The Present Moment

by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

  The home was happy, though she had no living child by Henry. His daughter Emma grew to love her and Hawa, though Mariam sulked and grumbled.

  They tried sending her to school, but she was humiliated at being with smaller children, though age levels were still fluid, up to the time of Independence, and there were other girls as big as herself in the lower classes. Then Sophia tried her at the machine again and she made some progress, especially when she was allowed to sew a dress for herself, but would always break off when there were other girls to talk to. She sat sullenly in church but refused baptism and took to slipping off to her grandfather’s house on Sundays. Then once she was away for two days, and Sophia dared not check with her sisters whether she was telling the truth. Instead she let them arrange for Mariam, then fourteen, to go and stay with the proposed in-laws till she should be ready for marriage. This was just about the time the war ended, so Mariam missed the heady and none too decorous celebrations in the port. They never saw each other again.

  The atmosphere lightened without her. Hawa was nearly six and Emma a year older. On Sunday Henry would walk with them to the seaside or bring some of his friends for a meal. They always spoke Swahili and he did not particularly try to impose any pattern from his home place. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons he would stay with the little girls while Sophia went to attend or address a women’s meeting somewhere, perhaps bringing back with her orders for dresses or children’s clothes.

  They still read a Bible passage together and prayed before they went to bed, but Henry was changing. He joked a lot and his language was not always as discreet as a new Christian might think it should be. He became a football enthusiast and kept reminding her that it was about time they started their own team of boys. She had a stillbirth followed by two miscarriages, and though he was gentle with her each time the irritation showed.

  He was impatient, too, with the commissions meeting and reports that kept being made about conditions in the town and in the country. The five years they spent together were full of unrest. Everybody knew that the 1939 strike was not the first or most violent upheaval in Mombasa and would not be the last. Had not Ali always said that after the war things would be improved? As more and more workers poured in to assist the war effort, they became more and more conscious that houses were too few, too overcrowded, too small, too expensive. Work grew heavier but the wages remained the same – less than forty shillings a month for labourers – though the war bonuses kept on for a while after the supposed peace had come, and Henry, near the top of the scale of literacy and experience, was getting a hundred and eighty shillings. Sophia was also earning through her sewing machine, so they could count themselves well off, but prices went on rising and shortages created a black market where certain kinds of foods and clothes were completely beyond the reach of the ordinary worker.

  Water was a problem, particularly in the hottest weather and the most crowded districts. You had to pay one cent for a tin full at the water-kiosk but the water-carrier charged five cents for delivering it at home. It had never crossed Sophia’s mind that she might have to carry water, but the up-country ladies were used to fetching theirs from the river at home and were prepared to go to the kiosks themselves. The water-carriers’ strategy, then, was to crowd round the water-point, distracting the operator and jostling other people so as to keep the queues long and impatient until, little by little, the country women would give in and pay the five cents rather than leave their homes unattended while they waited their turn.

  Sophia had been sure things would get better after the war ended. Rationing would come to an end, the government would buy what it wanted without having to give it all to the army. New houses would be built and repairs done. Henry was more cautious. Lots of things had been destroyed, he said, in other countries. Many people could not work because they were wounded or undernourished. It would all take time. But surely, thought his wife, wood and cement and makuti for the roof are all local materials. We can make electricity here for ourselves. Water can come out of taps in private houses as well as in kiosks. Rice is for eating, not for firing out of guns. Wait, woman, wait, we shall see.

  Through 1945 and 1946 they went on seeing. By the middle of January 1947 they had had enough of waiting. A big transport strike was going on in London and making the headlines. (London kept on making the headlines even through the Mombasa strike, because of the big freeze-up that followed, nearly crippling the country that had not moved its fuel stocks in time.) Six soldiers were shot dead at Gilgil and ten wounded when they refused to work, tired of waiting for their demobilisation. (That did not make the headlines.) A congress on prehistory in Nairobi was calling attention to the origin of man in Africa. Rumours of a general strike in Mombasa took second place, with labourers making the absurd claim that they needed two or even three times their present wage to live on. Were they not alive? But even the government admitted that housing conditions were shocking.

  Henry nodded his head and approved. Look, the Labour Commissioner was concerned enough to come to the port even before anyone had downed tools. He was known to agree that wages needed to be higher than in Nairobi, because most Mombasa workers could not get food brought from their home areas without paying excessively for transport. (They were, in fact, already getting a few shillings more than in Nairobi, where an employer paying the minimum wage of thirty-eight shillings a month could deduct five shillings if he provided housing and ten more if he gave free rations.)

  But although the Commissioner called meetings here and there, to negotiate, although even some African leaders urged workers to hold on and state their complaints before coming out, feelings were running high. The strike was on. To Sophia it made sense: she had more notion of social justice in Medina than of social justice in Jerusalem or Mombasa, but why should it not be the same?

  As in 1939, the stoppage was declared illegal, but it was much more widespread, affecting an estimated fifteen thousand workers. There were meetings twice daily of between three and five thousand people, at which strike funds were collected and cooked food sometimes served to the needy. Dock workers and municipal workers held firm – emergency plans for sanitation had to be made, and after a week loudspeakers broadcast an appeal to strikers to allow sweepers to return to work without victimisation because of the health hazard. About two thousand workers on a mainland sugar estate joined in. Extra police and troops were sent to Mombasa, a naval party marched through the streets and a military guard replaced the standing police guard. By the middle of the month two hundred pickets had been arrested for alleged intimidation.

  The government was worried, but their attention was distracted by the Rift Valley Province Squatters’ petition claiming land in the ‘White’ Highlands – in February they would stage an early morning sit-in at Government House, and the Olenguruone crisis was looming. All the same the official side had their resources and claimed sympathy, for employers as well as themselves. Hotels were working on a self-service basis. Italian prisoners of war were made available to man the European bakery. Voluntary labour was unloading the ships and operating the trains. This was made much of in official announcements and pamphlets. As long as the port was in operation, they said, the strike could not be effective: in any case it had not been organised with formal notice and a set of demands specific to each industry. Archdeacon Leonard Beecher, representing African interests alongside Eliud Mathu in Legco, came down from Nairobi and, characteristically, cycled from meeting to meeting, urging workers to return to work so that their demands could be put constitutionally. Mathu himself, it was rumoured, would come.

  Henry was tireless in attending meetings. He was talking and joking loudly, intoxicated with the sense of African power, not coming home till he was exhausted with the heat and excitement, calling for bath water and food, hardly bothering to ask where water and food came from in the middle of a strike that left the regular market stinking, the kiosks unmanned, the wayside vendors able to raise their prices at will. And it was
all very well, Sophia reminded him, to expect the machine to make up for wages lost – what woman, this month or next, would be able to pay for sewing done or put anything away towards a new dress for Easter? She even suspected that he took a bottle or two of beer while planning campaigns with his friends, just now when he could least afford it and most needed his wits about him.

  There is wit and wits. The strikers had been at pains to keep the peace, though a few had been charged with unruly behaviour or threats to non-strikers. So someone had devised a new method. Suppose those blacklegs were detained in a friendly manner, assisted to the barber’s chair, shaved in some fancy pattern that would mark them out as special? That would involve no violence, nothing like the tarring and feathering they had read about in more tempestuous countries. A good laugh, and if the fellow was really upset he had only to wear a hat or shave himself completely as though he had come from a funeral. He was not hurt, even if some members of the crowd did shout a warning that next time it would be done with broken beer bottles.

  It was no sooner thought of than put into operation, and how could Henry miss a lark like that? Inevitably Henry – senior clerk, Christian gentleman, one who might have been able, thought Sophia, to conduct himself more decently – had to be one of the barbers, one of the arrested, charged, convicted barbers.

  Sophia was at home when it happened. She did not feel there was any place for her in these open-air meetings, and though she was in sympathy, of course, it was not bad to keep an eye on your things with all these young idle men roaming around. So neighbours brought the news and took her with them to the court house, police station, remand; she would have been ashamed if she had not been so angry, and did not manage to see her husband but was told the rule was six months for riot, two months for shaving. Two months? And would he get his job back? She went home grieving.

  But there was no time to grieve. Of course she must vacate the house. There were only a hundred and forty two-roomed houses on the whole government estate. They would never get another. But equally they could not keep one for a man in prison. She moved back to Damaris’s where she had stayed before her marriage and distributed her furniture where there was room for it. Damaris welcomed her and the two children. After all, only two months.

  And yet after two months he did not come, and her hopes of his getting reinstated faded. There must have been some mistake. Six months then. She found a room and sewed to all hours. She gave her new address to the people who had moved into her old house, to Damaris, to the church workers, to Henry’s office. Ali’s old workmates refused to speak to her. The accordion player had been jailed too. Henry seemed to shrink. One tin box held all his spare clothes, the magazines, the church books in Kidabida. The private papers must have been in his pockets. He had sold the accordion long ago. The little girls stopped asking her daily when he would come.

  Sophia had hardly noticed when the African schools reopened the Monday after the arrest (Emma had had to remind her) or when Mr Mathu addressed ten thousand people and persuaded them to go back to work if the government would redress their grievances within three months. The strike was over, with an interim award of only a small cash increase on the lowest permanent staff wages. The government, of course, said they could not be bound by a time limit, but the tribunal did start hearing evidence straight away and made their report in June. They gave a few extra benefits and indicated the need for a higher minimum wage, though they did not specify what it should be, as a general salaries’ commission had already been appointed to look into that. But Sophia was not paying attention, because the six months was already finished and Henry had not come.

  In July Kenyatta turned up in Mombasa, with others, to address a big meeting. Why could not the Kikuyu stick to their own troubles in the Rift Valley, thought Sophia. That Kibachia getting a laugh by saying that next time scabs would get their ears shaved off as well as their hair. (Or so it was reported: he denied it.) Would not that sort of talk make it worse for Henry?

  Emma was half-way through standard three. At the end of term Sophia handed her over to a couple going on leave and sent her to her grandmother. They were going on transfer after leave, so she never heard how they travelled or if any news of her husband had reached his home. She never attempted to go there.

  She pulled herself together sufficiently to save up news that would interest Henry. For instance, the newspapers kept on saying that the strike leaders stayed in the background, when in fact everybody knew that Chege Kibachia and the KAU were the inspiration behind them. The Mombasa Postmaster said that a wage of forty shillings a month was near starvation point for a single man, let alone a family, and the Port Medical Officer worked out eighty-eight shillings and eighty-three cents as the absolute minimum to feed a couple with two children adequately for a month. (He rather spoiled the effect by saying that if his minimum diet were introduced next day there would not be enough milk on the Island to go round.) One firm was accused of sacking its union members, one supervisor ‘had never given a thought’ to how his African colleagues managed, one worker claimed that ‘the new government’ (a catchword of the time) ‘belongs to every African’. Henry would be glad that the tribunal took seriously claims that, as well as living at subsistence level, the worker could reasonably wish to go to a cinema occasionally, buy a few magazines, even, in the submission of one witness, give his wife two shillings a month to get her hair done.

  But Sophia herself did not particularly want cinemas, magazines or better hair-dos than she could exchange with her Swahili neighbours: she wanted Henry, and compared to the want of Henry her desire for justice was a small thing, and it did not particularly bother her that the small increases did not procure these amenities for anyone who had not had them before. A cold fury settled upon her. It seemed that it was all for nothing that she had given up the comfortable superiority of that old, Islamic city. She had been promised justice and equality in the new life, and been denied them. She was prepared to wait for Henry, but not for justice. She would protect her feelings more in the future. Hawa was eight, a pretty, happy girl, near the top of her standard two class, though she missed Emma bitterly. Let her read, thought Sophia fiercely, let her get ahead. Let her be rich, and command the power which stops men of their work and wages. We shall not be cowed a third time. But who were ‘we’ if Henry did not come?

  She took the money from the little red book – it had grown over the years, since Henry had provided the house and food money and not required accounting for what she earned so long as she clothed herself and her daughters and bought such things as she fancied for the home. Mombasa still bordered on the countryside and it was possible to get a place to build cheaply. With the money she managed to build a traditional house, big enough for three (she still believed they were three) with a wide working verandah. This saved the rent, and they were able to grow their own bananas and a few vegetables and keep chickens. She was still not satisfied, and scraped and saved until she could get a second sewing machine. She employed a lame man to work this one, making school uniforms from dawn to dusk, and drove him hard. She wanted to be ready when Henry came, but two years passed and he did not come, a third, and there was still no news. She still did not know the way to his home place and a terrible pride possessed her. It was not as though he had nothing to come back to. She was not forty yet and her time for childbearing was not past. Surely he knew, too, that she could earn enough to make up for his loss of seniority? Was there, in fact, nothing to wait for?

  Revival had come, and there was a new excitement in the church. But now, between choruses, they would ask for the day and hour of her conversion, and look sad when she could only tell them the year and the slow process of learning. She closed her lips and made splendid dresses for Hawa, and bought a third machine and set the daughter of her uncle, the coffee-seller, to use it, for the girl had disgraced her family and could no longer show shame of having a Christian relation. Sophia remembered that her aunt had taught her needlework long ago, so s
he allowed the girl to sleep in the back kitchen with her baby, and made no comment when her aunt, heavily veiled, would call in now and then at market time to see her daughter, hoping to escape a beating for it.

  The years passed, a dull sequence of shirts and shorts, drill-slips and aprons, until Hawa did well in her KAPE and left standard eight with the glory of a certificate. She could have gone for training as a nurse, but Sophia knew better than her daughter the disgrace of dead bodies and emptying slops and sponging the nakedness of men. The teachers wanted her like them to be a teacher – to go away to a normal school where there were boys as well, and sleep in dormitories with what sort of girls one would prefer not to mention. Hawa rather fancied the idea. But Sophia bade her wait a while and took her to church in the splendid dresses and to the music festival, and to call on her classmates, and pretty soon Wau came up with a good offer. Hawa flushed and looked away and said she wanted to qualify for a job. Wau said that these days girls were not restricted to teaching and nursing: already his company was employing Asian girls as typists instead of men, and the days were coming when African women would go into business too. So when he offered to pay for a course in typing and office practice Hawa smiled and consented. Her mother also made a reasonable bargain in respect of the little red book, and indulged herself in elaborate bridesmaids’ dresses and a gown for Hawa which, though dully white, dazzled by its ingenuity. It was the beginning of 1957. People were talking again of freedom and equality. Sophia reserved her judgment. More children were going to school and wanting uniforms. Elaborate decorations had been put up for Princess Margaret’s visit, but nothing sparkled in Sophia’s eyes like the old beni processions and the armistice fireworks. Lighted objects were circling the earth in the upper air. A black man called Kwame had set up a new country called Ghana in West Africa where the cocoa came from. Sophia nursed the little red book and waited to see what would happen.