Fortunately I did not need to try.
‘The clerk at the first farm said he could not register any more people that day but they were short of workers and I could come back in the morning. I told him that I was far from my place. I had gone to see my brother in Nairobi – that was what I thought I had better tell him – but he had gone away and his friends had told me that I could not fail to get work on the farm since I had experience in coffee. Well, he agreed, that was so. Some workers had got above themselves with the troubles of these days and therefore they were short-handed. He could perhaps find somewhere for me to stay the night if I had some money left from my last job to compensate the lady who would put me up. I said, of course, that I had no money left but a little sugar and soap that might make me welcome, and so he called one of the older women passing and she agreed to take me with her for the night. Next morning I put my fingerprint on the form.
‘I was, in a sort of way, happy. I knew the work, and how to get advantage from the work, better than when I had first started in the coffee at Nyeri. I was safe from the danger of yesterday. I was safe also, for a while, from questions at home. I had seen Nairobi. I was not yet satisfied – even to this day I cannot say I have seen all of Nairobi – but there was the city within walking distance, with people I knew and streets I knew, waiting to be explored. On a Sunday I could go and come back and not be much more tired than if I had made three trips to the river for water. I had not yet got shoes, but I had enough money for shoes now and was going to earn some more. Surely I should be content.
‘As I picked, I thought and thought, and I realised that this was the gift Waitito had given me in return for what he took from me. He had opened a door through which one could see picture after picture, more lively and colourful than the black, dead pictures which get on to each side of a page on a newspaper, and try oneself out on each, accepting or rejecting. Before there had been pictures – Wairimu, girl – Wairimu, bride – Wairimu, mother – Wairimu, elder’s wife – Wairimu, grandmother – but nothing to choose between them, only to be chosen. And if one was not chosen to have a child then the pictures became very few indeed. Not many people were like Mary Nyanjiru, who had a song sung about her even after she died outside the police lines – Kanyegenuri, you remember. We used to sing it all the time, and I still sing it now when I need to get my courage up.
‘So I picked and thought, picked and thought, earned enough to eat and a bit to save, made friends enough for day to day but saved a bit of myself too, undisclosed, ambitious, special. What must I aim at? First, to know Swahili, not in order to be a servant like Mr John, even a rich servant, but to enter a wider world than the Kikuyu world, to understand Nairobi, even if it were only on a Sunday, to go home with power – that meant with presents and knowledge, like a boy. So that even if they wanted to pair me. . . .’
‘Do you know the time?’ asked Sophia. ‘I do not want to miss the TV.’
‘Really, Wairimu,’ said Priscilla, taking advantage of the interruption, ‘there is nothing wicked about being a servant. Most people are servants of somebody and all of us are servants of God, and Jesus Himself. . . .’
‘Yes, yes, I know. I did not mean it like that. You started by being a servant and ended up a friend to your madam. But someone like John would never be a friend to anybody. He can only be Mr.’
‘Mama Chungu was a housemaid,’ cried Sophia, hoping for further revelations. ‘You told me that much once. Were your employers like friends?’
‘Bosses are bosses,’ replied Mama Chungu with a shrug. ‘It would not help to remember them. You have your own life to live.’ She would not be drawn any further.
All the same, Wairimu continued the recital of memories to herself. Some things one could not share. At least, not with virtuous, desiccated old women. The very best one might, for a little while, share with a man. Some people did. . . .
‘So that even if they wanted to pair me it would not be only within the daily tr
amp for water, digging and shelling, peeling and digging again, bent under firewood. I did not despise these things, and don’t – fire, food and water, even here in the Refuge, our life centres on these three – but already, at eighteen, I had seen that it is not necessary to being a woman to be bent against the painful forehead-strap, with a little hump down on your spine and danger in bearing children because of it. I have seen hairy white women, big-eyed Indian women, big-nosed Arab women, big-boned charcoal-black women all standing straight and not lacking for food and fire and water. My body, too, can be respected.
‘Respected but also used. The circumcisor’s knife has not cut away the urgent need for that. So I must find out what there is for me before I become withered and shrunk like some of these women at the coffee, whose husbands went away to the war and did not come back, whose land was given by their “chief” to the strangers and cannot be got back, whose strength is used up in weeping and protest, roadwork and terracing, and cannot come back.
‘That is what I thought – are you awake, Rahel? I am trying to share, I am trying – and that is what I still think. Though I have never had a child, it is not struggle and weeping that have dried up this body of mine. I have a good age and have had good times, sister. If I had then pictured old age, shivering, feeding the fire under the porridge-pot, I should not have seen it as lively and comradely as this we have.
‘So I listened and practised, listened and practised, talking with the ayahs and the house servants and the clerks of other tribes until I had mastered this language I speak to you now – not as Sophia speaks it, I grant you, but well enough to describe what I have seen.
The Present Moment Page 7