The Mzungu Boy (9 page)

“We'll get Salt and Pepper,” he said. “They are not afraid of anything.”

“It will be dark before we get home,” I told him.

We wondered what to do.

A pack of jimis got it into their heads to go after the gazelles. I tried to hold them back, told them it would be dark before they got to where the gazelles were, and by then the gazelles would be somewhere else equally far away. But they chose not to believe me and went on their way.

We rounded up the remaining dogs and headed home. Along the way we ate some wild berries, but they did little to relieve our hunger.

The sun went down as we made our way through the forest. I could smell buffalo but, not wanting to frighten Nigel, I did not mention it. Nor did I tell him of the shadows that lurked, watching us go by, following us with their eyes. The dogs saw them too but they knew them for what they were and did not bark.

A subdued cough betrayed their presence to Nigel. He clutched my arm, his hand cold with fear.

“What's that?”

“Nothing,” I said loudly for the shadows to hear. I was a good boy who saw nothing and said nothing.

The fear grew, mounting with every step we took until it was too great to bear.

Then we ran, and we did not stop until we got home.

The following day I told Hari I had seen his friends in the forest.

“My friends?” he asked.

“The ones who gave me the letter to bring to you. The men of the forest.”

Hari glanced around, saw that no one was watching and pulled me behind the chicken house.

“What did they say to you?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Did they give you another letter?”

“No.”

“Did they talk to you at all?

“No.”

“Then why are you telling me about them?”

I had thought he might want to know, I told him. I wanted to be his friend.

He pinched me by the ears and lifted me off my feet. I bit my lip, determined not to cry out from the pain. When he finally put me down, he gave me a left-right slap and I went deaf.

From that day on I never told Hari anything he didn't ask to know.

Eight

BOYS ARE OFTEN
the first to know when things go wrong. When lions invaded Bwana Ruin's cattle bomas and ate three of his biggest bulls, it was a boy who first came across the feasting lions and raised the alarm. When fire suddenly gutted the old storage barns where Bwana Ruin stored his diesel and hay, it was a boy who was the first to see the smoke. And when the old watchman disappeared from the dairy, where the machines were also stolen, it was a boy who came upon his body buried in the forest, far away from the farmstead, and alerted everyone about it.

I knew that the white farmers lived a good and rich life in the big farmhouses, while the Africans who labored for them lived a life of slavery in their crumbling village huts. I knew white people did not like black people and treated them little better than donkeys and much worse than their dogs. My father had told me as much. I knew they paid their workers a pittance and worked them like slaves. I knew that white people beat black people and locked them up in police cells. I knew that they sent black people on detention to faraway islands where they died of malaria and other diseases. It was no secret that Bwana Ruin beat up and abused the village women when he found them in the forest cutting trees for firewood.

I knew these things and more, because people talked about them all the time. Once Bwana Ruin had set his dogs loose on us when he found us stealing fruit from his orchard. I had escaped by jumping over an impossibly tall keiapple fence, but one boy died from the mauling he got from the dogs. His father had to run two miles to the hospital carrying his gravely injured son on his back, because Bwana Ruin had refused to allow Hari to take the boy to hospital on the ox cart that transported milk and cream to Nanyuki.

“A thief is a thief,” he had said. “Let it be a lesson.”

But we soon forgot and went back to raiding his orchard. It was the only fruit garden around.

Though I knew these things, and many more things that were wrong and unjust, I never let them worry me for a moment. They had been going on for a long time, and the adults had done nothing but grumble about them. Besides, I had school to go to and fish to catch and Old Moses to hunt. So I left it to the grownups to moan about the injustices.

Even my own father was helpless. He grumbled, he moaned and, in extreme cases, he took out his anger on me or Hari. When things went very wrong in the kitchen, when he burned the roast and got a lashing from Mamsab Ruin, he came home raging. He looked for something we had done, or not done, and gave us a beating for it. He lay awake at night, tossing angrily in his bed and sighing again and again. I heard him swear not to take it any more. I heard him promise himself to stand up for his rights and his dignity. I heard him swear to resign and find another job.

From my hard and cold bed in the cooking place, I heard my father do a lot of thinking out loud. But, come morning, he rose with the roosters and went to light the woodstove in the kitchen and heat the bath water for Bwana Ruin. No matter what sort of a night my father had, Bwana Ruin's breakfast was always ready by seven o'clock.

I knew there were gangs of men living in the forest and armed with machetes and spears and smelling like old buffalos. I knew them to be the mau-mau. According to Bwana Ruin, they were bad men, thieves and murderers. They had never stolen anything from me or spoken to me, apart from the day they gave me a message for Hari.

I knew I must not talk about them to anyone, not even to Hari who was their friend. But I did not have the vaguest idea what they were about, or why they crept through the shadows in the forest. It was not until the second raid by the white soldiers that I began to get an idea of what was going on.

The soldiers rounded us all up and herded us into the old auction pen as before. They made us sit on the cow dung. They surrounded us, their guns pointed at our heads while they ransacked our village again. They searched every nook and cranny, looking for anything that would link the villagers to the mau-mau. They turned the huts inside out and stole money and valuables as they had done before. But they found no guns and no sign of mau-mau, and they gave up the search in the end.

Bwana Ruin came to address his people and plead with them to be cooperative. He stood on the auctioneer's platform way above our heads so that the sun burned our eyes when we looked up at him. He surveyed us like a herd of cattle and addressed our upturned faces.

“
Watu
,” he said, “I hear there are some
watu
going about at night telling you a lot of
maneno
, a lot of nonsense.”

He was dressed in his khakis and riding boots. As usual he rapped on his right boot with his riding crop as he spoke.

He was not angry this time. The soldiers had allowed his cook and other essential personnel to go to work as usual before leading the rest into the auction pen. He had not kept us waiting as long as he had the last time. But the mothers had learned from the earlier experience, when children had cried themselves sick, so they had brought enough to eat and to drink. It felt more like a forced picnic than a military operation.

Bwana Ruin arrived after his usual inspection of the farm.

“This is my land,” he said forcefully. “Bought from the Crown and paid for with my own money. If the mau-mau tell you that they will take it from me and give it to you or to anyone else, they are telling you a load of manure. That will never happen. Not in two thousand years. Not over my dead body.”

Mamsab Ruin and the little white man watched the proceedings from a distance. Nigel caught my eye and waved. I dared not wave back.

“Freedom?” Bwana Ruin was saying. “What freedom,
aye
? I ask you again, what freedom are they telling you about? Freedom to do what? Freedom to go where? You
watu
know you have nowhere else to go. Your tribal reserves are overflowing with poor and unemployed people. You have no land to go back to.
Kweli
rongo?
True or not?”

“
Kweli
,” the workers answered. “Too true.”

“You know that I have been very good to you,” he went on. “I have given you a job and a generous salary. More than other bwanas pay their labor. You ask their watu. They will tell you I am the best bwana in Nanyuki. I have given you a place to live. Very soon I shall demolish your old hovels and build you new ones. I give you a pound of
posho
and all the skimmed milk you can drink.
Kweli
rongo?
”

“
Kweli
,” some people said. Others nodded in agreement.

The sun was very hot now and we prayed he would soon let us go back to our business. Then the jimis showed up. The village dogs, we were to discover, had taken the opportunity to ransack the wide-open huts after the soldiers had left. They had eaten all the food they could find, all the milk and several sitting hens and numerous eggs. Now Jimi came by to see what had happened to the owners of the vandalized huts. He was accompanied by two of his loyal lieutenants, two lazy old jimis who hung around with him because he seemed to know where to eat.

On seeing the armed soldiers guarding us, the dogs ran into the bush and returned to the village.

I could see Nigel was impatient. He walked nervously around his grandmother. He squatted. He got up and walked around her again.

We had set this day aside for the adventure of our lives. Today we were to forget the worthless village dogs and take Salt and Pepper hunting instead. They were our last card against Old Moses, the indomitable old man of the plain. But this mau-mau business was taking too long.

“Freedom,
aye
?” Bwana Ruin raved. “You
watu
know you are free to come and go as you wish. You are not my prisoners here. You are not my slaves here,
aye
? You can leave any time you wish. You may leave today, if you wish. Who wants to leave, right now? Hands up those who want to leave.”

A few hands went up, but they were all from bored children who had no idea what he was talking about. They wanted to go back home to play.

Their mothers whacked their hands down.

“So you all want to stay and work for me,
aye
?” Bwana Ruin asked.

“
Ndiyo,
Bwana,” the people said as one. “Yes, Bwana.”

“Very well,” he told them. “But remember that no matter what they tell you, this land will never be yours. Not in two thousand years.”

He said he intended to farm the land until he died. Then his children would farm it and his grandchildren too. But, as long as they worked well, the watu and their wives and totos would be free to live and work for him. They would be treated well and they would always get their wages. That was a guarantee from Bwana Ruin.

“You go tell them that,” he said in conclusion. “You go tell your mau-mau brothers what I have told you today. They don't know what they are playing with.”

He turned abruptly and hopped down from the platform. He talked with the officers for a moment. Then he left for his house.

Without a word to the villagers, the soldiers climbed back on their trucks and drove away. They did not arrest anyone this time and it took the villagers a while to realize that they had been dismissed and could go back home. Then there was a general scramble back to the village to see what had survived the invasion of the white soldiers.

It took the villagers the rest of the afternoon to sort out the mess. The dogs had turned the place upside down. In some instances they had carried household articles from one end of the village to the other and left them there.

The villagers had learned from the last time around, and they had hidden their money well. In their desperation to find the money they knew was hidden somewhere, the soldiers had stopped just short of dismantling the huts.

Some villagers had done such a thorough job of hiding their money that they never found it again. For months after this second invasion, money kept turning up in the strangest places long after the owners had forgotten about it.

I left my mother searching desperately for the money she had hidden in the thatched roof of the latrine and sneaked through the village. I avoided Jimi so he would not know what I was up to and made a wide detour to our agreed meeting point by the fish pond.

Nigel was there with Salt and Pepper, holding the dogs by their collars so they would not get bored and go back home. They were massive German shepherds and came up to his waist.

“What was that all about?” he asked me.

“Nothing,” I told him. “The soldiers do that from time to time.”

“What was my grandfather talking to you about?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “Did you bring the biscuits?”

His pockets were stuffed with them. We were both beginning to understand that we could not catch, skin, roast and eat Old Moses all in one busy day.

The dogs growled at me. They were wondering what I was doing there.

“Shut up,” Nigel ordered.

I was his friend, he told them. They were to leave me alone, otherwise he would give them a hiding like they had never received before.

I was very impressed by his authority. I had nothing but fearful respect for those giant dogs, and I was a whole year older than Nigel.

“We must hurry,” I told him.

He dragged the dogs by their leashes and we forded the river. We cut as straight a path as possible through the forest. The ground rose unevenly through the rock-strewn undergrowth, and the dogs wanted to go their separate ways. Nigel could hardly cope as they pulled in different directions. He tried to give one of them to me to hold on to. But the dog wanted to eat me up on the spot and I was scared stiff of him. So Nigel had to hang on to both dogs until we got to the grassland plateau between the two rivers, and the dogs forgot all about going back home.