Dreams in a Time of War (12 page)

Sometimes I accompany my mother when she goes to the Indian shops to look for work. Maybe I can also get something that pays more than what I get from picking pyrethrum and catching moles. The place has a different feel from that other time when she and I had gone to get my school uniform. Then my mind was focused on clothing stores. Now I pause at groceries: bags of beans, peas, sugar, and salt, and bins displaying packets of flour, green, red, and yellow peppers, garlic, onions, chiles, purslane, and fruits, papayas, mangoes, and dates. I also note the same picture of the frail Indian with eyeglasses, dressed in white trousers with a shawl flung over his shoulders, the one I had seen before. I now ask my mother who the man is and why his picture hangs on the walls of many shops. He is one of the Indian gods, she says without really paying much attention to the picture. Her mind is really set on getting work, any
work, that will pay. Govji, in one of the shops, has a job for her: sorting potatoes. The good unblemished ones are put in sacks. The tiny ones are collected to be sold as seedlings. Damaged ones are thrown away. I help my mother. It is the most tedious thing I have ever done, more boringly repetitive than picking tea or pyrethrum. Catching moles and rats and building a store for trade are adventures, even though they don’t pay. My enthusiasm wanes as days go by. But she needs the money to buy food she should not have had to buy and also for my tuition. She continues working at the potatoes without me. Sometimes she is allowed to take home some of the damaged potatoes as payment in kind.

There was an Indian shopkeeper named Manubhai but generally known as Manu. He spoke Gĩkũyũ fluently, though he sometimes mixed it up with Kiswahili. He had set up a bakery, Manubhai Limuru Bakery. His bread was also known as Manu as opposed to that baked in Elliot’s Bakeries in Nairobi, which was simply referred to as Elliot. Manu and Elliot, as the loaves were named, were in competition. The Manu bakery produced more loaves than there were buyers, and sometimes he was forced to throw away piles of unsold bread in different stages of fermentation and decay. When this happened, word would quickly spread and many people, adults, children, women, and men, would descend upon the piles, and in no time every bit of bread would be gone. Once this coincided with our job hunt. I found myself among a horde grabbing at discarded bread and brought some home in triumph. Too bad Manubhai did not do this every day, and there was no way of telling when he next would.

I am becoming closer to my grandfather than I had been to my father. I am flattered when one day he asks that I go to his house. He sits on a finely carved three-legged stool. I sit on another, smaller one. Mũkami nourishes me with a glass of warm milk. Then he asks her to bring “the box.” He takes out a bag from the box, dips into it, and comes up with a bunch of letters. Read that, he says, which I do. No, no, not that one, he would say, and I would go to the next, and so on until I got the right one. Yes, read it all, he says. He nods time and again as I read it. Hey! Hey! he exclaims with approval and delight. I am proud that my reading skills are recognized. Bring him some more tea, he calls out to his wife. Next he hands me paper and a pen, with ink. He dictates a reply word for word, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, asking me to go over what I had written till the letter has captured the tone he wants. Hey! Hey! he says, now laughing quietly in admiration and approval. “He can really hold a pen!” He raises his voice to his wife, who approaches with tea. He seems to be genuinely impressed with my learning. I become his scribe. He would often ask me to go to his house to help him write a letter but more often to read him old letters and help him sort out documents, including tax receipts. A headman at one time, he has developed a reverence for government-related papers. But he values any written documents and has bags of them in nice boxes. He would ask me questions about this or that document, what it said; then he would tell me how to arrange them. I have become his confidant though he never asks me for my opinion about
the content. I am simply his personal scribe. In the process, I also get to eat nice food and drink tea with lots of milk. My grandfather has many cows. My mother likes this because it means one tummy less to feed. I get the impression that she and my grandfather’s wife are not close.

My grandfather really loves his young wife Mũkami, who always wears Western-style dresses. She is completely devoted to his welfare. Though not haughty and certainly not given to fights with neighbors, she has an aloof bearing that keeps other women, even my mother, at a distance. Nobody would dare wander into her house without certain knowledge that they would be welcome. Sometimes I wonder if it was Mũkami who had driven Grandmother Gathoni away.

One evening Mũkami stops me outside Njango’s hut. I should visit Grandfather first thing in the morning. I assume that he has a letter for me to read or write. But why so early in the morning? I am there, Mũkami opens the door, gives me a seat, and then my grandfather comes to the living room all dressed up. We share tea and sweet potato together. I wait for my assignment. Then my grandfather stands up, says farewell for the day, and leaves for some event out there. Mũkami says thank you to me and I leave, my mind puzzled but my tummy satisfied. Later in the evening Mũkami tells me that I should do the same the following morning.

Visiting my grandfather before any other visitor knocks at the door becomes part of my daily routine. I see it as some kind of privilege and savor the honor. It also makes me feel even closer to him. It is only later that I learn that I have
merely replaced Gĩcini as the first caller at dawn. My grandfather believes that boys bring him good luck. He wants a boy to be his first encounter before a woman, any woman, even a girl, crosses his path. I am the new bird of good omen. Apparently good things happen to him after I visit him at dawn.

My grandfather must have been touched by the intolerable congestion and tension inside Njango’s hut. Or maybe it is now clear that my father is not coming to plead for his wife and children. He sets aside a two-acre plot for my mother to put up a building, ironically next to Lord Kahahu’s land.

My brother Wallace Mwangi, in the early stages as an apprentice carpenter, organizes the construction of a mud-walled, grass-thatched rondavel, almost a replica of the house we had left behind at my father’s. Later he puts up his own, a four-cornered two-room house, resting on stilts. My sister, Njoki, whose marriage has gone awry, joins us. During the rainy season, my younger brother, my sister, and I decide to plant twigs of some bush all around the one-acre plot, in the hope that they will take root and form a hedge. The dry season arrives. My mother brings home a small twig of some tree and plants it just outside the courtyard. It is a pear tree, she says, and we laugh at her. Mother, you do things your own way; you don’t plant it during the rains; you choose to do so when the rains are gone. She does not argue. She just smiles. But she waters it and by the end of the season our plantings have died, and the pear tree is alive. The hedge has to be done all over again.

And so new life begins: From a polygamous community we become a single-parent family. I continue playing my role as scribe and bird of good omen for my grandfather. But I will now be going to Manguo and back, from my new home with a lone pear tree just outside the courtyard.

School was about two miles from my new home, but still an improvement on the distance I used to cover when going to Kamandũra. It was midyear in grade three when I left Kamandũra school for Manguo school. Thinking that I was merely acting on my brother’s advice, I was surprised to discover that I was part of an exodus, responding to the same pressures. It was not clear why I was really moving but I learned from other children that it had to do with two mysterious terms, “Kĩrore” and “Karĩng’a.” Nobody explained what they meant or their origins. But they had a history.

After Kenya went from being British company property to being a colonial state in 1895, the state left education largely in the hands of Protestant and Roman Catholic missions, among them the Church Missionary Society, founded way back in 1799. Others such as the Gospel Missionary Society, founded in 1898, came after. The most prominent in my area was the Church of Scotland Mission, founded in 1891, whose hub was in Thogoto, about twelve miles from Limuru, where, under Dr. J. W. Arthur, a school was established that was popularly known as Mambere, meaning “modern” or “progressive.” The mission later opened outreach
schools, like Kamandũra, farther out. While these centers were influenced by modernity,
kĩĩrĩu
, and provided much-needed medical care and even taught useful skills in woodworking and agriculture alongside limited literary education, they were there to proselytize. Successful conversion was measured by how quickly, deeply, and thoroughly one divested oneself of one’s culture and adopted new practices and values. For instance, among the Gĩkũyũ people, circumcision was considered a rite of passage marking the transition from youth, a stage of no legal accountability, to adulthood, with full responsibility. In 1929 a number of missionary societies in the Central Province—the Church of Scotland Mission led by Dr. Arthur; and the Gospel Missionary Society and the African Inland Mission, which had already condemned female circumcision as barbaric and unchristian—went further in their campaign against the practice and announced that all their African teachers and agents would have to sign a declaration solemnly swearing never to circumcise female children; never to become a member of the Kikuyu Central Association, the leading African political organization at the time; never to become a follower of Jomo Kenyatta, the KCA’s general secretary, then in England as the organization’s delegate; and never to join any party unless it was organized by the government or missionaries.
^*
The declaration was asking the schools’ Christian
adherents to take a position against the practice and also the politics of resistance, which, despite the banning of Harry Thuku’s East Africa Association in 1922, his exile and imprisonment, and the massacre of twenty-three Kenyans outside Nairobi’s Central Police Station, had continued and even intensified under the KCA. There was a conflict of interests. From early on the missionaries had been the colonially accepted spokesmen for African interests, Dr. Arthur even having a seat in the colonial legislature as the official spokesman of African interests, whereas Europeans and Asians had their own direct representatives. So the struggle over female circumcision became a proxy for economics, politics, and culture and who and which organization had the right to speak for Kenyan Africans.

Kidole
, the Swahili word for “thumbprint,” became
kĩrore
in Gĩkũyũ and evolved into a pejorative term for those who signed or agreed to the declaration. Those who did not sign it,
aregi gũtheca kĩrore
, left the missionary institutions and joined the nascent African independent schools movement, followed, in most cases, by their students. One of the earliest known independent schools in Kenya was started in Nyanza by John Owalo, but in Central Province an independent elementary school was founded at Gĩthũngũri in 1925 by Musa Ndirangũ, a successful trader, and Wilson Gathuru, its first teacher, who also gave the land on which it was built. Initially a laborer on a white farm, Musa Ndirangũ went to school in 1911–1913 at a Gospel Missionary Society school in Kambũi, the home area of Harry Thuku. His attending school after his laboring days was in pursuit of
personal independence, which he found in trade as his own boss. This mind-set was in tune with the politics of Harry Thuku, in part influenced by his ties to Marcus Garvey, whose slogan, Africa for the Africans, embodied the vision of self-reliance. Marcus Garvey had sought independence in business. Ndirangũ applied self-reliance by creating an elementary school run by Africans themselves. After the 1929 declaration, many other schools were founded by local committees of elders and teachers. Two organizations arose to oversee the development of the new schools. The Kikuyu Karĩng’a Education Association (KKEA) was launched in 1933 at Lironi, not far from Kamandũra, and the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association (KISA) in 1934 at Gĩtuamba, Mũrang’a.

The two organizations had religious affiliations: the African Independent Pentecostal Church for KISA and the African Orthodox Church for KKEA, with roots that went back to the American African Orthodox Church via South Africa through Bishop William Daniel Alexander, who visited Kenya for sixteen months between 1935 and 1937. The American African Orthodox Church had been formed by another Alexander, Bishop George Alexander McGuire, who earlier had been chief chaplain of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. “Karĩng’a” was the self-chosen term for orthodoxy in both tradition and religion. Christianity would be shorn of Western propensities, and tradition, of negative tendencies, the African being the judge of the shape and direction of change. Female circumcision was allowed but not required.

The terms “Kĩrore” and “Karĩng’a” became a way of characterizing the schools. Kĩrore, as applied to missionary schools, connoted schools that were deliberately depriving Africans of knowledge, in favor of training them to support the colonial state, which initially limited African education to carpentry, agriculture, and basic literacy only. Command of English was seen as unnecessary. The white settler community wanted “skilled” African labor, not learned African minds. Karĩng’a and KISA schools sought to break all limits to knowledge. The English language, seen as the key to modernity, also sparked contention. In government and missionary schools, the teaching of English started in grade four or later; in Karĩng’a and KISA schools, in grade three or even earlier, depending on the teachers.