Their sense of time was all disordered. At nightfall the remaining locusts went to roost and it was only when the moon came into view that they realised it was natural night. People started scooping up the insects from the ground to cook and eat. Wairimu was so weary that she drank a little uji and fell asleep.
Next morning they saw the full extent of the destruction. The bushes were stripped bare, down to the woody stems, some broken with the beating given them in the dark. Even the grass at the edge of the paths and the flowers in the house garden had been eaten up. They did not know where to start work. The Master looked grey and worn out. He sent the foremen to call them together for a meeting.
‘I cannot tell you exactly what will happen,’ he said. ‘I am grateful that you tried to help, but an enemy of the air is harder to fight than an enemy of flesh and blood. We shall have to see what we can do. First, everybody will stay till the end of the ticket. You will get your money and your posho. I cannot say how any of us will manage to live, because if other places have been devastated as much as this there may not be any vegetables. At the end of the ticket I am afraid some of you will have to go. You will not find it easy to get work, as things are. It may be that I shall have to go myself. Some of you think perhaps that Europeans just get money out of the air, but it is not so. Like you, we get it out of the ground and from the work of our hands and heads. You say, “He has a motor car,” but if I took my car to sell in Nairobi tomorrow it would not fetch what would run this place for a month, because more people want to sell cars than are able to buy them. I have to see the Agricultural Officer, and the bank, and those who owe me money on the coffee you have already produced, before I see my way clearly.
‘Well, now, the foremen will show you where to start digging in the locust remains when you have used what you can. You will also have to resurface the road inside the estate, because lorries or even trains can slide about on these squashed horrors. Let us all do our best.’
Wairimu saw that it could not last. She asked for her card to be signed off when it was full and left.
She walked to Nyeri to see her people. Plenty were walking now. Everyone was feeling the pinch. She found her brother in the town looking thin and shabby. He had now five children, his wages had been cut and there was no sale for any surplus you could grow. It was good she had come, he said, for their mother was near her end. Father was still upright, but troubled. Kanini had long been married and Njoki was helping the nuns in the hospital. He wondered if they wanted to make a nun out of her – it seemed strange, but perhaps, after all, it was not a bad life, with enough to eat and the other girls for company.
She walked the rest of the way home. The terracing had stopped. Some of the land was bare and the trees fewer. Her mother was lying close to the fireplace. She seemed shrivelled. She had a cloth tied loosely round her body and a blanket drawn round her. Her teeth were nearly all gone and a trickle of saliva ran out of her slack mouth. A tin of uji lay untouched beside her.
She is old, thought Wairimu, and then wondered how she could be old. Her brother, the oldest, must be about thirty. At fifty, even allowing for the first few babies to have died, is one already old? The sister-in-law was the only one whose voice seemed to get through to the sick woman, and she herself looked tired, her breasts sagging, her back permanently bent. After several repetitions she managed to convey the message, ‘Wairimu has come to see you.’ The mother put out a hand towards her daughter, but her eyes hardly focused. In the night, during which none of the grown-ups tried to sleep, the gasping breath at last gave out.
They carried the little body five miles down the mountain and buried it near the church, the priest reading prayers over it. Then they walked back home, and Wairimu’s father prepared to sleep in the house as though it had not been desecrated. He had not yet taken a second wife. Where would he now find one? His herds were small and only one of his three daughters had brought him dowry. His son had come home for the funeral, so there was no sleeping-place for Wairimu. She found a corner in a neighbour’s house and a day or two afterwards slipped back to her first place of work among the coffee.
Workers had been turned away since the locust invasion two years before had set production back, but she found one of the foremen whom she had known ten years before and who had recommended her. The old Master had gone away and the young Master preferred to work in a bank, so the names were new but the organisation much as before. She got six shillings for a thirty-day ticket (the men got eight), posho and a blanket. The dormitory the girls used to use had been divided up into little rooms for the mature women to share. It was cold and dull compared with Kabete and the attractions of the city nearby, but fair enough as far as work went. Some farms still did not give the blanket in advance of payment, though the law required it, and some had the reputation of forcing girls to work against their will. Strictly females were not to be sent, unless they wished it, too far from home to walk back to sleep there. Of course farmers always denied using force, though many of them could not deny requesting government to use it, but it was sometimes made worth the while of chiefs and headmen to do so, and a man who complained of the treatment of his womenfolk could find himself punished.
This practice had probably come to an end partly through scandals brought to light by some government officers and partly because there was no longer a shortage of labour, but Wanja, Wairimu’s room-mate, had been herded into a plantation seven years before, locked in a hut with some other girls and all of them assaulted. She became pregnant, and when her parents complained they were told that their daughter ought to be able to look after herself. She had left the farm as soon as she could, but was ashamed to go home, so had come to this plantation, which had a better reputation. But with a baby it is difficult, of course, to protest your virtue: she had fallen for another child and now felt hemmed in and unmarriageable. They talked about it day in, day out. Wanja seemed hard-working and unassuming. At length a chain of introductions was started which led to her being married, for a token dowry, to Wairimu’s father. This was upsetting the order of events with a vengeance, but Wairimu kept in the background and felt satisfaction that two problems should be solved at a go.
She herself did not particularly have problems. The years came and went, came and went. Dull food, dull work, now and again a dull man. But she had no responsibilities, enough to eat, talk round the fire, a place to sit aside and watch the young people dance, occasionally, as times grew better, a chance to switch to piecework and get more money. She knew the uses of extra money.
But then came a new interest, classes. She had learned to read a bit at Kabete but there was not much to read. There was the Harry Thuku pamphlet in Swahili, a booklet of scripture quotations in Kikuyu she had been given at a street corner, and a newspaper she had picked up somewhere with pictures of King George V’s Silver Jubilee, but it was in English so she could make out only a few words like Sunday and Queen. Sometimes she would make a pretext to go to the office and look at the notices on the wall, a calendar, a list of prices, just to make sure her skills were not slipping, though the words did not mean much to her. There were also words written on trucks and machines – people’s names, places, left, danger, no smoking – and on packets of tea or tins of condensed milk. But when the school came, life became more interesting, and more ambitious people came to ask for work on the plantation. This was about the time they were given a day off to walk into Nyeri and celebrate the coronation of the new king (the one who had been properly advised on his marriage and got children, though unfortunately only girls).
First the Master came with a white missionary and told the workers that, since he had had many requests for a school for the children and a place of worship, he was offering to pay for a schoolmaster and for a tin roof if they were prepared to put up the building. But, since he was going to pay someone who picked no coffee and packed no coffee and carried no coffee, he hoped that all the workers would support him by working harder to cover that man’s wag
es. Everybody cheered, but some asked why 120 should work harder to support an extra one. Wairimu and some of the others knew that the one man would get the pay of four or five labourers and a better house too. But they wanted to learn.
So they joined in building a rectangular mud house for the church, and someone carved a rough cross and put it over the door. The Master brought timber and corrugated iron for the roof, and they asked for a door frame and shutters for the windows, but he said there would be time enough for that when there was anything to put inside.
All the same, he brought more timber, and in their spare time the fundis made benches and a blackboard and a table and chair for the teacher. A two-roomed house was built, and the teacher moved in with his own furniture.
The first set of children were all put in one class, whatever their size or sex, as none of them had ever attended formal lessons before, but within a few months they were divided into two groups, according to progress. They wrote on slates and read from the blackboard. Later a few books appeared and were kept under lock and key in the teacher’s house.
But the evening school was even better attended than the day school. Ostensibly a baptism class of the Church of Scotland, it attracted many men and boys who wished to learn to read and a few women. Wairimu had to wait for a while until the first women had caught up with her, but she started straight away to attend the Sunday services in Kikuyu. The speakers were always urging people to read the Bible, so she bought little paper editions of the separate gospels, which the elders used to bring round, and was thrilled by the new knowledge she found in them and the absorbing puzzle of working the words out. In 1939 she was baptised Mary.
She had not realised that this too, proper and inevitable as it seemed, would cause distress to her family, for Njoki, at twenty, became a postulant in the Sisters of Mary Immaculate. Her father was proud and even renounced the cow which the fathers of the first novices had claimed ten years earlier. Her married brother and sister also basked in reflected glory. That one member of the family should not simply remain in traditional darkness but court damnation of a Scotchman’s devising was hard for them. But Wairimu, bearing no ill-will towards the sisters, nonetheless hugged to herself her new knowledge and her growing horizon.
With the war a lot of the younger men drifted away into the army or to better-paying jobs in transport companies or in the docks at Mombasa. Labour was short and the cost of living going up. To keep them happy, the Master decided to give them meat once a month and vegetables once a week without deducting from their wages. This made him popular, though Wairimu had learned to see that he was still making a good profit from his labour – that she, in fact, contributed towards the car, the crude hot water tank over a wood fire, the boarding school fees, the outings to the Club. All the same, he did not, like some, stick to the minimum provision of the law: he took an interest in the school and made advances to one or two families who had sons bright enough to be promoted to intermediate school.
But of course it couldn’t last. There was famine and the coffee crop was affected too. Her brother, needing to buy extra food as the harvest dwindled, could not meet the school fees for his two sons, and came to her for help. Fiercely she wanted the girls to read as well, but knew he had reached his limit. The Catholic church would admit illiterates. She tried to teach the girls a little when she went home now and then, but they were not very interested and she did not know how to set about it. The drought did not let up, and many children were getting listless. If it was that bad in Nyeri, then in places that were always on the margin of hunger one knew people were dying. Machakos people had settled in Embu and their relations walked there to save themselves and swarmed over the plantations looking for work, but there was no work. Government had rounded up unemployed men from Nairobi and Mombasa and sent them back to their locations to save the food situation in the towns. But even in the country one had to eat, and no more hands were needed on the farms. The government reduced the maize meal ration for labourers from two pounds to one and a half daily. The Master swore, but said they would have to accept it as there would be inspections. He set some workers to planting vegetable plots to keep the promised issue, as it was not a squatter farm and they had no land of their own. It was better than nothing, but the leaves were limp and tasteless: the meat was from game animals, struggling up towards the mountain in search of better pasture. Wanja came, pregnant again, looking for work, but there was none. Wairimu managed to spare her some flour out of the ration, but it was difficult for the hefty men to leave any for their families. There was no more piecework, since the crop was so poor.
In 1944 the flour ration was to be cut again by some three ounces, and this time the Master refused and said the inspectors could do what they liked if they complained: he could not face his labourers with less than they already had. But everyone was too busy to do much inspecting, and the rain in its time returned.
At last the war was over. Soldiers came back from Somalia, Ethiopia and Burma with heavy pockets and sad faces. Some did not come back. It took time for the ex-servicemen to readjust to ordinary life. They had suffered. But they had also grown used to regular rations and regular pay. Many had shared their sufferings with white servicemen and some few had shared their memories and dreams as well. They were no longer interested in working for a few shillings a month. Some were given technical training. Some used their gratuities to set up shops and transport businesses, but they were inexperienced and did not all succeed. Some sank into apathy with fearful memories behind their eyes. But many of them talked about what they had seen, what they had accomplished and what they had heard about meeting force with force.
Kikuyu newspapers were now available. Mwenyereri and Agikuyu passed from hand to hand together with some Swahili papers. People who had hardly before looked beyond the ridge were beginning to feel part of a whole. There was no one who did not have a son, a brother or an uncle away at work or in school, no one who had never heard by word of mouth how you loaded a rifle, how you concealed yourself, how you kept a line of communication open. These were the ones who were listened to, not the grandfathers, the few who remembered escaping from Maasai spears or opening up new ground at Kabete.
The ladies were not particularly anxious to hear of these things. Posho and wages they had all come up against one way or another. But they were always interested in presidents and politicians.
‘Jomo Kenyatta came back from England in 1946. In February the next year he went to address the people at Ruringa Stadium – Mbiyu Koinange and James Beauttah were there with him. Of course I went. After what I had seen as a girl, I felt I had a right to be present at any political event. And I fell under the spell. From then on I became devoted to Kenyatta. But of course I was only, in their eyes, an ordinary member of the crowd. I did not get invited to the big dinner afterwards and I did not know till much later that the leaders’ oath had been given that day. But little by little news of an association and of an oath were being whispered about.
‘There was reason enough. The Rift Valley Squatters’ Association had been demanding return of their land: they even parked themselves early one morning in the garden of Government House – a sit-in you would call it nowadays. The stand made at Olenguruone was known to us, though the climax of conflict had not yet been reached. There had been a general strike at Mombasa which attracted a lot of attention though it only got limited results. Most people thought Kikuyu skills of organisation had a lot to do with its success. The foreman brought us the partial news which came over the radio. He also told me that there had been a similar strike in the docks before the war and riots a couple of years before that. This was news to me – it shows that our eyes were opening wider as the years passed.
‘In fact I narrowly missed seeing the 1947 strike myself. I had often thought of going to Mombasa to have a look round, but for a year or two after the war Africans were not allowed to enter Coast Province from up country without a special permit. I’d been told that a woman c
an always get by in a port town even if she is past her first youth. After all, I have never looked my age, have I? But I did not know the rules about women having to register for health reasons – and, all said and done, I am not a woman of the streets – so I soon came back again. In any case I found it too hot for comfort.
‘The interesting thing is that when I told the police I was a Kikuyu and had come to visit my brother who worked in the docks, but I had lost his address, they straight away directed me to Chege Kibachia, although they were not Kikuyu themselves and I had never then heard of Kibachia. He had resigned from KAU and was then a salesman for the East African Clothing Company, but all the political people still knew him.
‘I stayed a day or two to be able to say I’d seen the sea and the palm trees and then got on the train back. You learn something if you travel on our railway. If I had known I would have liked to stay until the strike started. You must have lived through that, Sophia. Some of you people had been organised for a long time. I wish I’d known you then.’
Sophia tossed her head at the thought that she might have known a plantation labourer on the make among men in the docks. But Wairimu’s eyes lighted on another picture, of light-skinned girls at the coast working in houses or cafés, gathering outside the Catholic church with hats and handbags, pushing white babies in shaded prams.
It was good to learn new things, and often during those years a story or a song would strike Sophia with its novelty, and the other women, who had heard it long ago and perhaps not yet learned to read, were moved by her enthusiasm. So they would take her about to other churches to give her witness. The story of Ruth was particularly dear to her. In the church she still had the name of a newcomer who had helped many others to believe.
The Present Moment Page 12