“The orders that you are to give your people,” the interpreter continued, “will come from this stranger, and from him alone. He is now the ruler of the country and you are to be his chief njama. For this work he will give you—so long as you perform it faithfully—generous payment. He will pay you five of these rupees every month.”
“I do not want these metal objects,” Muthengi answered. “What can I do with them ? Why does he not give me goats ?”
“It is the same as if he gave you goats,” the interpreter said. “You can exchange rupees for goats.”
This was obviously an even greater lie than the stranger’s previous statements. “How many are needed to obtain a goat ?” he asked.
“One rupee will buy one goat.”
Muthengi could conceal his incredulity no longer. It was impossible to believe that the world held anyone so foolish as a man who would surrender a goat for a useless piece of metal possessed, it seemed, of no magical powers.
But the thought of five goats a month burrowed like a mole underneath Muthengi’s mind. It seemed incredible, yet what if it could be true ? Five goats a month, thirty goats a season, two hundred and ten goats in four seasons with the increase of one to each female in a season … it was impossible to encompass so many goats with the mind’s eye. He decided to agree to all that the interpreter said. It could do no harm, and no one could be certain that everything the stranger said was lies.
“It is good, you are appointed a chief njama,” the interpreter said. “As a sign of his goodwill, this ruler has brought you a present.”
Muthengi was given a large supple cloak made of a material he had never seen before. It was thick and soft and coloured a brilliant red like leather dyed for a scabbard. He fingered it with astonishment and delight, thinking that it would shelter the stomach from cold winds and keep the body warm at night.
3
THE interpreter, whose name was Ali, was left behind with his two attendants. Muthengi had taken a liking to him, and presented him with a he-goat. The next morning Ali arrived at his hut and said:
“Summon now three of the njamas, for we must count the number of huts on the two ridges over which you have been given authority.”
Ali told the njamas to cut a number of long sticks from the bush. He led the way along the narrow paths which crisscrossed the ridges and at each homestead he counted the number of thatched roofs within. He broke off a piece of stick to represent each hut and handed it to one of the njamas, telling him to carry the short sticks carefully and to drop none.
Muthengi grew alarmed and uneasy as the day advanced. Openly to count a herd of cattle, a family of children, a group of huts, or anything else, was well known to invite disaster. This Ali, who seemed so wise in some things, was strangely ignorant in others. Fortunately many of the homesteads had been well concealed in patches of thick forest in order to escape the eye of the Masai, and paths wound so tortuously that Ali soon grew confused. Muthengi guided him away from as many hidden clumps of huts as he was able, so that when the count was finished it was by no means complete.
The njamas threw down their armfuls of sticks and Ali drew from among his clothes a small red object with something that was white and possibly alive entrapped within it. He produced also a small stick which he rubbed against the white, not as hard as if he was making fire. Muthengi observed that black marks appeared on the white after the stick had passed, as if burning had occurred. His nervousness increased. Here was another kind of magic, but he did not know what it was intended to do.
When Ali had finished he said: “My master, now your ruler, wishes to know the number of all the huts on the ridges in the land of the Kikuyu this side of the Chania river. I have counted the huts on these two ridges, and tomorrow I must do the same elsewhere. How could I remember the numbers to tell him ? This device in my hand remembers them for me. A month later, if necessary, it will tell him where I have been, what words I have heard, and all that I have done.”
“Will it tell this frog-skinned stranger what words have been spoken ?” Muthengi asked incredulously.
“Yes, if I desire it to, and if you lie he will hear of it and have you beaten.”
“I am a warrior,” Muthengi said. “Only women and sometimes children are beaten.” He looked at the magic apprehensively, but he did not believe the interpreter’s words.
“To-morrow I must leave,” Ali continued, “and for every one of these sticks you are to bring to Tetu one rupee, which you must obtain from the owner of each hut that we counted. If the owner has no rupees he is to give you a goat instead. If you keep any goats the stranger cannot fail to find out, because he will know the total number of huts and therefore the total number of rupees and goats that you should bring to Tetu.”
“And out of all these goats,” Muthengi asked, “he will only give me five ?.”
“They are not for him. He will exchange them for rupees, and send the rupees away to another country to his ruler.”
“Even these strangers you call white-skinned, mad though they appear to be, cannot be such fools as that,” Muthengi said. “And what if my kinsmen, and Irumu’s, refuse to bring me goats?”
“Then you are to send njamas to take those who refuse to Tetu, where the stranger will judge them. And if any man living on these ridges kills another, or steals his property, or injures him in a dispute, you are to send that man to Tetu also; for now the white man’s law is yours, and he will judge all wrongdoers and all serious disputes.”
“This stranger must be rich beyond all counting,” Muthengi said, “if he takes a goat from each litigant and judges every case alone. I am sure that the council of elders will not agree to that.”
“The choice is no longer theirs,” Ali answered.
When Ali had departed, Muthengi set about the task of collecting goats from all the married men on his ridges. At first the opposition was adamant. For two days the matter was debated by the senior elders’ council. Many maintained that payment would be foolish; the stranger had left and would not return; who had ever heard of goats being taken except in war ? The defeat of the warriors by strange magic, however, was fresh in the minds of others who, fearing that even more potent magic might be at the stranger’s command, advised payment of the goats. The council of caution at last prevailed. With great reluctance the elders agreed to pay the goats, and the young men drove them into Tetu in batches. When all who could be persuaded to contribute to the levy had done so—there were many dissenters—Muthengi put on his war attire and went a second time to Tetu, eight ochred and befeathered njamas at his heels. They passed without molestation across the bridge and were welcomed by the stranger. Muthengi was given five glittering rupees, and that evening he exchanged them without difficulty in the stranger’s camp for five good goats. Then he realised that the red stranger had indeed something to offer as the price of friendship.
4
MATU had kept the coins he had received for ditch-digging under the floor of the thingira in his father’s homestead, where he slept. Now, hearing that the owner wanted them back, he dug them up and gave them to an njama who was going to Tetu. His interest in the behaviour of the strangers had been eclipsed by his interest in a girl of his age-grade whom he had met soon after harvest at the dances. She was one of Wangombe’s many daughters: as tall as he was, with strong shoulders and full breasts, quick of wit and alight with laughter. She was a graceful dancer, but he was clumsy, and when he jumped the muscles of his spindly legs, bearing the scars of many sores, never jerked him far enough towards the stars. Sometimes she had let him dance opposite her, however, and they had spoken together in the moonlight when his blood was hot with leaping and the path dew-cold beneath his feet. She had several suitors, but she did not seem to favour any of them unless it was Kabero, Irumu’s son, who had grown into a tall, merryfeatured young man with a quick tongue that could stab as deep as a sword. Kabero was known as a wit; he was popular with the young women. Although he was only a youth he had a
lready attained such skill at the game giuthi* that he had defeated several elders on his ridge, and was spoken of as the coming district champion.
During the season of dancing Matu looked for her every night. Sometimes he thought that she threw her glances towards him like arrows in the dance. Perhaps, after all, he looked as well as any other youth, with a white-painted chest, flying white monkey tails and a white feather in his ochred hair. Shyness, he told himself, was a fool’s sponsor. His leaps rose higher and his voice grew full with song. When a chance came he sprang into the centre of the ring and led the song with a verse extolling his courage and the good name of his clan.
“Hark, you girls, the bamboo I broke, that grew so
High, so high above on the mountain’s shoulder
Now is withered: high will I climb to fetch it,
Far will I travel!
When the cows go down to the water, herders,
Drive them down below where the cows of my clan
Go; my cows must drink of the pure clear water,
Water unsullied!”
The men moved around him in a circle, stamping their legs, and took up the chorus:
“ Go, my cows must drink of the pure clear water,
Water unsullied!”
When Matu had done he leapt back into the circle feeling flushed and bold. Now he had come forth as a young man should, with raised voice, to lead the chorus of his fellows; surely the blood of Wangombe’s daughter must have quickened to the rhythm of his song.
Kabero landed with a graceful leap in the centre of the circle. His limbs were long and muscular and bright as clouds, as he stamped his feet to the rhythm. In a full voice he led the song:
“ Hawk who tried to sit on my head,
why did you
Fly away ? I flew to the forest,
there I
Found a youth who feeds on the wild
beasts, there I
Perched on his sore legs.”
The sound of high-pitched giggling shook Matu’s ears as the girls took up the chorus and chanted:
“ Found a youth who feeds on the wild
beasts, there I
Perched on his sore legs.”
Matu’s eyes burned with anger and rage blotted out the stars. All around him were white-toothed faces, hideous with ridicule ; he felt himself ringed by spears. He kept his face impassive and danced on as if unhearing. When the dancers broke off for a rest he slunk into the shadows and walked home, the yellow-flecked leopard of hatred at his heels. All night he lay sleepless on his bed planning the curses he would call down upon Kabero and upon the foolish, disdainful girl who no doubt was lying by Kabero’s side.
5
WHEN he heard gossip that Kabero had taken beer to Wangombe, he knew what he must do. He went again to the dances, and one night when he placed his hands on the girl’s shoulder—she was openly contemptuous of him now—with his finger-nails he scraped off a little of the ochre and castor oil on her skin. This he wrapped carefully in a leaf and took it next day to a mundu-mugu along the ridge: a man of less renown that Irumu, but still competent in magic. When the mundu-mugu heard what was needed he took the scrapings from the skin of Wangombe’s daughter and mixed them with medicines from two of his gourds.
“Hang this in concealment in a tree which stands by running water,” he said, “on land belonging to Wangombe’s clan. Then, as the stream will flow and cannot stop, so will her menses flow and she will be unable to conceive. Nothing can release her from this curse of barrenness until you are sorry for her, and throw away the charm.”
Matu paid him a fee of one goatskin; and when the moon was dead he fixed the charm secretly in the branches of a tree by the river below Wangombe’s homestead. He walked back through the cold darkness with the exaltation of revenge in his heart. Through the girl who had humiliated him he would reach his vain, complacent rival. The curse of no increase would fall on Kabero and his clan, and the shame of sterility upon his wife.
After the curse was laid Matu’s head felt light as a butterfly and empty as a new gourd, but his feet were heavy and slow. Sometimes his mind would fill with visions as though torrents of water were rushing into an empty pool; then suddenly it would be drained dry of thought. Strange fancies danced across his eyeballs. Sometimes he saw blood and dying men, and old women with half-eaten leper faces, or shambas seething under a sheet of yellow locusts; at other times the quiet faces of sleeping girls, and flaming trees of strange colours, and fat black goats moving slowly over a green pasture.
He worked often in his mother’s shamba, even now that he was a grown man. Somehow the crops he helped to cultivate were nearly always heavier than those on other shambas. He knew the ways of wild plants and animals as others knew the steps of dances and the tactics of war. He spoke little, but his eyes were never clouded or his ears closed, and often in the evenings he could let fall some piece of news that neither Muthengi nor Ngarariga knew, although they had been to the market or sauntered all day about the ridges.
When a message came from Irumu Matu put down the iron scraper with which he was felling a goatskin for a woman’s dress without a word and went at once to the mundu-mugu’s homestead. He had known within him that the summons would come. The interview was long and strange. Irumu had heard of the curse; how, Matu could not tell. Rumours had reached the girl and she was frightened; her father was willing to pay a fat ram to Matu if he would remove the spell.
Matu said nothing until Irumu, who did not press for a reply, asked him whether visions often came into his head. Then Matu opened his mind to the mundu-mugu and laid out before him the fancies that troubled it. Deep in his heart hid the fear, so long a living part of him, that a curse derived from eating the flesh of wild animals—even though he had not been circumcised at the time—was closing in upon him.
Three times Irumu threw the beans to probe the cause of Matu’s visions and of his failing health. With eyes still gazing at the beans he said:
“The thing that troubles you is here; it is not a thahu. It is something that comes from God. It is a sign that within you are powers of magic and powers to see into the future. You will be married soon, to another who will work well for you although you do not desire her as you desire Wangombe’s daughter. Later, when you are married and have children, you are to become a mundu-mugu, to learn the secrets of magic and of medicine and of foretelling the future. Visions have come because these powers are already stirring within.”
Matu was silent for a long time after Irumu had spoken. He was frightened of the powers that moved already as a child moves in the womb; he did not know whether the life of a mundu-mugu would bring him happiness. But, if God had so decided, it would have to be.
“How can I marry ?” he asked. “The girls here look only at warriors brave in war and skilled in dancing. As for me, the spear is heavy, it does not spring from my hand like a bird taking flight; and because there was sickness in my legs when I was little I cannot dance.”
“You speak thus because of one girl who has been chosen by another,” Irumu said. “It is not one ridge only that has bananas on it; you must cut your bunch from another plantation.”
6
THE land cultivated by Wanjeri and Waseru’s second wife, and by the wives of Ngarariga and Muthengi, had, in some eight seasons, grown tired and unproductive. The time had come for new land to be cleared. Muthengi and his uncle Ngarariga took beer to the muramati of the clan and asked for fresh strips of land. Because of famine and pestilence many shambas had been claimed by choking bush and weeds, the inheritance of the goats, and the muramati had no difficulty in showing the two young men strips of bush where their wives might cultivate.
Before the move could take place a most unwelcome visitor arrived: Karue, the mundu-mugu, brother of Wanjeri and son of Ndolia. He came one evening at sunset when the meal was cooking in the pot. His body seemed more crouched, his keen eyes more evil, than ever before. It was clear that he had suffered from a severe sicknes
s, for he had let his hair grow long, and it stood up around his head in a black cloud.
Waseru, returning from a council meeting, greeted him politely but with dread in his heart. He had been expecting the visit for so long that he had half hoped to escape it. He should have known Ndolia better. There was a debt to pay, that was admitted; but the amount was again in dispute. He agreed to seven goats, and would have paid them long ago had it not been that Ndolia now demanded seventeen, and five brews of beer. Waseru had rejected Ndolia’s fantastic claims, and so the matter was still in abeyance. Now he almost wished that he had swallowed the injustice and paid the claim.
Karue was silent all the evening. He greeted his sister and his nephews, to whom he should have been as a second mother, with the barest courtesy. After the meal in the thingira an incident occurred which left no doubt as to the enmity that lay like an unsheathed sword between Ndolia’s kin and Waseru’s. Karue went into the hut where his sister and her daughter were eating, and sat by her fire. Waseru followed uneasily; he could not stop Karue and yet he felt the air to be heavy with threats. Then Karue deliberately lifted his feet and placed them squarely on Wanjeri’s hearthstones.
This was an open and cold-blooded affront. To place the feet on a woman’s hearthstones was to curse her by saying: I will trample you and your children underfoot as your hearthstones, the very core of your life, are now beneath my heel. There could be no greater insult.
Red Strangers Page 19