Devil on the Cross

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  When he reached the climax of his speech, and he started shouting, “I am the king of thieves and robbers!,” Gĩtutu staggered and collapsed, completely exhausted.

  The master of ceremonies and two others waddled to the platform and fanned his body with handkerchiefs till he came to. Then half the audience in the cave rose to give him a standing ovation.

  “What! Are they under the illusion that we have forgotten?” Wangarĩ whispered to Mũturi.

  “They appear to imagine that we are children who can be bribed into silence with sweets,” Mũturi replied.

  “And furthermore, sweets that have been taken from our own pockets,” Wangarĩ added.

  Watching Mũturi and Wangarĩ whisper to one another, Mwaũra became restless: Why did Mũturi ask me about the Devil’s Angels? he wondered. What does he know about me? Who is Mũturi? Who is Wangarĩ? Gĩtutu wa Gataangũrũ returned to his table, supported by two people, but he was still shouting: “I am the king of kings in the kingdom of cunning! My lords and masters, see what I have done with my talents . . .”

  . . . And the servant who was given . . . talents. . . .

  The Testimony of Kĩhaahu wa Gatheeca

  And these are the experiences of Kĩhaahu wa Gatheeca, revealed to those who had gathered at the robber’s cave in Ilmorog for the competition in modern theft and robbery.

  Kĩhaahu was a tall, slim fellow: he had long legs, long arms, long fingers, a long neck and a long mouth. His mouth was shaped like the beak of the kingstock: long, thin and sharp. His chin, his face, his head formed a cone. Everything about him indicated leanness and sharp cunning.

  That day, Kĩhaahu was dressed in black-and-gray striped trousers, a black tail coat, a white shirt and a black tie. Standing on the platform, he looked like a 6-foot praying mantis or mosquito.

  Kĩhaahu started by clearing his throat, and then he spoke the following words.

  “I don’t have much to tell. Too much of anything is poison. But a little is often sweet. My aim, or my motto, is to act on my words. My actions are the trumpet that sounds my abilities as a thief and robber. I myself am the best possible illustration of the sayings that we were reminded of earlier today: that tallness is not a misfortune, and a hero is not known by the size of his calves. For, indeed, I am the cock that crows in the morning and silences all the others. I am the lion that roars in the forest, making elephants urinate. I am the eagle that flies in the sky, forcing hawks to seek refuge in their nests. I am the wind that stills all breezes. I am the lightning that dazzles all light. I am the thunder that silences all noise. I am the sun in the heavens during the day. I am the moon, king of the stars, at night. I am the king of kings of modern theft and robbery. Crown me with the golden crown, for it is not too early for the new king to begin his reign.

  “I am not praising myself for the sake of it. We came here to hold a seminar in modern theft and robbery. I’ll sing a song about myself that will move our foreign guests to make me overseer of other overseers, watchdog over other watchdogs, messenger above all other messengers. Say yes, and I’ll tell you a story full of wonder.

  “Skills like those just mentioned to us by Gĩtutu wa Gataangũrũ ni kama mswagi kwangu, they are nothing at all. To head societies or companies that purchase land in such a way that one is the first to select all the healthy cows for one’s own farm, or in a position to divert public money for one’s own use, or to borrow from a bank on the security of the society’s lands—these are the simple tricks through which I learned how to steal and rob. In English they would be called amateurish tricks or beginners’ tactics.

  “As for my name, I am Kĩhaahu wa Gatheeca. My foreign name is Lord Gabriel Bloodwell-Stuart-Jones. To turn to matters of the flesh, I am an elder with only two wives. I married one before I became a man of property; I married the other after acquiring property, when I started receiving invitations to cocktail parties. You here don’t need to be lectured about the fact that old, scentless perfume is not fit for the modern dance of party talk in foreign languages. If a woman were to be out of step, she might jeopardize your whole future. So my second wife knows English, and she has no job other than decking herself out in expensive clothes and jewelry for cocktail parties.

  “As for my children, I have quite a few. All of them speak English through the nose, exactly like people born and brought up in England. If you were to hear them speak Gĩkũyũ or Kiswahili, you would laugh until you pissed yourself. It is so funny. They speak the two languages as if they were Italian priests newly arrived from Rome—priests without priestly collars. But then the children are mine, and I don’t mind that they speak their national languages like Italian foreigners.

  “Now for my sugar girls. I never run after schoolgirls. Girls like those are danger itself. They may pass on diseases, and I have no time for penicillin injections or for swallowing preventive capsules before the job.

  “I like other people’s wives. One gets such a glorious feeling of victory. You know, don’t you, that that’s another kind of stealing? I am particularly good at bourgeois women. They never resist. And they have no pretensions. They want only one thing. Some are not satisfied with one or two shots—this is because their husbands are always at nightclubs with their girlfriends. And again, many of them don’t have much work to keep them busy: today, they sing only one song—change for good seeds are not all contained in one gourd. A cunt is not salt or soap that will dissolve or disappear after use. I have baptized them Ready-to-Yield. They aren’t expensive. But there is one professional, who has a row of degrees that stretches from here to there. She left her husband for my sake, and I felt as if I had just returned from a victorious raid. But, of course, I had to give her something in return: 1,500,000 shillings for a ten-acre plot of land that I bought for her at Tigoni, near Limuru. . . . That’s why I’ve always sworn that if I catch my wife loitering on street corners, I’ll make her begin to see through her arse!

  “As for my car, there’s not a single model that I haven’t tried. . . . I change cars like clothes. A Mercedes Benz beats them all, but when I get tired of that, I buy a Citroën or a Daimler or a Range Rover. I have also bought toys for my two wives and older children, playthings like Toyotas, Datsuns and Peugeots.

  “My sports: counting money in the evening, playing golf on Saturdays and Sundays and, of course, playing about with the thighs of the Ready-to-Yield when I have the time.

  “I often contrast the way I live today with the way I used to live before I entered the field of theft and robbery, and it seems to me like contrasting sleep with death. Long ago, before Uhuru, I lived with duster and chalk in my hands, teaching children their ABC at Rũũwa-inĩ Primary School. Oh, those were terrible days! I used to eat ugali with salt as soup, or with ten cents’ worth of vegetables when a bird of good omen had visited me. I used to cough all day because of the chalk dust that had accumulated in my throat, and I couldn’t afford any fat to cool the pain that burned in my chest.

  “I don’t know, even now, how it came about that one day I opened the classroom window, and I looked outside, and I saw many people of my own generation busy picking fruit from the Uhuru tree. I heard something whisper to me: Kĩhaahu, son of Gatheeca. how can you stay here like a fool, your nose clogged with chalk dust, while your contemporaries out there are munching the fruits of freedom? What are you waiting for? What will be left for you after everybody else has grabbed his share? Remember that there are no crumbs to be gathered in the wake of masters of the art of eating.

  “And suddenly the scales fell from eyes. I could now see quite clearly. I, son of Gatheeca, threw the chalk through the window, put on my long coat, made the biggest about turn of my life and said bye-bye to the teaching profession. I too wanted a chance to find out what these fruits of Uhuru wa Mwafrika tasted like.

  “Too much haste often splits the yam. Listen to this. I foolishly rushed for the very first fruit that came my way, like the girl i
n the story who was tricked by others into picking fruit with her eyes shut and ended up by picking only the raw ones. The fruit tasted bitter in my mouth. Had I picked crab-apples, mistaking them for real apples?

  “Let me tell you about the mistake I had made, for we have come here not only to boast about our abilities but to also share our experience. While I was still teaching, I had already found out that the biggest thirst in the country was the thirst for education. This thirst for education oppressed the masses, but it was the basis of the wealth of a select few. Even people who could hardly read or write A or B had started their own private secondary schools, and they would get a Mercedes Benz or two out of the enterprise. The buildings were often made of mud, the teachers had been recruited from a junk yard, the desks were made from off-cuts of wood, the stationery had been collected at the roadside, and still the schools were able to turn a profit for their owners. I thought that I too, son of Gatheeca, should try to find out for myself the true weight of a coin picked up in that quarter. I thought I would start a nursery school, because it would not call for heavy investment. I went to a bank and got a loan. My small farm was my security. I looked for and found a building in Nairobi. Then I looked for and found an African girl who had failed her CPE, whom I employed to look after the kids: she would play with them, give them a bit of milk at ten and teach them a few songs. Then I placed a big advertisement in a newspaper, with the following wording:

  New Black Beauty Nursery School

  for Children of VIP Kenyans.

  Owned, Managed and Taught

  Entirely by Kenyans.

  Swahili Language in Use.

  Kenyan Songs, Kenyan Lullabies, etc., etc.

  Cheap in Fees: Dear in Quality.

  Bring One, Bring All.

  Sisi Kwa Sisi, Tujenge Kenya Taifa Letu.

  “Well! I never got a single child, not even a disabled one.

  “I sat down and wept, remembering the amount of money that I had spent, and knowing very well that the bank might auction the piece of land I had been foolhardy enough to offer as security. I thought and thought hard. Could it be that I had not examined the Uhuru tree properly, so that instead of a sweet berry, I had picked a bitter one? But then I told myself: That which defeats a seeker after money has been turned over and over again.

  “I did a bit more research to find out what was really going on. I soon found out that no prominent Kenyan, on acquiring a large farm, would employ a Kenyan as his manager: he would only employ a European foreigner. A prominent Kenyan who was a success at big business would not employ a Kenyan as his manager or accountant: he would only employ a European or an Indian foreigner. When Kenyans conversed, they never used their national languages: they only conversed in foreign languages. Whenever a Kenyan. . . . I noted and observed until my vision cleared. Ugeni juu, Ukenya chini. That was the basis of profit for the modern Kenyan bourgeois.

  “I hurried back to the nursery school before the bank started harassing me. I changed its name. I baptized it: MODERN-DAY NURSERY SCHOOL. Then I looked for a white woman to be the principal. Luckily, I found one. She was a decrepit old woman, half-blind and hard of hearing, and she was always falling asleep. She agreed to join the staff of my school and to do her dozing there.

  “Next I visited certain Nairobi shops. I bought child mannequins—those plastic human shapes—and I dressed them in expensive clothes. I fixed red wigs to their heads. I put electric machines into their plastic bellies, and then I fixed tiny wheels on the soles of their plastic feet. When I switched on the power, the mannequins would move about the floor like real human children at play. Through the big glass windows of the school building one could see them playing even if one were standing by the roadside. Then I placed another big advertisement in a newspaper:

  Modern-Day Nursery School.

  Experienced European Principal.

  Formerly for Europeans Only,

  Now Open to a Few Kenyans.

  Foreign Standards as Before.

  National Languages, National Songs, National Names Banned.

  Foreign Languages, Foreign Songs, Foreign Toys, etc., etc.

  English Medium of Instruction.

  Limited Places.

  Telephone or Call in Your Car.

  Color is no Bar: Money is the Bar.

  Fees High.

  “Oh, then parents started ringing day and night to reserve places for their children. Whenever the phone rang, I would run to wake up the European principal to answer it. But the majority of parents preferred to call in their cars to make sure of a place for their children. And on finding a white woman, and on seeing the mannequins at play through the windows, the parents would pay the fees then and there: they didn’t even bother to find out more about the school.

  “I took—or, rather, I instructed the principal to take—no more than a hundred children. Each child paid 2500 shillings a month. I was overjoyed, for that meant that every month I was pocketing 250,000 shillings. After paying the rent and the salaries of the dozing principal and her assistants, I would be left with over 200,000 shillings every month. And please note, all this time I hadn’t shed a single drop of sweat, and I hadn’t swallowed any dust from chalk and dusters. To me the fruit from that particular tree did not taste bitter—not at all.

  “I picked another fruit and yet another. I opened four other nursery schools in Nairobi, using the same trick of employing aged or even crippled white women as principals and buying white mannequins to stand in for real white children. Even here at Ilmorog and Rũũwa-inĩ I have opened a few nursery schools along the same lines.

  “The fruit from that tree was certainly plentiful, and it was very ripe indeed. And sweet—but that’s another story! Now, Europeans have told us that it is not good to put all your eggs in one basket. So I thought I should try to find out what the fruits of other trees tasted like. Societies and companies for purchasing farms like those mentioned by Gĩtutu wa Gataangũrũ and other ways of stealing and robbing through land speculation have all yielded fruit that I have eaten gladly.

  “But the tree from which I’ve picked fruit riper and sweeter than that on all the other Uhuru trees is—Wait, let me start the story of that special tree right from the beginning, so that all of you can see that I am not a novice when it comes to the art of theft and robbery.

  “After I had picked a lot of fruit from the two trees that were watered by the people’s thirst for education and their hunger for land, I began to look about me to see which fruits my contemporaries were plucking. I saw that as soon as people accumulated property, they all wanted to enter Parliament. With my own eyes, I’ve seen someone sell his farm and auction his very beautiful wife in order to meet his election expenses. I paused to think: What’s in this business, which has become the object of so much in-fighting, to the extent that people are prepared to scatter millions of bank notes about and sell their wives and daughters and farms? Could it be that this tree yields more fruit than all other trees?

  “I made up my mind to enter the field of politics and find out for myself: after all, it’s only he who sits under the tree who knows what the black tree-ant eats. But since I was also familiar with the saying that too much haste splits the yam, I was determined not to race for a parliamentary seat—those seats, as you know, are very hot and have been the cause of bloodshed—I would go first for a seat on Iciriri County Council, Rũũwa-inĩ Ward.

  “To say is to do, and it is never too early to market vegetables, before they lose their bloom. I literally poured money into the pockets of those around me. When I mean to do something, I do it in style: I don’t hold back. I gathered a choir of Nyakĩnyua women about me, who sang my praises and invented stories of how I had fought for freedom and had provided people with land and education and other lies like those. I bought colorful uniforms for the Nyakĩnyua women, with my picture printed on them.

  “Then I empl
oyed a youth wing, whose task was to destroy the property of my opponents and to beat those who murmured complaints about me. I had five opponents. I took two of them aside and bought them out for 50,000 shillings each. They both made public announcements that they were withdrawing in favor of Gatheeca, the hero. The third opponent refused to be bribed. One night he was kidnapped by two youth wingers and taken to Rũũwa-inĩ forest, where he was shown the barrel of a gun and told to choose between living and being elected. He wisely opted for life. The fourth one not only refused to be bribed but actually went as far as to shout his defiance even after he had been shown the barrel of a gun. I sent some youth wingers to his home. They broke both his legs.

  “The fifth was a clever bastard. He quickly sent round his own thugs, who blocked the road with their car and pointed a gun at me and warned me that should I ever play with their chief, the result would be a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye, a leg for a leg, blood for blood. I got the message. My opponent wasn’t joking. I gave in. I told them to tell their chief that eaters of other people’s wealth usually meet in the field to decide which can out-eat the other. So he should agree to meet me on the election battlefield to put an end to all doubt, once and for all, about who was who. In the meantime, I warned, no eater should threaten the life of another. Money is power, so he should let his money and my money fight it out in the field. In the end we arrived at an understanding: we agreed to let iron and iron clash to see whose weapon could drill a hole in the other.