Petals of Blood Read online

  Another migrant who says little but sits on a ton of secrets is Abdulla, the one-legged shopkeeper who owns the donkey and knew Karega’s brother back in the days of the Mau Mau. He is gnawed by his failure to avenge a fallen comrade’s death. He is the representation of the ‘positive contribution Kenyan workers of Asian origins made to the struggle for independence and the deliberate attempt by the ruling class and some intellectuals to downplay it’. He is a war hero, who participated fully in the post-independence struggle to liberate the downtrodden. He confirms Ngũgĩ’s multi-ethnic approach to politics as the way forward for Kenya.

  In a book of journeys and returns Ilmorog makes its journey to the city. The city is a beast with gaping jaws: it swallows youths, it demands taxes, it sends thugs to demand money for bogus oathing ceremonies. It is an inhospitable place for the pilgrims. The identity of its inhabitants, especially the ruling class, has become deformed. One such man tells in Devil on the Cross, ‘a car is a man’s identity. I met my wife once on foot. I did not recognize her.’ ‘Come to think of it,’ another says, ‘his face is beginning to assume the shape of a Peugeot 504.’

  Unsurprisingly, the city does not roll out the red carpet for the pilgrims, but welcomes them with empty biblical texts, flatulent speeches, the explosion of guns, the crack of whips and the yellowed fangs of vicious guard dogs. It is like in the old days when the settlers and their colonial governors held sway over the city and the country. Like colonizer, like neocolonial ruling class. Wanja redeems herself by saving the group from the claws of her old hog of long ago. And later when Munira wants to despise her, calling her a prostitute, Karega reminds him that the definition of prostitution has changed: ‘we are all prostitutes. In a world where a man who has never set foot on this land can sit in a New York or London office and determine what I eat, drink, read, think, do, only because he sits on heaps of billions taken from the world’s poor, in such a world, we are all prostituted.

  Ilmorog is transfigured or rather transmogrified by the arrival of capitalism. The dog of capitalism comes with all its fleas and rabies, burying Old Ilmorog and putting a New Ilmorog in its place. The ruling class and its lackeys take over. Loans are given only to result in the seizure of land as schemes fail. The rich own everything including the slums in which the workers and peasants live. The peasants and workers form trade unions to fight back but it is an uphill climb. Karega, the man of many wanderings, devotes himself to the unity of workers and helps the trade unions. He is rewarded for it by being linked to the murder. He is the one who personifies Ngũgĩ’s belief that ‘imperialism, the power of dead capital, in its neocolonial clothes will not be able to destroy the fighting culture of the African peasantry and working class for the simple reason that this culture is a product and a reflection of real life struggles going on in Africa today’. Karega’s defiant stay in prison calls to mind Ngũgĩ’s detention without trial and the detention of many opponents of the ruling class. It is not personal. ‘It is part of the wider history of attempts to bring up the Kenyan people in a reactionary culture of silence and fear and of the Kenyan people’s fierce struggle against them to create a people’s revolutionary culture of outspoken courage and patriotic heroism,’ Ngũgĩ says in Detained. We know that once freed Karega will go on fighting. It is this that imbues Petals of Blood with great optimism. Where the middle classes give up on the peasants and workers, and see only doom and gloom in Ilmorog, in Kenya, in Africa, he sees hope; he sees future prospects.

  Petals of Blood is so bloody deep and detailed that by the time it ends nobody cares for the fate of the three petty ‘Krupps, Rockefellers and Delameres’, who are just a few shoddy links in a chain of traitors and exploiters stretching back into the sands of time, or whether it was Wanja, Karega, Abdulla or Munira who killed them. Petals is a great history lesson, passionately delivered, deeply steeped in class politics, with the leading question pounding like a hellish refrain: HOW CAN A WHOLE COUNTRY BE TAKEN IN BY A FEW GREEDY BELLIES? How indeed? The answer is clear: it is not because people are not trying to lacerate these bellies; it is not because people have lain back and opened their legs to be raped. It is because these bellies are wonderful pupils armed with the colonizer’s trinity: the Gun, the Bible, the Coin. It is because in church they sing: ‘wash me Redeemer, and I shall be whiter than snow’ while dipping their hands in the blood of anybody who opposes them. It is because they have powerful imperialist allies in America, Europe and Japan and they use a whitewashed official version in which the heroes are villains and villains heroes.

  By writing Petals of Blood Ngũgĩ juggled a big array of balls, one of which was correcting the Africa of European fiction, the Africa espoused by the likes of Ruark and Blixen. He finds Blixen’s type of racism dangerous because it is presented as love, a love he would gladly see blasted with a ton of dynamite. In Out of Africa Blixen says: ‘when you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find that it is the same in all her music. What I learned from the game of the country was useful to me with my dealings with the natives.’ Ngũgĩ makes it clear that Blixen mistook the trashy rhythm ground out for game hunters and tourists for the true music of the people, and that a white woman who uses animals to read people’s minds is part and parcel of the reactionary settler culture of the whip, the gun, detention and oppression. Ngũgĩ has also put to rest the Bible as a source of truth; to him it is now a cave which he raids for stories, parables and allegories to fit into his world, where heaven is here and now, and passive toleration of oppression in exchange for life after death is out of the question. Ngũgĩ set out to burn the bush of ignorance and indifference behind which many people hide their inaction. It is the reason why the book takes no prisoners and stretches its wings wide to straddle genres – prison diary, whodunit, history book, literary novel – and uses allegory, parable, reminiscence, interior monologue, dialogue and drama to hammer its message home. For anybody who has not worked it out: the days of ‘Please sir, can I have a little more?’ have given way to ‘Give me my fair share or I will kill you, motherfucker.’

  In a world where money has been elevated to the status of world religion and where globalization, meaning the sanctified domination of the world by rich corporations, is seen as a panacea for all problems economic, Ngũgĩ is a writer to cherish for warning, witnessing and pounding on the locked doors of the psyche, especially as for a chilling while it was thought that the end of the Third World War, cynically called the Cold War, would be the end of writers who do not glorify the rich – that they would be cremated along with the remains of the communist empire. Ngũgĩ is sitting pretty because for him history is not some dead skunk reeking to high heaven of centuries of despair, but a mammoth beast, a terrible growler that makes hearts tremble when it bellows for change, change, change; struggle, struggle, struggle. Ngũgĩ has spent most of his life wrestling with the essential issues of life in general and Kenya in particular and has come out of the ring with the definitive African book of the twentieth century.

  Karibu Ilmorog, Karibu Kenya, Karibu Afrika.

  Moses Isegawa, June 2001

  Part One: Walking . . .

  And I saw, and behold, a white horse, and he that

  sat thereon had a bow: and there was given unto him a crown:

  and he came forth conquering, and to conquer . . .

  And another horse came forth, a red horse: and to him that

  sat thereon it was given to take peace from the earth, that they should

  slay one another: and was there given unto him a great sword . . .

  And I saw, and behold, a black horse; and he that sat thereon

  had a balance in his hand . . .

  And I saw, and behold, a pale horse: and he that sat

  upon him, his name was Death . . .

  And there was given unto them authority over the fourth part of

  earth, to kill with sword and with famine, and with death.

  Revelation, Chapter 6

  The people scorn’d the ferocity of kings . . .

  But the sweetness of mercy brew’d destruction, and the frighten’d monarchs come back;

  Each comes in state, with his train – hangman, priest, tax-gatherer,

  Soldier, lawyer, lord, jailer, and sycophant.

  Walt Whitman

  Chapter One

  1 ~ They came for him that Sunday. He had just returned from a night’s vigil on the mountain. He was resting on his bed, Bible open at the Book of Revelation, when two police constables, one tall, the other short, knocked at the door.

  ‘Are you Mr Munira?’ the short one asked. He had a star-shaped scar above the left brow.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You teach at the New Ilmorog Primary School?’

  ‘And where do you think you are now standing?’

  ‘Ah, yes. We try to be very sure. Murder, after all, is not irio or ugali.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You are wanted at the New Ilmorog Police Station.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Murder, of course – murder in Ilmorog.’

  The tall one who so far had not spoken hastened to add: ‘It is nothing much, Mr Munira. Just routine questioning.’

  ‘Don’t explain. You are only doing your duty in this world. But let me put on my coat.’

  They looked at one another, surprised at his cool reception of the news. He came back carrying the Holy Book in one hand.

  ‘You never leave the Book behind, Mr Munira,’ said the short one, impressed, and a little fearful of the Book’s power.

  ‘We must always be ready to plant the seed in these last days before His second coming. All the signs – strife, killing, wars, blood – are prophesied here.’

  ‘How long have you been in Ilmorog?’ asked the
tall one, to change the subject from this talk of the end of the world and Christ’s second coming. He was a regular churchgoer and did not want to be caught on the wrong side.

  ‘You have already started your routine questions, eh?’

  ‘No, no, this is off the record, Mr Munira. It is just conversation. We have nothing against you.’

  ‘Twelve years!’ he told them.

  ‘Twelve years!’ both echoed.

  ‘Yes, twelve years in this wasteland.’

  ‘Well, that was – you must have been here before New Ilmorog was built . . .’

  2 ~ Abdulla sat on a chair outside his hovel in the section of Ilmorog called the New Jerusalem. He looked at his bandaged left hand. He had not been kept long at the hospital. He felt strangely calm after the night’s ordeal. But he still could not understand what had really happened. Maybe in time, he thought – but would he ever be able to explain this fulfilment of what had only been a wish, an intention? How far had he willed it? He raised his head and saw a police constable looking at him.

  ‘Abdulla?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am a policeman on duty. You are wanted at the station.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will it take long?’

  ‘I don’t know. They want you to record a statement and to answer a few questions.’

  ‘That’s all right. Let me put this chair back inside the house.’

  But at the station they locked him up in a cell. Abdulla protested against the deception. A policeman slapped him on the face. One day, one day, he tried to say in sudden resurgence of old anger and new bitterness at the latest provocation.

  3 ~ A police officer went to the hospital where Wanja had been admitted.

  ‘I am afraid you cannot see her,’ said the doctor. ‘She is not in a position to answer questions. She is still in a delirium and keeps on shouting: “Fire . . . Fire . . . My mother’s sister . . . my dear aunt . . . put out the fire, put out the fire!” and such things.’

  ‘Record her words. It might give us a clue in case—’

  ‘No, she is not in a critical condition . . . just shock and hallucinations. In ten days’ time . . .’

  4 ~ Karega was fast asleep. He had come late from an all-night executive meeting of Ilmorog Theng’eta Breweries Union. He heard a knock at the door. He leapt out of bed in his pyjamas. He found a heavily armed police contingent at the door. An officer in khaki clothes stepped forward.

  ‘What is the matter?’

  ‘You are wanted at the police station.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Routine questioning.’

  ‘Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’

  ‘I am afraid not.’

  ‘Let me change into something . . .’

  He went back and changed. He wondered how he would contact the others. He had listened to the six o’clock news and so he knew that the strike had been banned. But he hoped that even if he was arrested, the strike would go on.

  He was hurled into a waiting Land Rover, and driven off.

  Akinyi, preparing to go to Ilmorog Church for the morning service, happened to look in the direction of his house. She always did this, automatically, and she had promised herself to cut out the habit. She saw the Land Rover drive away. She rushed to his place – she had never been there – and found the door padlocked.

  Within a few hours word had spread. The workers, in a hostile mood, marched toward the police station demanding his release. A police officer came out and spoke to them in a surprisingly conciliatory manner.

  ‘Please disband peacefully. Karega is here for routine questioning. And it is not about your last night’s decision to take a strike action. It’s about murder – murder in Ilmorog.’

  ‘Murder of the workers!’ somebody retorted.

  ‘Murder of the workers’ movement!’

  ‘Long live the workers’ struggle!’

  ‘Please disband—’ appealed the officer, desperately.

  ‘Disband yourself . . . disband the tyranny of foreign companies and their local messengers!’

  ‘Out with foreign rule policed by colonized blackskins! Out with exploitation of our sweat!’

  The crowd was getting into an angry, threatening mood. He signalled his lieutenants. They called out others who came with guns and chased the protesting workers right to the centre of Ilmorog. One or two workers sustained serious injuries and were taken to hospital.

  Workers were waking to their own strength. Such a defiant confrontation with authority had never before happened in Ilmorog.

  5 ~ One newspaper, the Daily Mouthpiece, brought out a special issue with a banner headline: MZIGO, CHUI, KIMERIA MURDERED.

  A man, believed to be a trade-union agitator, has been held after a leading industrialist and two educationists, well known as the African directors of the internationally famous Theng’eta Breweries and Enterprises Ltd, were last night burnt to death in Ilmorog, only hours after taking a no-nonsense-no-pay-rise decision.

  It is believed that they were lured into a house where they were set on by hired thugs.

  The three will be an irreplaceable loss to Ilmorog. They built Ilmorog from a tiny nineteenth-century village reminiscent of the days of Krapf and Rebman into a modern industrial town that even generations born after Gagarin and Armstrong will be proud to visit . . . etc . . . etc . . . Kimeria and Chui were prominent and founding fathers of KCO . . . etc . . . etc . . .

  Chapter Two

  1 ~ But all that was twelve years after Godfrey Munira, a thin dustcloud trailing behind him, first rode a metal horse through Ilmorog to the door of a moss-grown two-roomed house in what was once a schoolyard. He got off and stood still, his right hand akimbo, his left holding the horse, his reddish lined eyes surveying the grey, dry lichen on a once white-ochred wall. Then, unhurriedly, he leaned the metal horse against the wall and, bending down, unclipped loose the trouser bottoms, beat them a little with his hands – a symbolic gesture, since the dust stubbornly clung to them and to his shoes – before moving back a few steps to re-survey the door, the falling-apart walls and the sun-rotted tin roof. Suddenly, determinedly, he strode to the door and tried the handle while pushing the door with his right shoulder. He crashed through into a room full of dead spiders and the wings of flies on cobwebs on all the walls, up to the eaves.

  Another one has come into the village, went the news in Ilmorog. Children spied on him, on his frantic efforts to trim up and weed the place, and they reported everything to the old men and women. He would go away with the wind, said the elderly folk: had there not been others before him? Who would want to settle in this wasteland except those without limbs – may the devil swallow Abdulla – and those with aged loins – may the Lord bless Nyakinyua, the old woman.

  The school itself was a four-roomed barrack with broken mud walls, a tin roof with gaping holes and more spiders’ webs and the wings and heads of dead flies. Was it any wonder that teachers ran away at the first glance? The pupils were mostly shepherd boys, who often did not finish a term but followed their fathers in search of new pastures and water for their cattle.

  But Munira stayed on, and after a month we were all whispering – was he a little crazed – and he not so old? Was he a carrier of evil? — especially when he started holding classes under the acacia bush near the place rumoured to be the grave of the legendary Ndemi, whose spirit once kept watch over Ilmorog Country before imperialism came and changed the scheme of things. He is mocking Ndemi, said Mwathi wa Mugo, who divined for both the ridge and the plains and prescribed a deterrent. At night, under the cover of darkness, the old woman shat a mountain between the school building and the acacia bush. In the morning the children found a not-so-dry mound of shit. They ran back to their parents and told a funny story about the new teacher. For a week or so Munira galloped his horse the length of the hills and plains in pursuit of the disappearing pupils. He caught up with one. He got off his horse, letting it fall to the ground, and ran after the pupil.