Devil on the Cross

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  “The other part of the residential area is called New Jerusalem, Njeruca. That’s the residential area for the workers, the unemployed. It’s where the wretched of Kenya live. But are their shacks houses, or are they the sparrow’s nests that Kĩhaahu wa Gatheeca was talking about? The walls and the roofs of the shanties are made of strips of tin, old tarpaulin and polythene bags. These are the slums of Ilmorog. And this is where Maatheng’eeta, Chang’aa, Chibuku and other illegal beers are brewed—beers made more potent by the addition of quinine and aspro to knock the workers out. Sometimes I think of Njeruca as the Hell described in the Christian Bible. . . .”

  “Why?” Gatuĩria asked. “What does the place look like?”

  “How can you ask that, as if you were a foreigner in Kenya? Have you never visited the slum areas of Nairobi to see for yourself the amazing sight of endless armies of fleas and bedbugs marching up and down the walls. or the sickening, undrained ditches, full of brackish water, shit and urine, the naked children swimming in those very ditches? A slum is a slum. Here in Njeruca we don’t have any drainage. Human shit and urine and the carcases of dead dogs and cats—all these make the area smell as if it were nothing but pure putrefaction. Add to this decay the smoke of dangerous gases from the industrial area—all these are blown toward Njeruca by the wind—and add too the fact that all the rubbish and waste from the factories is deposited there, and you’ll see why I compare Njeruca with Hell. To bury a people in a hole full of fleas, lice, bedbugs—what hell could be worse than that?” Warĩĩnga ended her narrative with bitterness.

  “Fleas, jiggers, bedbugs . . . are there more of those in Ilmorog’s slums than the human parasites we have left behind in that cave?” Gatuĩria asked slowly, as if he were talking to himself.

  At that moment they saw a small matatũ approaching at full speed. Warĩĩnga waved it to a halt. It stopped, and they climbed in. After a minute or so they were at the New Ilmorog Butchery, owned by a one-eyed man called Tumbo. Gatuĩria ordered three pounds of goat’s meat. He asked Tumbo to include a few ribs but no offal. Tumbo fixed him with his one eye and told him that he, Tumbo, would never sell a piece of meat to anybody without throwing in a bit of offal. He, Gatuĩria, should remember that he was now in Njeruca, the people’s place, and not in Golden Heights, among the wealthy. Gatuĩria asked him to include a piece of liver instead of tripe. Tumbo agreed.

  Gatuĩria and Warĩĩnga went to the back of the shop that adjoined Tumbo’s butchery. The room at the front was the shop, but the ones at the back were bars. Many of the customers drank their beer sitting on empty beer crates. The main bar was full of customers, but the bartender showed Gatuĩria and Warĩĩnga into an empty room. They sat down on crates. The bartender brought them two Tusker beers. They drank out of the bottles as they waited for their meat to cook.

  “The speeches in the cave completely numbed me,” Warĩĩnga said.

  “To tell you the truth, I could hardly believe that I was actually here in Kenya,” Gatuĩria said, then he shook his head and started talking as if to himself. “Modern theft . . . modern robbery. . . . So it’s really true that the edifice of progress is erected on top of the corpses of human beings?”

  “Did you find the devil you were looking for?” Warĩĩnga asked him, laughing, “or don’t you remember telling us last night that you were coming to these parts in search of plausible themes for your music? Or was your devil removed from the scene by the invitation cards that we were given by Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ?”

  “I think that I was probably running too fast,” Gatuĩria said. “I think I was placing too much faith and hope in the other card. A belief is a belief, and it doesn’t really need the evidence of the eyes to grow roots. What really matters is the idea from which one can develop musical themes.”

  “So you didn’t find a single devil, not even among the foreigners, for instance?” Warĩĩnga asked.

  “What I’m saying is that it doesn’t really matter if the Devil actually exists or if he’s merely a certain image of the world.”

  “So what about the knot that was troubling you?” Warĩĩnga pressed him. “Or are you like the poor dancer who claims he is unable to dance because the ground is stony?”

  “Not quite . . . But . . . ,” Gatuĩria started, and then paused as if Warĩĩnga’s questions had unsettled him. “You see, music . . . or let’s say musical composition. . . .” He paused again as if he were not quite sure what he wanted to say. “The way I see it is this: an artistic composition should be inspired by love . . . love of your country . . . a love that inspires the composer to sing hymns of praise to the beauty, the unity, the courage, the maturity, the bravery, the generosity of his country. I have always dreamed of composing music to glorify the heroic deeds of our nation, in praise of our national heroes, like Beethoven composing the Eroica Symphony in honor of Napoleon, or Sergei Prokoviev composing an oratorio based on the deeds of Alexander Nevsky, one of Russia’s national heroes. I would like to compose music that expresses the soul and the aspirations and the dreams of our nation. . . . But what kind of talk did we hear in that cave? Wasn’t it like the morning frost that blights the shoots of patriotic love?”

  “No!” Warĩĩnga replied quickly. “Talk like that is the rain that should make buried love for one’s country burgeon. There is no love that is not linked with hate. How can you tell what you love unless you know what you hate? Take a baby that cannot speak. Its cries indicate its likes and dislikes. Didn’t we two emerge from that cave chanting poems to our country? Kenya has enough patriots and heroes to inspire a patriotic composition! Wasn’t Kĩmathĩ born of a Kenyan woman? The biggest knot in you is the absence of love, because you’ve never known what hatred is. For while, it is true, a child with parents to look after him will never eat shit, if he is brought up wrapped in over-protective love, he will never learn anything. He will never learn the difference between dirt and cleanliness, hate and love. . . . It is whiteness that tells us what blackness is. Those whom we have left behind in the cave are the very people who are now identifying for us the true heroes of our land.”

  “No, no, there you have confused a number of things,” Gatuĩria said quickly, as if Warĩĩnga had touched a sensitive spot in his heart.

  “In that case, show me what you hate and I will show you what you love. Or don’t you know where you stand?”

  “Ah, woman, why are you dragging me back to my home and to memories I would rather forget?” Gatuĩria asked.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Nakuru. My father is a business tycoon. He owns several shops in Nakuru, and lots of farms in the Rift Valley, and countless other businesses to do with import and export: footwear, fabrics, flowers, seedlings. Just mention any type of trade, and my father will have a hand in it. He runs special planes for many of those exports and imports of his. I am his only son. His aim was to send me to America to learn how to manage property and profit . . . business administration . . . the kind of education that Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ was bragging about last night. But as for me, I’ve never wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because my heart was always with the workers on his tea plantations. They were the ones who sang beautiful songs to me, who told me exciting stories, who often played their guitars or their bamboo flutes for me. . . . I would look at the shanties they lived in, the food they ate, the rags they wore, and when I contrasted that poverty with the richness of their songs and the breadth of their knowledge, I would be seized with a deep hatred for my father. Weren’t the workers people like ourselves? Sometimes my father would whip them, and abuse them, and call them dumb cows. And you know, on one occasion I actually found him beating my mother because she had asked him to stop whipping a man who was very old. When later I started questioning things, my father showed me the stick, and he forbade me to go near the workers’ quarters. I didn’t stop visiting the workers, howev
er. I think that’s why he sent me to America while I was still very young.”

  “How long did you stay in America?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  “Fifteen years! In a foreign country!”

  “Didn’t I tell you that I went there soon after doing my CPE? I had no scholarship. My father paid for everything.”

  “What were you studying all those years?” Warĩĩnga asked.

  “Lots of different things. But I ended up specializing in music, playing musical instruments like the piano, the organ, the clarinet, the recorder, the trumpet. I studied composition, the history of Western music from the times of J. Bach and Handel in the sixteenth century to the more recent times of Tchaikovsky and Igor Stravinsky, who died in 1971. And I studied conducting. Things like that. What excited me most were oratorios like Bach’s B Minor Mass and St. Matthew Passion, Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. But when my father heard that I had gone to all those universities to read for a degree in music, that I had chosen not to study business administration, he sent me a telegram the length of a railway line. He told me that he could not go on spending the thousands of shillings he had lavished on my education so that I could end up with a degree in singing and carry a guitar on my shoulders like the rogues of the Bondeni area of Nakuru. He told me to choose between music, which would condemn me to spending the rest of my life as a footloose minstrel, and business administration, which would allow me to return home as his son. Well, how could I explain to him that what I saw the American rich doing to the descendants of the Africans who had been taken to America as slaves about three hundred years ago was exactly what I had seen him doing to his plantation workers? How could I tell him that my long stay in America had shown me the darkness into which people of my father’s class were leading Kenya? I did not answer him. But I chose music so that money should never rule my life.

  “In those days, my father did not belong to the Church. But even after I had come back from America, and I found that my father was a pillar of the Church—today he has a special family pew at the front, very near the altar—he never forgave what he saw as my ingratitude and disobedience. He asked me: ‘Apart from money, what else is worth struggling for on this Earth? How can you bury your talent in the ground like the wicked, ungrateful servant?’ And then and there he took up his Bible and he read me the very parable that Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ was telling us last night in the matatũ. When he had finished, I said to him: ‘Father, how can I eat food snatched from the mouths of the hungry? How can I drink water stolen from those who are thirsty?’ He retorted: ‘What! Do you mean to tell me that you know better than the Reverend Billy Graham, who came here very recently and preached to us about those very talents? You are not fit even to clean the shoes of Billy Graham!’

  “Next thing he knew, I was employed by the university to research into our culture, our traditions and customs, especially those connected with music, and he reached breaking-point. He summoned me once again and asked me: ‘How can you strip me naked before the whole church congregation? How can you strip me before God, so that even babes in arms can see my nakedness? Remember the Ham of old, who saw Noah’s nakedness and refused to do anything about it—what did the Lord do to him? Do you know? He was cursed to sire the children of darkness forever. If God had not later had mercy on him and sent the children of Shem to our Africa, where would we, the children of Ham, now be? Go away. Follow in Ham’s footsteps. Go and wander about the world, and return home only after you have stopped casting before swine the pearls of your talents and eating rubbish from the same plate as those swine.’

  “These days I never go home. Today I am trying to save so that one day I’ll be able to give him back the money he spent on my fees and will feel free of any obligation on that account.”

  “That’s ambitious,” Warĩĩnga sighed. “What’s your father’s name? I might know him. You know I grew up in Nakuru?”

  “In that case I won’t tell you who he is,” Gatuĩria replied quickly. “I wouldn’t like to know that you know him because you might start to hate me as well. And even if you didn’t say anything, I wouldn’t be able to look you in the face, because whenever I looked at you, it would always remind me that you know my father and you also know me. No, I don’t even use his name. I want to make my own way in the world and leave his trail behind me forever.”

  Before Warĩĩnga could say anything in response to that, the meat they had been waiting for was brought to them on a wooden dish, cut into small pieces. Next came a plate piled high with a mixture of onions and hot pepper and green cloves.

  They began eating the meat in silence. Gatuĩria was turning over many things in his mind. He thought: I only met this woman in Mwaũra’s matatũ last night, traveling from Nyamakĩma to Ilmorog, and then again this morning, and now I am telling her all the secrets that have long been lodged in my heart. Could the events in the cave have affected me?

  Warĩĩnga was having similar thoughts. The things that had happened to her in the past twenty-four hours were truly amazing. She recalled how she had been abandoned by her lover, John Kĩmwana; how she had been dismissed from her job by Boss Kĩhara because she was stingy with her thighs; how she had been thrown out of her house by her landlord; how she had been given a threatening note signed by the Devil’s Angels. She remembered . . . and at once Warĩĩnga picked up her handbag to take out the piece of paper to show Gatuĩria how the rich were employing thugs. She looked and looked, but she could not find it. It doesn’t matter, Warĩĩnga told herself, and she picked up the threads of her thoughts about Gatuĩria and the struggle between father and son. Why did he say he wouldn’t like me to hate him? she wondered. Does he think we’ll be seeing each another every day? Does he think he has found his own Ready-to-Yield?

  Warĩĩnga was suddenly roused from her thoughts by Gatuĩria’s voice, which sounded like that of man who is kicking about in the water in order not to drown.

  “What! Would I ever think of giving up my involvement in our culture and participating in daydreams about selling soil to the poor in tiny calabashes?”

  “Daydreams about selling God’s free air to the people!” Warĩĩnga chimed in. “People planting lilies in the air to mark boundaries and then announcing: ‘From here to over there, this is my air space!’

  “Daydreams about building sparrows’ nests for the poor so that landlords and the banks can reap big profits!” Gatuĩria said.

  “Daydreams about having dozens of girlfriends,” Warĩĩnga said in a tearful voice. “Are they aware how many hearts they have broken into tiny pieces? Aware of the many bodies they have destroyed, the many lives they have trodden into the dust, so that every girl, examining her own body, can see only the leprosy she has caught from men? These days a woman’s youth has become a rotting corpse, the warmth of her body a bonfire that consumes her life, her womanhood a grave in which her fertility is buried. . . . Do they know how many girls they have driven to throwing their babies into latrines or killing them while they are in the womb?

  “Let me tell you. When a woman is in her youth, she has beautiful dreams about a future in which she and her husband and her children will dwell forever in domestic peace in a house of their own. There are some who dream of the educational heights they will scale, of the demanding jobs they will take on, of the heroic deeds they will do on behalf of their country, deeds that will inspire later generations to sing their praises thus: ‘Oh, our mother, a self-made national hero!’ At the time a girl is dreaming of a bright future filled with heroic deeds, her breasts have not yet developed. But just wait for them to develop. Wait for her cheeks to bloom. Wait for the likes of Boss Kĩhara to start whistling at her and offering her lifts in their Mercedes Benzes to the bright lights and night spots of Naivasha and Mombasa. Oh, yes, just wait until she is shown all the alluring wonders of afternoons and nights in expensive hotels in Nairobi, and I can tell you that our maiden will wake up one
morning to find that all her dreams are lying shattered on the floor, like broken pieces of clay. There, scattered on the sandy floor, lie the fragments of her illusions. Tell me this, you who research into our people’s culture: when a clay pot is broken, can it be mended? Where is the craftsman who can put back together the shards of a maiden’s dream, like the dove in the story who once gave life back to a girl? No, no, no! How did the boys put it in their Mũthuũ dance-song?

  An amazing sight,

  The clay pot is now broken!

  When I came from Nairobi,

  I never knew that

  I would give birth to

  A child named

  “Producer of wondrous courage.”

  “Come, clansmen, and let us weep together! Come here and behold modern wonders. Today we can only be called the bearers of doomed children instead of the bearers of children of heroic stature. No. No. If a clay pot is broken, it can never be mended. That’s how the dreams of us sugar girls are destroyed by sugar daddies. . . .”

  Gatuĩria suddenly saw tears flowing down Warĩĩnga’s cheeks and on to the floor.

  “Warĩĩnga! Warĩĩnga, what is it?” Gatuĩria asked, surprised. What had he done to this woman?

  Warĩĩnga picked up her handbag, took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. She tried to smile, but she could not quite manage it. She continued in the same sorrowful voice.

  “It’s nothing . . . but it is also something. . . . What and how can I tell you, you who are a stranger in my life? But really there’s nothing secret about it—though I’ve never told anyone about it before—because it’s happening to girls all over Kenya. It is your story that has made me look back on my life in anger, and I can see vividly where my own dreams fell to pieces like the clay pot the boys used to sing about in the Mũthuũ dance. What shall I tell you? Where shall I start?