The Mzungu Boy (7 page)

I had so many questions, they wore Nigel out.

I learned later, from Father Mario no less, that we were all children of the same God. Not just the village boys, not just the village children, but all the children and all the people of all the world. Including Bwana Ruin and our schoolmaster, Lesson One.

But that knowledge came later.

In the meantime, Nigel fell madly in love with hunting. He wanted to go hunting every minute of every day. He came to the village three or four times a day and begged me to take him hunting. But it was the potato and bean harvesting season, and my mother kept a close rein on me.

“I'm bored,” Nigel told me.

He had no one to play with.

“Go play with Salt and Pepper,” I said.

But his grandfather's dogs were tired of playing fetch. He wanted to go hunting again.

“I must finish harvesting the beans,” I told him.

He tried to help me finish the harvest quickly. He came by my house every chance he could and helped me with the harvest.

He was not very good at it, but he was good company as I labored and made the work seem lighter. My mother grumbled about him trampling all over her beans, but she did not know what to do with him. She did not ask him to go away. I think she liked him a little, though she did not understand a word he said. We must have harvested a whole granary together that season.

Nigel gave up his suits and started wearing khaki shorts and shirts. He took off his shoes when he was with me, and walked barefoot like me to see how it felt. I put on his shoes and walked in them to see how it felt.

In the time it took to bring in the harvest, Nigel became a regular feature around my mother's hut. The village children soon tired of following him about chanting
bwana kidogo
, little master. No one but me, it seemed, knew the white boy's name. Everyone called him simply
ka-mzungu
, little white man.

The day he ate ugali at my mother's hut was a historical event in our village. Nigel liked it and asked how it was made.

“With maize flour and water,” I told him.

How did it harden? he wanted to know. It just hardened, I told him. Did she bake it in the oven? We had no oven to speak of.

“It hardens by itself,” I told him.

I don't know how word got out that the little white man was eating ugali in Kariuki's mother's hut. It may have been the amazed jimis who passed it on to the village boys, who then brought along the whole village to see for themselves.

There was a sudden uproar outside. We looked up to find the whole village there, come to see Nigel eat ugali. They crowded the doorway, looked through the window and peered through the cracks in the wall. It took a long time for each and every one of them to look and wonder. To finally agree that the little white man was indeed eating ugali.

My mother was thoroughly embarrassed by their behavior. She tried in vain to drive them away.

“Have you sugared it?” they asked her.

“No,” she said.

But they did not believe her.

“We want to taste it,” they said.

Whereupon, her patience finally exhausted, she slammed the window in their faces. She could not shut the door. We needed the light to see by.

Nigel did not understand our language and wondered what was going on.

“Why are they staring at me?” he asked.

“You eat ugali.”

“So do you.”

“I am not mzungu,” I told him. “They have never seen a mzungu eat ugali before.”

Mzungus did not eat ugali. They lived on sweets, cakes and chocolate. I knew this to be untrue, because Father brought the evidence home from Bwana Ruin's kitchen from time to time. And Nigel had told me himself that he did not like chocolate.

But that was the story around the village.

“Do you like it?” I asked Nigel.

He loved it, he told me. It did not taste much like anything he was used to, but he loved it. He asked Mother if he could have some more. She gave us some and pleaded with the crowd to go away and leave us alone to eat our lunch. Nigel was just a hungry boy, a human being like any of them.

They refused to go away. They wanted to stand there and watch. So they remained. I began to enjoy the attention.

Eventually, word got around to my father, as he prepared lunch in Bwana Ruin's kitchen, that the white boy was eating ugali in his house. He dropped everything and came charging down to the village. He grabbed a huge chunk of firewood from the fireplace and charged at the crowd of spectators. In no time at all he had cleared the compound of all idle spectators and jimis. Then he stopped in the doorway, huffing and puffing like a rhinoceros and regarding me with eyes that burned with fury.

“Kariuki,” he said. “I shall skin you today, I promise.”

He was a man of few words indeed.

“Come,” he said, taking Nigel by the hand. “Your food is ready.”

Nigel was too startled to argue as father dragged him out of the hut and through the village to his grandfather's house where, no doubt, nice things waited to be eaten.

My day of fame and glory turned to mud. Why did everything that was fun turn out to be like a deliberate effort to have my father dismissed from his job?

Nigel did not come back that day.

When my chores were done, I called Jimi and we went for a walk along the river. We ended up by my duck pool and sat for hours listening to the water rush over the rocks. Jimi eventually got bored and went back home, leaving me to brood alone.

I could smell buffalo stealing through the forest. But I saw nothing and heard nothing.

The duck family did not come out to play that day and I was worried about them. Had they been killed and eaten by some wild animals? Or had they moved to another part of the river where it was safer?

I waited for them until sunset.

That night at about midnight, Father came back from Bwana Ruin's kitchen and woke me up roughly. He found me in the middle of a nightmare and, when I opened my eyes and saw him looming over me, I thought he had finally made up his mind to take me out in the forest and skin me alive.

“Mother,” I cried in panic.

“Quiet,” he said.

“Hari,” I called out.

“Shut up,” Father ordered.

“Mother,” I cried. “He is killing me!”

He gave me a hard slap that nearly knocked my head off my shoulders. It shocked me into silence long enough to hear what he had to say.

“Get up,” he ordered.

The fire was burning bright, throwing grotesque shadows on the wall. We were alone in the room, just the two of us. Hari slept in his own hut next to the grain store. Mother and Father slept in the next room.

We were in the kitchen. That was where I slept, on a platform of sticks and boards. It was a hard and rough bed. But I was always so tired when I went to bed that I did not feel a thing.

“Get dressed,” Father said.

There was no doubt left in my mind any more. He intended to finally carry out his threat of skinning me alive. But why was Mother so quiet? Didn't she care about me at all? I knew she loved me. Why didn't she come to my rescue?

Then it hit me. He had killed her too and left her in the forest for the hyenas.

I was trembling all over when I got out of bed. I stood before him and awaited my fate.

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat down on a stool across the fire from him. He had taken off his white uniform and changed into his brown shirt and patched cord trousers. Except for the tortured look in his eye, he seemed just like my father.

He took a piece of cake he had brought back from the kitchen and gave it to me.

“Eat,” he ordered.

He found a foul-smelling piece of cigarette and lit it. From the riverside came the terrible scream of the tree hyrax. The sound had frightened Nigel half to death the first time he heard it as we came back from hunting. Then he had told me that the hyrax was a true cousin of the elephant. He had read it in a book.

“I want to talk to you,” my father said.

I ate my cake and listened. He was as bad with emotions as he was with words. I could never tell what he felt for me. I could not tell if he felt anything at all. All I knew was that I could never please him, no matter how hard I tried.

Finally he sorted out his words.

“Keep away from the little white man,” he said.

“Why?”

“Why?” His right hand rose, ready to bounce me off the wall of the hut. Then he remembered he wanted to talk, not fight.

“Do you want to have me dismissed from my job?” he asked.

“No.” It was the last thing in the world I wanted.

“Then keep away from the boy.”

And that was that. Our little talk seemed over. He pulled on his cigarette. I polished off the last of my cake and got ready to go back to bed. Then he stirred suddenly and cleared his throat.

“Kariuki,” he said with great difficulty. “White people are not like us. They do not want us to step on their clean floors. I must take off my shoes when I step in their kitchen to do my work. They do not want us to touch their things. They say we make them dirty. They do not like us. They do not want our children to play with their children. They are not like us at all. They do not want their children to eat our food.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why?” he repeated. “Because… they hate us.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He had to think a long while. Even then, the answer he gave was no more illuminating than anything else he ever told me.

“They could die,” he said finally.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why?” he repeated. “Because… they are not like us.”

He pulled on his cigarette. I had never had this much conversation with him before. I was thrilled. His long, thoughtful pauses were very impressive, very profound.

Somewhere in my heart, deep down under the layers and layers of fear and awe and absolute terror, I had a certain pride in and respect for my father.

“They are not used to our food,” he said finally.

“Nigel eats ugali,” I said reasonably.

“He must not eat ugali.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why?” His hand rose instinctively.

Any discussion we had ever had before had involved some sort of violent physical contact. His knuckles on my bare head.

He now lowered his hand and said, “Because…”

He had great difficulty getting at whatever he wanted to tell me. His eyes, his will, his whole being pleaded with me to help by understanding at once.

“Do you know what they do with ugali?” he asked me.

I had no idea.

“They give it to their dogs,” he told me.

So what? We gave ugali to our dogs too.

He nodded in agreement and said that was not the point. That was completely different. It was not the same as giving it to the little white boy at all.

“Do you know what would happen to me if he should fall ill and die?” he said fearfully.

I had no idea.

“I would be fired,” he said. “I would lose my job.”

And that was not all. They would take him out and hang him. Then they would come for my mother and take her out and hang her too.

“And then,” as if that was not enough to scare me already, “then they would come for you. And Hari.”

My father did not make up the stories to frighten me. He believed every word. I had to believe too. The fear in his eyes was all too real.

He made me promise never to give ugali to the white boy again.

I promised. But he wanted more than that. He wanted me to also promise not to play with or to have anything at all to do with the little white man.

I promised. I did not believe he expected me to keep such a promise.

“Go to bed,” he ordered.

I gladly climbed back on my platform. I was thoroughly exhausted by our discussion and fell asleep right away.

There was one very bad outcome of the whole ugali affair. The village boys now knew that the little white man was human too. From that day on, every village bully wanted to test his strength and enhance his reputation by wrestling Nigel to the ground and thrashing the daylights out of him. I had a hard time protecting him, and on occasion got thoroughly beaten myself.

Seven

THEY COULD NOT
keep Nigel away from my compound. I was his only friend, but I never gave him ugali again.

He came by every chance he got and pleaded with me to take him hunting. He could not understand how I wasn't even supposed to be with him.

We sat in the yard and played marbles as I thought of a dozen things to keep our minds occupied and away from his first and only love, hunting. Whenever he brought up the subject I had to invent good excuses like the jimis were sick or Jimi had gone off to Nanyuki with Hari. Sometimes his grandfather took him on a different kind of hunt. They went far out into the plains in the roofless Land Rover to where the game was plentiful. There was no running, not even walking. They drove up, stopped the vehicle and, while the animals watched and wondered, Bwana Ruin stood on the seat and shot them dead. Then he loaded them on the vehicle and brought them back for his dogs.

“You don't eat the meat?” I asked Nigel.

“Grandma can't stand the smell of game,” he told me.

My mother couldn't stand the smell of fish.

“Crocodile?” he asked.

I told him we didn't bother with any animals we could not eat.

“Zebra?”

I had never heard of anyone who ate zebras. But Nigel had read about it in a book. Some people even ate snakes.

“Tastes like rabbit,” he said.

“I have eaten rabbit.”

“Buffalo?”

“Tastes like beef,” I said.

“I have never eaten buffalo,” he said.

Bwana Ruin killed buffalo all the time, I informed him. We ate buffalo often.

“Have you ever eaten warthog?” I asked.

“How does it taste?”